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A Universe Of Layered Worlds
Olivia E. Sears
“... he had a friendship with the vines
and the trees,
and he was like the eyelashes of the
forest.”
— Traditional, “The Geba Bohot
and Other Buru Tales,”
translated by Chaumont Devin, in
Two Lines: Tracks (2005)
Almost 20 years ago, the editors
of Two Lines, our anthology
of world writing, received a
translation of tales from the island
of Buru with an accompanying
introduction. “The Buru people
envision a universe of layered
worlds, perhaps stacked one
upon another, or fitting inside one another like concentric
shells,” the translator wrote. In a typical Buru tale, hunters enter
a cave in pursuit of prey and emerge suddenly into an open
village where the animals they had been hunting were now men.
When I first read these story-poems, I recognized that
they would be considered “exotic”—tales from Buru Island in
the Central Moluccan Archipelago, transcribed in an ancient
Austronesian language (in which they were sung) never before
recorded until the bored teenage son of a missionary began
collecting words and, eventually, stories.
Yet it was not their exoticism that I found striking; it
was that many of the images resonated with me, a graduate
student in Italian literature far across the world. When I read
of a mythical Geba Bohot, or “wild man,” described as “the
eyelashes of the forest,” I recalled Dada poet Tristan Tzara who
wrote such lines as “the open road is a flower who walks with
you” and described Dada as “a snow of butterflies coming out
of a conjurer’s skull.” And when I read about the Buru concept
of layered worlds I felt like I was wandering through a Jorge
Luis Borges story or a José Saramago novel. (Of course, today
the image of layered worlds just reminds us that scientists are
discussing new evidence of cosmic inflation and, potentially, a
multiverse.)
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National Endowment for the Arts