21st St. And Guadalupe
Austin, Texas 78705

2009 marks the 150th anniversary of Edward Fitzgerald's landmark translation of the poetry of the medieval Persian astronomer Omar Khayyam. Fitzgerald's work became an unprecedented popular phenomenon in England and America: by the 1930s, the Rubaiyat was by some accounts the most published and translated text in English after Shakespeare and the Bible. This exhibition draws on the Center's expansive Rubaiyat collections, ranging from Persian manuscripts and miniature editions to parodies and playing cards, to reveal how the Rubaiyat phenomenon constructed an idealized Orient even as Omar Khayyam and his poems helped readers understand their own lives.

Added by Upcoming Robot on January 31, 2009