The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

How on Earth did I get here !! ?

A good question, but I can only say what I've been doing since I arrived.

In July 1857 Edward Fitzgerald took six months to translate the rubaiyat or quatrains of Omar Khayyam from a transcript of a Persian manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, England. After publishing this work, he spent the rest of his life adding or reducing the number of quatrains, changing their order or phrasing, publishing a further three editions between 1868 and 1879, and a fifth edition, published in 1889 after his death. E.F. took a lot of liberties with the text (dated AD 1460, some 338 years after the death of Omar Khayyam), and my edited and illustrated version of 1975, although true to E.F., also rearranges the order of the text somewhat along autobiographical lines. It'll give you some idea where I come from. It's not as dark as it looks, although philisophically I started as a Nihilist. It is now a place that is a distant memory for me.

TECHNICAL NOTE

The illustrations may look a bit dark because they are 'monotypes' , a process of using printing ink on plate glass overlayed with drawing paper. Pressure and lines are then applied on the back of the paper to produce a reversed image when the paper is raised.

The second to last verse is by ANTHONY DICKINS, with some small changes to integrate it into the style of E.F. I hope he will forgive me for messing about with his excellent translation.