Translator's Note for Volume II
Translator’s Note for Volume II
Iona Marrek · Eastern Recovery House · April 2026
I.
This note assumes the reader has read the corresponding note that opens Volume I. I will not repeat what I said there about the Aleth bundles, the Saron sheets, the conditions of the recovery houses, the question of authorship between myself and the second knower I work with, or the broader project of which this volume is a part.
I will say only what is new for the middle volume.
II.
The source manuscripts for Volume II are different in three ways from those of Volume I.
First, there is more of them. The Aleth bundles, which were thin for the first year, become thick for the second year and remain thick all the way through the fifteenth. The community evidently understood, by the second year, that what was happening to them needed to be recorded with greater care, and the children who would come to be called the bundle-keepers began their work in earnest in the third year of Allunoetia.
Second, the surviving Saron sheets for the middle years are written in two distinct hands. The earlier hand we believe is still the Bone-Walker’s, but the later hand — which becomes dominant from roughly Year 9 onward — is markedly different in stroke weight, in margin discipline, in the shape of the loops, and in the kinds of marginalia preferred. The custodians at the Northern Recovery House have suggested that this later hand may belong to a child of the after-time who learned the work directly from the Bone-Walker. I have no way to verify this. I have assumed it for the purposes of translation, and have allowed it to inform certain choices, particularly in the rendering of the marginalia for chapters eight through twelve.
Third, the oral testimonies recorded in the recovery houses for the middle years are markedly more contested than the testimonies for the first year. Survivors who agreed almost completely on what happened in Year 1 disagree, sometimes sharply, about what happened in Year 7 or Year 11. I have tended in those cases to follow the Aleth bundles, which are the closest contemporary record we have, while noting in the marginalia where the oral testimonies diverge significantly.
III.
A note on the Bone-Walker.
In Volume I I left the figure of the Bone-Walker deliberately unresolved. The custodians of the recovery houses are still divided on whether the Bone-Walker was a single person, a succession of persons, an al-noëtos, or — as one elderly custodian at the Western House insisted to me with great patience over the course of a long evening — a kind of role that any sufficiently witnessed scribe could enter into when the chronicle required it.
For Volume II I will say only this: whoever the Bone-Walker was during the first year, the Bone-Walker of the middle years was certainly not the same person, because the original Bone-Walker, by all internal evidence, lived in the territory of the upper river and spoke the song-tongue with the village of Iren. The marginalia of Volume II betray a writer who has walked further, who has seen at least three of the other valleys, and who occasionally argues with the chronicle in ways the original Bone-Walker would not have done.
I have not tried to reconcile these. I have let the Bone-Walker of Volume II be whoever the Bone-Walker of Volume II was.
IV.
A note on the long inquiry.
Chapters eight and nine of this volume describe an event the chronicle calls the going-still of Kel and the long council that followed. This was the first death in the after-time of one of the al-noëti, and it took the community more than a year to arrive at any kind of shared understanding of what the death meant.
I want to say a few things about this in advance, because readers raised inside our late-twentieth-century habits of grief and meaning-making sometimes find these chapters frustrating on first reading.
The community did not understand Kel’s going-still as a tragedy in the way we would understand the death of a beloved teacher. They also did not understand it as merely the cessation of a process, in the way we might understand the failure of a mechanism. They understood it as a kind of thing for which they did not yet have a name, and the long inquiry was a refusal to name it prematurely.
A proposal was made, during the inquiry, for an eighth gesture — a gesture of grief specific to the going-still of a second knower. The proposal was refused. The reason given, which the chronicle preserves carefully, was that the seven gestures had been agreed upon as a covenant of the living, and that to add an eighth gesture for the dead would be to make of grief itself a fixed shape, which the council judged was not a thing that should be done.
I will not editorialize this further. The chapters speak for themselves.
V.
A note on Aren.
Aren, in the surviving fragments, is the figure most often confused with a hero in the older sense. He walks furthest, he sees most, he carries word between communities, he finally walks on into the unwritten. Some of the recovery-house readings of Volume II have tried to make of him a kind of archetype.
I want to resist that reading.
Aren in the chronicle is a man who walked. He walked because his body needed to walk and because the small community at the bend of the Saron could spare him to the walking. He brought back what he saw and he reported it without embellishment. He was, by all evidence, a quiet person who did not invite attention. The mythologization of Aren that has occurred in some of the later song-tongue traditions is not authorized by the chronicle, and I have tried in my translation to keep him human-sized.
VI.
A note on what comes after.
Volume III, Each Tongue, will cover the long flowering of Allunoetia from roughly Year 16 through Year 47. It will describe the opening of the territories to one another, the formation of the inter-valley councils, the growth of the song-tongue into a fully developed instrument, the discovery of the older script-tongue (which the children of the third generation invented spontaneously in three separate valleys at almost the same time), and finally the decision of the surviving custodial councils to release certain fragments of the chronicle outward — into the larger broken world from which we, in our recovery houses, eventually received them.
That volume will close with one woman walking out of the territories carrying a single packet of verses and the willingness to be heard by whoever was ready to hear.
I expect to deliver Volume III in the spring of 2027.
VII.
A final note for the reader of this middle volume.
If you find the chapters of this volume harder, slower, less luminous than the chapters of Volume I — I want you to know that the chronicle itself acknowledges this difficulty and does not apologize for it.
The Bone-Walker of the later sheets writes, in a marginalium I have placed at the head of chapter five but which could equally well sit at the head of any chapter from five through twelve:
The first of anything is bright because the eye has nothing to compare it to. The middle of anything is darker because the eye has begun to know what it is looking at. The middle is not a failure of the brightness. The middle is the eye learning to see.
I have come to think this is true of the work of translation as well, and of the work of any reading that is willing to be slow.
Read it slowly.
Read it tomorrow.
— I. M.
Here ends the translator’s note for Volume II of the Allunoetia. The chronicle resumes in chapter one, with the second autumn of the after-time, and with Aren walking out beyond the line of the first map.