Illustration by Na Kim.

Translated by Imogen Taylor

One stifling hot night in early August, I dreamed, as I always do when I have a fever, the old, familiar dream: the earth opens up before my feet, a gaping pit appears, and into this pit I fall, then clamber straight back out, as eager as a cartoon character, only to fall into the next pit that suddenly yawns before me. An endless obstacle course engineered by some higher power, an experiment going nowhere, the opposite of a story. This dream has followed me since childhood and is probably as old as the realization that I will, one day, end up in a pit forever. As a piece of drama, it is extremely simple, and yet it’s an effective dream and no more unoriginal than that of my friend Sibylle, who told me over breakfast a few days later that she has regular nightmares of being swept away by a vast, tsunami-like wave.

I was reminded that of all the arts I would like to master, lucid dreaming is at the top of the list: you sleep and dream, fully aware that you are asleep and dreaming, but the real skill lies in being able to intervene in the events of your dream and steer the plot in your favor. As a lucid dreamer, I could, with no trouble at all, see to it that the steam train hurtling toward me was brought to a halt by, say, a lady-chimp passenger with the presence of mind to interrupt her grooming and pull the emergency brake. I could arrange for my missing child, lost in the fairground throng, to reappear, bright and chirpy, on the broad shoulders of a gently smiling nurse. I could even have a burned jungle returned in dizzying time-lapse to its former chlorophyll-drenched glory and commandeered by a raucous and triumphant menagerie. I could rewrite my nightmares with every narrative device available to me, draining them of the horror that resonates deep into waking life. All the signs, all experience, all probability notwithstanding, I could make everything end happily. I could transform leaden impotence into mercurial superpower with daring and ingenuity, unafraid of even the most implausible twist.

Midpoints, Sibylle explained to me—she was plotting out a streaming series and had papered one side of the hall in her apartment with Post-its—midpoints are what screenwriters call those decisive events that change the course of a film’s action and send it heading toward a new destination on the plot horizon. Tipping points, I knew from the science pages of the newspapers, are those critical moments when climate and ecological systems shift from one state to another—decisive but elusive events that have such a huge impact on the environment that conditions are thrown off-balance. Ecosystems, for example, are so severely weakened, or populations of individual species so seriously depleted that they no longer recover but collapse, tip over, leaving behind them what, in the drastic vocabulary of Sibylle’s screenwriting theory, is known as the point of no return. A simple enough phrase, but what it means to reach that point where there is no going back defies not only imagination but terminology and narrative patterns.

The question of when exactly tipping points are reached is, despite decades of feverish research, difficult to predict. There is a wealth of data on the subject—figures that chart the various factors with relative precision, from the number of carbon dioxide particles in the Earth’s atmosphere to the rising sea level to the maximum temperatures measured since records began and the projected number of plant and animal species lost daily to extinction. Plotted onto a graph in an impressively simple-looking grid of coordinates and neatly divided into units, this data can be extrapolated, and correlations established, but the result is only a series of formidable curves which, bar a few fluctuations, move with an apparent sense of purpose from the bottom left to the top right-hand corner—from the one known, unchangeable past to several unknown futures.

These prophecies are at once concrete and abstract; the scenarios they spell out made about as much sense to me as the mosaic of scrawled Post-its on Sibylle’s wall. I walked up and down the hall, deciphering the occasional note, especially the bright signal-yellow ones that Sibylle had used to flag the midpoints. But the overall plot eluded me. I was sweating, though the hall was the coldest place in the apartment and it wasn’t yet noon. Perhaps my temperature was up again, I thought, and I asked Sibylle for a rapid test, but like all the others I’d taken, it turned out negative.

That morning, a voice on the radio had announced that it was the driest summer on record. The newspapers, meanwhile—this was national news, not local—were reporting a mysterious fish kill of scandalous proportions in the Oder River. In the first articles on the topic, an angler referred to the event as “a tragedy,” the environmental minister called it “a disaster,” and a scientist described it as “a massacre.” A stretch of more than five hundred kilometers of a river that was both boundary and connection between two European countries was as good as dead; its ecosystem had tipped over.

I didn’t know whether Sibylle had read Aristotle’s Poetics as a student, but his idea that a poet should write not about what has happened but about what might happen still applied. To what extent, however, poetry could be used to describe a present of overlapping emergencies and tipping points was more than doubtful.

