Alteration of the domain of discourse in Fitzgerald's English translation of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat

After over one hundred and sixty years, when Fitzgerald published his first English translation of Khayyam’s quatrains, not only does his beautiful literary text still seem pleasant and fresh, still being studied and evaluated by translation scholars and literary critics, but also it has been able to marginalize later contenders as translators of Khayyam’s quatrains into English. As evidence, one may mention what was asserted in the 1920s by Saeed Nafisi, the famous Iranian scholar, that by 1925, Fitzgerald’s rendering of the Rubaiyat had been published 139 times. Although Fitzgerald’s work has so far been praised by both literary figures and translation scholars, if one considers the text from the angle of ‘faithfulness’, one notices that his text may be challenged as far as the ‘domain of discourse’ and ‘ideology’ are concerned. To put it another way, like any other translation, Fitzgerald’s rendering of the Rubaiyat has also been influenced by the translator’s ideological orientations by altering the source text’s domain of discourse. In this article, on the basis of the comments made by the translator himself about his rendering, what has been stated by translation critics, and the analysis and comparison of a couple of sample quatrains, the researcher has investigated Fitzgerald’s rendering from an ideological and domesticating point of view.