Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam - Influence

Influence

Like Shakespeare's works, Omar Khayyám's verses have provided later authors with quotations to use as titles:

• The title of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe novel Some Buried Caesar comes from one of the Tentmaker's quatrains (FitzGerald's XVIII), for example.
• Eugene O'Neill's drama Ah, Wilderness! derives its title from the first quoted quatrain above.
• Agatha Christie used The Moving Finger as a story title, as did Stephen King. See also And Having Writ….
• Lan Wright used Dawn's Left Hand as the title of a science fiction story serialized in New Worlds Science Fiction (January–March 1963).

Equally noteworthy are these works likewise influenced:

• The British composer Granville Bantock produced a choral setting of FitzGerald's translation 1906-1909.
• The American author O. Henry humorously referred to a book by "Homer KM" with the character "Ruby Ott" in his short story "The Handbook of Hymen." O. Henry also quoted a quatrain from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in "The Rubaiyat of a Scotch Highball."
• Using FitzGerald's translation, the Armenian-American composer Alan Hovhaness set a dozen of the quatrains to music. This work, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Op. 308, calls for narrator, orchestra, and solo accordion.
• The American horror author H P Lovecraft created an Arab poet Abdul Alhazred to whom was attributed a couplet:

That is not dead which can eternal lie

And with strange aeons even death may die.

Lovecraft was obsessed with the Arabian Nights and had no doubt read the Fitzgerald translation - the couplet follows Fitzgerald's metre and rhyme pattern for the first half of a Khayyam quatrain.

• The artist/illustrator Edmund Dulac produced some much-beloved illustrations for the Rubaiyat, 1909.
• Filmmaker D.W. Griffith planned a film based on the poems as a follow-up to Intolerance in 1916. It was to star Miriam Cooper, but when she left the Griffith company the plans were dropped; he would ultimately film Broken Blossoms instead.
• The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges discusses The Rubaiyat and its history in an essay, "The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald" ("El Enigma de Edward FitzGerald") in his book "Other Inquisitions" ("Otras Inquisiciones", 1952). He also references it in some of his poems, including "Rubaiyat" in "The Praise of the Shadow" ("Elogio de la Sombra", 1969), and "Chess" ("Ajedrez") in "The Maker" ("El Hacedor", 1960). Borges' father Jorge Guillermo Borges was the author of a translation to Spanish of the FitzGerald version of The Rubaiyat.
• The Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf based his novel Samarkand on the life of Omar Khayyam, and the creation of the Rubaiyat. It details the Assassin sect as well, and includes a fictional telling of how the (non-existent) original manuscript came to be on the RMS Titanic.
• Science fiction author Paul Marlowe's story "Resurrection and Life" featured a character who could only communicate using lines from the Rubaiyat.
• The Supreme Court of the Philippines, through a unanimous opinion penned in 2005 by Associate Justice Leonardo Quisumbing, quoted The Moving Finger when it ruled that the widow of defeated presidential candidate Fernando Poe Jr. could not substitute her late husband in his pending election protest against Philippine president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, thus leading to the dismissal of the protest.
• In Cyberflix's PC game, Titanic: Adventure Out of Time, the object is to save three important items, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, one of Adolf Hitler's paintings, and a notebook that proves German officials were attempting to gain geo-political advantage by instigating communist revolution. Two passages from the book are also included in the game as clues to progress the narrative.
• The Rubaiyat was quoted in the 1946 King Vidor Western film Duel in the Sun, which starred Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones: "Oh threats of hell and hopes of paradise! One thing at least is certain: This life flies. One thing is certain and the rest is Lies; The Flower that once is blown for ever dies."
• A canto was quoted and used as an underlying theme of the 1945 screen adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray: "I sent my soul through the invisible, some letters of that after-life to spell, and by and by my soul did return, and answered, 'I myself am Heaven and Hell.'"
• Coldcut produced an album with a song called "Rubyaiyat" on their album Let us Play! This song contains what appears to be some words from the English translation. See album This was probably influenced by the ambitious 1970 album by jazz-soul harpist Dorothy Ashby, "The Rubaiyat of Dorothy Ashby," which has become something of a cult classic. The lyrics quote from several of the poem's verses, and the tracks' highly stylized and heavily reverberated production values and pop mysticism have made it a favorite of samplers, beat-diggers, and fans of psychedelic jazz and R&B.
• In one 6-episode story arc of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, Bullwinkle finds the "Ruby Yacht of Omar Khayyam" in the town of Frostbite Falls (on the shores of Veronica Lake, no less).
• Woody Guthrie recorded an excerpt of the Rubaiyat set to music that was released on Hard Travelin' (The Asch Recordings Vol. 3).
• In the film The Music Man (based on the 1957 musical), town librarian Marian Paroo draws down the wrath of the mayor's wife for encouraging the woman's daughter to read a book of "dirty Persian poetry." Summarizing what she calls the "Ruby Hat," the mayor's wife paraphrases FitzGerald's Quatrain XII from his 5th edition: "People lying out in the woods eating sandwiches, and drinking directly out of jugs with innocent young girls."
• The satirist and short story writer Hector Hugh Monro took his pen name of 'Saki' from Edward FitzGerald's translation of the Rubaiyat.
• The Rubaiyat have also influenced Arabic music. Indeed, Oum Koulthoum, a legend of Arabic music, has sung one of those poems and made her song "robaaiyet el khayam" become one of her most beautiful songs.
• A copy of the Rubaiyat plays a role in an episode of the TV series New Amsterdam and is shown to be the inspiration for the name of one of the lead character's children, Omar York.
• The famed "skull and roses" poster for a Grateful Dead show at the Avalon Ballroom done by Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse was adapted from Edmund J. Sullivan's illustrations for The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
• The play The Shadow of a Gunman by Sean O'Casey contains a reference to the Rubaiyat as the character Donal Davoren quotes "grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, and mould life nearer to the heart's desire."
• Wendy Cope's poem "Strugnell's Rubiyat" is a close parody of the FitzGerald translation, relocated to modern day Tulse Hill.

• Oliver Herford released a parody of the Rubaiyat called "The Rubaiyat of a Persian Kitten" in 1904, which is notable for its charming illustrations of the kitten in question on his philosophical adventures.

• One of the title pages of Principia Discordia, a co-author of which went by the pen-name Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst, features its own spin on the quatrain most quoted above:

A jug of wine,

A leg of lamb

And thou!

Beside me,

Whistling in

the darkness.

• In the opening chapter of his book God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens quotes from Richard Le Gallienne's translation of Khayyam's famous quatrain:

And do you think that unto such as you

A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew

God gave the secret, and denied it me?

Well, well-what matters it? Believe that, too!

• The work influenced the 2004 concept album The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam by the Italian group Milargo Acustico.
• The final words of the work, Tamam Shud (which translates to 'Ended'), were at the center of the rather bizarre Taman Shud Case along with other connections to the Rubaiyat.
• Elektra Records released a complication album named Rubáiyát in 1990 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Elektra Records record label.