The genius of Edward Fitzgerald was parasitic; it needed a host to thrive. Fitzgerald was probably the only English poet of any stature to base his entire career on translations or versions of others’ works. Even people who hate poetry (and for all the best reasons) like “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.” The real ‘Umar Khayyam, who lived from 1048 to 1123 and made his reputation as a mathematician and sometime philosopher in the tradition of the great Avicenna, enjoys his reputation in Iran as a Persian poet mainly because of the renown accorded Fitzgerald’s translation. No Persian speaker would place him in the same rank as, say, Hafiz or Rumi, but the rich imagery and ear-clinging cadences of Fitzgerald’s version have given poor ‘Umar a retroactive luster.

Fitzgerald was a translator of genius, and Khayyam was not the only author transfigured by his touch. His renditions of the Persian poets Jami and ‘Attar, to mention but these, as well as his translations of the Spanish playwright Calderon, are also masterpieces of English verse (he translated too from Latin, Greek, and Italian). Less well known, perhaps, is that Fitzgerald wrote some of the best letters in the English language; he may not be as vivid and memorable as Lord Byron – but, then, who is? His large correspondence encompassed such friends as Thomas Carlyle, Lord Tennyson, Charles Eliot Norton, Thackeray, and Fanny Kemble, among many others, and his best letters exhibit a playfulness and wit that put him in the same rare company as Charles Lamb.

Here, for example, in a letter written in 1833, he comments on Lord Bacon’s remark that among friends a man tends to “toss his thought”:

An admirable saying, which one can understand, but not express otherwise. But I feel that being alone, one’s thoughts and feelings, from want of conversation, become heaped up and clotted together, as it were: and so lie like undigested food heavy upon the mind: but with a friend one tosseth them about, so that the air gets between them, and keeps them fresh and sweet. I know not from what metaphor Bacon took his “tosseth,” but it seems to me as if it was from the way haymakers toss hay, so that it does not press into a heavy lump, but is tossed about in the air, and separated, and thus kept sweet.

Anyone who has spent time brooding in solitude will know just what Fitzgerald means by “heaped up” and “clotted” thoughts and feelings. And how easily and naturally he moves into the haymaking analogy. We need to keep the air circulating between our thoughts, he implies, and it is friends who help us to accomplish this.

Born in 1809, Fitzgerald graduated from Cambridge, where – as one commentator has noted – “he was more addicted to friendships than to work.” Settling into a bachelor’s life at Boulge Cottage in Suffolk, he surrounded himself with pets: a cat, a retriever, and a parrot he named Beauty Bob. Something of a stay-at-home, despite occasional jaunts to London, he traveled and conversed through the Royal Mail on every subject imaginable; or, as he himself put it inimitably, “whatever aboutly.” He did marry, briefly and disastrously, in 1856; it was during this period of marital misery that he embarked on his translation of ‘Umar Khayyam who, he sighed, “seems to breathe a sort of Consolation.”

As a scholar of Persian, Fitzgerald was an amateur in the best sense. He certainly read the language fluently, and when we remember that he had largely to work from manuscripts, with their notoriously difficult ornate calligraphy, his accomplishment is all the more impressive. My own favorite of his translations is the “Bird-Parliament,” a long mystical poem by the 12th-century Sufi author Farid al-Din ‘Attar. This strange and delightful work has been beautifully rendered into contemporary English verse under the title “The Conference of the Birds” by Afkham Darbandi and the English poet and Persianist Dick Davis (Penguin Classics, 240 pages, $14), but I confess to liking Fitzgerald’s older translation, for all its gaps and flaw. Like the crusty English bachelor himself, his version is both homely and strange. And in any case, Fitzgerald had a way with the English language all his own.

The Parliament consists of all the birds – what Fitzgerald nicely calls “the scattered Commonwealth of Wing” – who convene to elect a caliph. The birds, from the lapwing to the pheasant, the nightingale, and “the subtle Parrot,” to the peacock and the owl, confer, and each is given a delightful and distinctive set-piece in which to preen. Interspersed with their speeches are little tales in the time-honored Persian manner. Here is one of the shorter anecdotes:

A fellow all his life lived hoarding gold,
And dying, hoarded left it. And behold,
One night his son saw peering through the house
A man, with yet the semblance of a mouse,
Watching a crevice in the wall – and cried –
“My Father?” “Yes,” the Musulman replied,
“Thy Father!” “But why watching thus?” “For fear
Lest any smell my treasure buried here.”
“But wherefore, Sir, so metamousified?”
“Because, my Son, such is the true outside
Of the inner soul by which I lived and died.”

The charming “metamousified” is pure Fitzgerald. He loved language for its own sake, and couldn’t resist playing with it. But he commanded other registers as well. The birds are persuaded to seek out the fabulous Simurgh, a kind of phoenix who lives beyond seven valleys; they are led on their journey by the hoopoe. Only 30 birds survive, and when they get to their destination, Fitzgerald pulls out all the stops:

They were within – they were before the Throne,
Before the Majesty that sat thereon,
But wrapped in so insufferable a blaze
Of glory as beat down their baffled gaze,
Which, downward dropping, fell upon a scroll
That, lightning-like, flashed back on each the whole
Past half-forgotten story of his Soul.

For the birds now realize that the Simurgh, for all its fantastic beauty (often represented in Persian miniatures), is in fact one in essence with themselves. In Persian, si murgh means “30 birds.” All, in the end, are one, and so they pass “from seeing into being.” Fitzgerald, in his letters, expressed considerable reserve and sometimes outright scorn for such old “Sufi” stories. Yet when he sat down to translate in his countrified seclusion he too, like one of his fabulous birds, briefly became “enmiracled,” at one with what he wrote.