by Yuri Rytkheu
But where was the whale? Where was the huge pile of meat and blubber that only yesterday they had hauled from the sea? Armagirgin ran down to the water’s edge. The sea lapped at something there, small and hard to make out at first.
There was no whale. Instead, a man lay in the surf. He was dead, and the waves riffled his long, black hair.
Far ahead, to the very join of water and sky, the vast, empty sea stretched bereft of any sign of life or a single spout.
The whales had gone.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
I first “met” Yuri Rytkheu in the fall of 2004, over the phone, so early in the morning that it was still dark in London, and the day just beginning three hours ahead in Saint Petersburg. I’d been told he was an early riser and preferred the phone over email, and mornings to everywhen else. So I bought a calling card and collated my queries, and phoned. A Dream in Polar Fog was to be my first published translation, and I was getting cold feet.
We talked; we ran through a list of questions, mostly to do with small inconsistencies of the sort “three men get into a boat, four men get out.” Earnestly, I asked about a few sentences that seemed to contradict themselves, and vocabulary that seemed oddly (but perhaps deliberately?) repetitive and didn’t quite sound right in English. I wanted to be faithful to the book and was wary of editing out something meaningful that I’d simply misunderstood; but I was also keen to iron out irksome snags that were a product of lax editing and was curious to hear Yuri’s views on being translated—by no means for the first time, though for the first time in English. Chuckling, he told me to iron away. Then, growing more serious, he said, “Don’t worry too much about being exact. It’s not a textbook. I want people to enjoy it and lose themselves in the story.” And then: “Write it like a song. Like you could sing it if you wanted to.” We were strangers, in most ways, and so I couldn’t tell for sure whether it was a request or an instruction. Perhaps it was simply a benediction.
Months later, after a long dinner launching the book in Las Vegas—of all the unlikely places—as we trekked companionably down the endless corridors of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, I finally got the nerve to ask him straight-out whether he liked the translation. Fluent in English but impervious to ambush, he only grinned. But later, as we headed for different airport gates, Yuri gave a me a hard-to-interpret look and then said, quite soberly: “In English, too, it sings. Let’s do more books.”
Uelen—which also appears in A Dream in Polar Fog and The Chukchi Bible—is the modern name for Yuri Rytkheu’s birthplace, where Nau and Reu’s yaranga once stood, all those generations ago. The topography of the Chukchi homeland includes cliffs, crags, plains, mossy and dry tundra, and all manner of ice and snow—not to mention a row of wind-lashed yarangas improbably lined up on a narrow sandspit between an ocean and a lagoon. A look at the map will prove more enlightening than a dictionary of Chukchi words. It is an astonishing landscape, geographically within sight of Alaska across the narrow Bering Strait, and yet inarguably perched on the outer rim of the world.
When the Whales Leave is a story concerned with ecology. The great lesson it teaches is that no human is outside nature, and the blind urge to consume and dominate is an expression of weakness, not strength. The best place in the world—though it may be harsh and unforgiving—is one’s own homeland, and it ought to be cherished. The deeply spiritual commingles with the utterly practical, and kinship does not apply solely to men, but to all living things. Not until the closing pages of the novel, and many generations in, does the very first murder—the killing of the whale—occur. By contrast, the Edenic state of the Old Testament scarcely lasts two generations before degenerating into fratricide.
It is also a story of storytelling. Lived truth becomes a commandment, and then a fireside tale; memory becomes myth and is eventually relegated to an inconvenient fiction, given time enough. All stories end—even that of the first mother, who will be called the Always Living, many centuries after her death.
Unsurprisingly for the founding myth of a people so intimately aware of and dependent on ice, water, and sun, not much happens in When the Whales Leave without a precise and detailed setting out of the weather conditions. Once again, I am indebted to the truly invaluable resource of Encyclopedia Arctica and its “Glossary of Snow, Ice, and Permafrost Terms” (found in volume one of a fifteen-volume reference work dating 1947–51), hosted online by Dartmouth College. There are many kinds of ice and snow, and the Encyclopedia Arctica, though unpublished, is a treasure trove of them, with helpful equivalents in several languages.
It is easy to form an impression of darkness and cold when reading about life at the edge of the world and the limits of human endurance. All good things—food, light, human tenderness—are associated with warmth. And yet—though wind is mentioned forty times, the word “snow” sixty times, and “ice” over seventy times—the most welcome weather word, “sun,” appears in the book nearly a hundred times. Perhaps more appropriately still, for these descendants of whales, the nearly fifty instances of the word “sky” and the nearly ninety of “earth” or “land” are easily vanquished by the several hundred appearances of “sea,” “waves,” and “water.” For a still and silent vastness, this landscape is also wondrously rife with sound: creaking snow and moaning wind, whistling gophers and shrill birds, burbling streams and murmuring surf, thrumming tambourines and crisply chiming stars.
Ancient yet piercingly timely, by turns mystical and matter-of-fact, mysterious and simple, and with a very unusual woman at its heart, When the Whales Leave is not just an elegy for a vanishing world, it is a lesson in duty and hope, and a story against the dark, cold night. I hope for new readers, too, it sings.
YURI RYTKHEU (1930–2008) was born in Uelen, a village in the Chukotka region of Siberia. He sailed the Bering Sea, worked on Arctic geological expeditions, and hunted in Arctic waters, in addition to writing over a dozen novels and collections of stories. Several of his books were published in European Ianguages. The English translation of his book A Dream in Polar Fog was a Kiriyama Pacific Rim Prize Notable Book in 2006. In the late 1950s, Rytkheu emerged not only as a great literary talent but as the unique voice of a small national minority—the Chukchi people, a shrinking community residing in one of the most majestic and inhospitable environments on earth.
ILONA YAZHBIN CHAVASSE was born in Belarus and, together with her family, immigrated to the United States in 1989. She is the translator of Rytkheu’s novels A Dream in Polar Fog and The Chukchi Bible, as well as the work of several other Russian authors. Educated at Vassar College, Oxford University, and University College London, she now lives in London with her husband and children.
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