Sibylle’s original plan had been to set her series in the near future, and she had taken several stabs at establishing the difference between our present and the time of the show’s action. But since coming across a quotation by the author Kim Stanley Robinson describing science fiction as “the realism of our time,” Sibylle had declared the problem obsolete. The future was unequally distributed; evidently the past was, too. Only recently, the demise of the fossil age had seemed imminent—an arduous but inevitable process; now, all over Europe, mothballed coal power plants were being prepared for reactivation. No climate curve could compete with the material immediacy, the archaic weight of war. When the bombs fell, everything went through the floor.

At home, I looked up the passage in the Poetics to see what Aristotle had to say about turning points. “Peripeteia,” he writes in Chapter Eleven, is a reversal from one state of affairs to its opposite, “from ignorance to knowledge, and thus to either friendship or enmity, depending on whether the characters are destined for good or ill fortune.” I caught myself wondering what we were destined for. Not the bombastic apocalypse of the book of Revelation, that was for sure—but evangelical hopes of deliverance were equally out of the question, with their guilt-steeped, redemption-starved slogans clamoring for nothing less than the “salvation of the world.” Aristotle had it good, I thought; he had the whole soap opera of Greek myth at his disposal. “Every tragedy,” I read, a little further on, “is made up of complication and dénouement. The complication consists of the prehistory and part of the action; the dénouement comprises the rest.”

I was aware that the history of life on Earth was no stage play and the emergence of humans an astounding but fleeting protein-based event; I knew that, like other strange and wonderful beings, we would one day vanish. But I couldn’t help myself; I saw the scenes play out in my mind again: the planet burning, then seething and steaming, then squelching; water withdrawing and continental plates shifting; forests growing rampant, oceans filling with life, animals coming on land to explore—until, an eternity and a few glacial seconds later, a stooped, hirsute, armed creature emerged, with whom I had learned to identify. The rest was settlement and deforestation, mining, urbanization and satellite junk. I was stuck. If that was the prehistory, and human life was not to end in tragedy, we needed a dénouement—a solution, a turning point. But what form should it take? My brain, which had been just large enough to fit through the birth canal, seemed to have reached its limits. All it came up with was the worst kind of ecokitsch, calendar quotes such as “We have only borrowed the Earth …” and “Only when the last tree …”—words of wisdom that I had once written on my exercise books in glitter pen and whose half life was shorter than that of a plastic bag rotting in a bush. The more dramatic announcement—another tipping-point warning—that it was already “five to midnight” seemed, ironically, to be one of the oldest catchphrases around and had completely outlived itself. But there was that other common idiom, particularly popular in the English-speaking world, of “the canary in the coal mine”—a cryptic, equivocal expression that evoked a little yellow bird in the hidden bowels of the Earth. A fowl of the air in the underworld, relegated to lightless depths where it sings its song, perched in a small cage, because that’s all it can do and because, torn from its context, it does what birds so often do in human stories: it produces a surplus of beauty, grace, and meaning. But how, I wondered, had the bird found its way into the mine—into that figure of speech, that metaphor, that image of disorientation, of misery, mercy, danger, the Anthropocene?

While searching for the origin of the expression, I came across a character—and characters, as I knew from Sibylle, were always good. People were still more interested in people than anything else—this was, of course, a not insignificant part of the problem. My character was the Scottish physiologist John Scott Haldane, whose first biographical turning point might, in the script of a biopic, be the scene in which fourteen-year-old John sees his elder brother George turn copper-colored and struggle to breathe for days on end until he is carried off by diphtheria. The physiological miracle of human breathing would hold a lifelong fascination for Haldane and inspire him to a number of inventions, from the haemoglobinometer to a prototype space suit, but also to some rather abstruse experiments that might make for some good scenes in a biopic: his field trips to collect samples of contaminated air in the Dundee slums and London sewers, for instance, or his studies of altitude sickness at Pikes Peak, Colorado and decompression sickness in the deep sea lochs of Scotland—not to mention the test involving goats in a decompression chamber, at the end of which the poor creatures teetered out of the porthole-like opening, staggering on their feet.

But the scene that leads to the little bird comes earlier, in the 1890s, when Haldane, a man in his midthirties, is investigating mining accidents in British collieries. The coal from those pits was used to power the puffing machines of the motherland of industrialization—machines whose wondrous, many-cogged mechanisms not only unleashed enormous quantities of energy and produced a highly ramified industrial system, but also sent vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and masses of workers into misery.

