Published on the day Denmark entered lockdown, Danish writer Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild’s award-winning novel All the Birds in the Sky follows a young, nameless protagonist who—in the submerged wasteland of a post-apocalyptic world—has to find her bearings in this strange landscape alone. The excerpt we are featuring this Translation Tuesday poignantly depicts a moment of aphasia that our narrator experiences as she attempts to grasp the language of her new world in all its ineffability. In a prose style that captures both the stillness of its depopulated setting and the urgency of our human desire for home, Haslund-Gjerrild’s voice is a unique one in the pages of climate fiction today. Equally pertinent is how, as co-translators Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell show us, this novel demonstrates the role that words and translation can have at a time when the ground we stand on has never been more uncertain.
“All the Birds in the Sky begins with the wind reaching into a house and touching all the things inside—creating a sort of inventory, like a finger which points and names: knife, shovel, blankets, shoes, pails of grain, leaves. This taxonomizing wind awakens the main character, a young girl who is, we come to understand, the last human left on earth. It is a word that pulls her out of the murky depths of her slumber: why—a word that demands an answer, an explanation, a story. She uses word chains and associations to try to hold on, making up new terms for the ones she has forgotten.
As translators, we too search for words. In a work about losing language, our task was to find a vocabulary for and recreate the voice of a girl who was losing hers. The words themselves were important, of course: Haslund-Gjerrild’s language is much like the wind in this novel—simple and unadorned, it functions to reach out and touch, to grasp and hold. But even more central to this endeavor was the musicality of the text—its rhythm and movement. The girl’s journey in these first pages is felt as the steady beat of walking, the fluidity of thought, the slippage of memory, the momentum of searching. Much of the translation therefore came together not on the page, but by being spoken aloud. We read out the text, letting its sound and rhythm guide our choices—this word or that, a comma here or there, one sentence or two.”
—Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell
Something darts past her, quick. Then again. Like a twitch in her eyelids. When she opens her eyes, the blue is full of black knives that draw lines between the houses. There’s a shrieking in her ears, a squealing, like knives being whetted, that’s how sharp the tongues and wings of the black cloud are, now drawing circles and figure-eights above her. Below her, the gentle thumping of the sea.
She lies there a little longer and tries to remember what Um called those birds. Their flat, metallic cries ring in her ears. A flock of flying birds that can say only one thing, which they repeat, again and again and again. She has always wondered what could be so important for them to say that a single word, almost just a scream, could suffice for an entire life. She can’t imagine what it might be. Maybe here-here-here-here.
Other birds prefer to fly alone, like the heron, which just is as it is. A quiet and precise bird. If she sees a heron staring at the water, she stops too and waits motionlessly with her net in hand. The heron is so still it stops time, not a single feather quivers. Only the rings of the raindrops in the water reveal that time is passing as usual, but then, a loud splash, and the next second the fish is in its beak. It swallows its catch whole and resumes its waiting. When it finally does say something, it speaks with the same precision with which it waits; a few hoarse calls that echo between the houses before it falls silent again.
Meanwhile, the little shriekbirds, maybe that’s what she should call them since she can’t think of the word, fly ceaselessly and cry ceaselessly. They always fly together, never alone, so there’s really no need for them to constantly call each other. Perhaps they’re not calling, perhaps they’re just shrieking us-us-us, for joy of flying together as one.
The shade is deep and the street is narrow, but apart from the quick, black slashes of birds, the strip of sky above her is blue. She stands and folds up the blanket. One of the birds shoots past her ear while she winds the tether around the door handle. Carefully she poles out onto the street, into the little birds’ morning frenzy. Um loved them, real city birds, Um said. Before the big fire, they had roosted in the houses on land, but now most houses are at sea. They lay their tiny eggs in nests of seaweed, grass and feathers in the houses’ cabinets and drawers, fly up and down the streets and over the rooftops, around and around until they crash into the windows. Sometimes the glass breaks and the bird hurtles into the house like a soft rock, but most often the glass holds and the bird tumbles into the water.
The bottles seem to be keeping in place, there’s no resistance and the boat glides across the water. She moves faster to get warm; she knows the area well so she isn’t afraid of getting lost or sailing down a dead-end. She and Um have often rowed the wooden boat through these streets to fish and hunt for things in the sea-houses, and this was one of the streets she swam through when searching for Um.
*
Suddenly the boat lurches, throwing her off balance. It must be stuck. She takes a deep breath and warily pushes the boat a hand’s width backwards. It moves, but something is grating against the boat. She pushes the boat forwards a bit, but it still feels heavy. Something has latched itself on and is trailing after her. She runs her pole the whole way around the boat until she catches hold of something, but she doesn’t dare tug at it. Instead she pulls the pole out of the water and takes off her clothes.
Underwater she pushes the dark green bladderwrack aside to find a wheel. It’s a bicycle, but it’s easy enough to coax free. She untangles it from the net and sets it on the seabed next to an overgrown bin.
