The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

In Our Time

BBC

History

4.6 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 22 May 2014

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. In 1859 the poet Edward FitzGerald published a long poem based on the verses of the 11th-century Persian scholar Omar Khayyam. Not a single copy was sold in the first few months after the work's publication, but after it came to the notice of members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood it became enormously influential. Although only loosely based on the original, the Rubaiyat made Khayyam the best-known Eastern poet in the English-speaking world. FitzGerald's version is itself one of the most admired works of Victorian literature, praised and imitated by many later writers.

With:

Charles Melville Professor of Persian History at the University of Cambridge

Daniel Karlin Winterstoke Professor of English Literature at the University of Bristol

Kirstie Blair Professor of English Studies at the University of Stirling

Producer: Thomas Morris.

Transcript

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0:48.0	Hello.
0:50.0	Quote, awake for morning in the bowl of night, has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight,
0:57.3	and lo, the hunter of the east has caught the sultan's turret in a noose of light. That rousing standard is the opening of the
1:04.9	Rubaiyat of Oma Cayam, a long poem which in the first half of the 20th century was arguably
1:10.1	the most influential in the English language. It was self-published as a pamphlet in
1:14.2	1859 by the Victorian poet Edward Fitzgerald and it's based on verses attributed
1:20.3	to one of the great thinkers of medieval Persia. But who was Omer Cayam and how did a poem which sold not a single copy for the first year of its life become one of most admired works of Victorian literature?
1:31.0	With me to discuss the Rubietta Omer Cayam are Charles Melville, Professor of Persian History
1:36.7	at the University of Cambridge, Daniel Carling, Winterstoke Professor of English Literature
1:41.8	at the University of Bristol and Kirstie Blair,
1:44.4	Professor in English Studies at the University of Stirling.
1:47.6	Charles Malvin, before we get under old, let's begin with the Persian writer whose work in translations.
1:52.3	Will you tell us something about Omer Kyayam on the period you lived in?
	...

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