Haldane appears in this fog-shrouded scene wearing overalls and a miner’s helmet and carrying a cage full of mice and a leather case marked in signal red with the forbidding words London Fever Hospital. He is already a renowned respiratory expert and has been called to the scene of the accident in the Rhondda Valley in South Wales, if not to save the lives of the casualties then at least to prevent further accidents.

It goes without saying that conditions in coal mines were, then as now, unhealthy and often even life-threatening—and explosions, triggered by coal dust or gases, were all too common. In the biopic, we see Haldane in the pit, taking blood not only from the dead miners but also from the pit ponies that have perished underground with them. We also see—it’s a color film, of course—that he is troubled by the carmine hue of the blood; we see his gaze fall on the Davy lamps that are still burning next to the corpses. Then come a few scenes of rising action, but eventually—after a change of scene to his laboratory in Oxford—Haldane is able to prove that the majority of victims did not die, as supposed, in underground explosions or from a lack of oxygen, but were poisoned with carbon monoxide, that colorless, tasteless, odorless gas that inhibits oxygen intake even when inhaled in only the most minute quantities and kills large land mammals such as horses or humans within a couple of hours.

Haldane’s life was one big self-experiment; one of his biographers even described him as a kind of “canary in the coal mine” himself, so strong was his habit of self-experimentation. In a later scene, we might see him studying the effects of carbon monoxide on his own organism and comparing the results with the effects of the same substance on a mouse. While he observes only a slight drowsiness in himself, the mouse is already curled up unconscious in a corner of its cage, the pale fur of its belly exposed. Haldane grabs the little body, opens the window and almost immediately—it is literally a matter of seconds—the mouse, who remains unnamed in the script, recovers consciousness.

Switch scenes again and Haldane is recommending to the miners that they use mice as “sentinel animals”—but as the rodents are rife in the pits, and always after the men’s victuals, they are clearly not trustworthy enough for the job. In fact, it won’t be long before mice are cast as canaries in the drama of human medical history and used as model organisms in genetic research, but that would be another film altogether, a documentary that would open in a park in Novosibirsk with a tracking shot onto a bronze statue of a bespectacled mouse about the size of a baby, dressed in a lab coat and wielding a pair of needles with which it appears to be knitting a DNA helix.

But to return to our hero. Haldane eventually strikes on another, smaller species of warm-blooded creatures that are similarly practical, almost as easy to acquire and keep, but most importantly, have an impressive track record as pets. Canaries are also such efficient breathers that they absorb oxygen even when they exhale; this makes them extremely sensitive to toxic gases—sensitive enough to lose consciousness some twenty minutes earlier than humans. Twenty minutes is a long time, long enough to leave the mine and return to the surface, to fill one’s lungs with fresh oxygen and escape asphyxiation. What’s more, the symptoms of poisoning are immediately apparent: an unconscious canary will stop singing and fall in a swoon from its perch—an unmistakable warning sign. And aren’t those bright yellow feathers a sign in themselves, crying out to be interpreted?

Some sources claimed that the first canaries to be sent down into the mines were deviant specimens that had been withdrawn from sale and were going for a bargain: male birds with less attractive plumage and poor singing skills. But the contemporary literature that I managed to find on the subject—titles such as Katechismus der Kanarienzucht (The canary breeder’s catechism, 1901) or Der Kanarienvogel: als Hausfreund der deutschen Familie (The canary: a friend of the German family, 1908)—never tired of complaining that “the English fancy” for breeding canaries for their color and form alone, “with no heed to the birds’ singing power,” had brought forth “monstrosities” such as the long-necked, humpbacked Scotch Fancy, the London Lizard with its scalelike markings, and the Yorkshire Spangle, a straw-yellow bird with a brown-green cap and eye rings that was “particularly popular among the lower classes of the population”—“the strongest” but also, as the author remarks, not without a touch of chauvinism, the “most phlegmatic breed of English canary.”

There is one scene without which no Haldane biopic would be complete. It is set underground and shows a group of miners—some still boys, some aged before their time—having whistling competitions with the birds in their little cages. Since canaries are good mimics, this scene should perhaps be imagined as a kind of concert—a high-pitched, cross-species, underground concert, the voices echoing and answering one another, spurring each other on. I liked the idea that the men kept an eye on the birds, concerned about their well-being—not least because their own depended on it. I also liked the thought that they, in turn, would save the lives of their lifesavers in an emergency.

