the shore littered with stars
EAVESDROPPING, n. This word comes to us from “eavesdrop,” which originally meant water that dripped from the roof of a house—from the eaves, the part of the roof that hangs over the walls—and then came to mean the place where the water fell. In a world before gutters, if you were standing outside a house under the eaves, you were standing in the eavesdrop.
The eavesdrop also happens to be a great place to surreptitiously listen to a conversation inside the house, which is how we come to the modern meanings of the verb “to eavesdrop” and the noun “eavesdropping.” Now, of course, you don’t have to linger outside someone’s house to eavesdrop. You can do it in a coffeeshop while someone’s on their phone, or remotely, through surveillance software I don’t really understand and am thus probably vulnerable to. No eaves required.
Here follows some discussion of a novel that features both regular old-fashioned listening-to-somebody-else’s-conversation eavesdropping and sci-fi-neural-implants-and-algorithms-spying-on-you eavesdropping.
This week, I finished some small-r romance and I did read a few things that qualify as Capital-R Romance, but right now I only want to talk about A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, which is neither.
I mentioned this book last week. It took me some time to read it, partly because I am easily distracted, partly because there are always library books appearing that need to be read, partly because at some point I was reading slowly expressly to fuck with my beloved, and partly because A Memory Called Empire is so damn good that it needed to be savored.
Also, sometimes, as a writer, it’s hard to read the work of someone who’s so much better than you. You have to do it, of course. Not because it’s educational, but because otherwise you’d be denying yourself all the best writing. That’s no way to live.
This same kind of frustrated longing—appreciating something, knowing it can’t ever be yours—is threaded throughout A Memory Called Empire. The main character, Mahit Dzmare, is the ambassador from remote Lsel Station, sent to Teixcalaan, the capital of a vast space empire, to advocate for her people and to solve the mystery of what happened to the previous ambassador. Mahit loves Teixcalaanli literature and culture, but she is and always will be an outsider. As good as she is at their language—and she is very good—she’ll never be able to compose verse rich with literary and cultural allusions as spontaneously as they do.
As someone who got a doctorate degree studying the literature of a language that is not my own, someone with a very good accent who will still never pass for a native speaker, the passage below absolutely punched me in the face. I’m pasting the whole thing here because it’s too perfect to summarize, and because I’m wild for everything about it—the expertly constructed invented language, the poetry-infused imperial culture, the parenthetical and multilayered prose, the heartache, the hilarity.
Somewhere in the middle of her third glass of the pale spirit Three Seagrass kept bringing her (Three Seagrass herself was drinking something milky-white that she called ahachotiya, which Mahit was convinced meant “spoilt burst fruit”—at least from her understanding of the roots of the unfamiliar word—and couldn’t quite figure out why it was in any way desirable to consume, let alone consume multiple instances of), Mahit found herself standing on the edge of a circle of Teixcalaanlitzlim, watching them have what she could only describe as not a poetry contest but a battle of wits conducted entirely in extemporaneous verse. It had begun as a sort of game: one of Three Seagrass’s evanescently clever friends took up the last line of Fourteen Spire’s dull and prize-winning poem, said “Let’s play, shall we?” and proceeded to use that last line as her first one, composing a quatrain that shifted the rhythm from the standard fifteen-syllable political verse form to something that was absolutely stuffed full of dactyls. And then she’d pointed her chin at another one of Three Seagrass’s friends, in challenge—and he took her last line, and apparently came up with a perfectly acceptable quatrain on his own, with no preparatory time. Mahit caught a few of his references: he was imitating the style of a poet she’d read, Thirteen Penknife, who used the same vowel-sound pattern repeated on either side of a caesura.
Imitating Thirteen Penknife seemed to be the order of the day, after that—Three Seagrass took a turn, and then another woman, and then a Teixcalaanlitzlim of a gender Mahit didn’t recognize, and then it was back to the initial challenger—who changed the game again, adding another element: now each quatrain had to start with the last line of the previous one, be in dactylic verse with a vowel-repeated caesura, and be on the subject of repairs made to City infrastructure.
Three Seagrass was annoyingly good at describing repairs to City infrastructure. She was lucid even through many glasses of ahachotiya, laughing, saying lines like the grout seal around the reflecting pool / lapped smooth and clear-white by the tongues of a thousand Teixcalaanli feet / nevertheless frays granular and impermanent / and will be spoken again, remade in the image / of one department or another / clamoring, and Mahit knew two things: first, that if she wanted to take a turn at this game, all she needed to do was step forward into the circle, and someone would challenge her, same as any other Teixcalaanlitzlim—and second, that she would fail at it completely. There was no way she could do this. She’d spent half her life studying Teixcalaanli literature and she was just barely good enough to follow this game, recognize a few of the referents. If she tried herself she’d—oh, they wouldn’t laugh. They’d be indulgent. Indulgent of the poor, ignorant barbarian playing so hard at civilization and—
Three Seagrass wasn’t paying the slightest bit of attention to her.
