The Rubáiyát of a Persian Kitten

The Rubáiyát of a Persian Kitten is the 1904 parody by Oliver Herford (1860-1935), the American humorist-illustrator, recasting FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in the voice of a Persian kitten. Herford follows the famous quatrains stanza by stanza, turning the wine, the rose, and the moving finger into saucers of milk, the hearth rug, and the perils of kittenhood, with his soft pen-and-ink drawings of the kitten throughout. The FitzGerald Rubáiyát was then at the height of its enormous vogue, endlessly quoted and endlessly parodied, and Herford’s kitten version became the most popular of all the parodies, repeatedly reprinted. The book remains his best-remembered single work and a classic of American light verse. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.