In this week’s Translation Tuesday, a mother’s heartbreak echoes the mournful music of the Earth in Aurélia Lassaque’s hybrid story “Whalesong.” Our protagonist is a prodigious scholar processing a loss so excruciating and traumatic that our narrator frames it via global atrocities and cataclysms. The Earth’s persistent gravity seems absurd, even obscene. Mass extinctions are viewed as unimportant. Through the speaker’s close-third reveries, we witness the massacre of the French Cathars—a gnostic community burned alive by the Church—and meditate upon the world’s cruelty as their ashes are washed away by a seemingly divine rain. Even the sea’s withdrawal evokes a desert’s emptiness. Excerpted from Lassaque’s forthcoming novel, “Whalesong” marries poetry with music, verse with prose—its aural artistry is preserved and accented by Madeleine Campbell’s exquisite translation, which strategically leaves passages in French, Occitan, and Latin to preserve bits of the source language’s sound. Just as our protagonist writes love poems in Occitan (the “language of secrets”), Lassaque’s prose itself reads like verse. A hauntingly beautiful selection by a contemporary troubadour.
She doesn’t know what to pack in her suitcase . . . Toothpaste. A translucent comb with a broken tooth.
When do milk teeth start to grow in? Why this amnesia of our early years? Why don’t our memories reach back to our birth? We are born, and then we step out on a tightrope without a net. We survive infancy. It takes so much effort there’s no room left to remember them. No room either for the future save for the thirst.
What is she to do with all the things they’ve given her? If only she could track the objects passing from nursery to nursery, outgrown in a matter of weeks. Why do people discard them so readily? What would a map of their journey look like?
She has fluoride toothpaste. She thinks it’s silly to deny herself a microwave yet use a toothpaste that causes cancer.
To lose your parents is to become an orphan. To lose your child, what is that? Why is there no word to express it?
*
Outside, it’s pelting down. In the South it rains less than in Paris. The rain is striking. In the tongue of Oc they say it’s raining millstones, raining anvils. A Christian god wouldn’t pelt them with anvils. Mind you . . . He did allow men, women, and children to gather in his temple, be massacred in his temple, even though the stones bleached out, all the blood had dried off centuries ago. That god had let it be known: Kill them all, God will know His own. The river of blood might be flowing still. There may be the odd mistake. A tiny martyr disappears down the river. Does God really welcome all innocents? The god who imposes baptism to save one’s soul, what does he do with the stillborn?
Dehors il pleut à coup de pelles. Plòu a palas.
It’s raining shovels.
*
She goes to her window, absorbing herself in the « etching game » she made up when she was a child. A river has formed in the street. The current gathers in folds that resemble waves. People take shape. She can make out a face here, an arm there, reaching for the sky. Thousands are carried off by the waters. Here a tiny hand, it could be a flower. Beheaded. But she knows headcounts are fudged in the service of the one and only god.
She whispers: after the massacre of the innocents, the Pope’s legates may have knocked a great hole in the roof of the cathedral. They summoned the rains, danced, spoke in tongues. They danced upon the heretics’ ashes. Under the soles of their feet, a fertile bed of embers and blood. Sang e cendres dels eretics. And the heavens answered their call, granted them rain. And the water, mixed with the ashes of innocents, scrubbed the cathedral floor clean.
*
She wants to be gold and ivory, master of controversy, winner of wars, revered by the meek and the powerful. From the top of her hill, she’d see the Mediterranean as it was when the whales prevailed. She would throw olives to the whales’ god, would indulge him with her teasing laughter, her victory laugh. For her name would be victory.
There hadn’t even been a war. She is a wreck. There was no battle, no armistice. It happened inside her belly. Invisibly. In a place where neither horizon nor hills exist. Though there was a small sea inside. And a human being inside that sea. A human being, stuffed with everything it needed. A heart the size of a knuckle, a little stomach with likes and dislikes, and ears to hear songs with.
But on the morning of the Big Bang she’d heard nothing. Sight and smell were enough. In fact there were loads of odours. No, the senses aren’t kind to unchilded mothers. They say that if you lose an arm, endorphins kick in to protect you from the pain of amputation. But not for unchilded mothers. No, they must open, bleed, give birth, yield.
Their eyes wide open to the void.
*
She doesn’t know how to answer the question: do you have any children? To say yes is to say no. It’s unutterable.
After the delivery her rounded belly persisted for a while. In the street they would ask: When is it due?
There was nothing left inside her but they continued to believe the earth was round, the moon revolved around the earth and the earth around the sun, and mass extinctions didn’t worry them much.
She almost broke a wrist. A Moroccan mother’s. Faded henna on the palms of her hands. At the market, the mother had placed a hand on her empty stomach. She may have wanted to do the fortune thing. Maybe to tell her whether it was a boy or girl. She held onto the mother’s wrist. She squeezed it very hard. It was to say don’t, but the mother didn’t take her hand away. Maybe she did have the gift of foresight after all. She’d started to cry. Her brown eyes were beautiful and sad. Her breath was sweet. A mother’s breath. In that very moment, her own pain had vanished. Her pain had nested inside the mother. Her pain, an eagle from the Urals. The same eagle that centuries before had tormented the last of the Titans.