After that she poles more cautiously, checking first before pushing herself forwards. It wouldn’t take much to destroy the bottle-boat. Underwater the streets are full of shards that can easily rip nets apart, bins and especially signs, so it’s best to stick to deeper waters, but she mustn’t go further out than the length of her pole allows. This method works well, and once the sun reaches down into the streets she’s no longer cold, even though she’s moving slowly.
*
Sometimes, on windless days when the sun was shining, she and Um would sail out to open sea in the good wooden boat, not to fish, just to sail. Hours would pass with Um whistling and rowing stroke after stroke to the same, strong rhythm. On some trips they almost got as far as the wind turbines, but only on summer days and only with great caution, because storms can come out of nowhere. And yet they had done it, again and again. Sitting there on the croft, beneath the wide sky, so far out that the island was just a line with blue all around and you had to close your eyes to see through a teeny-tiny slit, that was their favourite thing.
On their final trip she had been the one to row, and she had finally understood why that sea-look always came over Um’s face when rowing. How good it is to feel your hands connected to your shoulders and back by thick bands that tense up when you pull the oars through the water. And the sudden lightness when you pull the oars up, as though none of your limbs are connected, just floating freely in the air—but that’s not what it’s like to pole, there’s too much to be aware of, and if she remembers correctly, Dragon Square is right around the next corner, a big, empty square with a low-lying shagtree-islet on which two rowan trees have sown themselves. She and Um have often collected sacks of white droppings to fertilise their potatoes and corn and the roses by the house.
*
When she turns the corner, for a moment she’s unsure if she has remembered correctly. It looks like the same square, but there’s no islet. Just a single tree juts up through the water like a protruding thighbone, dead and white. It’s been a long time since she and Um were last here. The water must have risen to cover the rubble that made up the islet. She carefully poles her way over to the tree covered in droppings until the bottles hit the islet, now just below the water’s surface.
Once she’s made sure that the boat is anchored well enough, she takes out a cup of cornmeal and mixes it with water from the freshwater barrel. She eats while looking out across the square. It’s big and empty, almost like the sea. All the houses here were destroyed during the big fire. The sun is blazing straight down onto the water, the light burns, there’s no shade in sight, just a couple of thin, black stripes on the water beneath the shagtree’s branches. It’s so clean and clear. No strong smells, just the fishy sea air.
*
She pulls up the pole and lies down, letting her arms rest. The time before the fire has almost vanished from her mind, she remembers the sound of airplanes circling in the air, more like big insects than birds. She remembers that they were afraid of them, that they had to hide if they heard them, and she remembers the overwhelming stench of rubbish. Um said that the fire grew so fierce because there was so much plastic and paper in the streets. The rubbish made it impossible to pass between some of the houses. It was like wading through rotting seaweed, Um said. She can’t remember it herself, but she remembers the tone of Um’s voice: what a pigsty.
There were mountains of rubbish in smooth plastic bags that gleamed in the sun, but she wasn’t allowed to climb on those, Um had said and grabbed her shoulder so hard she had started to cry. Once, when she did it anyway, the plastic beneath her split and a dark soup oozed out, coating her in its stickiness, and that smell she’ll never forget. Or the way the hairs in her nose had singed when the island erupted into flames. Um had wrenched her out of her sleep and dragged her out into the flames. The wind was raging, people were screaming. Above them the sky was dark, black shadows darted about like bats; you could only see them when they were right above the fire, which lit up their bellies. Houses that hadn’t yet caught on fire suddenly collapsed with thunderous crashes and flames leapt out. One time, it happened right beside them. The only way she can describe it is as the air breaking apart; a loud blast followed by an immediate silence. Um fell over and disappeared. The air was filled with dust, she coughed, her nose and throat closed up, she was left alone in the grey, soundless vacuum of smoke. The world had disappeared. Not like when the air is so thick with snow that you can’t see or hear anything, because snow is more like a soft, gentle mumble. There, in the grey, she was sure the world had been turned off. She remembers it clearly. And then she remembers Um bending down out of the grey and picking her up and squeezing her tight. Deaf and stumbling, they walked with their heads bowed, fire in their faces. The deafness slowly abated and gave way to an ear-splitting howl. They walked and walked and walked. Um turned back to face her, she had sat down on the ground.
No more.
Yes, you have to.
No more, Um.
You have to.
Um held her hand and tugged in the way that meant: Come on, just a bit further, a bit faster, we’ll stop and rest soon, but now, right now, walk a bit faster. They used to speak with their hands that way, but her legs could walk no further, she wanted to but she was so small. Um put down the bag with all their things and picked her up. They walked through darkness, through red light, they crawled and they coughed until they reached the hole in the ground. She didn’t want to, she screamed, but all around them the park’s old trees were burning, the tower and the big yellow house were burning, they could see across the island, they could see towers crashing down like waves breaking, and then Um slapped her. She stopped resisting, Um picked her up and together they crept into the ground.
