Author Description

Product Description The Rubá iyát of Omar Khayyam, in the famous translation by Edward FitzGerald, remains one of the world s most popular poems. Well received at the time, it also reveals the popularity of Victorian England s fascination with the Orient. Here, the poem forms the main work in the first part of this recording, along with shorter poems by other leading Persian and Indian figures, including Rumi, Sa di and Rabindranath Tagore. The second half is devoted to works written by Western poets on the theme of the East with The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, an excerpt from Thomas Moore s Lalla Rookh, one of the bestsellers of the early nineteenth century. Review "The word 'Orient' is a nineteenth-century European term and a concept that carries the lush overtones of mystery luxury, and exotica. These extravagant readings of familiar Middle Eastern and Indian poets and Western poets writing about the region harken back to the 'mysterious East' of yesteryear. The selections are heavy in meter and rhyme...It works wonderfully well, too, in the way old movies and forgotten pop tunes do. The musical selections are especially good, and give focus and purpose and balance."-- "AudioFile" About the Author Omar Khayyam (1048-1123) was a Persian mathematician, astronomer, and poet, renowned in his own country and time for his scientific achievements but largely known to the English-speaking world as the author of Edward Fitzgerald's collection of translated quatrains, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. In addition to poetry, Khayyam also made major contributions to the fields of algebra and geometry. In The History of Western Philosophy Betrand Russell remarks that he was the only man known to him who was both a poet and a mathematician. Rumi (1207-1273) is the foremost Sufi poet, famous for his lyrics and for his didactic epic Masnavi, a collection of mystical tales and discourse. Rumi lived in the