My paper contends with the surge of translations that Arabic writers and performing artists produced of premodern quatrain poetry from the Persian tradition. I focus upon the years 1920-60. The popularity enjoyed by the ruba‘i (“quatrain” serving as its imperfect English label) is not well accounted for by most major studies of Arabic popular culture. That is because Arabs’ interest in premodern Persian fits uncomfortably with the major political trends of the first half of the twentieth century, namely colonialism and the Arab national independence movements. Persophilia usually emerges as a side-note in our curricular intellectual histories of the Mandate Era. But in this paper I show how the translation movement provides us with a voluminous, and revealing, narrative of national discourse, spanning colonialism and political independence. Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) became widely known to the Arab bourgeoisie in the 1920s through major translation efforts. Ahmad Rami of Egypt and the Iraqi poet Ahmad al-Najafi serve as complementary, competitive figures in World Literature. Rami, well known as a collector of manuscripts in addition to a composer of poetry, stressed the scholarly bona fides of his Khayyam research. Al-Najafi took pride in having translated the largest number of the quatrains, and winning high acclaim from his Persian contemporaries. My study argues that such contentious poetics receded by the 1950s, as political independence and mass media became the organizing principles of official culture. Recording artists took on the ruba‘i, such that its literary status has been shaped, long-term, by its distribution and consumption as popular lyric. The great singer Umm Kulthum adapted Rami’s translations for musical performance, with profound effects upon the poet and the larger audience for poetry itself. Umm Kulthum’s unrivaled celebrity helped to make Rami’s texts near-synonymous with the very idea of the translated ruba‘iyyat. My paper on Persophilia and mass distribution of “foreign” cultural texts reaches its conclusion by examining Khayyam’s afterlives in popular music, stretching into the twenty-first century. Arabic Studies still needs to take on the challenge of understanding poetry across epochs, including the vital role of Persian-Arabic translation in the world of media which we currently inhabit.