by Nike Sulway
There is a scent of musk in the air, and old blood. The beast’s fur is hot and his yellow eyes wide. The black skin of his lips barely conceals the creamy yellow teeth. When he smiles his lips stretch back. His breath is hot, fetid. He reaches out his hand to help you from the boat. This close, you can see that there is a scar across his broad nose: a furless stripe of skin where some creature – or man – has wounded him. His body is clean, rude, unadorned. He guides you up the beach, onto the stones where his table sits. He offers you a chair beneath the shade, and wine, and fruit so cold your teeth ache when you bite into it. He asks about your journey, tells you stories, pours the wine. The heat of the sun settles in your body. It has been a long time since you were onshore; the earth rocks unsteadily beneath your feet when you stand.
He suggests a walk to counter the effects of the wine: a circumnavigation of his tiny island. It is cooler now, the sun is setting, you can go down to the shore and walk with your feet in the ocean.
You go down to the water, roll up your cuffs, set out on your walk. On the other side of the island, a heap of bones whiten in the sun. Just as you realise your foolishness, the Donestre puts his arm around you, lifts you from the ground and tears out your heart before consuming your body, from foot to throat. Arriving at your now dead traveller’s head, the Donestre is struck by regret and horror. Here are the eyes that see, the ears that hear. Here is the mouth that will never speak again. The Donestre cradles your bleeding head in his arms, crooning lullabies and elegies in the language you can no longer hear. The creature’s tears soften and darken the gold of his luxurious mane.
In Beowulf, too, monsters roam. How can we know whether those monsters were common or fresh to their audience? How can we know if they knew of other wells, other monstrous mothers deep in the watery pit? Perhaps Beowulf’s mother was a bedtime story – as common as Baba Yaga in Russia. When my mother read us the Brothers Grimm – when we were five, perhaps six – we knew already what it meant to say stepmother, to say witch or dwarf. When the ancient Anglo-Saxons, boozing in the halls, sang out Beowulf’s name, did the children in the hall shudder as one, calling up with terrified relish the monster that stalked the hall while they slept? We suppose that Beowulf was sung, or recited. Performed for a crowd in a hall with long tables while the night brooded about them. But who can say what tune the song held? How long or sharp or deep the notes? How soft the voice that belled those antique vowels?
There are silences that occur when the page is intact, but illegible. Words are scratched out, crossed out, painted over. A drop of ink is spilled across a page. A wormhole burrows through, connecting and disrupting the text. The Nowell Codex was damaged in a fire in 1731, the edges of the pages scorched. Attempts to preserve the manuscript and prevent further decay, through rebinding, have obscured and further damaged the edges of the pages.
One manuscript I worked with, the owner had used its stiff, old pages as mounts for swatches of fabric. Mostly pieces from the nouveau period. Beautifully coloured, inked and rolled swatches of precious, historically significant fabrics designed by John Illingworth Kay, Lindsay Butterfield and Charles Voysey. Delicate cottons, silks, cretonnes and velveteens, and even a few heavy silk and wool double cloths, pasted onto the pages with wallpaper paste and mounted in frames. A woman had inherited the fabrics from her grandmother. She was packing up her grandmother’s house, preparing to sell it, dealing with the detritus of a woman’s long and wealthy life. She was trying to sort the things that should be kept from those that could be handed on, donated to the Fine Arts Society of London, as her grandmother’s will had requested, or would simply be destroyed. One of the heavy frames slipped from her hands. The glass smashed. The frame split apart at the corners. Her grandmother had loved those swatches. There were twenty of them, mounted and framed, hanging throughout the house, and a further thirty stored between sheets of acid-free paper and bubble wrap in a tea chest. She brought them all to me when she saw the text stitched and glued to the fabrics: a careful woman, thorough, and concerned not to let some piece of history, some secret, pass unremarked. She told me a story about discovering a stack of hundred- year-old newspapers in the tack room of her childhood home. She was twelve, she laughed, when she took them to her local library and arranged her first bequest.
