Classic Poem

There is a tradition in Laparone that the first
man to wake each morning must sweep
shadows from his porch lest night
pull the long limbs of sunlight
into its mouth and devour the day.
Serto wants to be the broom melting dark
and light in the moment of their divorce.
This teases the translator with a feast
of moral and technical difficulties. For
example. There is a widely chattered rumor
that the arm Serto lost in the last battle
for Muipo, now passed by Zedefi rebels
from base to base in the Chimasta mountains,
reverts to his body in dream and chokes him
to death, his last breath the word benudok.
In Kuntolo this means something like traitor/
savior. The aspiration, for which there is no
simple English equivalent, in fact no
comparable word in the Romance “pallet,”
is to hold in one unit of language the complex
idea of the man or woman who saves a village
or clan by a putatively faithless act,
the virtue of which only he or she is aware.
In the first sentence of Kiloso dak Vermoso or
Swallowed River, Serto injects the legend
of his missing arm into our imaginations
in words of necessary misinterpretation. Ekiu zar
sedru dok erchulo tubuso can be translated one
of two ways—The arm rose and embraced the sun
or The arm rose and devoured the sun. Given
Serto’s standing as a world writer,
the opening sentence is a challenge
to translators to base the tone of the novel
on the seesaw of a single word. By the time
Mersatta, tortured by the dream of the arm,
hangs himself from the 300-year-old
kloson tree in the square of his unnamed village,
it is clear the arm has been the novel’s
narrator, and that if erchulo had been translated
as embraced, Mersatta is to be forgiven,
as devoured, Mersatta should be left to rot.
Further complicating matters is that sometimes
the narrator is the arm but others a tongue
or foot, there is an entire chapter called
Bukosaman or Metronome, where the narrator
becomes, without reference until the last word
of the chapter, the gold buckle of General
Cuntare’s belt. As always with Serto, we are made
to wonder, knowing so much about his life—
the shuttling of rebel messages as a child
along the honed ridges of the Chimastas,
the rape of his mother, shooting of his father
before his eyes, the sudden appearance
of a wealthy uncle who shipped the boy
out of the country into the arms of the Treost
Jesuits, his return as the lunatic pen
behind the incendiary pages of The Undressed
Land—if we are not being asked to wear
the complexity of his guilt and decide if he,
the supposed informer at Muipo, is a child
of reverence or scorn. Out of this tempest
I have essentially written my own book. Mersatta
still dies but is happy to let the sway
of his body replace the wind’s tick-tock.
The arm which haunts him has nothing to say
about the revolution but wants to come home.
At the end the two are reconciiled into a single
body of death. After that the country is quiet,
rebel come down from the mountains
to discover their familes have long ago left,
packed rivers and wheat fields and nailed
a note to the barbershop saying Don’t follow,
after twenty years your eyes can no longer see
our skin. Then the rebels take the mountains apart,
I leave them with mouths full of dirt, hands
clawed to nubs in bereavement, and Serto
in the distance in the guise of the Guitano,
a sea famed for placid waters but hiding
the Judas teeth of rocks.