As Iran burns, Mary Kenny finds solace in the Persian classic, the Rubáiyát
My response to the distressing events in Iran is to take refuge in a restorative reading of Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám – as a pearl of ancient Persian philosophy. We are told (by artificial intelligence) that this Rubáiyát is not entirely as the Persian scholar Khayyám composed it. ‘While based on 11th-century Persian verses, it is more of a “transmogrification” or creative adaptation, with scholars questioning if only a small fraction of the 1,000-plus attributed quatrains are genuinely by the mathematician Khayyám,’ declares AI. But I don’t care whether the 1859 version is an exact replica of the original work or not. It’s beautiful, it’s soothing and it captures a spirit of desert melancholy, wine-soaked hedonism – and the immutable passage of time. And didn’t schoolgirls of my vintage once write in their autograph books, ‘Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,/ A Flask of...
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