Background
Edward FitzGerald was born on March 31, 1809 at Bredfield House in Bredfield, around 2 miles north of Woodbridge, Suffolk, England.
( One of the best-known, most often quoted English classi...)
One of the best-known, most often quoted English classics. Edward FitzGerald's free translation of skeptical, hedonistic verse attributed to Omar Khayyám (1048â1122), Persian mathematician, astronomer and philosopher. The 5th edition incorporates FitzGerald's handwritten changes in the 4th edition, and is traditionally printed with the 1st edition. Notes explaining Persian names and unfamiliar terms.
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Edward FitzGerald was born on March 31, 1809 at Bredfield House in Bredfield, around 2 miles north of Woodbridge, Suffolk, England.
In 1821, Edward was sent to school at Bury St Edmunds. In 1826, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where, some two years later, he became acquainted with Thackeray and W. H. Thompson.
Soon after graduating in 1830, he retired to the life of a country gentleman in Woodbridge.
A slow and diffident writer, FitzGerald published a few works anonymously, among them "Dialogue on Youth" (1851) and "Polonius: a Collection of Wise Saws and Modern Instances" (1852). Then Edward freely translated Six Dramas of Calderón (1853) before learning Persian with the help of his Orientalist friend Edward Cowell.
His principle of translating was to reproduce the atmosphere of the original accurately, though dealing freely with the words.
Edward turned to Oriental studies, and in 1856 he anonymously published a version of the Salaman and Absdl of Jami in Miltonic verse.
In 1857 FitzGerald “mashed together, ” as he put it, material from two different manuscript transcripts (one from the Bodleian Library, the other from Kolkata) to create a poem whose “Epicurean Pathos” consoled him in the aftermath of his brief and disastrous marriage.
In 1859 the Rubáiyát was published in an unpretentious, anonymous little pamphlet. The poem attracted no attention until, in 1860, it was discovered by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and soon after by Algernon Swinburne. FitzGerald did not formally acknowledge his responsibility for the poem until 1876. Its appearance in the same year as Darwin’s Origin of Species, when the sea of faith was at its ebb, lent a timely significance to its philosophy, which combines expressions of outright hedonism (“Ah take the Cash, and let the Credit go”) with uneasy ponderings on the mystery of life and death.
In 1901 the letters, addressed by Edward FitzGerald to his life-long friend Fanny Kemble, were published. They formed an almost continuous series, from the middle of 1871 to within three weeks of his death in 1883.
According to those letters FitzGerald was a witty, picturesque and sympathetic letter- writer, one of the most unobtrusive authors who ever lived.
( One of the best-known, most often quoted English classi...)
Edward married to Lucy, the daughter of the Quaker poet Bernard Barton in Chichester on 4 November 1856, following a deathbed promise to Bernard made in 1849 to look after her. The marriage was evidently unhappy, for the couple separated after only a few months, despite having known each other for many years, including collaborating on a book about her father's works in 1849.