Mahit slipped back, away from the circle of clever young people, and made herself disappear into the great ballroom under the glittering starlit fan-vaults, and tried not to feel like she was going to cry. There wasn’t any point in crying over this. If she wanted to weep she should weep for Yskandr, or for how much political trouble she was in, not over being unable to describe pool grout while referencing a centuries-old poem on departmental conflict. One department or another, clamoring. She’d read that poem in one of her collections, on the Station, and thought she’d understood. She hadn’t.
The poem is about pool grout. All that meter and cleverness and the poem is about pool grout. And it’s not about pool grout at all. It’s just so perfect as a punchline and as an encapsulation of being befuddled by another culture, even one you admire.
(Seriously, I think I was at that party. More than once.)
There’s lots more to say about A Memory Called Empire, which is not solely about language, but language is so fundamental to the questions of empire and identity that it poses—and obviously it’s the part I liked best. But this book is also a murder mystery, and a story of political intrigue, and it has beautiful characters and friendships and is dazzlingly queer. (Romance-reading friends, it doesn’t have a Happily Ever After, at least not in this book, but there’s a really beautifully done slow-burn relationship and a great kiss scene, in case that entices you.)
Mahit’s people, the Lsel, have a neural implant technology called an imago-machine that allows them to retain other people’s memories. Mahit is supposed to have the imago of her predecessor, Yskandr, just as Yskandr possessed the memories and knowledge of the previous Lsel ambassador to Teixcalaan. But Mahit’s imago-machine malfunctions soon after she arrives in the city, and she is left alone to figure out what happened—both to the real Yskandr and to the one who was living in her head.
The Teixcalaanli are horrified by the idea of an imago-machine, of merging with another person, even as their empire fights to annex all of space and absorb other cultures into their own. Meanwhile, for the Lsel who live on a remote station, the imago-machines allow them to preserve generations of pilots’ knowledge about the surrounding space. The machines keep their culture alive. Lsel culture is in danger from the perils of space and the empire that would devour them; Teixcalaanli culture has no such concerns.
It’s impossible for me to think about A Memory Called Empire, a grand space opera about empire and identity, without also thinking of Yoon Ha Lee’s marvelous Machineries of Empire trilogy (the first one is called Ninefox Gambit), which is about all the same things. Both A Memory Called Empire and Ninefox Gambit have a protagonist who is thrust into imperial intrigue while sharing their body with another person’s consciousness—and the queerness of the experience is woven into both—and it’s fascinating how those concepts unspool so differently in each work. I highly recommend both.
Now that I spent all that time talking about sci-fi poetry and language, I have to share a poem, a translation (into a Romance language, but not my usual Romance language), and a story.
What It Was
Mark Strand
I
It was impossible to imagine, impossible
Not to imagine; the blueness of it, the shadow it cast,
Falling downward, filling the dark with the chill of itself,
The cold of it falling out of itself, out of whatever idea
Of itself it described as it fell; a something, a smallness,
A dot, a speck, a speck within a speck, an endless depth
Of smallness; a song, but less than a song, something drowning
Into itself, something going, a flood of sound, but less
Than a sound; the last of it, the blank of it,
The tender small blank of it filling its echo, and falling,
And rising unnoticed, and falling again, and always thus,
And always because, and only because, once having been, it was…
II
It was the beginning of a chair;
It was the gray couch; it was the walls,
The garden, the gravel road; it was the way
The ruined moonlight fell across her hair.
It was that, and it was more. It was the wind that tore
At the trees; it was the fuss and clutter of clouds, the shore
Littered with stars. It was the hour which seemed to say
That if you knew what time it really was, you would not
Ask for anything again. It was that. It was certainly that.
It was also what never happened—a moment so full
That when it went, as it had to, no grief was large enough
To contain it. It was the room that appeared unchanged
After so many years. It was that. It was the hat
She’d forgotten to take, the pen she left on the table.
It was the sun on my hand. It was the sun’s heat. It was the way
I sat, the way I waited for hours, for days. It was that. Just that.
