The Fitz/Khayyam poems are probably my favorites. I keep a really nice copy next to my monitor at home and a small, pocket edition in the satchel I carry about with me everywhere.

Whether at Naishapur or Babylon,
whether the cup with sweet or bitter run,
the wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,
the leaves of Life keep falling, one by one.

The Moving Finger writes, and having writ,
moves on - nor all your piety nor wit,
may lure it back to cancel half a line,
nor all your tears wash out a word of it.

Think! On this battered caravanserei,
whose portals are alternate night and day,
how sultan after sultan, in his pomp,
abode his destined hour, then went his way.

I love 'em and can read 'em for hours and hours when I'm in a particular mood. I've had several persian friends tell me that the English translation is extremely good, but still only captures about 70% of the feeling. These buddies told me that they like to sit around, get drunk, and recite these to each other on occasion.

Fitzgerald achieved his remarkable results by mixing and matching the original quatrains into the translations. So any particular poem in English might be an amalgamation of several in Persian.

Factoids: Khayyam means "tent-maker." "Rubai" is a very popular style of persian poetry, and "Rubaiyat" is a collection of that poetry.

His life was fascinating. Although he is most famous in the west because of the translations by Fitzgerald, people in his native Persia thought him a bit of a borderline heretic, because some of his poems expressed a world view at odds with the Quran. He was a great astronomer and algebraist and he was able to pursue these interests because of a childhood pact he made with two other boys - that whichever of them came into weatlh, he would share it equally with the other two. (I've forgotten their names long ago.) Sure enough one of his friends gained a very high appointment to the Sultan and he asked his compatriots what they desired. One of them wanted a government position for himself, but the other, Omar, only wanted to pursue his studies. So the fortunate friend procured a stipend for Omar to study at an observatory, which he did. During this time he determined a very accurate measure of the length of a year and developed solutions for cubic equations. He also wrote a couple books, the names of which I can't remember.

k