She brought the broken frame into my study, laid it on the desk. I moved the lamp closer and we bent together while I haltingly began to read what I could of the looping, crosshatched script.
When we discovered what was written on the pages – love letters and poems passed between the woman’s great-grandmother and another woman, a designer living outside Paris in the late 1800s – we tried to save all of the text – and the fabric, which was also part of their story – but it was heartbreaking work. Painstaking, almost hopeless. Sometimes, the words washed away with the glue and solvents, no matter how careful we were, or the letters were lifted away, imprinted in faded and reversed characters on the fabrics. Unreadable between the woven owls, lilies, smoke and tulips. Her great-grandmother’s secret passion, covered up and left in plain view for almost two centuries, was reduced to a cobweb of endearments.
Sometimes, you do the best you can – guessing – leaping across the divide between the words you recognise, hoping to make sense of the silences that lie between them with some mixture of intuition, enthusiasm and deep familiarity with the work or the author.
The [angry] bees?
The [honey-eyed] bees? The [terrible] bees?
There is courage in those small leaps, and arrogance. Pressing my pen to the page, imagining what the author might have meant to say, or to hide, I have a feeling of headiness. Looseness in my bones. As if I have lied, and got away with it. Sometimes, after working for months on a piece, I feel as though I could almost write the next line myself. I anticipate the sounds, the syntax, the movement of the pen across the page. I fool myself into believing I am close to the one who wrote it, inhabiting his or her inky ghost. I fool myself into believing that I have come to know them through recitative attention, but this is false intimacy. These marks they made, these traces, are merely words. They are less than ghosts. They are the ghosts of ghosts, though their voices whisper urgently in the dark.
I bent low over the page, only hours later realising the tension in my body, and thinking that writing – translating – only seems to be an activity of the mind. In fact, it is entirely of the body. This pen, this paper, this room in which I sit to write are essential aspects of the words I write. Each morning, before I go into my study, I walk.
I woke in Ana’s bed before dawn. The room was hushed and cool. She was curled towards me, her hands folded prayer-like beneath her cheek, her body warm with the heat of dreams. I put on my clothes and padded through the house. Sat on the back step, pulled on my boots, stepped out on the damp grass and into the forest. A few metres in I found my stride, and began writing. The sentences rose up between my feet, took on the shape of trees and hills and paths. The smell of trees. The smell of the breathing earth. The smell of an early summer morning, burning in. I stepped and stepped and paused. Walking up sentences through a forest I planted fifteen years ago.
Stepping them out. Feeling the age of the earth, the youth of the complicated sky. Once, this was an open field, its face turned up to the warmth of the sun, blasted clean of soil by wind and rain. Now it wears a veil of eucalypts. My mind struggled to form the image into a metaphor for translation: the curvature of the earth a chapter, this stretch of land a paragraph, the trees mere words. My brother’s manuscript was the earth – the geology of rocks and deep, unimaginable time – and my words the trees, with their feet in the soil that rests like a blanket over him. I wrote from a kind of madness born of occluded vision. I felt my way in the dark, pushed my roots into the soil, fingering towards the rock beneath, reaching towards the earth’s hot and fluid centre, knowing only a small measure of what lay beneath. I felt the heat of the earth’s breath, flowing up through a vent. The core’s prayer.
I stopped and took off my boots, my socks, and pressed my bare feet to the earth. Felt the heat and coolness on them. Walking barefoot is my translator’s prayer: I put my soles down one by one, feeling the soil heat up as the sun rises. Feeling the earth crumbling and pressed flat beneath my weight. The stones rolled and jabbed, the damp leaves stuck to my skin. I learned the earth by touch and rhythm. I walked, barefoot, until the earth came into my body. Each stone was a gift, each graze a mark of acceptance. I learned the earth by accommodating my body to its lines. Just as I had to open myself to my brother’s work, walk its lines until it entered me. I prayed that I would have the strength to annihilate myself – to let my self go – to be the leaf tracing the shape of the earth’s breath as it fell. To be the tree whose trunk twists, who is formed by a constant turning.