I’ve been in love with this poem for a long time. The loneliness of it, the grandeur and the specificity of it, the way its abstract first half evokes Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” with “blueness” and “dot” and “speck,” and the music of “it was impossible to imagine, impossible / Not to imagine,” a line I feel sure has made its way into my own writing at some point, because what can you do with something that perfect except let it echo. As soon as someone tells you something is impossible to imagine, you start trying to imagine it. This is true of the incomprehensible vastness of the universe, and it’s true of other people’s pain. When we tell each other of our suffering, the response is so often “I can’t imagine what you’ve gone through.” But in order to know you can’t imagine something, you have to try: “impossible to imagine” is “impossible not to imagine.”
Pale Blue Dot, a photo of Earth from 6 billion km away, taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 and titled by Carl Sagan
The poem’s more concrete second half aches with loss, which is always about what happened and what never happened. The stillness casts a retrospective dread (“if you knew what time it really was”) over the past, freezes it (“the room that appeared unchanged / After so many years”), and empties the present (“the way I waited for hours, for days”). And yet it is beautiful: the sun’s heat, the shore littered with stars.
Before going to my bookshelf to type this poem out, I searched the internet to see if I could save myself the trouble. I didn’t find this poem posted in English, but I did find its second half translated into Italian.
It’s a lovely translation—il modo in cui aspettai per ore, aahhhh—although I was almost guaranteed to think that, feeling the way I do about this poem and Italian. It is, sadly, missing my favorite sounds, translating “fuss and clutter” as il caos ed il disordine (the chaos/din and mess/disorder), which isn’t wrong, but it’s no fuss and clutter, either. Translation is like that. You make some trades.
Once, as a recent college grad, I got invited to a dinner one of my professors was giving for Mark Strand, who was on campus for a reading. He could have talked to any number of older, smarter, better-educated, less obviously starstruck and terrified people at the party, and he did, because everybody wanted his attention. But he also made a point of talking to me. And not just talking at me—as so many male poets, translators, and academics did, and then got mad when it turned out I was not a woman-shaped vending machine into which they could insert opinions in exchange for admiration—but asking me questions and thinking about my answers.
It’s a gesture that I simultaneously want to write off as basic decency, but also hold up as exemplary graciousness. At that point, Mark Strand was a seventy-something, Pulitzer-winning former Poet Laureate. He didn’t have to spend his time asking dopey twenty-year-olds their opinions on poetry. But he did. (Who are we kidding, I will never write this off.)
So we talked about translation. He told me about a translator who was putting his work into Italian. “She’s me in Italy,” he said. It might have been an offhand joke for him, but I have remembered it for more than a decade now, a comment on the strange intimacy of inhabiting someone else’s work, taking their words into yourself and then writing or speaking them anew.
I don’t think this Italian translation is one of the ones Strand was talking about. The translator is credited as “A. Pancirolli,” and Google tells me that “A.” is short for “Alessandro.” I am sure he said she. She’s me in Italy. I think Strand was probably talking about the poet and translator Moira Egan, who lives in Rome. He probably said her name, too, and it’s just that I only remember that one sentence. Anyway, it’s funny that I’ve never looked her up until now. Her work is great.
I haven’t translated any poetry in a long time. I mostly do tax forms and letters from schools to parents now. I still think about she’s me in Italy, though. When I interpret for the refugee family I work with, if we have to call a bank or a government agency, the person on the other end of the line will get upset if they hear us conferring in French. (Eavesdropping, you might say.) “Who am I speaking with?” they’ll ask, mid-conversation. Or worse, “How many people am I speaking with?” They’re following protocol, not revealing sensitive information to unauthorized people. But it’s troublesome when my friend and I are trying to get things done and suddenly we get asked to please go to the office in person, or mail in a notarized form. In order to cut through that red tape, sometimes I just make the call and pretend to be my friend. The conversation is always on speakerphone and she’s sitting right there listening; I’m not committing identity theft. But it feels like breaking the rules.
This arrangement feels like the mundane version of the imago-machine in A Memory Called Empire. I offer her my knowledge, my language skills, and we pretend to be one person in order to navigate life in the heart of the empire. I’m her in America—except she’s her in America, too.
This marks six months of Word Suitcase. I started this newsletter back in June when I was grieving a miscarriage. Even though things got worse later on that count—It was certainly that. / It was also what never happened.—and it’s been a hard six months, this newsletter has been one of the better parts of it. Writing books is a long, slow, solitary affair, so it’s nice to do a kind of writing that puts me in touch with people every week. Thanks for reading. I’m glad to have you here.
If you have any words you want investigated, I’m always happy to hear them. Just reply and let me know.
