The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

KHAYYAM, Omar; Edward Fitzgerald; Elbert Hubbard.

$500.00

Item Number: 146603

East Aurora, NY: Roycroft Shop, 1899.

Signed limited edition of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, rendered into English Verse by Edward Fitzgerald, with an Address by John Hay. Oblong octodecimo, bound in full cloth with gilt titles to the front panel on a decorated morocco label, marbled endpapers, sparsely illustrated with decorative images and initials. One of nine hundred and twenty numbered copies signed by Elbert Hubbard on the limitation page, this is number 414. In very good condition, with some toning to the front and rear endleaves, previous owner calligraphic epitaph to the front flyleaf.

Eleventh-century Persian poet and mathematician Omar Khayyam composed more than one thousand quatrains, or rubaiyat, on love and mortality, expressing an enigmatic theology that has been interpreted and disputed over the course of centuries. Scholar Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883), first translator and author of five separate English versions of the Rubaiyat, did not produce strict translations as much as loose "transmogrifications" of the poetry, often taking great liberties with the original Persian text. Nevertheless, he remains the most famous of Omar Khayyam's translators, and is credited with bringing the Rubaiyat to broad public notice in the English-speaking world.