Omar Khayyam famous for his Rubaiyat was one of the prominent Persian scholars and philosophers in the 11th century Persia. Rubai, a Persian poetic form corresponds to quatrain in English. It covers a vast gamut of subjects in poetry.
Edward FitzGerald translated The Rubaiyat of Khayyam in English and introduced it to the West. Omar Khayyam became a more familiar name in the West rather than the East after FitzGerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat into English since 1859.
FitzGerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat caused a literary revolution in South Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Some notable poets and scholars have translated Khayyam’s Rubaiyat in Urdu language like Khumqadaye -e- Khayyam by Qizilbash Delhavi; The Rubaiyat-i- Omer Khayyam by Mahesh Prasad Molavi Fazal and others. They do not refer to FitzGerald’s English translation in their works. But Khayyam ul Hind Prof. Waqif included the FitzGerald's translation in his Urdu Rubayait-i-Omar Khayyam.
My paper shall focus on Prof. Waqif’s Urdu translation vis-a-vis FitzGerald’s English quatrains. He had translated more than 500 quatrains of Khayyam into Urdu and transliterated them into Hindi in three Volumes. I shall discuss the 37 English quatrains of FitzGerald refracted in the Urdu collection. The Urdu collection of Prof. Waqif is profusely illustrated which depict the ethos and dictions of FitzGerald’s quatrains rather than Khayyam’s rubaiyat.
