C. Kunin noted that the "Edsel Ford lines
quoted by Kinbote are reminiscent of the opening of the famous Fitzgerald
translation of The Rubaiyat. There are at least two versions, though, one with
and without the cock."
My poems follow the arrangement of the fourth
edition and I did find where a verse in which "a cock crew" but saw
no "shaking fire" nor "morning and misty mows."
If we omit the cock (!!) what shall we
encounter? Could Carolyn quote the lines she has in mind?
( besides, what can we make out of
"empires of rhyme, Indies of calculus" in the context of Persian Khayyám
- inspite of his having been a poet and an
expert mathematician) ?
The Shade Lines 602/605 being discussed are:
"Empires of rhyme, Indies of calculus;/
Listen to distant cocks crow, and discern/ Upon the rough gray wall a rare wall
fern..." and Kinbote´s quotes
of Edsel Ford's poem are: "And often when the cock crew, shaking fire/
Out of the morning and the misty mow"...
We know FitzGerald was not a
faithful translator: he was unfamiliar with Persian and he
made substantious alterations to Khayyám's original.
Would there be an
allusion to the distorted relation bt. Kinbote's renderings and Shade's
original poem?
It's an interesting conjecture. Soon Kinbote will write about America's "stars and stripes" and mention
Prof. "Starover" Blue - an astronomer, just like Khayyám.
Kinbote also dwells on King Charles and
his father's passion for airplanes and machines. Would his interest
somhow indicate Henry Ford's machines?
Data on Edsel inform that he
was "more fascinated by the shapes of automobiles than by their inner
workings." Apparently E.Ford died of nervous tension and
of complications following a stomach ailment and one of the causes might
have been the troubled relationship with his
tyrannical father. According to information gleaned on the net, Edsel
was "manipulated, harassed,tormented and humiliated" by Henry Ford who
fired his un-Indian empire's accountants and who succintly defined
History as... "bunk"?
Jansy