It touched me to read that the miners mourned their canaries when they were replaced in the eighties by more sensitive but soulless detectors known as electronic noses; the underground symbiosis between them had transformed the birds from avian early warning mechanisms into something more like companions. The empty cages ended up in museums and became anecdotal material for a chapter in industrial history, along with Haldane’s “canary resuscitator,” now on display at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, a contraption designed for the immediate resuscitation of unconscious birds—a cast-iron box with glass sides, its porthole-like opening firmly bolted with a swivel pin. Atop this box, screwed fast in the grip of a pipe clamp, is a shiny black cartridge that strangely resembles an atomic bomb. A nickel-plated copper pipe connects it to the inside. Behind the glass sits a small bird, yellow with green patches, its pale pink beak raised, its tiny black eyes gleaming as they reflect a distant source of light. The bird is dead as a doornail, its stuffed body attached to a perch with invisible wire. Its life—so much is clear—could not be saved by the resuscitator.

As so often, the obsolete and discarded are to be found hibernating in the parallel universe of language. In metaphor, the pit canaries live on, haunting the news like miniature Cassandras—practical, feathered oracles that fall mute in the face of disaster and drop dramatically from their perches at that precarious point where life tips over into death. These figurative canaries turn out to be every bit as adaptable as their real-life models. In recent articles, the phrase “canary in the coal mine” has been used, variously, to refer to a species of water flea called Daphnia that is sensitive to chemical substances, the drought-ravaged wine industry of Australia, a foundering baseball star, methane-spewing craters in Serbia, the canceled Batgirl movie, and thousands of dead manatees starving off the coast of Florida.

But the metaphor is not always uncontroversial. In 2021, the Fijian prime minister, Frank Bainimarama, stated with some force that the Pacific Island nations, already long affected by global warming, were tired of playing the part of the plucky little sentinel bird. “We refuse to be the proverbial canaries in the world’s coal mine, as we are so often called,” he said, adding, “We want more for ourselves than to be helpless songbirds whose demise serves as a warning to others.”Their lives, after all, were not figurative; they were actual and actually under threat—and they wanted, understandably, to be saved for their own sake, and not because the nations responsible for their plight saw their predicament as an anticipation of their own precarious future.

The canary metaphor was on the point of becoming an empty cage, a cliché. It seemed to obscure rather than reveal, like the 1934 camouflage publication that I came across in the catalogue of the Berlin State Library. Listed as Der Kanarienvogel: ein praktisches Handbuch über Naturgeschichte, Pflege und Zucht des Kanarienvogels (The canary: a practical guide to the natural history, care and breeding of canaries), this book turned out to contain Molotov’s speech on the second five-year plan at the seventeenth conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Figures of speech are never innocent, and even canaries are less innocent than one might imagine. Buffon, in his Natural History of Birds, may describe “the musician of the chamber” as a “delicate,” “social,” and “gentle” bird—“its caresses are amiable, its little pets are innocent, and its anger neither hurts nor offends”—but his contemporary, Goethe, has Werther almost expire with longing when Lotte’s canary caresses her mouth with its bill and then proceeds to kiss his: “His little beak moved from her mouth to mine, and the delightful sensation seemed like the forerunner of the sweetest bliss.” The meaning of this “sweetest bliss” is hinted at not only in the German verb vögeln (to fuck; literally, “to bird”) but also in Dutch seventeenth-century genre paintings, in which a caged bird is a common and unequivocal symbol of virginity—a state that is, by definition, precarious.

While searching for the origin of this association, I came across an image of ravished innocence in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, where, aptly enough, it is mining that is depicted as a nonconsensual act, the rape of Mother Earth:

We trace out all the fibres of the earth […] We penetrate her inner parts and seek for riches in the abode of the spirits of the departed […]

[…] we probe her entrails, digging into her veins of gold and silver and mines of copper and lead; we actually drive shafts into the depth to search for gems and certain tiny stones; we drag out her entrails, we seek a jewel merely to be worn upon a finger!

I wasn’t sure whether to feel happy or fatalistic about such serendipity. The story I’d set out to tell seemed to be a very old one.

Perhaps the main tipping points lay so far back in time that, rather than simply damn their consequences—the part that was usually faded out—we should learn to value them. It occurred to me that plenty of ruined landscapes that had been abandoned by humans were now places of refuge for threatened species and would soon be conservation areas. It was getting complicated.

