Writing in the eleventh century, Khayyam was one of the most accomplished masters of the new and increasingly popular ruba'i, or two-line stanza, that had been adopted by poets to help them shake off the artifice of conventional court poetry and express their personal feelings with wit and clarity. Khayyam ranges in his stanzas through the most fundamental aspects of human experience and, since Edward Fitzgerald's Victorian translation, his verses have been among the most popular in the English language.
In this new translation the Persian scholar Peter Avery and the poet John Heath-Stubbs have recaptured the sceptical and unorthodox spirit of the Persian text by giving as literal an English version of the original verse as possible. In the words of Jan Morris, they have 'restored to that masterpiece all the fun, dash and vivacity'.
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