But if this reference to token-writing is correct, it poses what may be a problem later on in the Culhar’: at almost the exact center of the fragment there is a reference Steiner herself admits translates as ‘an old woman on the island, putting colored “memory marks” on unrolled reeds.’ These, incidentally, are among the tokens ‘reed,’ ‘old woman,’ ‘island’ that show up most clearly inside the bulla, though of course we have no way to be sure—from the bulla—what their order is supposed to be. Were there at one time two forms of writing? Or perhaps, as Steiner suggests, there actually was ‘… a “natural” writing, that came as an amalgam of vegetable and mineral pigments and vegetable or animal parchments, anterior to this Mesopotamian ceramic violence-within-a-violence, a writing in which the Culhar’ begins, a writing later suppressed along with “… the three-legged pots and the weak flights of the storied serpents [dragons?] …” that the Culhar’ mentions both towards its beginning and its end.’
Here are some further examples of traditional versions of the Culhar’ with Steiner’s mathematically inspired emendations:
‘I walk with a woman who carries two thin knives,’ reads the second sentence of most versions of the text in at least half the languages it has shown up in. Previous commentators have taken this to refer to some kind of priestess or religious ritual. Steiner reads this (at one of the two places where her reading makes the text more, instead of less, confusing): ‘I travel (or journey) with a hero (feminine) carrying a double blade (or twin-blades).’ One has to admit that, weapon-wise, this is a bit odd.
The emotional center of the Culhar’, for most modern readers at any rate, is the narrator’s confession that he (Steiner, for reasons that must finally be attributed to a quaintly feminist aberration, insists on referring to the narrator as she) is exiled from the city of Culhar’, the city that names the text, and is doomed to spend his (her?) life traveling from the ‘large old roofless greathouses’ to the ‘large new roofed greathouses’ and ‘begging gifts from hereditary nobles.’ Steiner’s comment about the sex of the narrator is illuminating about her mathematics, however: ‘The highest probability my equations yield for my suggested translations is fifty percent—which, as anyone who has worked in the field of ancient translation knows, is a lot higher than many versions that are passed off as gospel (with both a small, and capital, “g”). Since the sex of the narrator of a sexually unspecified text is always a fifty-fifty possibility, I simply take my choice, which is consistent with the rest of my work.’
A phrase that has puzzled commentators for a long time reads, in some versions: ‘the love of the small outlander for the big slave from Culharē.’ Although here Steiner’s equations did not settle anything, they generated a list of equally weighted possibilities (Steiner prefers the word ‘barbarian’ to ‘outlander,’ and argues for it well):
1) ‘the love of the small barbarian slave for the tall man from Culharē’
2) ‘the love of the slave from Culharē for the small barbarian’
3) ‘the small love of the barbarian and the tall man for slavery’
‘It is even possible,’ writes Steiner, ‘that the phrase is a complex pun in which all these meanings could be read from it.’ Just how this might actually function in the narrative of which the Culhar’ fragment is a part, however, she doesn’t say.
Here are some other emendations that Steiner’s matrix equations have yielded vis-à-vis some of the more traditional versions that have come from other translations:
‘For a long time they starved in the greathouse after the women had eaten their sons,’ runs the consensus version from Sanskrit to Arabic.
Steiner’s emendation: ‘He starved in the greathouse many years after she had eaten her own twin sons.’ Moreover, says Steiner, the antecedent of He is none other than our tall friend from Culharē.
‘… the dream[ing] of the one-eyed [boy/man] …’ All translations agree that the one-eyed substantive, who, in the last half of the text (for reasons probably given in some section now lost) seems to replace the barbarian, is male. But Steiner’s mathematics leaves it wholly undecidable whether the one-eyed [man/boy] is doing the dreaming himself, or whether the dream is, in fact, somebody else’s dream about him—though all translations we have but one come out on the side of making him an oneiric figment.
