Even though it doesn’t cast me in a good light, I’ll tell you the reason I grabbed this copy of Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám at the most recent used book fair. I just finished reading The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (write-up to follow!). Throughout that entire book, the one “off” note in the characterization of the main character is that she “always carried an Omar Khayyám in her travelling-bag.” I couldn’t stand being less well-read than Lily Bart.
I took a class in college on Sufism and mysticism that involved quite a bit of Rumi, but I couldn’t remember actually reading anything by Khayyam. As a starting point, I read the Wikipedia pages of both Persian poets. According to that source, Khayyám lived from 1048 to 1131 and Rumi was 1207 to 1273. Then, I did some googling to find out whether there was any relationship between the two.
You’ll be shocked to hear that Google’s AI provided garbage information. As of 5/5/25, if you search “did rumi read omar khayyam poem,” the AI overview of the results says that the two were contemporaries. If you drop either the word “poem” or the word “omar,” the aggregator admits that Rumi came later.
It turns out to be a tough question because lots of poetry is attributed to Khayyám, most of it first attested in the couple of centuries after his death. So any similarities or continuities between those works and Rumi’s are necessarily the same as between Rumi’s and Persian poetry of the period in general. Probably why that college class steered away from Khayyám.
Anyway, the Wikipedia page for the book I got, the book Lily Bart always had in her travelling-bag, is hilarious. In 1859 Edward Fitzgerald “translated” some poems he figured were probably by Omar Khayyám. The authorship of his source material is incredibly suspect, and on top of that, his translations were creative. Here’s what Wikipedia says on the subject:
Fitzgerald’s translation is rhyming and metrical, and rather free. Many of the verses are paraphrased, and some of them cannot be confidently traced to his source material at all.
They also have a fabulous quote from Fitzgerald defending his work:
I suppose very few people have ever taken such Pains in Translation as I have: though certainly not to be literal. But at all Costs, a Thing must live: with a transfusion of one’s own worse Life if one can’t retain the Originals better. Better a live Sparrow than a stuffed Eagle.
I almost want to get into translation work, just so that, when I write something wildly inaccurate, I can snap back, “better a live Sparrow than a stuffed Eagle.” Burn.
And that brings us back to The House of Mirth. All of a sudden, everything makes sense. Contemporary readers (1904) wouldn’t have taken that sentence to mean that Lily Bart was particularly well-read. She was caught up in the latest fad, Orientalism, and that fits The House of Mirth much better.
The illustrations in this edition are by René Bull, and they’re all amazing. These two in particular stuck out to me.
I think they resonated with me because of an illustration by Richard Jesse Watson, done for The High Rise Glorious Skittle Skat Roarious Sky Pie Angel Food Cake by Nancy Willard. I loved this book as a kid, and this illustration was a lot of the reason why. If Watson wasn’t consciously referencing Bull’s drawings, then at least they were pulling from the same well for their angelic depictions.
I’m not hugely one for mystic poetry. Sorry. I can only put up with so much atmosphere before I start demanding concrete narrative.
My favorite is Quatrain 52, which actually gets two illustrations in this edition.
And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky,
Whereunder crawling coop’t we live and die,
Lift not thy hands to It for help – for It
Rolls impotently on as Thou or I.
But because I want narrative, reading that verse just makes me want to grab The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. And if I re-read that novel, well, then of course I’m going to have re-read The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty by Vendela Vida, and her title’s a Rumi quote, and then we’re right back into reading mystic poetry. It’s very much a If You Give a Mouse a Cookie situation.
Caption: Me right now.