A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread---and Thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness---
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
These lines appeared in London in 1859 in an anonymous transalation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, written by a 12th century, Persian poet and astronomer.
From the get go, the transalation was ahiled by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other Pre-Raphaelites as an authentic masterpiece. But it was not until the early 1870's that the name of the transalator was revealed: Edward Fitzgerald. His transalation of the Rubaiyat helped establish the mood of fin-de-siecle poetry in England.
The leitmotif of the Rubaiyat was simple and deeply felt: We know nothing about life in the hereafter, so let us make the most of the here-and-now. In Fitzgerald's graceful transalations, a mood of sweet resigned melancholy suffuses the poems.
~Facts on File Dictionary of Historical and Cultural Allusions
