Translation
Gura learned to speak French because she heard a man once speaking it to his dog, and it sounded simpler than her native tongue.
She learned English and began translating old American movies for her grandmother around the time her brother got an ear infection. An ash-speckled rook flitted around the Mother Theresa memorial, making percussive melodies against the metal railings which were heard around town, until the railing gave way to the effects of constant pecking and the statue met its own fate. When the story was related to the brother once his infection wore off, it lost something in its telling.
Ten years later, she pointed out to herself the aqua marine painted old tyres surrounding the seaside camp as she got nearer to it, a redundant colour she thought. To the east of the village, an inexplicable dune fell from the side of the mountain, eternally, the length of which locals and tourists ran down then jumped falcon-like into the sea. They were watched over by a sabred rock, a giant ossature that made flute sounds with the winds and remained unnamed, except for some graffiti in different languages that tried to claim it. Approaching the camp Gura saw, from a distance, what looked like a reddish egg lying on a colourful table , which turned out to be the head of a bald man weeping, on the colours of a table.
The pigs eluded the afternoon winds with their piercing pink silhouettes. She had been waiting on her favourite broken tree trunk on the beach for half an hour for the tourists to show up so she could do her little tour; a hike through the “The Black Peak” then down to the “PetroSchism” and up again for the final: “The Dune of Inexplicably Falling Sand,” names she had given to the landmarks surrounding the area on the campsite’s website to notify potential visitors that this place evoked things.
She had called for a local to drive the translator and his sick wife back to civilization after hearing his knock at the door at four in the morning. Along the Black Peak, the muzzled trees seemed darker than the soil they stood on. The translator hadn’t seemed to notice his surroundings the whole time he’d been on the grounds. My wife is sick, some kind of stomach thing, can you see if there’s a way to get back to the city; she wants to fly back as soon as possible. We don’t have a car. In his book, there were birds trying to reach enlightenment by boasting of their proximity to the divine, and she thought of the time it had taken him to work through the ancient text versus how long it would take the couple to reach home.
The bald man shivered a job offer so she accepted. The bald head had belonged to the proprietor of the ragged but charming campsite, who was lamenting the death of his black lab at the hands of a petty neighbour. They sealed the deal supping on a bottle of raki. Various paganslogans had been written on the visitors’ sleeping rooms. The village surrounding them was strewn with half-finished hotels and rooms in traditional houses watching over the quiet drudgery of the villagers’ daily visions.
Opening her satchel, she asked if he’d like to be read to. It’s a French translation of the original Persian she said; I’m attempting my own translation in our own language. Sensing his lack of enthusiasm, she went on to say her own translation, in their native tongue, might be better than the text she was reading from, which wasn’t even the original.
She read to him of the Hoopoe, the Nightingale conversing, the Tajidar and the Prophet, the poor fisherman finding his luck after the visit of the auspicious Sultan. What do they mean “The king’s crown is a shadow of their wings?” he asked her. She said the birds must learn to give up worldly treasures and earthly beauties to be as one with the holy. She wasn’t sure – the Holy light, the parts of us where shadows meet. The shadow knows itself, he offered. Knowledge doesn’t make the act of knowing good, she offered in turn, surrendering herself to the sea.
After the third glass, they thrummed slowly towards the beach on the marsh drawn in by the frog chorus, then sat in the communion of a reciprocal dislike, until the sun went down.
This new generation of travellers wasn’t out to make anything of themselves; being alive and dealing with its repercussions was, for them, a form of arrival, and she liked that. They talked a lot about being present which is something you can do anywhere.
Last month, Alex the American had waxed lyrical sitting by the fire about the beauty of the local women, then proceeded to tell her about his girlfriend in Minnesota and another kind of girlfriend he’d met online, who was from Costa Rica. He didn’t speak Spanish, and she didn’t speak much English. Plummeting his hands in Gura’s thighs he asked if she could interpret for them. She didn’t dare explain what translation does to lust.
So Gura swivelled from the telephone screen where the Costa Rican girl smiled at Alex’ coquettish demeanour to announce things like “Now he would like you to take off your top…She says your eyes are beautiful in the moonlight.” “Now he wants you to – how do you say ‘bend over?”’
