![]() ![]() His province, Khorassan, was prosperous, being both fertile and on the China-Mediterranean trade route. He was born in Naishapur, a city about two hundred and fifty miles from present day Teheran, and not too far south of the River Oxus. Omar Khayyam's story has its variants but is roughly agreed. Who was Khayyam? He was a real man, a mathematician who lived in north eastern Persia between 10 (or '26). ![]() Cowell had also introduced him to Spanish, enabling to get his translating hand in on the plays of Calderon and two other Persian poems before tackling Omar. (The work took his mind off things.) When he was translating the poem between 1857 and '59 Cowell was in India, connected by an efficient Victorian postal service. Even then FitzGerald, who was congenitally idle, might have done nothing if he hadn't undergone what, for him, was a decade of stress in the 1850s. (FitzGerald was no linguist.) It was by chance also that Cowell discovered an Omar Khayyam manuscript in the Bodleian (FitzGerald had tried to stop him going to Oxford). It was by chance that he met Edward Cowell, one of the few Victorians who spoke Persian, and who was friendly enough to help him. We're lucky to have FitzGerald's The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam at all. ![]()
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