Traverse, reverse, converse

JARCHAR, v. This Spanish verb is the word that stumped me in Yuri Herrera’s Señales que precederán al fin del mundo. It wasn’t in WordReference, my usual online dictionary. The closest word that dictionary could offer me was “jarcha,” a noun and not a verb. Supposedly the English translation of “jarcha” is “kharja,” which helped me not at all.

“Kharja,” it turns out, is an Arabic word that means “exit.” It’s also a poetic form that flourished in Al-Andalus, or parts of present-day Spain and Portugal when they were ruled by the Caliphate of Córdoba. Kharja tend to be lyric love poems written in Arabic with some verses in Iberian Romance (regional languages that were not yet modern Spanish, sometimes called Mozarabic).

This is not a kharja, it’s just a very cool 14th-century manuscript illustration that came up when I searched for Andalusian manuscripts at Gallica.

This information about medieval Mozarabic poetry is very cool but it did not seem, to me, to have much to do with a novel set on the US-Mexico border in the present. So I kept looking.

I found my answer in the Spanish-only WordReference forums where someone had asked exactly the question I had:

Hello,

In a novel that I’m reading, the verb jarchar (get out, leave) frequently appears; for example, “Dio las gracias y jarchó” [She said thanks and left]. Is this Mexican Spanish or does it have to do with the register of language (colloquial, slang,…)?

Thanks everyone! [Translation is mine.]

The first post after this answers very firmly that this word is not Mexican Spanish. The poster has never seen or heard it before, and it produces hardly any search results. Perhaps, the poster suggests, “jarchó” is a typo.

“No,” the original poster says. “It can’t be a typo. It’s all over this book.”

Then the original poster returns, having written to the author of the novel, and offers the author’s response:

What I was trying to do here is to mix colloquial language with innovation. (…) Jarcha, jarchar is a word I derived from the name that’s used for fragments of poems written in the 13th century, which are the most distant example of what would then be Spanish. I used it because the word symbolizes some important things for my novel: an “exit” from the poem, a feminine voice, a melancholy tone and, most of all, a language in transition. [Translation is mine.]

So “jarchar” does come from jarcha/kharja, the poetry of Al-Andalus. And then a couple posts later, someone else asks, “Hey, is that author Yuri Herrera?”

And it is!

I love that apparently you can just email Yuri Herrera and be like, hey, what the heck is this word, and he’ll write you back with a thoughtful explanation. That’s lovely.

Knowing that Yuri Herrera had invented the word “jarchar” made me curious about the novel’s English translation. Also, I gotta be real. Reading a novel in Spanish is one thing; reading a novel in Spanish where some of the words are the author’s neologisms is another. I don’t always recognize regular words! My Spanish is cobbled together from three semesters 15 years ago + knowing French and some Romance linguistics. I’m at “decipher a dictionary entry or a newspaper article” Spanish, not “read boldly innovative prose” Spanish.

So my progress through the original Spanish was slow, and then I thought, why am I avoiding the translation? I love translation, I’ve worked as a translator, I know translation is a worthy artistic and intellectual labor, it is not “cheating” for me to read this novel in English, too. So I bought Lisa Dillman’s translation, Signs Preceding the End of the World. And it’s beautiful!

And I was delighted to discover that “jarchó” has become “she versed” in English. Dillman’s translator’s note on this choice is great:

[…] Signs is just that: a book about bridging cultures and languages. Jarchar, too, is a noun-turned-verb. I wrangled with myself—and spoke somewhat obsessively with others—over how best to render this term, debating multiple options before finally deciding on “to verse” (the two runners-up were “to port” and “to twain”). Used in context it is easily understood, and has the added benefits of also being a noun-turned-verb, a term clearly referring to poetry, and part of several verbs involving motion and communication (traverse, reverse, converse) as well as the “end” of the uni-verse. Makina, the protagonist, is the character who most often “verses,” as well as the woman who serves as a bridge between cultures, languages and worlds. Would readers realize any of this had it not just been explained? I doubt it. But that’s ok; the same is true of the Spanish.

She’s right about that last bit, as the thread on the WordReference forums demonstrates—plenty of Spanish speakers don’t recognize “jarchar” as a word. (But at least one of them is emailing the author about it!) And she’s right that when she translates “Makina dio las gracias y jarchó de ahí” as “Makina thanked him and versed out of there,” it’s easily understood in context.

I’m glad to have read this book, which is about crossing the border and the different words and worlds on either side, in two languages. Here is a passage from Señales—Yuri Herrera’s original Spanish—and then the same passage from Signs, Lisa Dillman’s translation, talking about remaking the world by mixing languages:

Al usar en una lengua la palabra que sirve para eso en la otra, resuenan los atributos de una y de la otra: si uno dice Dame fuego cuando ellos dicen Dame una luz, ¿qué no se aprende sobre el fuego, la luz y sobre el acto de dar? No es que sea otra manera de hablar de la cosas: son cosas nuevas. Es el mundo sucediendo nuevamente, advierte Makina: prometiendo otras cosas, significando otras cosas, produciendo objetos distintos. Quién sabe si durarán, quién sabe si sus nombres serán aceptados por todos, piensa, pero ahí están, dando guerra.

Using in one tongue the word for a thing in the other makes the attributes of both resound: if you say Give me fire when they say Give me a light, what is not to be learned about fire, light and the act of giving? It’s not another way of saying things: these are new things. The world happening anew, Makina realizes: promising other things, signifying other things, producing different objects. Who knows if they’ll last, who knows if these names will be adopted by all, she thinks, but there they are, doing their damnedest.

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So that was my Capital-R Romance for this week. Uncharacteristically, I didn’t finish any small-r romance novels, but I did read about half of A Heart of Blood and Ashes (m/f, both cis and het?, fantasy) by Milla Vane, which is dense so I am savoring it. More on that next week.

And in things that are neither Romance nor romance, I read some really good non-fiction this week:

This ragged claw by Ellen Wayland-Smith, an autobiographical essay about having cancer that explores the history of cancer treatment through the words we use for the disease. There’s a lot of really great etymologies in this very moving piece.

The Lost Congressman, a series of articles in The Montgomery Advertiser on the life of Jeremiah Haralson, a remarkable man who was born into slavery, then elected to represent Selma, Alabama in the US House of Representatives in 1872, and then disappeared from the historical record in the last decades of his life. Reconstruction is one of the most fascinating moments in US history and I love learning more about the people who fought for a better version of this country. These articles also feature some really cool archival research, in case you’re into that.

And here is a poem that was in my inbox this morning from another newsletter, which I love and which I think resonates with the Yuri Herrera passage above about “Dame fuego/Give me a light”:

Small Kindnesses
Danusha Laméris

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”

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I do like your hat. Have a good week!