She left them to it and went to clean the bathrooms. A Greek woman wanted her to call her daughter. She tried to tell the old woman she only had some Greek, her father having immigrated to Greece for work, and had imparted to her very menial jargons. The woman gesticulated in a sorry manner and offered the mobile phone. Gura told the daughter her mother had taken with a young Macedonian called Alex, and he would enlist her in a human trafficking operation of which she would be a kind of harem executive, while the old woman splashed about happily in the marsh. The fisherman with the red shirt arrived in the afternoon to deliver the fish.
In the autumn, there weren’t many visitors and the proprietor left for his apartment in town. She set to finishing her translation against the ochre smell of metallic sand on her feet. The fisherman came to tell her the winds would be heaviest in the coming months and she should make sure to put the free standing bamboo sticks back in the kitchen, and empty out anything the sands could wish away. Not to climb the sand dune when the northern winds blow.
One day, the wind makes her rush down, enveloped into a sandy monsoon until she clampers into the water, and is taken away by a wave pirouetting as if to take vengeance on those who walk on land. By the time his hand has grabbed her upper arms, she has already made it most of the way out, pleading with the tides. I told you about the winds, he warns again, referring to it in the local dialect.
The fisherman tells her his father is sick. He is gone, and the future holds them unawares like a tea cup, lodging unobtrusive in their bodies.
The French man who was really into reggae, dreadlocks and everything, had told her: We will tell the story of this place to all of our friends we meet, back home, and all of our neighbours, and all of our family, and anyone else we meet on our travels, should they wish to hear of the tale of the rock, the sand and the mountaintop. His Danish girlfriend, having long foregone the mussy hair, said the same thing, more or less. Gura had wanted to laugh when the couple had placed themselves in the rock, secure in its crevasse, unembarrassed by the other tourists in the tour, who watched the bodies enfolding each other.
The French man held his girl in the umbilithical crevasse while the rest of the group watched their union politely. Gura decided now would be the time to tell them the story. She pointed to the sand, to the dune, to the searing grooves; Gura told them this was a propitious event, because it was said that the birds – the simurgh, the shah-falcon, the humā, the phoenix – of the ancient poem had converged here to discuss their journey into the holy spirit, and this rock, was the metaphor they had used for the split selves of the mortal being into his authentic self and the shadow of himself, which could only be merged when following the light within. The couple giggled with delight when they heard they were ensconced in a metaphor.
Years later, the Dutch girl will wish she had spent longer around the campfire where she was talking to the Taiwanese man, while the one limping American messed around with the campsite guide – he was some kind of accountant working in the English stock exchange appraising different genres of patterns he wasn’t used to, He asked her questions by the fire while her boyfriend traced stars across the dark skies to envision peace.
Gura looks at the translator’s jacket portrait while her thighs begin to numb from sitting so long on the craggy stump. The face on the page ricochets into the hole-ridden ash trunk supporting her weight. Before getting into the van beside the driver with the bad breath, the translator had told her it is easier to read and write beautiful things when you are not confronted by them on a daily basis. He seems to be pleading with her to close the cover on him again. In the distance, the rock face turns violet when unencumbered by human presence.
The fisherman walks stealthily towards her, as if walking on sand was a punishable act.
So, timing her movements to the distance he’s yet to cover to reach her, she messes with her satchel and sits on the sand instead of walking back to the camp as intended.
They talk about the lack of people, the fact that the weather kept him from going out on the boat this morning, and that his father has really died this time. It isn’t sincere to say anything other than what she’s really thinking. So she thinks out loud whether his father might have been spared if she had really drowned that day when the tide had almost taken her. Sitting down, he furrows his brows and says his father would have known not to climb the dune when the northern winds are blowing.
In the dusky sandburst, he opens a notebook which seems from afar like a giant scrape on a person’s body, and offers it to her. The image on the cover looks like a rectangle woven with water fabric. Upon closer inspection, she recognizes the shape and texture of the Sliced Rock. In the next page, the rock face has gained an eye, from which, on the next page, a myriad of feathers form bird shapes, and so on until the last page where the rock face is made up of thousands of birds illustrated in various forms, each wing spelunking the other, damask corvets intertwining the monolith rivulet bones. At the bottom of the page, a name, no longer in use.
At the centre, at the most vertical point of the crevasse, the hoopoe bird begins the imagery of all other birds in the middle of the pencilled, noiseless flapping, but even with a central figure there is no centre to the work, just a cavernous hush of wordless flight.