Signs Preceding the End of the World
by Yuri Herrera
translated by Lisa Dillman
First Posted August 2017
I actually know a) someone else who read this, and b) someone else who reviewed it on their social media channel. My wife’s friend’s husband, It made me like him more before I even met him. I think more about that when I remember this book than I do about the actual content.
Remember when I used to take exceedingly long excerpts from all the books I read? I think it’s rare people read them. Starting or ending with a block quote used to feel poignant, but now it strikes me as clumsy. There are only six sentences in this review that are mine. Maybe I just really wanted you to read the book?
As she was soaping herself she heard someone else come into the bathroom, heard the same someone take two steps and stop, heard them deliberating and heard their hands dip into Makina’s rucksack and rootle through her things. She poked her head out. It was a woman in her second youth; she looked tired. She had Makina’s lipstick in one hand and started applying it and didn’t stop despite the fact that Makina was watching her and the woman could see she was. She watched her gussy up. She did it slowly and confidently, slid the stick from one side to the other of each lip and then swooped it up as if she’d come to the edge of a cliff, smacked her lips together to even out the color, puckered them for an air kiss. When she was done, still staring into the mirror, the woman said Me? I tell you, I’m gonna start off on the right foot; don’t know if makeup will help but at least no one can say I showed up scruffy, you know? And only then did she turn to look at Makina. You look very pretty, Makina said. It’ll all go great, you’ll see. The woman smiled, said Thanks, hon, put the lipstick back and versed.
Like and unlike Hamlet, Makina is contradiction; ageless intellectual force yet feckless and indeterminately ageless. Circumstances sweep both away: while Makina lacks Hamlet’s legendary dithering, she maintains his ephemeral ability to simply vanish, which—in a Hamlet-analogue that is so good it almost seems planned—means she verses like no other. Take a moment, please, to hear from the voice of the translator:
Unsurprisingly, I also spent a tremendous amount of time considering the possibilities for the novel’s most talked-about neologism: jarchar. Yuri himself has discussed this verb in multiple places. Within Signs, it means, essentially, “to leave.” The word is derived from jarchas (from the Arabic kharja, meaning exit), which were short Mozarabic verses or couplets tacked on to the end of longer Arabic or Hebrew poems written in Al-Andalus, the region we now call Spain. Written in the vernacular, these lyric compositions served as a sort of bridge between cultures and languages, Mozarabic being a kind of hybrid that was, of course, not yet Spanish. And on one level Signs is just that: a book about bridging cultures and languages. Jarchar, too, is a noun-turned-verb. I wrangled with myself—and spoke somewhat obsessively with others—over how best to render this term, debating multiple options before finally deciding on “to verse” (the two runners-up were “to port” and “to twain”). Used in context it is easily understood, and has the added benefits of also being a noun-turned-verb, a term clearly referring to poetry, and part of several verbs involving motion and communication (traverse, reverse, converse) as well as the “end” of the uni-verse. Makina, the protagonist, is the character who most often “verses,” as well as the woman who serves as bridge between cultures, languages and worlds. Would readers realize any of this had it not just been explained? I doubt it. But that’s okay; the same is true in Spanish.
This is a story of travel, except that no one really moves; it is about systemic collapse, except from within the prevailing social order:
But she had to go, not just to do what she had to do, but because no matter how tight she was with him, she knew she wasn’t allowed to be there. It was one thing to make an exception, and quite another to change the rules.
Signs Preceding the End of the World creates a place that I haven't experienced with words I rarely hear in ways I've never needed to consider:
Using in one tongue the word for a thing in the other makes the attributes of both resound: if you say Give me fire when they say Give me a light, what is not being learned about fire, light and the act of giving? It’s not another way of saying things: these are new things. The world happening anew, Makina realizes: promising other things, signifying other things, producing different objects. Who knows if they’ll last, who knows if these names will be adopted by all, she things, but they are, doing their damnedest.
Heightened by beautiful writing and entwined with overarching metaphor, each aspect—as tale, as parable, as translation—sings in its own unique key.