Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness -
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

In celebration of the UN World Poetry Day, March 21
Dr Abe V Rotor
Living with Nature - School on Blog [avrotor.blogspot.com]
Paaralang Bayan sa Himpapawid (People's School-on-Air) with Ms Melly C Tenorio
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Dr Abe V Rotor

Omar Khayyam

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is the title that Edward Fitzgerald gave to his translation of a selection of poems, originally written in Persian and of which there are about a thousand, attributed to Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), a Persian poet, mathematician, and astronomer.

A Persian ruba'i is a two line stanza with two parts (or hemistechs) per line, hence the word "Rubaiyat", (derived from the Arabic root word for 4), meaning "quatrains".

Perhaps the most famous of FitzGerald's verses is this one,
Quatrain XI in his 1st edition:

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness -
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

Quatrain XII in his 5th edition:

"A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread--and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness--
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!"

The following are several samples of Fitzgerald's translation, concluding with another well-known verse (Fitzgerald's quatrain LI in his 1st edition):

Some for the pleasures here below
Others yearn for The Prophet's Paradise to come;
Ah, take the cash and let the credit go,
Nor heed the rumble of a distant drum

And much as Wine has played the Infidel
And robbed me of my robe of Honour, well ...
I often wonder what the vintners buy
One half so precious as the stuff they sell

For some we loved, the loveliest and best
That from His rolling vintage Time has pressed,
Have drunk their glass a round or two before,
And one by one crept silently to rest

But helpless pieces in the game He plays
Upon this chequer-board of Nights and Days
He hither and thither moves, and checks ... and slays
Then one by one, back in the Closet lays

"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."

Edward Fitzgerald versions. The translations that are best known in English are those of about a hundred of the verses by Edward FitzGerald (1809–1883).