Biography

The first facts on Khayyám's life date from biographers and historians as al-Kházeni (1121) and al-Beihaqi (1154), from whom we learn that Khayyám was born in Nishapur, where his family already lived for generations, that he was not a very prolific writer and that he was not a very agreeable chacacter. Remarkably enough however, none of these sources mention his name in relation to his poetry. Even Nezami of Samarkand, contemporary of Khayyám and author of the Chahar Maqalé (Four Discourses), never mentions him as a poet. The popular legend, cited by FitzGerald in his introduction, about the three friends who as young students pledged to help each other in later life, has been proven by F. Rosen to be historically unjust.

The earliest sources in which we find references to Khayyám as a poet are the Kharidat al-Qasr (about 1174/5), a biographical work on Islamic poets by Qazvini, and the Mersád al-'ebád (1221), a sufi handbook by al'-Din Dáya. In fact, until this day no manuscript or document has been found that provides irrefutable evidence that Khayyám did write the verses that he is supposed to have written. Some of Khayyám's scientific writings however have survived and have recently been published by B. Rashed and B. Vahabzadeh in Al-Khayyám mathematician (1999). Soon after FitzGerald published his translation in 1859, and despite its worldwide recognition as a masterpiece of English literature, questions were raised with regards to the reliability and truthfulness of his translation and the authenticity of the quatrains. The Russian professor V.A. Zhukovski was the first who tried to establish which quatrains were genuine but discovered that 82 of the 464 verses from Nicolas' translation (1867) also appeared in the divans of other poets.

The number of these 'wandering' quatrains was increased by investigations by the British orientalist Denison Ross, the Danish scholar Arthur Christensen and the German scholar Christian Rempis. Also the German translator Friedrich Rosen and, more recently, Iranian scholars as Sadegh Hedayat, Ali Dashti, Mohammed Ali Furughi and Qasim Ghani have tried to find a method to determine which quatrains may, with some degree of certainty, be ascribed to Khayyám. In a recently published study, The Wine of Wisdom (2005), Mehdi Aminrazavi reviews the major studies until this day and concludes that it is impossible to determine the historical Omar Khayyám. In stead he suggests that 'he who has composed the Rubáiyát is for us Khayyám'.

Another ongoing dispute concerns the question how Khayyám's poetry should be interpreted. Was he a mystic, a sufi, or was he the hedonist that western translators hold him for? Edward FitzGerald and Omar Khayyám are often treated as an unseparable couple. Most people only know Khayyám from FitzGerald's translation and it is this translation that has been reprinted in thousands of editions world wide. However, there are hundreds of other translations in approximately 85 languages, sometimes literally translated directly from the Persian. Some of the more important translations are by J.B. Nicolas (1867), E.H. Whinfield, (1882), J. Payne (1898), F. Rosen (1909), and more recently by Rempis (1935), Fouladvand (1960 and 1965), Saidi (1991).