*
The sun is sharp, the sky is reflected in the water. She gets up, poles across the square and keeps going. She squints. The wind picks up, the boat rocks slightly, but otherwise the water is fairly still between the houses. She poles past the dragon at the start of the big boulevard which leads to the strait. Now only the verdigris tail sticks up, but under the water you can see its angry face and the bull biting its throat. Before, when they used to fish at Kastel Island, they would often sail over the mermaid. They could see her hair and shoulders and just make out her tail-legs, but the mermaid’s face was turned down towards the murky seabed. When she was little, she couldn’t understand why the mermaid had to give up her voice in return for legs—actually, it’s still hard for her to grasp. It makes sense that it would hurt to walk if you’ve never had legs before, but the sea witch taking the mermaid’s tongue, she found that horrible.
But then she won’t be able to tell people who she is, she said to Um when Um told her the story.
That’s the price to pay for legs.
But won’t that end badly?
That’s how the story goes.
Can’t you change it?
And then Um had changed the story, but she couldn’t really forget the tail-legs beneath the water.
*
The birds are still following her. They squawk and circle around her as though wanting to show her what the wind looks like when it twists on itself, and now they surge forward with the wind across the houses, across the strait and over the big land. Their legs are too short for sitting, so they fly almost all the time and can sleep in the wind, Um once told her. Soon it will be too cold for them, and they’ll fly off. Each year around this time she sees them disappear across the sea, and it grows quiet among the houses. And it’s not just them, but flock after flock of every kind of bird; larks, geese, all the other birds whose names she’s forgotten. They fly to a place she doesn’t know, she’s never been anywhere other than here. Nowhere else exists, Um once told her in the tone that meant and that’s the end of that. But then where do they go in the winter, she had asked anyway. Across the sea, said Um and went outside to the potatoes.
Maybe Um is right; she doesn’t know much about the land on the other side. Only that it’s big, bigger than the island. She has often stood at the top of the hill and looked out to the other side of the strait. Even though the sea is steadily growing, the strait that separates the island from the land isn’t so wide yet, more like a river than a sea, and yet she’s never been to the other side.
But now she’s on her way, like the birds. It’s a good thought, it gives her arms strength, and she poles her way onwards, pushing the bottle-boat with the wagon and her things out into the strait. The boat flies, her arms are light as wings and she has the wind at her back. Even though the strait is too deep for the pole in some places, it doesn’t frighten her or make her turn back. Ever so calmly she lets the bottle-boat drift with the current while she drags her pole through the depths until she feels the bottom again, there. She pulls herself forward, carefully. Then the bottle-boat hits the bed of the opposite bank. She hops into the water and drags the boat as far onto the shore as she can. She lifts the boxes, the barrel, the sack and finally the wagon itself up onto the concrete. For a moment she considers what to do with the bottle-boat, but then she pushes it back into the strait and lets it drift off.
*
Here, surrounded by everything new, she gazes back at the island, at the hill with the cisterns, the cold, wet corridors where Um carried her when everything burned, and at the houses and the towers that haven’t yet toppled. The island is dark green against the sunset, the sea-houses’ windows glow red with evening like the roses in their gardens. She looks at the white wind turbines, the sea’s enormous daisies. Most have lost their petals, but those that aren’t yet completely withered spin lazily in the evening breeze. Then she looks out at the tall tower in the water.
Yes, it’s good to go, she says out loud so it echoes in the evening stillness, and she feels stronger and more resolved than she has for a long time, and so she repeats it, it’s good to go, but because she repeats it, it ends up sounding like she’s trying to convince someone, and she realises that there must be a little shadow somewhere within the big, happy feeling. She follows the quick knife-birds with her eyes, now they’re just a distant, hazy dot against the deep blue, a black dot falling like a stone through water and landing on the bottom where the darkness awaits. The shadow isn’t big, but it’s there. Then the birds are gone, and she still can’t remember what Um called them even though she’s been trying to remember the word all day. Oh well, she says and wafts the shadow away, no matter. On a day like today you shouldn’t let a little bird like that get you down, and maybe she’ll find the word again. What’s been lost can be found, Um always said.
Translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell
Danish author Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild (b. 1988) made her debut in 2016 with the short story collection Islands. She has a BA in Chinese Studies and Literature, an MA in Chinese Studies and has recently published her second novel, Adam in Paradise, to great critical acclaim. All the Birds in the Sky is her debut novel, which was awarded the Michael Strunge Prize and is forthcoming in French and Hungarian.
Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell live in Copenhagen. Their co-translation of All the Birds in the Sky by Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild was awarded the ASF’s 2020 Translation Prize; the judges noted how the “musical translation vividly captures the strange beauty and tactility of the novel’s post-apocalyptic setting while also conveying the quiet longing of its observant young narrator with subtle sensitivity.” They are currently translating My Work by Olga Ravn which will be published by Lolli Editions in the UK.
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