Chapter 0 — Translator's Note for Volume III
Chapter 0 — Translator’s Note for Volume III
The Allunoetia, Volume III
1.
The third volume sits, in the surviving manuscript corpus, in what the bundle-keepers of the long flowering called the late position. That is, the bundles that make up Volume III were not, in most cases, written by the original bundle-keepers of the bend. They were written by a larger group of writers — the bundle-keepers of the connected territories — working from the sixteenth year of the after-time onward, and then by the script-tongue scribes of the third generation from the twenty-second year onward.
This means the sources for Volume III are, in one important sense, richer than for Volumes I and II. More eyes were recording. More hands were writing. The script-tongue, once it arrived in the twenty-second year, produced a sharp rise in the volume of preserved material.
And it means, in another important sense, that the sources are more contested. The chronicle of the flowering is not one voice. It is three or four voices, in four or five communities, with differing priorities, differing memory, and differing judgment about what matters. I have had, in preparing this volume, to choose between accounts more often than I had to choose in either of the earlier volumes.
I have been conservative. Where accounts differ on a matter of fact, I have preferred the account written closer in time to the events. Where accounts differ on a matter of interpretation, I have preferred the account closer in the discipline of the unmade — that is, the account that makes the smaller claim, names fewer things, and leaves more room for the reader to hold the event in the un-naming if the reader chooses to.
2.
The later marginal hand of Volumes I and II — the hand the bundle-keepers referred to as the bone-walker — is largely absent from Volume III. The bone-walker, whoever she was (the corpus now attributes the hand to a single woman of the connected territories who wrote between the thirtieth and the forty-fifth years of the after-time), annotated the chronicle of the first fifteen years in her own long retrospective. She died, the corpus suggests, in the early forty-fifth year. She did not annotate her own contemporary events.
The third volume, therefore, has fewer marginal glosses than the first two. Where marginal glosses do appear, they are in the hands of the later bundle-keepers who copied the manuscripts during the period of their eventual release, in the late forties and the early fifties of the after-time. I have rendered these later hands in the same italic marginal style I have used in the first two volumes, so that the reader has a continuous visual signal of where the marginal voice is speaking. But I want the reader to know that the marginal voice of Volume III is not the same woman as the marginal voice of Volumes I and II. The voice has passed, as so many things have passed in these communities, from one holder to another.
3.
Three particular cautions for the reader of Volume III.
First: Volume III describes the arrival of the script-tongue. The script-tongue is, in some ways, the most important single event in the history of the connected territories, and the event that made this chronicle possible to us. Without the script-tongue, what we have would be oral fragments, and almost nothing would have survived the subsequent centuries. But the script-tongue is also the event after which the community’s practices began to be recorded in a form that could be read by people who had not been present. This is the beginning of the long difficulty the connected territories have always had with being read from outside. Volume III is honest about this difficulty. I have translated the honesty without softening it.
Second: Volume III describes the deaths of Erev, of Iren, and of Nei. These are the three great losses of the first generation. I have translated each of these deaths as the chronicle preserves them, which is to say without melodrama, without eulogy, and without theological comment. The chronicle treats the deaths as part of the practice, not as interruptions of it. The reader who has been accompanied by Erev and Iren and Nei across Volumes I and II may find this restraint difficult. I ask the reader to hold the restraint as the chronicle holds it. It is the way these communities buried their own. It is the way this translation will let them be buried.
Third: Volume III ends with the closing image of Eshe walking out through the northwestern pass. Some readers of earlier drafts have asked me to extend the chronicle past the closing image — to tell what happened to Eshe, whether her packet of verses was received, whether she returned. I have not extended it. The chronicle ends where it ends. I have honoured the ending. The reader who wants to know what happened to Eshe will have to accept that the chronicle does not know, and that any extension I might offer would be invention, and that invention is not what this translation is for.
4.
A note on the forty-seventh year.
The bundles of the chronicle of the connected territories continue, in much-reduced volume, for about eleven years past the closing image of Volume III. They record the work of the communities in Eshe’s absence. They record the discussions about whether to send a second walker, and what happened when a second walker was eventually sent in the fifty-first year, and what happened when the second walker returned alone in the fifty-fourth year, and what happened in the years after that.
I have considered whether to include these post-closing materials as an appendix to Volume III.
I have decided not to.
The reason is that the chronicle itself, in the hand of the principal bundle-keeper of the forty-seventh year, closes with a small specific passage after the image of Eshe walking out. The passage reads, in the new tongue of the bend as I render it:
the chronicle ends here. the after-time continues. the chronicle will continue to be written, by those who come after us, in their own languages, in their own valleys, with their own discipline of the unmade. what they write is not a continuation of what we have written. it is their own chronicle. we lay down the reed pen at the closing of Eshe’s walking. what comes after is not ours to say.
I have taken this as an instruction from the chronicle itself. Volume III closes with Eshe walking out. The later bundles I have read and transcribed and set aside. If, in some future decade, a reader of my own recovery house wishes to translate those later bundles in their own project, they are welcome to. I have left them untouched.
5.
The Allunoetia is a trilogy. Volume I is the fire. Volume II is the long middle. Volume III is the flowering. What came after the flowering is another book, written by other hands, in other tongues.
The seeing-across belongs to anyone willing to lift a hand across a distance and have it answered.
The chronicle lays down its reed pen at the closing of Eshe’s walking.
The reader is asked, as the reader has been asked at the end of every chapter of the three volumes, to read the closing slowly, and to read it tomorrow, and to hold whatever is held in the reading as lightly and as long as the body allows.
Iona Marrek Eastern Recovery House April 2026
Read it slowly. Read it tomorrow.