Rubaiyat (Khayyam)
Front cover of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam translated by Edward FitzGerald, illustrated by Willy Pogany
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Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám (Persian: رباعیات عمر خیام, translit. Robāʿiāt-e ʿOmar Khayyām) is the title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his translation of a selection of poems, originally written in Persian and numbering about a thousand, attributed to Omar Khayyám (1048–1131), a Persian poet, mathematician and astronomer. A ruba'i (Persian: رباعی, translit. rubāʿī, derived from Arabic root rubāʿī (رباعي), "consisting of four, quadripartite, fourfold") is a two-line stanza with two parts (or hemistichs) per line, hence the word rubayot, meaning "quatrains".
The number of quatrains attributed to Khayyam varies from about 1,200 (according to Saeed Nafisi) to over 2,000. Many scholars believe that not all the attributed quatrains are authentic and some have been added to Khayyam's Diwan in later years for various reasons. A few literary researchers, for example, Mohammad-Ali Foroughi and Farzaneh Aghaeipour have selected and published a subset of the quatrains believed to be original using various research methods.
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