About this edition

A complete edition of the surviving works of Omar Khayyam Nishapuri (1048–1131), translated in a single voice with the Persian alongside.

What's here

One work: the Rubaiyat — the corpus of quatrains attributed to Omar Khayyam of Nishapur (1048–1131), mathematician, astronomer, and reluctant poet. The text is the Foroughi–Ghani critical selection of 178 quatrains, translated quatrain by quatrain with the Persian facing. Each quatrain is a section of its own, so the famous ones — the jug of wine and loaf of bread, the moving finger of the potters' workshop poems — can be linked, quoted, and compared against the Persian directly. Attribution in the Rubaiyat tradition is genuinely uncertain; quatrains the tradition also assigns to other poets carry a note saying so.

From the Persian

Every translation was produced by reading the Persian text directly, not by copying or adapting any prior edition. The Persian comes from open scholarly sources.

How to use this

Read the quatrains in order from the work page, with the Persian beside the English and every name linked to the glossary. The Glossary collects every person and place in the corpus; Search works across the Persian and the translation. The chronology page sets the quatrains in Khayyam's life and the Seljuk world they came from.

Citation and reuse

The translation, the headnotes, and the editorial apparatus are released under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 — share and adapt with attribution, non-commercial use only, derivatives under the same licence.

Status

1 work translated in this language.