At least five traditional versions have some form of the sentence: ‘The merchant trades four-legged pots for three-legged pots,’ which is usually taken to be a proverb that, because we are not sure exactly what the pots were used for, we do not quite understand.
Steiner: ‘The merchant [female] ceases to deal in three-legged pots and now deals in four-legged pots.’
The traditional translation: ‘Dragons fly in the northern mountains of El’ Hamon. The Dragon Lord rules over the south, and the southern priests, and the children’s high bouncing balls.’
Steiner: ‘Dragons fly in the northern mountains at Ellamon. But the Dragon Lord vanishes in the south among the southern priests and the children’s high bouncing balls.’ Though precisely what the Dragon Lord is doing with the children’s bouncing balls is a question that has puzzled everyone from those Rumanian monks to Steiner herself; it is finally anybody’s guess.
Steiner’s translation of the closing of the Culhar’ pretty well agrees with most traditional versions though some of her ‘fifty percent possibility’ alternates are a bit disconcerting, if not disingenuous:
‘… the polished metal mirror [or ‘stomach’ suggests Steiner without comment; or ‘genitals’] destroys [or ‘distorts,’ or ‘reverses’] all I see before me and behind me.’
Whatever one may say, most of Steiner’s suggestions make the text a lot more coherent than it appears in most versions. Problems remain, however, such as the vanishing Dragon Lord or the twin blades. Some of Steiner’s suggestions (for instance, that the ‘child ruler Inel’ko’ referred to in the text is really a girl) should probably be taken with the same grain of salt with which we take her suggestion that the author is a woman. One recalls the eccentric theories of Samuel Butler and Robert Graves on the feminine authorship of the Odyssey; and one smiles with the same intrigued indulgence.
But whichever of Steiner’s readings one accepts or rejects, it is impossible not to find one’s imagination plunging into the images thrown up by this archeological oddity, this writing on and around and within writing, and not come up with myriad narrative possibilities that might meet, or even cross, in this ancient fragment. If some writer were actually to put down these stories, just what sort of reflection might they constitute, either of the modern world or of our own past history?
Could one perhaps consider such an imaginative expansion simply another translation, another reading of the text, another layer of the palimpsest?
It is difficult here not to recall Lèvi-Strauss’s suggestion that all versions of a myth must be studied together in order to complete the picture—ancient versions and modern alike—and that Freud’s ‘Oedipus Complex’ is simply the most modern version of the Oedipus myth and should be taken as part of it. Yet by the same token (as it were) one must yet again recall Derrida’s Of Grammatology, whose first half is such a crushing critique of Lèvi-Strauss’s nostalgia for ‘primitive presence’ in matters anthropological. The question must finally be: Are Steiner’s equations the expressions of a conservative collective speech, which would certainly seem to be the case with any probability work concerning myth or language; or, are they the expression of a radical individualistic authority—which seems, at any rate, to be the collective view of mathematical creativity, if not authorship/authority itself.
But the recall of Of Grammatology is itself appropriately double. Let us consider Derrida’s reminder that the basic structure of written signification is not, as it is in speech, the signifier of the signified, but rather the signifier of the signifier, a model of a model, an image of an image, the trace of an endlessly deferred signification.
Just what would the value
of such an imaginative narrative experiment, as we spoke of, be? Exactly what sort of imaginative act would constitute, as it were, the mirror of Steiner’s own? Our answer must be deferred, however, since such a tale, or set of tales, written in reflection of the extant versions of the Culhar’ Text has not been written. And the Culhar’ Text itself seems to play through the spectrum of Eastern and Western languages as translations of translations, some older, some newer, but finally with no locable origin.
—S. L. Kermit
January 1981
Turn the page to continue reading from the Return to Nevèrÿon series
1. Of Dragons, Mountains, Transhumance, Sequence, and Sunken Cities, or: The Violence of the Letter
…The modality of novelistic enunciation is inferential: it is a process within which the subject of the novelistic utterance affirms a sequence, as conclusion to the inference, based on other sequences (referential—hence narrative, or textual—hence citational), which are the premises of the inference and, as such, considered to be true.
