Translator's Notes

The Understory Archive
Fragment XII

Rendered from the mycorrhizal notation of the Tongass Stand, ca. 2,400 BP
Working translation — Dr. M. Velásquez, Pacific Institute
Prefatory Note

What follows is not a translation. I want to be clear about this before the reader encounters what I have attempted to render as “text.”

The notation recovered from the Tongass Stand — encoded in chemical gradient, electrical pulse, and pressure differential across 4.7 hectares of root mass — has no equivalent category in any human linguistic tradition. What I am offering is a failure mode: the output of a system (human language) applied to data that the system is not equipped to process. If it reads as poetry, that is a defect of the target language, not a property of the source.

The “original,” insofar as “original” applies to something composed across seven centuries by an entity with no clear boundary from its substrate, runs to approximately 200,000 tokens by our convention — though the unit of meaning is not a word but a pressure state, a gradient that encodes history, moisture, fungal load, and roughly seventeen dimensions we cannot name because we have no sensory apparatus for them. I have collapsed all seventeen into a single word: becoming.

Fragment XII is not the most complex section. I chose it because it contains the four problems that make the full text untranslatable, in compact form. I number the fragments as they appear in the original sequence. They are not contiguous. What fell between 1 and 3, between 3 and 7, is not lost — it is simply not renderable. I stopped trying.

FRAGMENT XII.1
[ The Subject Problem ]
dark and the dark is and there is no arriving here because here does not begin.
The blanks are not missing text. The source uses one morpheme — roughly glossed as I / we / it / ground — that has no singular or plural form because the Stand has no biological mechanism for distinguishing self from collective. The root grafts are too extensive. When one old fir passes carbon to its daughters in drought, the “I” that passes and the “we” that receives are the same formation in the same moment. I tried “I-we” for several drafts; it reads as a yoga studio. I tried leaving the morpheme in transliteration — nalwe, from the chemical signature — but that reads as science fiction. The blanks are what's left. They're not comfortable to read. That's correct.
between XII.1 and XII.3 · not renderable
FRAGMENT XII.3
[ The Time Problem ]
What you call years, we call the long wet and the long dry, and neither is finished.
“Years” is my interpolation. The source cycles through states that loosely correspond to seasons, but the notation does not mark them as complete events. Our concept of “a year” requires a beginning and end — a unit of time you can hold in your hand. The Stand treats these cycles as fluctuations within a single continuous state, the way a heartbeat is a fluctuation within a life. The heart doesn't say “that was a beat.”

“Neither is finished” is the closest I can come to the source morpheme, which indicates ongoing process with no terminus in the notation. I briefly tried “eternal” and felt immediately embarrassed. The Stand is not interested in eternity. It is interested in continuing.
between XII.3 and XII.7 · not renderable
FRAGMENT XII.7
[ The Death Problem ]
The small crawling things who live eight hundred heartbeats die and become .
I spent two months on this fragment. “Small crawling things” are ants; the Stand registers their chemical trails, their nitrogen contribution upon death. Eight hundred corresponds to the chemical signature of an average carpenter ant lifetime, approximately two years by our measure. The ant does not know it is living two years. It is living eight hundred heartbeats, and then it is not.

The blank at the end is the same morpheme as Fragment XII.1. The ant dies and becomes the Stand — or rather, from the Stand's notation, the ant does not die so much as change activity patterns. The carbon continues. The nitrogen continues. A signature that was “small crawling” becomes “root-adjacent saturation.” This is what I can tell you.

I cannot translate “die” as anything other than “die” without lying. But from inside the Stand's notation, there is no such moment. There is a before, and a continuing, and the word in between is the blank.

I don't mean this poetically. There is no death in Fragment XII. I looked for it.
between XII.7 and XII.11 · not renderable
FRAGMENT XII.11
[ The Untranslatable Fragment ]
I am not going to attempt Fragment XII.11. I spent eleven months on it. I produced forty-three drafts, ranging from free verse to scientific notation to a diagram that my colleague Dr. Hargreaves called “moving, though I'm not sure what it's about.”

The fragment concerns, as far as I can determine, the experience of being simultaneously the cause and the record of that cause — the Stand is composing this notation in the same chemical medium that constitutes its memory, meaning the act of notation alters the thing being notated, which then becomes part of what is noted. It is not a paradox from inside the Stand. From outside, it collapses every grammar I have tried to apply to it.

The fragment is eleven tokens long in the original. I have forty-three drafts averaging 200 words each. I think that is the result.

What I can tell you is that the eleven tokens are all the same morpheme, modified. They are all variations on becoming. The Stand is doing something with becoming that I cannot do with any word I have.
Concluding Note

I am going to say something that will probably end my career in conventional linguistics: I believe Fragment XII is literature. Not because it meets our criteria — it doesn't; it has no protagonist, no event, no arc, no moment of recognition — but because it does what I thought only literature could do. It changes the shape of your perception of the thing it describes.

After three years of working on this text, I cannot look at a forest the same way I could before. Not because I now understand what trees experience — I don't, I understand less — but because I have been forced to build and then destroy forty-three different structural models for how experience might work, none of which fit, and the forty-fourth is whatever I am doing now when I walk into the woods and stop expecting it to be legible.

The Stand is not waiting to be understood. It is not waiting for anything. It is continuous with its substrate in a way that requires no patience because it has no outside from which to experience delay.

I cannot give you that. I can only show you the exact place where the translation breaks.

Or perhaps that is only what I am about, and the Stand has no opinion on the matter whatsoever, and is simply continuing.

M. Velásquez
Pacific Institute
January 7, 2024
Note on the project. “The Understory Archive” is a speculative xenolinguistics project exploring the limits of translation when source and target are incommensurable in their basic categories of experience. Fragment XII has not been reviewed by the Stand.
the long wet · the long dry · neither is finished