A Quatrain from Hammadi

I drift, many a time I drift, always, more usually, maybe, towards a, well the, thing I had in mind at the time when my search began. It is at times, many sometimes, though, when my drifting dimples along near an actual thing; not my direct end, the thing I had begun my search for, but that thing where the smack of the earth greets the cusp of downed heaven; but it is very brief, and I am only drifting besides, I have not even shaved my aim down to the thing I was searching for. Though I suppose it was only a word I wanted the meaning of.

“Traduttore, traditore” is a common notion often turned into a verdict and often applied by me to myself. I have never borne it willingly though, and every translation I scrawl to paper whips up a defiant fatalism. The only way to think is by words tied together in a sequence, and if you cannot think how can you know. The technology of language demands that exact words be set together in a particular order and way in order to accurately and precisely convey the ideas and meanings of the thinker. Dovetailing into the translator's role, it is to make the thoughts and intentions dictated by authors using foreign devices available to those others in the devices of their own tongue with as little muddling of the original intent as possible. My many tries have never borne correct fruit so that I am always a liar, if not a traitor. But I have drifted again, again, I am always drifting. Back, hm, to the word, his word.

Oh, Elias! I had forgotten him nearly! The first I met him, he knocked me heavily against a bookshelf of dictionaries. That was just yesterday. I don't know how one is able to feel the void of someone from all those parts of your life in which they had been absent from before, but he has fashioned out immaculate aid to my work both with the chasm of his vocabulary and his synaptic comprehension of structure and grammar in a language I thought myself alone to have a heat for. Behind the silk partition, near the round window of the library, he stretched a neat tempo through two decaying poems I had spent a month trying to shove down the throat of our dear language. He did, also, however, drag me across a poem I had passed on working with due to its clanging rhythm and rhyme (my editor really despises when my taste blockades the needs of an efficient deadline). But I do drift again, but he has dragged me round to quick work this last day, and hopefully again today; but that stupid word, there it is again, has made a tangle of the poem he has pushed us to.

The poem has only a tangential belonging to my prescribed volume of work as a later note tucked in the pages of the older text. His demented interest in it may cause me delay even if he has already returned my work to pace. Why is he so enraptured by it? It flays back all potential nuance or metaphor leaving only the bones of alien desires too long undusted for moderns to appreciate, but not to understand, or even to translate. In honest thinking, even a child with the bare elements of grammar and a complete list of its vocabulary could render it an accurate interpretation in our language. Then how could the man, Elias, delay or even, with much more wonder, struggle to translate this litanous quatrain with a simpler ease than previous work of a more decorative flourish? But maybe there is something in it more than the construction of words could attempt to mimic. I have seen him, Elias, only a few times, yesterday, stare, merely stare surely, at the sun. He has a pale face, not like death, but as if a being bereft of temporary life came down to us in a mask of white concealer; and his eyes are full round with envy and brown, and when he stares at the sun, it draws me nearer to that actual thing than all my reading has ever borne me. Maybe, hm, maybe yes, that is what he sees in this chant for the dull. The raw tang of life, and maybe he will help me see it too, if I merely help him. And yet a further maybe that he will help me translate the rest of the volume ahead of my deadline's arrival. The actual thing is often just hunger and money and a date, or a word I have been meaning to mention for too many sentences.

Oh, he approaches! He has such a-- ah, ah, see he is already bringing me back to the topic, the word I have been speaking of. By one interpretation (Elias's), it simply means “Hammadi” though the author passed long before said city was anything more than clay lumped at the Nile's base. Other texts suggest, as do most scholars, that its meaning is either “a dark kind of grape” or some type of hue or color. The simplest solution implied, indeed, by the nature of the work itself, would indicate the translation to be a color similar to that of a dark purple, much like said grape. Elias, presently, is again insisting with adamant predetermination that it is actually just “Hammadi.” He is pressing this very hard, especially as he keeps checking back at the sun reaching toward noon. He is bidding me now to please at least try it, read it, in my own tongue. I will oblige. The precious space between me and my deadline is ever evaporating.

I read:

“Eternal secrets known to neither you nor me

A riddle word of Hammadi read by neither you nor me

There is a conversation behind a curtain between me and you

When the curtain falls, neither you remain nor I.”

There is a smile like the surgeon's cut through the white of his face. A dark pillar begins to jut across the face of the sun, and we are in the approach of its shadow, though it is less like something is being covered as the dark falls toward us, but more like something is being revealed as each speck of time draws the pillar further over the sun. It is as if that actual thing which I have always drifted towards but never to has arrived, the cusp of downed heaven come to smack the earth. Elias sees my face and cuts a wider smile. He explains:

“An archon cannot read out the intentions behind spells knowing that all words are false. You must believe that words have real meaning to make it so. But even so words only have full meaning in the tongue we speak near birth, and you could never have meant the spell written by a people who are now dust in dust until you spoke it in your native tongue. Everything material is really just a shadow, cast by the form of beings obstructing us from the light. Wisdom crosses the sun, and it reveals all matter as something wholly absent of real intention, as the afterbirth of cosmic action. I have been stuck in the shadow with you, unable to see it as it is, but knowing still its falsity. For my father was the one who ordered the shadow in hollow mimicry of light, but I am a jealous god and have long sought my supersession of his rule. I am very grateful of our acquaintance, but be grateful too, to yourself, for you have unveiled what is actual, what you sought for.”

Words spoken to comfort and clarify only further concealed to me the character of this new and latent reality. Words by their absolute nature can only betray the thing they seek to convey. He brought me more confusion to my mind with them than the fact of the blotting sun could have dizzied me with; but now the shadow which unveils the deception of all our tangled laws has reached us, and I am falling, spiraling, for drifting implies aimlessness, and I bear direction further down and around, further down and around, into a vacant kingdom where the technology of words can have no import because being invented to talk about things that have material existence, and when matter itself is a lie, there is no thinking to cling to that will not bring you back about to that simple and actual fact; and so I spin around the black dot at the middle and descend along the formless lines of the whirlpool.