Authors: Samuel R. Delany
Tales of Neveryon (39 page)
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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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.
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Samuel R Delany 1979
All rights reserved.
The right of Samuel R Delany to be identified as the author
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
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin's Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11923 9
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real
persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
*
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.