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Le Gallienne’S Paraphrase And The Limits Of Translation, Adam Talib

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This essay shows that Richard Le Gallienne’s 1897 edition of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is an original literary text and that it, along with other versions of the Rubáiyát published in the same period, was a response to FitzGerald’s wildly popular translation of a few decades earlier. Le Gallienne’s paraphrased versions of Persian poetry, Khayyam and later Hafez, are linked to his close involvement with the commercial publishing industry while his primary reliance in these paraphrases on academic translations highlights the parallel trend of scholarly reaction, often corrective, to FitzGerald’s edition. By examining how Le Gallienne composed his paraphrase …