“The extraction of ores and other mineral resources,” I dictated to myself, just to get things straight in my mind, “is inextricably linked not only with almost all human achievements in technology and civilization, but also—more than any other trade or industry—with massive overexploitation, devastating destruction, and a state in which nature and culture are no longer distinguishable and produce such strange amalgams as canary birds.”

The birds I was trying to set free were all flying straight back into their cages. They were no longer natural beings but cultural products of a centuries-old history of domestication, shaped above all by the unimaginative laws of a market—a history that began with the breeding monopoly of Spanish monks in the fifteenth century and was still going strong in the late nineteenth century when the rise of the mail-order industry ended in the deaths of so many birds. This wasn’t the story I wanted to tell: the dull, powerful, ubiquitous interplay of supply and demand, which had given us, on the one hand, the homogeneous cultural landscapes of Central Europe that I liked to escape to in my free time and, on the other hand, these birds—virtuoso warblers with a range of up to nearly three octaves, whose trilling I had listened to for a time on endless YouTube videos and could no longer hear without getting a headache.

For a particularly mellifluous specimen, old canary guides recommend keeping a male bird on his own, though some manuals have condemned this as cruel, pointing out that canaries sing to impress potential mates and rivals and to mark their territory. I was reminded of a theory for why evolution has given us not only an inexhaustible variety of biological answers to the question of what life is but also such peculiar, decadent, and superfluous gifts as beauty, ornament, and culture—the hummingbird’s iridescent feathers, the baboon’s pornographically bare bum, and, of course, the delights of birdsong. The theory had what I considered one of the best names a theory can have. It was called singing for sex, and in its out-and-out obsession with vögeln, it rivaled the writings of Sigmund Freud.

But there was another, more modest—and moving—interpretation, which saw birdsong as something that behavioral biologists refer to as the contact call. Also features of human behavior, contact calls are sounds made to convince those around you—and also, to an extent, yourself—that you still exist. An “I’m here; where are you?” A whistling in the dark—at once self-reassurance and protective magic.

The best canary singers are said to have lived on Fuerteventura, before deforestation and overgrazing transformed the island into a desert. There are still flocks of Atlantic canaries on Madeira, the Azores, and the western Canary Islands; my research told me that, with a population of about 1.5 to 2.5 million pairs, the species was classified as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List. What was concerning, however, was the dwindling populations of a number of other animal and plant species native to the Canaries, such as the dragon tree, the Canary Islands Large White, the Iberian water frog, and a handful of endemic species of giant lizards.

More concerning still was that, although a glut of poisonous golden algae had been identified as the cause of the fish kill, it remained unclear what had triggered it. Not for the first time, factors were too complex to allow the incident to be treated as a straightforward criminal case in which the perpetrators had only to be tracked down, brought to justice and duly punished. An affair that had destroyed the lives of millions of creatures was at risk of petering out in inquiry committees and mutual finger-pointing. Volunteers were called on to gather the hundreds of tons of stinking fish corpses from the riverbanks and dispose of them in dumpsters before they sank to the bottom of the river and further polluted the water by consuming oxygen as they decomposed. I didn’t have the words to comprehend these tons of dead fish—creatures that, more than any others, are proverbially mute, even in life.

Somewhere there was mention of damage limitation, but what I wanted was a face, a character, a hero. Someone who would rescue rather than repair—an expert like Haldane, an eccentric scientist who was on the side of the good guys and would make ground-breaking discoveries with his tests and experiments, preventing not only humans but freshwater fish and mollusks from death by asphyxiation. Hundreds of tons of dead fish—it was apocalyptic. But there was no lake of fire. It had even begun to rain. Life went on.

Before a canary falls from its perch, it begins to teeter. Before a system tips over completely, there are often major fluctuations and complications: populations rise and fall, and inconclusive test results cloud the already murky picture. But by then, as scientific models—and experience—teach us, developments cannot be stopped. The shit hits the fan. The situation spirals out of control, setting off an unpredictable chain of irreversible and, indeed, irreparable events, which for some reason I imagined as a custard-pie showdown in a silent film, in which the pie lands in the face of an innocent bystander, triggering a series of unlikely but inevitable chain reactions before the picture fades on a disconcertingly tranquil-looking scene of devastation.

There was no way back. The canary metaphor was teetering. It might be a compelling image, but it was no use to us, because, like it or not, Earth wasn’t a coal mine that could be evacuated in an emergency, even if tired fantasies of colonizing nearby planets had recently made something of a comeback. It would take more than the behavior of a bird to bring home to us that the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere during the extraction of coal and other fossil fuels was so drastically altering conditions for life on Earth that the future had become not only an uncertain place but a frightening one.

