Borges argues that the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in Fitzgerald's version is a hybrid text, one that is produced by neither Fitzgerald nor Khayyam alone. That these two authors might not have even liked each other if they met in person, separated as they were by time, space, and culture, yet they became "one poet." The Rubaiyat is a Victorian English poem, not the translation of a Persian poem of the eleventh century. (Yet it is also that.) There is no reason to suppose that the original poem enjoys any kind of special status vis-a-vis the translation.