Translator's Note Poem Rhyme Scheme

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There is a tradition in Laparone that the first	A
man to wake each morning must sweep	B
shadows from his porch lest night	C
pull the long limbs of sunlight	C
into its mouth and devour the day	D
Serto wants to be the broom melting dark	E
and light in the moment of their divorce	F
This teases the translator with a feast	G
of moral and technical difficulties For	H
example There is a widely chattered rumor	I
that the arm Serto lost in the last battle	J
for Muipo now passed by Zedefi rebels	K
from base to base in the Chimasta mountains	L
reverts to his body in dream and chokes him	M
to death his last breath the word benudok	E
In Kuntolo this means something like traitor	I
savior The aspiration for which there is no	N
simple English equivalent in fact no	N
comparable word in the Romance pallet	O
is to hold in one unit of language the complex	P
idea of the man or woman who saves a village	Q
or clan by a putatively faithless act	R
the virtue of which only he or she is aware	S
In the first sentence of Kiloso dak Vermoso or	H
Swallowed River Serto injects the legend	T
of his missing arm into our imaginations	L
in words of necessary misinterpretation Ekiu zar	H
sedru dok erchulo tubuso can be translated one	U
of two ways The arm rose and embraced the sun	U
or The arm rose and devoured the sun Given	U
Serto s standing as a world writer	H
the opening sentence is a challenge	V
to translators to base the tone of the novel	J
on the seesaw of a single word By the time	W
Mersatta tortured by the dream of the arm	X
hangs himself from the year old	Y
kloson tree in the square of his unnamed village	Q
it is clear the arm has been the novel s	Z
narrator and that if erchulo had been translated	A2
as embraced Mersatta is to be forgiven	U
as devoured Mersatta should be left to rot	B2
Further complicating matters is that sometimes	C2
the narrator is the arm but others a tongue	E
or foot there is an entire chapter called	D2
Bukosaman or Metronome where the narrator	H
becomes without reference until the last word	E2
of the chapter the gold buckle of General	J
Cuntare s belt As always with Serto we are made	F2
to wonder knowing so much about his life	G2
the shuttling of rebel messages as a child	H2
along the honed ridges of the Chimastas	C2
the rape of his mother shooting of his father	H
before his eyes the sudden appearance	C2
of a wealthy uncle who shipped the boy	I2
out of the country into the arms of the Treost	H2
Jesuits his return as the lunatic pen	J2
behind the incendiary pages of The Undressed	H2
Land if we are not being asked to wear	H
the complexity of his guilt and decide if he	K2
the supposed informer at Muipo is a child	H2
of reverence or scorn Out of this tempest	H2
I have essentially written my own book Mersatta	H2
still dies but is happy to let the sway	D
of his body replace the wind s tick tock	E
The arm which haunts him has nothing to say	D
about the revolution but wants to come home	L2
At the end the two are reconciiled into a single	J
body of death After that the country is quiet	H2
rebel come down from the mountains	C2
to discover their familes have long ago left	H2
packed rivers and wheat fields and nailed	H2
a note to the barbershop saying Don t follow	N
after twenty years your eyes can no longer see	K2
our skin Then the rebels take the mountains apart	H2
I leave them with mouths full of dirt hands	C2
clawed to nubs in bereavement and Serto	H2
in the distance in the guise of the Guitano	J2
a sea famed for placid waters but hiding	E
the Judas teeth of rocks	C2

Bob Hicok

Translator's Note Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis

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