Edward FitzGerald (31 March 1809 - 14 June 1883) was an English writer, best known as the poet of the first and most famous English translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is the title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his translation of a selection of poems, originally written in Persian and of which there are about a thousand, attributed to Omar Khayyám (1048-1131), a Persian poet, mathematician and astronomer. A Persian ruba'i is a two line stanza with two parts (or hemistechs) per line, hence the word "Rubaiyat", (derived from the Arabic root word for 4), meaning "quatrains". Salaman and Absal