I've wanted a copy of this for ages - and now I find it as part of a wicked 5 for £5 offer praying on the book-loving public with limited shelf space! The eccentric translator Edward FitzGerald used to live in Bredfield, Suffolk, which is near me. I must re-read that story in W G Sebald's excellent Rings of Saturn

(10/05) Firstly, I must admit to getting this classic translation confused with a different poem by Coleridge ('In Xanadu did Kubla Khan; A stately pleasure dome decree') Xanadu I now find out is a name for the C13th Chinese Emporer's supposedly luxurious summer palace in Inner Mongolia. So that clears that up then!

FitzGerald seems to have quite loosely translated a number of 4 line verses (or rubaiyat) from an C11th Persian manuscript. The poem (EF?) seems much taken with the pleasures of the grape, and a certain dreamy existentialism, although not always entirely understandable even with the excellent footnotes. One famous quatrain sticks out...

'The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: not all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all they Tears wash out a Word of it.'