I discovered this morning, sitting on my windowsill, a stone that I had brought back from the Alps of Savoy—a piece of quartz that contains within it those even finer dark red crystals commonly called “love arrows” or “Venus hair.” Seen from a certain angle, the crystals form a denser structure, a double sign whose patterning I’ll try to trace on this white sheet of paper:
This is the ideogram of Tao. The radical to the left 
means “to drift,” which in turn derives from 
, “to proceed slowly step by step,” a character that reaches back to 
, which represents a road. The component to the right comes from “the head, someone in the act of looking” 
. Combined, the two portions of the ideogram evoke the following event: “Someone slowly advances step by step, then stops to look, before proceeding….”
Astonished by my discovery, I believed I had finally discovered the Writing from Without that answered all my expectations. I ran back to my village and, notebook in hand, made my way along the path that started at the river. I counted to thirteen, hoping to discover further marvels. The first one, Kruger’s red house, not far from my own. Second, the list of names and addresses that Jean-Michel had placed in my mailbox. Third, a light clump of feathers beneath a gutter sheltering a pair of wood pigeons. Fourth, a linen sheet and a pair of maid’s hands on a windowsill. Fifth, a beautiful specimen of Orchys purpurea, hidden near the washtub between the nettles and the gravel. Sixth, a hay cart decorated with a goat skull. Seventh, a child’s drawing dropped in the gutter near the school. Eighth, a dark garden well choked with weeds. Ninth, a morose old drunk in a bar named The Star. Tenth, a display shelf next to the cash register of the local convenience store stacked with copies of TV Guides. Eleventh, a wall displaying a poster of Naïma, a little girl who was kidnapped two years ago and would now be fourteen, sequestered in what den of iniquity? Twelfth, a boy in a yellow sweater emerging from an alleyway holding a bouquet of daffodils. I was so happy, I caught hold of him and took him in my arms, as if our meeting had just rescued me from a grave danger. “Stop, you’re hurting me, and besides, you’re not my father.” And his mother, who came running up: “Leave the kid alone; he didn’t do anything to you.” Farther on, this other voice: “What time are you boarding?” Car noises, a door slamming. The air smelling of dawn, of boxwood, of kisses.
Between “boxwood” and “kisses,” the boy, crumpled on the ground twenty feet away from me, dropped his bouquet of daffodils and got up again, crying and pointing an accusing finger at me: “It’s your fault; you made me fall by looking at me.” The mother, who had witnessed the entire Orphic mission I sensed myself invested with, shouted out, “You bastard!” I laughed good-naturedly, which she couldn’t understand. Then bullfinches flying under a flowering maple tree, executing the perfect loop of a mating dance, spelling out the letters j and a against the sky—not the initial letters of the French jamais, or jadis, but the ja of a foreign language calling out questions that death could no longer dismiss:
Preise dem Engel die Welt, nicht die unsägliche….
Praise the world to the angel, not what’s unsayable….
A Note on this Translation
COMPOSED DURING THE LATE 1980s—when I first became fast friends with its author in Dijon—Aseroë was published by the prestigious publishing house of POL in 1992, to excellent reviews. An initial translation of the book was undertaken by Howard Limoli in 1996, but this version was left uncompleted at his death in 2013. Anxious to see his novel in print in English, François Dominique subsequently asked me to rewrite the draft translation of the text, whose original had in the meantime also undergone a number of revisions. This is the version given here: a co-translation by the late Limoli and myself—an Orphic commerce between the living and the dead, which reenacts some of this book’s deepest and most enigmatic themes.
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PRAISE FOR
Aseroë
“[An] enigmatic and radiant book.”
“This over-the-top, extraordinary novel, in its no less stupendous translation, begins with a mycological intimacy that brings to mind the great mushroom scenes of the film Phantom Thread. How not to be aroused by this whopping treat of verbal virtuosity?”
“A singular novel. Aseroë’s storyteller speaks from within the grasp of mysterious and urgent preoccupations. Yet his confident narration, rich in colorful, familiar detail, and sensitively and gracefully rendered into English by master translator Richard Sieburth, assures us of his obsessions’ importance to him and, within his brilliant and bizarrely convincing world, increasingly to us.”
“An immensely pleasurable read.”
“What a wonderful piece of writing! What an exhilarating adventure! What a madcap exploration of mushrooms, paintings, Rimbaud, the legend of Orpheus, and the mazes of a poet’s mind, in a jigsaw puzzle of a book that ultimately (like Alice’s Wonderland) makes absolute sense!”
“In this book oblivion is daylight.”
“Full of wonder…. Aseroë is a lyrical contemplation of how words affect reality.”