SA/JM: could “left” here also have an echo of the Latin “sinister?” This meaning persists in derog. Brit. Slang: “left-hander” (and “left-footer”) applied (rather irrationally?) to both Roman Catholics AND Homosexuals.
For what it’s worth, in the Gay context, “Turning [over] a new leaf” is an idiom that immediately recalls the Oscar Wilde anecdote, certainly familiar to VN and all Cantabrigiens. Wilde’s mother asks her son “O Oscar, when will you ever turn over a new leaf?” To which he replies (so they say) “Soon, dear Mama, soon. Only this morning I licked the bottom of a new page.”
I’ve always taken Khayyam/Fitzgerald’s “dawn’s left hand” to mean the “false dawn” that played an important prayer-timing role in Islam, at least before clocks & watches were commonplace.
The Prophet Muhammed is known to have described zodiacal light in reference to the timing of the five daily prayers, calling it the "false dawn," or "al Fajr al Khaadib." Muslim oral tradition preserves numerous sayings, or hadith, in which Muhammed describes the difference between the light of false dawn, appearing in the sky long after sunset, and the light of the first band of horizontal light at sunrise, the true dawn. Practitioners of Islam use the Prophet's descriptions of zodiacal light to avoid errors in determining the timing of daily prayers. (wiki)
Waking up pre-dawnish with a parched gob, “spittin’ feathers,” craving a drink (this, recall, was Tim Finnegan’s [apostrophic] downfall — “a drop of the craythur every morn!” ) and heading for the tavern rather than heeding the muezzin call to prayer, represents precisely where Omar dangerously deviates from TWO very basic Koranic precepts. Some say that Fitzgerald was no respecter of Persians [sic] but I’ve heard otherwise from competent scholars, as far as faithfully capturing Khayyam’s hedonistic fatalism. I can’t see that either Borges or Nabokov have the linguistic/cultural CREDENTIALS to judge the merits of Fitzgerald’s “Englishing.” Open to debate is why the English versions were so popular among “stuffy” Victorians. (Somewhere I have a parallel Uzbek Rubaiyyat bought in Samarkand in 1995, but my plans to compare this translation with Fitzgerald’s have suffered numerous attacks of sloth.)
If VN was upset with Fitzgerald, he would be screaming mad at my Scouse Rubaiyyat translation. My narrator wakes up hung-over desperate for nicotine
‘Alf dreamin’, ‘alf parlatic on me back;
O Jeez, anudder day before yiz, Jack;
And gropin’ for de ciggies by de bed
I sought de drag dat frees me from de rack.
(Scouse friCKatives are uniquely scary, like.)
We also have a Scouse parody relying on the fact that Dawn is a gerl’s [phonetic spelling] name:
“Dreaming when Dawn’s left hand was on me thigh ...”
Stan Kelly-Bootle
On 12/02/2009 01:50, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
Steve Arons: `"That is the wrong word,'' [Shade] said. ``One should not apply it to a person who deliberately peels off a drab and unhappy past and replaces it with a brilliant invention. That's merely turning a new leaf with the left hand.'' We have here a question of identity together with the front and back of a leaf. I'd also note the peculiarity of the gesture described by Shade, which implies hiding the page being turned from others' eyes [..]This suggests to me that the recto/verso hypothesis in the ``Botkin, V'' index entry is not without an anchor in the text.
JM: The theme of werewolves involves an "inversion" ( of the skin, of man into wolf), probably a sexual inversion.
Kinbote and Botkin, "turning a new leaf with the left hand", the image of the front and back of a leaf, perhaps even "verses and versions" express the same transformation.
Nevertheless, Nabokov's choice of allusions is never simple. I was also reminded of a line of Khayyam's Rubayyat (in Fitzgerald's translation, the detail is not present in the original): Dreaming when Dawn's Left Hand was in the Sky/ I heard a voice within the Tavern cry,/ "Awake, my Little ones, and fill the Cup/Before Life's Liquor in its Cup be dry." We know VN was disappointed after he realized Fitzgerald's was not true to the original poems.