Khayyam's Rubiayat
February 22nd 2008 06:37
Omar Khayyam's Rubiayat
Strangely Inspirational
Strangely Inspirational
This article started out as being about Art Deco illustrators and was going to be about Dulac and Pogany and others but during the research for it I came across a common thread that may be of ironic interest to book collectors and art lovers.
It seems that nearly every major illustrator from the 1860s onwards has drawn illustrations for or inspired by Fitzgeralds infamous paraphrase of the Rubiayat a collection of poems in quatrian form written by Omar Khayyam.
Here's some of them:
Elihu Vedder Blanche McManus Beardsley Eric Gill Arthur Rackham Heath Robinson Willy Pogany Edmund Dulac
And Translation ... Western culture seems to have had an ongoing love affair with this book!
It's been translated from the orginal Persian and from Fitzgeralds paraphrase nearly half a dozen times into English and has two major French translations plus there has been translations due into modern Arabic Thai Russian German Bengali Kurdish Swedish Afrikaans Chinese modern Farsi and given its popularity some studnet may be playing with it right now as I type !
The quality of the translations and illustrations vary from kitsch from to excellent!
I have a copy of the Pogany and Dulac illustrated versions?
Which version have you read?
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