I just bought my fourth copy of the Rubiyyat of Omar Khayyam. I'm starting to feel like Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory, collecting all those copies of Catcher in the Rye. It's such a beautiful poem though!
Right now I'm reading this book about Sufism by Idries Shah, and he syas that Omar Khayyam hid an esoteric message in the poem. Some aspects of this Sufic reading it were lost in the Fitzgerald "translation", but some remain. I just learned that Idries Shah created his own translation of the original Rubiyyat, which preserves the Sufic meaning. So I had to have it.
Soon (ie when I finish reading about him), I'm going to make a thread about the original Omar Khayyam. It's interesting -- it's very likely that teenage Kerry Thornely was not aware of the mystical depth of this name he chose, I suspect he just loved that so many of the poems are about getting drunk. But who knows. There's a lot of interesting stuff here which may tell us something about Discordia too.