JULIA KRISTEVA,
Desire in Language
SHE WAS FIFTEEN AND she flew.
Her name was pryn—because she knew something of writing but not of capital letters.
She shrieked at clouds, knees clutching scaly flanks, head flung forward. Another peak floated back under veined wings around whose flexing joints her knees bent.
The dragon turned a beaked head in air, jerking reins—vines pryn had twisted in a brown cord before making a bridle to string on the dragon’s clay-colored muzzle. (Several times untwisted vines had broken—fortunately before take-off.) Shrieking and joyful, pryn looked up at clouds and down on streams, off toward returning lines of geese, at sheep crowding through a rocky rift between one green level and another. The dragon jerked her head, which meant the beast was reaching for her glide’s height…
On the ground a bitter, old, energetic woman sat in her shack and mumbled over pondered insults and recalled slights, scratching in ash that had spilled from her fireplace with a stick. That bitter woman, pryn’s great-aunt, had never flown a dragon, nor did she know her great-niece flew one now. What she had done, many years before, was to take into her home an itinerant, drunken barbarian, who’d come wandering through the town market. For nearly five months the soused old reprobate had slept on the young woman’s hearth. When he was not sleeping or incoherent with drink, the two of them had talked; and talked; and talked; and taken long walks together, still talking; then gone back to the shack and talked more. Those talks, the older woman would have assured her great-niece, were as wonderful as any flight.
One of the things the barbarian had done was help her build a wooden rack on which stretched fibers might be woven together. She’d hoped to make some kind of useful covering. But the funny and fanciful notions, the tales and terrifying insights, the world lighted and shadowed by the analytic and synthetic richness the two of them could generate between them—that was the thing!
One evening the barbarian had up and wandered off again to another mountain hold—for no particular reason; nor was the aunt worried. They were the kind of friends who frequently went separate ways—for days, even weeks. But after a month rumor came back that, while out staggering about one winter’s night, he’d fallen down a cliff, broken both legs, and died some time over the next three days from injury and exposure.
The rack had not worked right away.
The marshpool fluff that pryn’s great-aunt had tried to stretch out was too weak to make real fabric, and the sheared fleece from the winter coats of mountain nannies and billies made a fuzzy stuff that was certainly warm but that tore with any violent body movement. Still, the aunt believed in the ‘loom’ (her word for it in that long-ago distant language) and in the barbarian, whose memory she defended against all vilification. For hadn’t he also designed and supervised the construction of the fountains in the Vanar Hold, one of the three great houses around which fabled Ellamon had grown up? And hadn’t the Suzerain of Vanar himself used to nod to him on the street when they’d passed, and hadn’t the Suzerain even taken him into his house for a while—as had she? While her friends in other shacks and huts and cottages felt sorry for the young woman so alone now with her memories, it occurred to the aunt, as she sat before her fireplace on a dim winter’s afternoon, watching smoke spiral from the embers: Why not twist the fibers first before stringing them on the rack? The (also her word) ‘thread’ she twisted made a far smoother, stronger, and—finally!—functional fabric. And the loom, which had been a tolerated embarrassment among those friends to whom she was always showing it, was suddenly being rebuilt all over Ellamon. Women twisted. Women wove. Many women did nothing but twist thread for the weavers, who soon included men. That summer the aunt chipped two holes in a flat stone, wrapped the first few inches of twisted fibers through them, then set the stone to spin, helped on by a foot or a hand, thus using the torque to twist thread ten to twenty times as fast as you could with just your fingers. But with the invention of the spindle (not the aunt’s word, but an amused neighbor’s term for it), a strange thing happened. People began to suggest that neither she nor the long-dead barbarian were really the loom’s inventors; and certainly she could not have thought up thread twisting by herself. And when it became known that there were other towns and other counties throughout Nevèrÿon where weaving