The Collision of two thoughts beyond the time and the place : Henri Cazalis and Omar Khayyam

Henri Cazalis, the French author of 19th century, was fascinated by oriental literature and philosophy to the extent that it brought him to know some Iranian poets like Khayyam whom was mostly interested in. He tried, therefore, to imitate the form of "Robaei" and it was the only existing example of quatrain as an independent poetic genre in French literature. What would be the problems of considering Robaei as an equivalent for quatrain in comparative studies?
Cazalis who was not well versed in any oriental language had a chance to read the translations available at the time, that of J.-B. Nicolas and E. FitzGerald. By ignoring the wrong translations and interpretations of J.-B. Nicolas, Caazalis understood the true essence of Khayyam thoughts and discovered the great similitude between the Iranian poet thoughts and his own. This article suggests that, Cazalis succeeded to apprehend Iranian poet thoughts due to resemblance of Khayyam’s pessimism to his own system of thoughts. Could we, then, conclude the influence of Khayyam poems on Cazalis’ work? In present paper, through philological study of these two poet-philosophers, we tried to demonstrate that this kind of influence, which is one of the branches of comparative studies, in an intellectual level, is not actually possible without common grounds of reception.