Edward Fitzgerald
(Edward Purcell; Bredfield, 1809-Merton Rectory, Norfolk, 1883) English poet and translator.He is the author of the philosophical dialogue Euphranor (1851) and a Collection of apothegms and axioms (1852), but he is known, above all, for his adaptation of the Rubaiyat by the Persian poet Omar Jayyam (1859).
Edward Fitzgerald
Of aristocratic lineage, Edward Fitzgerald was educated at Trinity Cambridge College, where he befriended Alfred Tennyson (who dedicated his poem Tiresias to him), William Makepeace Thackeray, James Spedding and WB Donne, graduating in 1830; later he would study Spanish and Persian privately.He lived a lonely country lord existence in Suffolk, Woodbridge, or the surrounding area; He only moved from there on the occasion of a few periodic trips to London and alternated literary activity with gardening and yachting.An eccentric character, he was a brilliant correspondent and maintained a close literary relationship with Thomas Carlyle and other authors.
In addition to a dialogue by Plato ( Euphranor , 1851) and a collection of aphorisms ( Polonius , 1852), which appeared anonymously, Fitzgerald made the free translation of eight dramas by Pedro Calderón de la Barca in white verse or prose (1853), from texts by the Iranian poets Giami and Farid al-Din 'Attar, and very free paraphrases of Aeschylus and Sophocles.Close to pre-Raphaelite artist circles, he is best known for his free version of the 12th century Persian poet Omar Jayyam's Rubaiyat , which he poured into beautiful and inspired verses.
Although it appeared in 1859 under the title The Rubaiyyàt of Ornar Khayyàm , Edward Fitzgerald's version was not famous until its occasional discovery (carried out by Swinburne and Rossetti) and satisfied the taste of the decadent and pre-Raphaelite circles of fin-de-siècle England, due to which it was widely distributed and numerous editions.Fitzgerald explains in his prologue that the Persian rubai (singular of rubaiyat ) is a separate four-line stanza and that he kept this form; it is not entirely exact, since the Persian stanzas constitute isolated poems, whereas this author converted them into sequences.However, the English version represents a milestone in the expression of a neo-pagan attitude in the middle of the Victorian era.
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