The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Comprising the Metrical Translations and the Prose Version, with an Appendix Showing the Variations in the First Three Editions of FitzGerald's Rendering

xl, 244 pp. Navy blue cloth, gilt titles and decorations, top edge gilt. Photographic frontispiece of Edward Fitzgerald. A collection of verse translations by Edward Fitzgerald and E.H. Whinfield, together with the prose version of Justin McCarthy, edited with an introduction by Jessie B. Rittenhouse. Also includes: a poem entitled To Omar Khayyam written by Andrew Lang; a brief biography of Khayyam; notes by Edward Fitzgerald on his translations; On Reading the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in a Kentish Rose Garden by Mathilde Blind; comparative stanzas; a bibliography of foreign translations, Fitzgerald's English translations, American editions of Fitzgerald's translations, and later English translations. Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is the title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his 1859 translation from Persian to English of a selection of quatrains attributed to Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), dubbed "the Astronomer-Poet of Persia". Although commercially unsuccessful at first, FitzGerald's work was popularised from 1861 onward by Whitley Stokes, and the work came to be greatly admired by the Pre-Raphaelites in England. FitzGerald had a third edition printed in 1872, which increased interest in the work in the United States. By the 1880s, the book was extremely popular throughout the English-speaking world, to the extent that numerous 'Omar Khayyam clubs' were formed and there was a 'fin de siecle cult of the Rubaiyat.' FitzGerald's work has been published in several hundred editions and has inspired similar translation efforts in English, Hindi and in many other languages.