Omar Khayyam

Each book a treasure
The famous quatrains of the poet
Omar Khayyam
are now available with modern illustrations
Lovers and collectors of beautiful books can look forward with pleasure to an extraordinary work:
The poems of the world renowned Persian mathematician, philosopher and poet, Omar Khayyam,
are now presented in a four-language edition with contemporary illustrations.
On 88 illustrated pages illustrated and with 22 colour plates, the Iranian artist
Naghi Naghachian
interprets the quatrains with their timeless beauty in a strikingly new way.
The book is laid out in four languages, Persian, German, English and French. Naghachian understands
his selection of translations and his illustrations as an attempt to create a holistic interpretation of the
writings of Khayyam and as a visual tribute to his poetic, philosophical works.
Page 3
Short Biographiy of Omar Khayyâms
Page 4
The Artist
Page 5-21
Exampels of some illustrated pages
Page 22
Imprint
Omar Khayyam – poet and philosopher of the 11th century
The poet Omar Khayyam was born in 1048 in Nischapur, a city in the Persian province of
Khorasan, and died there in 1123. He was also one of the greatest philosophers, mathematicians
and astronomers of his time, and concerned himself, among other things, with parallels and
irrational numbers.
In his quatrains, one encounters Omar Khayyam from his enlightened and sceptical side.
Only a few of these verses were published in his own lifetime. Not before the mid-19th century
was Omar Khayyam known to the West and Anglo-Saxon world through the translations of the
English scholar and writer, Edward FitzGerald.
Adolf Friedrich Graf von Schack and Friedrich Bodenstedt translated the quatrains into German
in 1880, and this was followed from 1912 on by the translations of Friedrich Rosen. The largest
selection of translations of Omar Khayyam’s quatrains is in French. Most of these versions are in
rhyming quatrains which, for the greater part, are transcriptions of already existing translations.
Many translators, however, neglect or distort the spirit and meaning of Khayyam’s poetry for the
sake of making the quatrains rhyme. Only the version of Mahdy Fouladvind is true to the wording
of Khayyam and at the same time has an extraordinary lyrical quality. In selecting the translations,
Naghachian was therefore able to draw on many sources. The decisive criteria were, in the first
instance, trueness to the text, and secondly, poetic rendering in the respective language,
The poems of Omar Khayyam are, as with no other poet down the centuries, copied, interpreted
or imitated time and again in new versions. These imitations and copies are one of the reasons
for the enormous degree of awareness of Omar Khayyam’s poetry. This has led on the one hand to
great confusion but has also allowed his work to be like a musical theme or composition, which
has generated variations, improvisations and fresh interpretations.
The artist Naghi Naghachian
Naghi Naghachian was born in Teheran. After completing his school education in Iran,
he studied illustration and book design at the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG),
an academy of design, in Offenbach, Germany. Thereafter he was engaged as art director
in various advertising agencies in Germany, Switzerland and England. He also worked as
a freelance graphic designer with focus on illustration and brand designing for leading
producers of brand articles in Europe, and also for broadcasting stations in Germany and
other European countries.
In addition, he was occupied with theoretical work in the field of colour and research in
the passive perception of colour and “after image” phenomena. He produced carried out
an analysis of the letters of the Arabic alphabet and a definition of their structure,
enabling him to design a number of modern types of Arabic script.
This publication of the illustrated quatrains of Omar Khayyam is his most recent project.
He devoted five years of intensive and creative study to produce the book.
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