Rubaiyat of Omar 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 is a two-line stanza with two parts (or hemistichs) per line, hence the word rubayot (derived from the Arabic language root for "four"), 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.
"Wine of the Mystic" by Paramahansa Yogananda is an illustrated interpretation of the FitzGerald translation. Each quatrain is accompanied with Persian text, a glossary of terms, Yoganada's spiritual interpretation, and practical interpretation. It won the 1995 Benjamin Franklin Award in the field of Religion. Yogananda makes an argument for the mystical basis of Khayyam's Rubaiyat.
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