Fall 2025 Course
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Sign up below for the Fall Term! Registration closes October 31st.
Course Description
Ah, fill the Cup: -- what boots it to repeat
How Time is slipping underneath our Feet:
Unborn Tomorrow and dead Yesterday,
Why fret about them if To-day be sweet!
In this and other quatrains translated by Edward FitzGerald, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam became one of the most beloved poems of Victorian England, and it has remained popular down to the present day. With his religious skepticism and reminders to “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” Omar Khayyam struck a chord among Victorian readers who were facing spiritual questions of their own in the age of Darwin.
But Omar Khayyam was an enigmatic figure, and many questions swirl around his work. Was he really a religious skeptic, or do his verses possess a secret, Sufi meaning? Which quatrains attributed to him are really his? And just how accurate is FitzGerald’s translation?
In this course on the “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,”1 we will get to know the real Omar Khayyam, unfiltered by the gauzy haze of Victorian translation.
In the first part of the course, we will explore questions such as: who was Khayyam? What are the main themes of his poetry? And just what is a “rubaiyat”? We will separate fact from fiction in Khayyam’s life based on the original Persian sources. Following this introduction, we will dive into a selection of Khayyam’s quatrains, presented in their original Persian, along with transliteration and English translation. By examining these poems line by line and word by word, we will gain a deeper appreciation for the linguistic and thematic beauty of his work. We will also explore how these quatrains connect to Khayyam’s broader philosophical outlook.
This course is ideal for poetry lovers, students of Persian, and anyone who has ever wanted to drink deeply from the cup of life.
The class is taught in English and the text of the poems will be presented both in the original Persian and in English translation.
Details
- Cost: $49
- Class meets Sundays at 2:00 pm Eastern Time (US)
- Class meets once a week for 5 sessions
- Class begins November 2nd and ends on November 30th
- Recording available for students who can’t attend live.
- Course materials will be provided by instructor
Prerequisites
None.
Some familiarity with Persian language and literature is helpful, but not required.
Instructor
Dr. Leila Seyed-Ghasem holds a Ph.D. in Persian Language and Literature from the University of Tehran. Her doctoral dissertation, titled “The Rhetoric of Syntactic Structures in the History of Bayhaqī,” received the distinction of Best Doctoral Dissertation in Persian Language and Literature in 2013. A revised version of the dissertation was published as a book and subsequently awarded the Iranian Book of the Year Award in the category of literary criticism. Her research interests extend to the field of balāgha and its connections to modern linguistics. Her studies on this topic have been published in esteemed Persian peer-reviewed journals. She is a cofounder of joyofpersian.com for teaching Persian language and literature.
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- An earlier version of this course was developed for joyofpersian.com. ↩︎