'The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a line Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.' In the 'rubaiyat' (short epigrammatic poems) of the medieval Persian poet, mathematician, and philosopher Omar Khayyam, Edward FitzGerald[...]

One of the best-known, most often quoted English classics. Edward FitzGerald's free translation of skeptical, hedonistic verse attributed to Omar Khayyam (1048-1122), Persian mathematician, astronomer and philosopher. The 5th edition incorporates FitzGerald's handwritten changes in the 4th edition, [...]

A work of staggering poetic beauty that has inspired the likes of John Ruskin, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Bly, "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" was written in eleventh-century Persia and was largely unknown in the West until it was translated into English by Edward FitzGerald in 1859. In FitzGerald's han[...]