Edward Fitzgerald
One can perceive the magnitude of the influence of Persian literature on its western counterpart when one investigates that, in the words of Christopher Decker of The University of Cambridge, "the most frequently read of victorian poetry, and certainly one of the most popular poems in The English language" was none other than Omar Khayyám's Rubaiyat . As a demonstrative metric, the 1953 edition of The Oxford Book of Quotations, contains no less than 188 excerpts from the Rubaiyat alone, of which 59 are complete quatrains, virtually two thirds of the total work of Omar Khayyám. Not even Shakespeare or the Authorized Version of the Bible are represented by such massive percentages.
Phrases like the following that are now part and parcel of the English language, have their origins in western discovered Persian literature:
- '"A jug of Wine, a loaf of Bread - and Thou/beside singing in the wilderness"'
- '"Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty face"'
- '"The courts where Jamshid gloried and drank deep"'
- '"I came like Water, and like Wind I go"'
- '"The Flower that once has blown forever dies"'
- '"And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky"'
- '"...turn down an empty glass"'
- '"The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on..."'
In the words of Dick Davis, Fitzgerald found the "twin soul" they had spent most of their lives seeking, in Khayam.
Read more about this topic: Persian Literature In Western Culture
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