The Art of Being Alone: Poems 1952–2009

Fragments of a Forged Talamaikan Manuscript

110 Fragments of a Forged Talamaikan Manuscript タラマイカ偽書残けつ (1978) Fragments of a ForgedTalamaikan Manuscript { [ ( “I don’t know exactly where the words I am going to speak now came from,” said the old sailor. “It’s already been half a century. I happened to be aboard a decrepit freighter, bound for Bombay from Naples. I saw these words, written in Swedish, on some old paper that was being used to wrap a spare teapot. It was hard to say whether they were an epic poem or just some maxims. Attached to them was a simple note: collected from the Talamaika tribe, North Gijin. I memorized them before I realized it, perhaps because I felt so comfortable coming upon my mother tongue after such a long interval. By the time I finished the voyage and arrived at Bombay, I had lost those sheets of paper, but their words were etched into my memory, and today, fifty years later, they are still vivid. I feel as much at home with these words as if they were originally my own.” With this the old sailor recited the lines of words recorded below in his hoarse indistinct voice.) So went the preface attached to a fragment of oral literature which one might call the book of Genesis of a minority people called the Talamaika. I first came upon this document while I was in my back yard, throwing into the fire a massive amount of the letters my late father had left. Its yellowed old envelope must have caught my eye because it bore no addressee or sender. On several sheets of paper, probably torn out of a notebook, the words were inscribed in neat handwriting. Driven by my own curiosity, as well as by my greedy hope that I might someday be able to sell this manuscript at a good price as a valuable academic document, I have been Fragments of a Forged Talamaikan Manuscript 111 keeping this for a long time, but today] At that point the writing, which appeared as a post script, broke off,} he said. When I asked, {What about the main text?} he answered, {What looked like fragments were preserved . I rearranged them in my own way, and translated them into English .} What you see below is my unskilled Japanese translation of the text he recited, with somewhat exaggerated gestures and elocution— the English version of what purports to be an Urdu translation of a Swedish translation from the language used by the Talamaika. So probably it is considerably different from the original Talamaikan[?] text. Besides , I find it difficult to give sufficient credibility to his account of how these lines, probably rhymed originally, survived. As for the region named North Gijin, or the people originally called the Talamaikan, my research showed no trace of their existence. If I am to believe him, the original text in Talamaikan was turned into the second version in Swedish (note: by oral transmission), from which the third version in Urdu was created, which was turned into the fourth version in English, from which follows this Japanese text, the fifth version. But there is no proof that other languages were not involved in the course of the oral or written transmissions. Not only that, it is equally possible that this was originally created in Swedish, or Urdu or English. The man I am referring to as “he” is an American national I happened to become acquainted with, and I have no idea what he does. According to him, he picked up the fragments written in Urdu on a roll of paper at a construction site in a mid-sized town on the West Coast of the United States. He says he found it under a Caterpillar tractor at a construction site where a library was being demolished as part of a new city planning project. But as to the whereabouts of the document, he was vague, saying it was stolen along with his belongings while hitch-hiking. Whatever the truth is, these words surely issued forth from human souls, even though the time, place, and people involved are not known. In order to preempt the unlikely event of any misunderstanding from academia, I name this “a forged document,” which, needless to say, by no means negates the words that follow. 112 I (there and here) My1 eyes went far. My mouth opens here. My ears went far. My mouth speaks here...