Trees are whirling dervishes. They spin for decades – for centuries. Their bodies are slowly twirling prayers to the light. They are describers of the air, the soil, the rain that falls. You cannot see the rain, the cloud, the season that has passed, but you can see evidence of their passing in the twist of a tree’s long throat, in the formation of its branches, in the length and breadth and strength of its roots. The tree is a translator of the earth, its body its translation.
I went to my brother’s pages. I pressed my bare feet, my bare hands, my bare heart against the page, knowing I would never get beneath the surface. Knowing that no matter how hard I tried to annihilate myself, I would always come between the work and the world. I would always be the one who spoke of it, for it, rather than speaking from within it. Any translation is the preservation of a moment of relation between two consciousnesses, two languages, two literatures, two worlds. My translations would sooner or later be revealed as imperfect mirrors. At their best, the words I wrote were documents of our – of my – perpetual ruin.
*
On one of those January afternoons that seemed endless to us when we were boys, as though the heat had melted the day like toffee and made it stretch out, golden and sticky, we were hanging about on a small rise, watching the cars go past and trying to think of something better to do. Our parents hated us hanging out by the road. ‘You have all the world to play in,’ they said. We didn’t understand where else it was they expected us to go, or why they couldn’t see that the road out of town was the place we wanted to be.
Idly, one of us began pegging small pebbles at the trunk of a tree on the other side of the road. A car came by, and then another. We recognised most of these cars: they were the cars of our parents’ friends, or of the parents of kids we knew from school. Finally, a car appeared that neither of us recognised and, without saying anything, we drew back into the shade and pegged our pebbles at it. We imagined our father had done the same as a child, and his father before that, issuing a subtle warning to the tourists and fly-by-nighters that this was our place, and not theirs.
We gathered a small pile of stones suitable for throwing: the right weight, size, shape. We threw low at first, aiming for tyres and numberplates, but as the afternoon wore on we grew bolder. A red Holden came past: two pebbles hit its tyres, one bouncing off the shiny hubcap that sprinkled light over the road. A white Volkswagen, a yellow Mazda. A stone hit a rear numberplate, but the car kept going, as if the driver wasn’t even aware he was under attack. The next car belonged to Mrs Casey, who drove hunched up over the wheel. The next an enormous Mack truck with silver girls on its mudflaps. A blue Ford came up the road. We chose our stones and took our places. When it was almost on us, Morgan stepped out of the shade and let fly. His stone hit the windshield. The car was full of people: a man driving, a woman in the passenger seat, and a row of kids in the back. A web of cracks appeared in the glass and the car veered over to the side of the road. The man got out and started running towards us. He didn’t turn off the engine or close the car door. His wife got out and called out after him, but he didn’t even pause.
We turned and started running, sure he would give up pretty quickly, once he’d let his wife see that he’d made an effort. It was a hot day, and he wouldn’t leave them all sitting in the car on the side of the road for long with the motor running and the air conditioning spooling out onto the hot tar. We went up into the bush, took one of the rutted paths the teenagers sometimes rode their off-road bikes on, then went left, away from home, towards the river. When I turned, I got a glimpse of the man. He was still coming. He was wearing a shirt and a tie, and long pants, as if he and his wife had just come from church. He looked younger than I’d thought he was, and patient. As if he had all day.
We ran towards town, skirted the edges, vaulted over the fences and hoicked it through people’s yards, certain a grown man wouldn’t follow, but every time I looked back he was there, gaining on us. His shirt came untucked and darkened with sweat, but he kept coming. I started to feel like a criminal in a movie, pounding the pavement. We kept running, keeping away from the wharves, moving through block after block, trying to think of obstacles we could navigate easily, but which would mess up our pursuer. We jumped fences and took sudden turns and shot through narrow side streets but he was always there. We were getting dizzy, and frantic, but we were filled with unadulterated joy, too.
We were pummelling the air with our bodies, running and running, using every breath we had, every muscle and tendon. We were hurtling ourselves through the summer air. We were being pursued by a madman who had abandoned his wife and kids by the road. Who knew what our fate would be if he caught us? This was life-or-death stuff: running, sweating, feeling the adrenaline pound through our bodies. My mouth was dry. Sweat ran into my eyes. I could feel every muscle in my legs bunching and releasing. When we ran past an open door the air conditioning hit me like a gift. A car horn hooted as we darted across the road, through the traffic. I wanted to laugh, but I had no breath for laughing. We shot up the outside stairs of a building, and for a moment I thought we would make it, escaping over the roofs into the sunset, but the stairs were gated. We would have jumped – it was only a one-storey drop – but by the time we climbed up onto the rail he was on us. He gripped the waistbands of our shorts and hauled us down off the rail.
We stood hunched over on the steel grid of the platform, heaving air into our bodies. His face was red and he was sweating. He’d torn his shirt at some point. He let go of one of us to undo his tie and rub at his face with his shirt. He was nodding and gulping air but after a minute or two he straightened up and grinned at us. We knew we were in trouble, but he grinned at us all the same, as though we were all kids and his chasing us had been part of a game. A door opened at street level, and a young guy in a chef’s uniform came out the back of the store and dropped two enormous garbage bags into an industrial bin before lighting up a cigarette.
‘Right,’ the man said. ‘Let’s get moving.’
We shuffled down the stairs. We could feel the pinging in our legs as the blood slowed and our bones and muscles softened and slipped. My head was spinning, my eyes stinging. My clothes were suddenly heavy and hot and damp. We turned on a tap in the alley and cupped water over our faces. The man wet his hair and shook it out like a dog.
We walked home. He didn’t say a word the whole way, and it wasn’t until we were nearly there that I thought again of his wife and kids waiting for him in the car by the side of the road. As we turned onto our road and trudged up the hill towards the house, I thought about them parked there in the glare of the afternoon sun. The kids growing hot and tired, the wife standing, leaning against the side of the car, smoking a cigarette, all of them waiting for him to finish what he’d started. Maybe she was used to this kind of thing, having married the kind of guy who never gave up.
It was almost dark when we reached the front gate. The shed doors were open, and light was spilling onto the circle of dirt outside them. The kitchen and lounge lights were on, and loud, thumping music was blazing out all the windows. Drums and fiddles and a rattling, scratched voice leaping joyfully through the air. My mother and father were
out on the grass that stretched between the house and the shed. There was a bottle of wine on the garden table, and they each held a glass. They were barefoot, and dancing. Stomping and whooping and yawping. My mother whirled until her blue dress was scrunched around her, then stopped and put her head back and her arms out and closed her eyes like a child letting the dizziness wash over them.
I had a sudden sense that they knew what had happened. The blood and heat that had risen in our bodies while we ran had also flown its course through their own taller, stronger, stranger bodies. They were celebrating our pursuit, as if it had been a test of our manhood. As if we had proved something by running so hard and fast and long.
My father raised his glass to us, beckoned us onto the grass, told my mother to go in and get another glass. We stood on the path and watched as our pursuer went across and held out his hand to my father, introduced himself. My father clapped him on the back, his face rosy and serene. As our mother came out onto the verandah with a fresh bottle of wine and another glass the song changed, and she bent in through the lounge-room window and turned up the volume. She smiled and kissed us as we scuttled past her into the house, turned up her nose and waved her hand at our stink. She told us to have showers and then come down. We took one last glance at our pursuer, who was standing with our father on the lawn, deep in conversation, before we plunged into the house, where all the windows had been thrown wide to let the late summer breeze blow through.