Tales of Nevèrÿon
Page 30
2) ‘the love of the tall 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 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 the 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 to actually 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
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Also By Samuel R Delany
SF and Fantasy
The Jewels of Aptor (1962)
Captives of the Flame (1963) (revised and expanded as Out of the Dead City)
The Towers of Toron (1964)
City of a Thousand Suns (1965)
The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965)
Empire Star (1966)
Babel-17 (1966)
The Einstein Intersection (1967)
Nova (1968)
Dhalgren (1975)
Triton (1976)
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984)
They Fly at Çiron (1993)
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)
Neverÿona (1983)
Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)
The Bridge of Lost Desire (1987) (revised as Return to Nevèrÿon, 1994)
Collections
Aye, and Gomorrah (1993)
Non-Fiction
The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977, revised 2009)
The American Shore (1978)
Starboard Wine (1984)
Dedication
For Joanna Russ, Luise White,
and Iva Hacker-Delany
Samuel R Delany (1942 – )
Samuel Ray ‘Chip’ Delany, Jr was born in Harlem in 1942, and published his first novel at the age of just 20. As author, critic and academic, his influence on the modern genre has been profound and he remains one of science fiction's most important and discussed writers. He has won the Hugo Award twice and the Nebula Award four times, including consecutive wins for Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection. Since January 2001 he has been a professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he is Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Samuel R Delany 1979
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of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
> Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz
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is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11923 9
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* Steiner has written numerous personable and insightful reviews of science fiction novels that have appeared in several Midwestern science fiction ‘fanzines,’ many of whose readers are probably unaware of her scholarly accomplishments.
* Other parchments in the codex, written in the same ink and presumed to come from the same time, are transcriptions of block-letter Greek inscriptions, that sculptural language written on stone in upper case letters without word-breaks, dating from pre-classic times.