That eagle . . . The devourer of bellies.
*
She didn’t know yet, that she was cursed, in the Aral sea.
She didn’t know, she was in charge. She was brilliant said her professors, who instantly became her colleagues. Her astonished professors.
In those days, beautiful thighs, beautiful breasts, unaware of their fate. In those days, trowels and brushes and sieves. A sieve is like a drum with holes in it. And the Kazakh man beat the drum day and night. And despite the tent’s canvas, she could see the stars. And the stars saw her die and come to life so often every night that they lost their bearings. Sometimes at dawn there’d be a crowd in the sky. Towards Asia, the sun. Towards Europe the moon. And here and there stars would insist on delaying the start of day. You will be my shepherd, I will be your shepherdess. Seràs mon pastre, serai ta pastressa, she said to him in her own tongue, to vie with the wonder of his ancestors.
She’d taught him a song about a butterfly Lo parpalhou sèc la candela . . . At the end it says: Lo parpalhòu brutla sas alas e l’amorós sa libertat. The butterfly burns its wings, and the lover his freedom. But she’d lied to him, she’d translated something else.
*
In the Aral sea, she dug the ground to find the sea. Today she dreams that in every sea there is a desert, she who knows what happens when the sea withdraws. And even though at times the sea does withdraw, even though at times the sea falters, the sea is drained of its fish and mothers cry at its emptiness, the sea is almost all of the earth. And her child would have asked her one day why isn’t the Earth called Sea when it’s covered by all that water? She would then have thought of the Aral Sea, of the Kazakh drummer, she would have blushed. She would have picked up a book and told her the tale in reverse. The one about the great plain submerged by the waters. She would have shown her photographs of boats from the Arctic, their decks piled high with mammoth tusks. Fishermen, lost as fireflies in their shiny waxed jackets. She would have pronounced the names Belkov and Stolbovoï and her child would’t know how to say them, would have said something like Stobolobouhi?
*
After their first night of love, when the drums beats had given way to dawn, she fell asleep to the sound of his voice. It bore the solemn, barely perceptible tonality he reserved for his ancestors’ tongue. She woke alone, its sound reverberating through her innermost folds. Within her soul too, an echo lingered. She wrote a poem in the hope of taming a small part of the mystery.
A mon pastre nomada
A l’ora que tos baisses
S’ornavan de promessas
Al nom del pòble liure
Plena encara de tu
Me soi vista ausèl
Ofrir mon còs
A la mossegada dels solelhs
Portant en bandièra
Lo cròs qu’i daissarà ta sageta
Me soi vista deman
Arrapada al pelatge de bèstias cegas
Pujant las montanhas al son dels tambors
E t’ai sentit fondre en ieu
Jos una pluèja d’estelas
Exortant las albas
D’alentir lors casuda
To my nomadic shepherd
When your caresses
Were draped in a promise
To free the people
Quenched by your touch
I saw myself as bird
Offering my body
To the bite of the suns
Displaying with pride
The wound your arrow will inflict
I saw myself tomorrow
Clinging to the pelts of blinded animals
Scrambling up mountains to the sound of the drums
And I felt your meltwater inside me
Under a downpour of stars
Begging the dawns
To dampen their fall
*
Out there in the desert, she was already writing love letters in the form of poems. In Occitan. The language of secrets. The language of before the Big Bang. The language of summers, scrawny cats and lizards. Grandfather’s tongue, L’Aujòl, who baited crayfish at dusk by torch light. With him she’d smoked her first cigarette, aged eleven. A gitane with no filter. He used to say Los cambaròts, son coma los parpalhòls, aquò s’aganta al lum; crayfish are like butterflies, you catch them with light. On the telly they talked about the demise of the great white rhino. This had worried him somewhat. He clearly had no idea about the crayfish. His house was dark and cool. There was a smell of soot and vegetables fresh out of the soil. These ancient houses, sheltering ancient ones, they reminded her of grottoes. There were treasures to haul out of cupboards. Nineteenth-century snapshots in caramel tins with horse-drawn carriages painted on the lids. Leather belts and binoculars from one of the world wars. Canes and vials like test tubes she would secretly pilfer to perform alchemy tricks. There were stamp collections bearing names of countries that no longer existed. There were pipe cleaners and hunting whistles. Soundless whistles, which had long perplexed her. There was a telephone with its rotary dial and holes for the fingers. If you got the number wrong, you had to start all over again. The old man had made a set to play checkers. One day she caught him cheating. She had been ashamed, had pretended not to have seen. When he grew very old, she started to play as one does with a child. She’d make out she was losing and smile at each new win. She never found out if he’d noticed her doing it.
*
Her travel case is cubist. A travel case for after the Big Bang.
She and her travel case had imploded.
To implode is to explode from the inside.
She is reminded of the toad that puffed and went up in smoke.
