Omar Khayyam (1048 - 1131) was a Persian astronomer and mathematician born in Nishapur in northeastern Iran who lived and worked at the courts of the Seljuk dynasty. Modern scholars agree that there is very little (if any) of the collected work of poetry know as the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam that can be certainly attributed to the historical figure. A tradition of attribution grew up in the centuries after Khayyam's death which culminated in Edward Fitzgerald's translation in the 19th Century.Juan Cole is a public intellectual, prominent blogger and essayist, and the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, USA. He is the translator of Broken Wings and The Vision by Khalil Gibran.

• PrefaceNote on the TranslationIntroductionThe Rubaiyat of Omar KhayyamEpilogueNotes

With this new translation of Khayyam and his insightful essays on the historical context, Cole offers a splendid piece of work which offers an alternative to FitzGerald’s epochmaking adaptation of the Rubáiyát, to be placed in the canon of nineteenth-century English poetry, finding imitations in a large number of languages. Perhaps even more important than the poetic nature and message of these quatrains is how Cole successfully brings to the fore the secular faction of Persian culture, of which quatrains attributed to Khayyam are living evidence.