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Please click on the links below to download, print and assemble (instructions in slideshow above) Vanessa Hodgkinson’s For the Motherboard: The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, typeset by James Bridle    LXIX   But obsolete Pieces of the Game He plays Upon this Transparency-grid of Nights and Days; Hither and thither tweets, and posts, and slays, And one by one back in the Hard Drive lays   **   But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays  Upon this Chequer-board of Nights and Days;    Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays,  And one by one back in the Closet lays   Rubáiyát Layout 1 Rubáiyát Layout 2     A Note on the Text by Vanessa Hodgkinson   The Rubáiyát that I own is one given to me over a decade ago when I lived in Kuwait A modest copy bound in plasticised leather, it is cheap but speaks of the sumptuousness of its genealogy Of ‘travelling size’, it is like a bloated cheap postcard Every verse is surrounded by a repeated border of flowers that have long since been abstracted beyond recognition of anything natural The paper is sleek; a biro slides over it without leaving much more than an oily smudge   This Rubáiyát is special to me because it is a dual translation of the original Persian verse into French and English While I couldn’t appreciate the Persian, I was being given a double window of opportunity in both French and English, my maternal and paternal tongues It acted as a playful reminder of my inability to master Arabic, let alone Persian, despite moving to Kuwait to do so   I often compare my pidgin Arabic to my pidgin HTML These languages intrigue me but I am locked out of their possibility Despite my best intentions I am never going to master them I recognise forms, sequences, ways in which they coagulate to have meaning They both contain a fundamental logic that I admire and wish I could possess What kind of person might I be if I did read and write in Arabic and was proficient in computer programming! We can only shudder at the thought But the reality is that despite these languages being constantly