Abdul-Rahman Shukri and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Omar Khayyam, the leading Persian poet and scientist of the fifth century created a collection of poems known as the Rubaiyat, which passed the geographical boundaries and has been translated into several languages. The first translation was presented by an English poet named Fitzgerald who introduced Khayyam's poetry and opinions to the western world. His translation is to some extent a conceptual one, and even some of his translated poems differ from its original Persian equivalent. The Arab world did not lag behind, and some literary men began to translate the Rubaiyat into Arabic. Some of them used the original Persian version as their source, but most of them, due to lack of proficiency in Persian, inevitably took advantage of the English version. One of these Arab figures is the Egyptian poet Abdul-Rahman Shukri who has translated three quatrains from the English version into Arabic. Since he used an English translation as his source text, his translation reveals some defects both in its form and its content. For example, Khayyam’s quatrain form  has been replaced by a free and conceptual translation, and he has endeavored only to convey the whole idea.This paper is a comparative study of Shakuri, and Fitzgerald translations and original Persian text of Khayyam aiming at evaluating and analyzing the defects of translation of Rubaiyat.