The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr.

This eBook was produced by David Schwan <davidsch@earthlink.net>.
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám Jr.
Translated from the Original Bornese into English Verse by Wallace Irwin author of The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum,
with eight illustrations and cover design by Gelett Burgess
Introduction
Since the publication of Edward Fitzgerald's classic translation of the Rubaiyat in 1851 - or rather since its general popularity several years later - poets minor and major have been rendering the sincerest form of flattery to the genius of the Irishman who brought Persia into the best regulated families. Unfortunately there was only one Omar and there were scores of imitators who, in order to make the Astronomer go round, were obliged to draw him out to the thinness of Balzac's Magic Skin. While all this was going on, the present Editor was forced to conclude that the burning literary need was not for more translators, but for more Omars to translate; and what was his surprise to note that the work of a later and superior Omar Khayyam was lying undiscovered in the wilds of Borneo! Here, indeed, was a sensation in the world of letters - a revelation as thrilling as the disinterment of Ossian's forgotten songs - the discovery of an unsubmerged Atlantis. While some stout Cortez more worthy than the Editor might have stood on this new Darien and gazed over the sleeping demesne of Omar Khayyam, Jr., he had, so to speak, the advantage of being first on the ground, and to him fell the duty, nolens volens, of lifting the rare philosophy out of the Erebus that had so long cloaked it in obscurity.
Although little is known of the life of Omar Khayyam the elder, the details of his private career are far more complete than those of his son, Omar Khayyam, Jr. In fact, many historians have been so careless as to have entirely omitted mention of the existence of such a person as the younger Omar. Comparative records of the two languages, however, show plainly how the mantle was handed from the Father to the Son, and how it became the commendable duty of the second generation to correct and improve upon the first.