*
She’s rummaging through her drawers, looking for her passport. She had packed it somewhere, her precious passport, her tattooed sesame to distant lands. But she can’t see properly because of the half light. She hasn’t touched the blinds in weeks. The thought of it fills her with dread. She doesn’t understand why. And so she has kept them as they were on the morning of the Big Bang, half shut. The penumbra that reigns evenly across her flat has become familiar. The darkness smooths the edges, softens the parting of night and day. The darkness restores a kind of harmony, imposing a slow rhythm on the choreography of her daily routines. And the time she spends folding her clothes, tying her shoelaces, ironing her laundry, the effort this entails, bring her comfort. Being mindful of the present stops her thinking, frees her momentarily from the burden of remembering.
But she will leave soon, with her passport, her yellow and green vaccination card tucked inside. So she decides to raise the blinds despite the rain to let in a little light. It’s an old-fashioned system but it works, with cord and roller. To lower the blinds, you have to give some slack by pulling the cord towards you and to raise them, you have to feed the cord with two hands back into a gap in the roller, as if you were climbing a rope. When she had first moved in, she’d been enchanted by these very blinds. They reminded her of nautical chores. For a whole week, she’d chuckle little gags to herself, yelling: “Sailor!” “Aye captain!” “Slacken the halyard!” “Aye captain!”
She seems so distant, the regal young woman, full of mischief, who had studied languages, led archaeological digs, and hadn’t flinched at the thought of being a mother for the first time, a single mother. That woman had slipped out one April morning, her eyelids screwed shut, soaked in water and blood, between her own thighs.
*
She feeds the cord in with a slow, stifled motion. Suddenly she understands why she had avoided this gesture. The clicking of the roller reminds her of another. The clicking of the mouse for her ultrasound.
Before the Big Bang, when everything seemed right both inside and outside herself, she had been fascinated by sonography. She felt she was discovering her child in the manner of cetaceans. What could be more natural than to rely on the language of these populations who, after leaving the ocean to endow themselves with lungs and the gift of song, had taken to the seas once again? She loved mysteries and often wondered what had caused their exodus. She saw in this event something of a quest for origins, with irredeemable consequences, a little like those anthropologists who reverted to a primitive lifestyle, left their families and all their titles behind in order to rise and sleep to the sun’s rhythm, learned to heal themselves with plants, lived from the hunt and inscribed their bodies with ancient chronicles. The male midwife had suggested she keep a 3-D photo of her five-month scan. She had wanted to explain it wasn’t a photograph but an echo. An acoustic rendering, the imago vocis already named in the classics. As she raises the blind, she is reminded of Echo’s curse. She whose bones turned to stone, then to dust but whose voice remains. Vox manet. The voice remains and sonus est, qui vivit in illa, it is the sound that lives on inside her. She had avoided this gesture on account of the ultrasound’s echo. Because the sound remains, though nothing lives inside her anymore.
Translated from the Occitan/French by Madeleine Campbell
Aurélia Lassaque (b. 1983) is a bilingual poet and performer who writes in French and Occitan, the language of the medieval troubadours. Endangered today, it is still spoken in Southern France, in Val d’Aran (Spain), and a few valleys in the Piedmont region of Italy. Her work has been translated into over twenty languages including Asturian, Basque, Catalan, Dutch, Finnish, Hebrew, Italian, English, Norwegian, Spanish, and Turkish. Her collection Pour que chantent les salamandres (Editions Bruno Doucey, 2013) has been translated in many different languages and received critical attention from, among others, The Guardian, the Al Araby Al Jadeed literary supplement and Haaretz Daily. Her second French/Occitan collection, En quête d’un visage, a prescient dialogue between Ulysses and Elle/Ela (She), was published in France by Editions Bruno Doucey (May 2017), and selections from this collection have appeared in several publications in English, including Poetry at Sangam (2017) and Poems from the Edge of Extinction (2019). Recent performances in Occitan and English translation include T Junction 2018, songs and recitation in French and Occitan at the forty-ninth Poetry International Festival Rotterdam 2018, and an interview on Trafika Europe (2020). Aurélia Lassaque also collaborates as a screenwriter for the cinema with director Giuseppe Schillaci: Transhumance (co-screenwriter, actress), a short film poem, presented at the seventy-sixth Venice Film Festival (MaTerre 2019, Cantiere Cinepoetico Euromediterraneo).
Madeleine Campbell is a Canadian writer, researcher, and translator who teaches at the University of Edinburgh. Her translations of Francophone Maghrebi poets were published in the University of California Book of North African Literature (2012), Lighthouse (2015) and MPT Magazine (2016). In 2017 she was awarded an ALTA Emerging Translator Menteeship to translate bilingual Occitan/French poet Aurélia Lassaque’s En quête d’un visage (2017). Her translations from this collection have appeared in Poetry at Sangam (2017), the Poetry International Festival website (Rotterdam 2018), Poems from the Edge of Extinction (2019), and are forthcoming in The Arkansas International. Poems from Lassaque’s first collection Pour que chantent les salamandres appeared in Pratik (2019). Madeleine’s book Translating across Sensory and Linguistic Borders was published in 2019, edited with Ricarda Vidal from King’s College Londo, with whom she leads the special interest group on Intersemiotic Translation and Cultural Literacy at cle.world. www.edinburgh.academia.edu/MadeleineCampbell.
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