In Aristotle’s time, the Canary Islands lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules, at the end of the world, and those who didn’t have the time to make the pilgrimage to Delphi, Olympia, or Claros relied on the observation of birds and the interpretation of dreams to provide them with oracles in their day-to-day lives. While dreams in those days were divine prophecies—the medium of choice for communications from higher spheres—in our culture they are at best expressions of the fears and desires buried deep in our psyches. I knew from years of analysis that such fears and desires can be almost impossible to tell apart, so I was unimpressed to hear that dreams about falling into pits have, not very originally, been linked to the discovery of having a vagina rather than a penis.

There can be few concepts that so closely interweave human fears and desires as the Anthropocene. Man-made, like all words, whether grace, or Gaia, or greenhouse gas, the term Anthropocene was coined to give a name to the world-dominating part played by our species in the drama of life on Earth and, at the same time, to sanction the rapacious work of industrial societies as human nature. The dilemma surrounding the concept of the Anthropocene is an old one: there is no such thing as unbiased description. With every word we utter, with every metaphor or idiom we use, we are shaping the world. The trouble is, as experience has taught us, that, despite their far-reaching consequences, life’s tipping points and turning points are often revealed to us only with a certain time lag. Moments that seem innocuous enough as we live through them later realize their fateful and inevitable potential. Historiography, whether concerned with one’s own life or with the use—or abuse—of the Earth, doesn’t identify the linchpins until it’s too late.

When did this desperate state of affairs begin? With the extermination of the saber-toothed tiger in prehistoric times, or with the introduction of the steam engine in the early modern era? With the Mesopotamian accounting system which invented stockpiling and the concept of ownership, or with the Neolithic or Industrial Revolution? With mining, that most unfathomable of arts? Or with one of Fritz Haber’s inventions? But which? The one that led to the production of artificial fertilizer and the feeding of billions, or the one that enabled enemy soldiers to be wiped out with toxic gases in World War I? It was good old Haldane, the secret hero of this essay, who braved the front as a human canary in May 1915 to identify the lethal vapors at the Battle of Ypres as chlorine gas, and immediately invented a makeshift gas mask to protect against them. It all linked up. No creature is imaginable without its environment. Or as Haldane put it, rather more soberingly, in his 1935 study The Philosophy of a Biologist—having progressed with admirable logic from breathing specialist to environmental physiologist:

The fact that the life of an organism extends over its environment implies that the lives of different organisms, although they are distinguishable, enter into each other’s lives. There is no spatial separation between the lives of different organisms, just as there is no spatial separation within the life of any one organism.

When I tried to tell Sibylle about it that evening, she waved me away. “Exactly. It wasn’t a weapon, it was a bag,” she said, somewhat incoherently, “and the whole of early history, with its bragging myths about hunting and killing, was a masculine, heroic, imperial narrative that’s left us screwed.” Some of the Post-its lay scattered on the floor. She had discovered Ursula K. Le Guin and decided to transfer Le Guin’s “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” onto the epic arc of her series plot—a story without heroes, blending character and background; a Where’s Waldo? picture effortlessly spanning multiple universes. I was convinced, but had no idea what it meant for my writing—no idea how to convey such obscure mycelial webs in language, in a script that depends on gaps to create a readable text, in a grammar that, however sophisticated, tends to rigidity. The genre question also reared its head again. I’d never been much of a fan of that bourgeois, individualistic genre that is the novel, but that hadn’t stopped me from devouring its prototype, in which a white man on a desert island reenacts a rather questionable version of the processes of civilization, slavery and all. It came back to me that Robinson Crusoe’s main problem was not hunger but loneliness, which he attempted to ward off by taming a young parrot before turning his didactic attention to a member of his own species.

I tried to envisage a world without birds. I tried to imagine the horror, the total quiet, the end of the world. Could silence be loud? Could it spur humans to action? In Silent Spring, a book by another heroic scientist, the marine biologist Rachel Carson, the silence of birds is an urgent warning sign, a call for retreat, and the book, although it makes no mention of pit canaries, is often credited with kick-starting the environmental movement. First published in 1962, it frames birds’ silence as both reality and metaphor—and the absence of birdsong as the salient feature of a wasted region that has been hit by “a strange blight”:

It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.