and spinning had been going on for years—as it had, by now, been going on for years at fabled Ellamon—then all the aunt’s claims to authorship became a kind of local joke. Even her invention of the spindle was suddenly suspect. And though he never claimed it for himself, the neighbor who’d named it was often credited with at least as much input into that discovery as the barbarian about whom the aunt was always going on must have had into the loom. For the barbarian turned out to have been quite a famous and fabled person all along, at least outside of Ellamon. And the spindle? Surely it was something she had seen somewhere. It was too useful, too simple, and just not the kind of thing you ‘thought up’ all alone. The aunt spun. The aunt wove. The aunt took in abandoned children, now of a younger cousin, now of a wayward niece, and, several years later, the grandson of a nephew. For wasn’t her shack the warmest in the village? When she had made it, she had filled every chink of it with a mixture of oil and mud, into which she had blown hundreds and hundreds of small air bubbles through a hollow reed; it would hold both warm air and cool air for more than twenty-four hours. (She had told the barbarian—whose name had been Belham—about her insulation method that first day in the market; and wasn’t that why he had consented to stay with her when the Suzerain of Vanar had put him out?) From all the looms of fabled Ellamon bolts of goats’ wool and dogs’ hair cloth and sheep wool rolled out, slower than smoke spiraling over winter embers. The great-aunt spoke little with her neighbors, loved her little cousins and great-nieces (and her great-nephew—seven years older than pryn—who had recently become a baker), and grew more bitter. What mountain pasturage there was about the High Hold was slowly given over to sheep, already prized for their thin but nourishing milk. (Sheep wool clearly made the strongest, warmest cloth. But that, alas, was not among the aunt’s particular discoveries.) And more and more milk-less, fleeceless dragons leapt from the pastures’ ledges and cliffs, with their creaking honks, to tear their wings on treetops and brambles decently out of sight.
Because the slopes around Ellamon sported more rockweed than grass, the local shepherds never could raise the best sheep: Ellamon’s fabrics were never particularly fabled.
Today pryn’s great-aunt was over eighty.
The barbarian had slipped drunkenly down the cliff more than fifty years ago.
Bound to the sky by vines twisted the same way her great-aunt still twisted goats’ fleece and marshpool fluff and dogs’ hair into thread that bound that bitter, old, energetic woman to the earth, pryn flew!
Flying, she saw the crazily tilting mountains rise by her, the turning clouds above her, the rocking green, the green-licked rock. Som
e where below, sheep, bleating, wandered over another rocky rise. Wind rushed pryn’s ears to catch in the cartilages and turn around in them, cackling like a maiden turning from her shuttle to laugh at a companion’s scabrous joke. Air battered her eye sockets, as a wild girl pounds the wall of the room where she has been shut in by a mother terrified her child might, in her wildness, run loose and be taken by slavers. Air rushed pryn’s toes; her toes flexed up, then curled in the joy, in the terror of flight. Wind looped coolly about pryn’s arms, pushed cold palms against her kneecaps.
They glided.
And much of the space between pryn and the ground had gone.
She had launched from a ledge and, through common sense, had expected to land on one. How else to take off once more? Somehow, though, she’d assumed the dragon knew this too.
Trees a-slant the slope rose.
She pulled on the reins, hard. Wings flopped, fluttered, flapped behind her knees; pryn leaned back in wind, searching for ledges in the mountains that were now all around.
She glanced down to see the clearing—without a ledge any side! Treetops veered, neared.
That was where they were going to land…? Leaves a-top a tall tree slapped her toes, stinging. She yanked vines. Dragon wings rose, which meant those green membranes between the long bones would not tear on the branches. But they were falling—no, still gliding. She swallowed air. The dragon tilted, beating back against her own flight—pryn rocked against the bony neck. Reins tight, she knuckled scales. Dragon muscle moved under her legs. A moment’s floating, when she managed to push back and blink. And blinked again—
—because they jarred, stopping, on pebbles and scrub.
A lurch: the dragon stepped forward.
Another lurch: another step.