For over a millennium, the name Omar Khayyam has resonated across the globe. To the West, thanks to Edward FitzGerald’s 19th-century translations, he is the melancholic hedonist: “A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou.” But to Persian speakers and scholars, Khayyam is something far more complex: a mathematical genius, an astronomer who re-calibrated the calendar, and a philosophical poet whose quatrains (Rubaiyat) cut to the bone of existence with startling clarity.

Omar Khayyam lived in a world of star charts and caravanserais. He would have been amused—and perhaps horrified—to know his existential drinking songs are now stored as pixels in a PDF. But the medium changes; the message does not.

To whet your appetite, here is one of Khayyam’s most famous quatrains in the original. Try reading it aloud: