Aseroë
Page 8
Furthermore, whose orders was I supposed to obey in order to make any real progress? Or should I just fall silent, lest I fail? The more I reread the fragment, the more I felt myself drawn to the Other Language. I needed to respond, even though there might be no promise of an answer.
Sometimes I imagine that, in the absence of any response, all one can do is remain alone and wait. This waiting must be so prolonged that no sentence could ever fill in its ellipses. At which point it’s just possible that a reader might fall in love with Orpheus’s unfinished command and might add his or her expectations to mine, in turn stimulating other readers to respond without ever closing the cycle of questions. Thus, question after question might echo forth, all spiraling around the same enigma, caught up in the undecidable movement of the Unknown Language, ever reaching forward.
Every morning, I observe the daylight. It fills us with talk; it bears us onward. I watch the children playing around the lake; I notice the bent-over figures of the old people strolling through parks; I see three young idiots on green motorcycles plowing their way through a mound of greenery covered with anemones. The sheer joys of the present moment are enough to make one forget all one’s troubles. The ordinary words of the world come to us in broad daylight like the flames of Pentecost descending upon the heads of the apostles and it seems as if we miraculously speak in tongues. But as the daylight wanes, the ellipses of the unfinished sentence come back to me and pursue me through the dark. There I wait and listen, gritting my teeth in order not to reveal my anger and frustration. Sometimes, my vigilance weakens and I yield to the cowardice of sleep—just as soldiers are said to doze off toward dawn after having kept vigil all night long while awaiting the onset of the morning battle.
Ideally, I would have nothing to say or do. I would simply give myself over to whatever came along or to whatever sentences I might hear, even the most ordinary ones: “Go fetch some bread”, “The children are coming over this evening”, “Someone’s at the door, let me get it.” This is where the answers I seek will emerge, from the accumulation of phrases, from the accretion of inert objects that bear within themselves—like the faint sorrow on the face of a young girl—the trace of lost voices. I would learn to read the air, to decode the vibrations it transmits. I would learn how to decipher the cracks in tortoise shells or the marks on charred bones, in the manner of the ancient Chinese. I would rediscover a state of the world prior to the separation of names from things. I would learn the art of “the rectification of names” (chêng ming). I would learn forms of writing that had not been invented but that inhered in our perception of the world.
I discovered this morning, sitting on my windowsill, a stone that I had brought back from the Alps of Savoy—a piece of quartz that contains within it those even finer dark red crystals commonly called “love arrows” or “Venus hair.” Seen from a certain angle, the crystals form a denser structure, a double sign whose patterning I’ll try to trace on this white sheet of paper:
This is the ideogram of Tao. The radical to the left means “to drift,” which in turn derives from , “to proceed slowly step by step,” a character that reaches back to , which represents a road. The component to the right comes from “the head, someone in the act of looking” . Combined, the two portions of the ideogram evoke the following event: “Someone slowly advances step by step, then stops to look, before proceeding….”
Astonished by my discovery, I believed I had finally discovered the Writing from Without that answered all my expectations. I ran back to my village and, notebook in hand, made my way along the path that started at the river. I counted to thirteen, hoping to discover further marvels. The first one, Kruger’s red house, not far from my own. Second, the list of names and addresses that Jean-Michel had placed in my mailbox. Third, a light clump of feathers beneath a gutter sheltering a pair of wood pigeons. Fourth, a linen sheet and a pair of maid’s hands on a windowsill. Fifth, a beautiful specimen of Orchys purpurea, hidden near the washtub between the nettles and the gravel. Sixth, a hay cart decorated with a goat skull. Seventh, a child’s drawing dropped in the gutter near the school. Eighth, a dark garden well choked with weeds. Ninth, a morose old drunk in a bar named The Star. Tenth, a display shelf next to the cash register of the local convenience store stacked with copies of TV Guides. Eleventh, a wall displaying a poster of Naïma, a little girl who was kidnapped two years ago and would now be fourteen, sequestered in what den of iniquity? Twelfth, a boy in a yellow sweater emerging from an alleyway holding a bouquet of daffodils. I was so happy, I caught hold of him and took him in my arms, as if our meeting had just rescued me from a grave danger. “Stop, you’re hurting me, and besides, you’re not my father.” And his mother, who came running up: “Leave the kid alone; he didn’t do anything to you.” Farther on, this other voice: “What time are you boarding?” Car noises, a door slamming. The air smelling of dawn, of boxwood, of kisses.
Between “boxwood” and “kisses,” the boy, crumpled on the ground twenty feet away from me, dropped his bouquet of daffodils and got up again, crying and pointing an accusing finger at me: “It’s your fault; you made me fall by looking at me.” The mother, who had witnessed the entire Orphic mission I sensed myself invested with, shouted out, “You bastard!” I laughed good-naturedly, which she couldn’t understand. Then bullfinches flying under a flowering maple tree, executing the perfect loop of a mating dance, spelling out the letters j and a against the sky—not the initial letters of the French jamais, or jadis, but the ja of a foreign language calling out questions that death could no longer dismiss:
Preise dem Engel die Welt, nicht die unsägliche….
Praise the world to the angel, not what’s unsayable….
A Note on this Translation
COMPOSED DURING THE LATE 1980s—when I first became fast friends with its author in Dijon—Aseroë was published by the prestigious publishing house of POL in 1992, to excellent reviews. An initial translation of the book was undertaken by Howard Limoli in 1996, but this version was left uncompleted at his death in 2013. Anxious to see his novel in print in English, François Dominique subsequently asked me to rewrite the draft translation of the text, whose original had in the meantime also undergone a number of revisions. This is the version given here: a co-translation by the late Limoli and myself—an Orphic commerce between the living and the dead, which reenacts some of this book’s deepest and most enigmatic themes.
—Richard Sieburth
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