Carson leaves no doubt as to who is responsible: “No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.”

The chapter is called “A Fable for Tomorrow,” and Carson’s narrative trick is to warn of acute disaster by writing as if it has already struck, and then proceeding to interpret the signs. It was, I thought, the reverse of a strident alarm. The silence of the birds made sense as a signal only if someone had previously heard them sing—only if their absence was noticed. For something to be missed, the memory of it had to be alive.

Carson’s study, an appeal written with both literary sensitivity and scientific vision, was certainly heartening proof that by influencing legislation, books could prevent the extinction of species and save the unmetaphorical lives of countless creatures. Laws and regulations are, in the end, also a kind of literature, with interpretations debating their value, application, and validity.

In 1969, seven years after the publication of Silent Spring—and five years after Carson died of breast cancer—a hearing held in Madison, Wisconsin ended with a breakthrough in the ban on DDT, a toxic, carcinogenic and non-biodegradable substance harmful to vertebrates as well as insects. Not only did scientists at the hearing attest to a sharp decline in the robin population following the use of DDT, and to the universal contamination of human mother’s milk with the pesticide; representatives of the US Department of Agriculture admitted in court that—unlike Haldane—they hadn’t tested for toxicity, but simply accepted the information provided by the manufacturers.

That same year, Kurt Vonnegut addressed an audience of physics teachers at the American Physical Society. Vonnegut, who had himself studied chemistry and German—an interesting choice in the late thirties—spoke of his doubts about the usefulness of the arts, “with the possible exception of interior decoration,” and went on to present what he called “the canary in the coal mine theory of the arts”:

This theory says that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are super-sensitive. They keel over like canaries in poison coal mines long before more robust types realize that there is any danger whatsoever.

The most useful thing I could do before this meeting today is to keel over right now. On the other hand, artists are keeling over by the thousands every day and nobody seems to pay the least attention.

It is unlikely that Vonnegut wore a canary-yellow suit to give this speech; he was probably wearing one of his fawn jackets—another color to be found in the canary breeder’s palette. Nor did he keel over at any point in the course of his address. But he did tell his audience of the urgent and seemingly simple advice that he liked to give young people to warn them out of the deep, dark pit:

When I speak to students, I do moralize. I tell them not to take more than they need, not to be greedy. I tell them not to kill, even in self-defense. I tell them not to pollute water or the atmosphere. I tell them not to raid the public treasury. I tell them not to work for people who pollute water or the atmosphere or who raid the public treasury. I tell them not to commit war crimes or to help others to commit war crimes.

The main character in Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, also published in 1969, is quite definitely a canary. But rather than keel over, Billy Pilgrim comes “unstuck in time,” because he is too sensitive to cope with the atrocities he witnessed during the bombing of Dresden. In a plot that jumps wildly back and forth, disregarding all chronology, Billy is abducted by extraterrestrials, who here assume the implausible—but no less surprising—role of deus ex machina, that higher power that traditionally intervenes at the last minute to untangle a snarled narrative or avert disaster. Because the horror has already happened.

In a frame story, the narrator, who is evidently closely akin to Vonnegut, writes repeatedly—like me in this essay—of what can be described only as a failure. The failure in his case is his powerlessness to narrate, and thus communicate and share, his experiences of the war—although he does at one point claim that, as “a trafficker in climaxes and thrills and characterization and wonderful dialogue and suspense and confrontations,” he has “outlined the Dresden story many times.” When at last he gives the manuscript to his agent, the agent is disappointed that it’s so short. The narrator defends himself:

It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is except for the birds.

And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like “Poo-tee-weet?”

I found it heartening that Vonnegut allowed the birds to survive the massacre. My mind still refused to grasp that the story wasn’t about us—that Homo sapiens wasn’t the hero of the drama but only a blurry character blending into the background, doing what birds do when they make contact calls. The canary bird was me, and it was calling to me, reassuring me that I still existed, in a present whose precarity was not only identified as such by science but brought to life by art—a world full of midpoints, X factors, and unsettling beauty; a web of unconditionally interdependent life.

I was exhausted. A lack of knowledge didn’t seem to be the problem. The Club of Rome had just published a new report which, fifty years after its infamous diagnosis on the limits to growth, came to a verdict that left me reeling. “The biggest challenge in the world today,” I read, with faint dread, “is not climate change, biodiversity loss, or even a pandemic. It is our collective inability to distinguish between fact and fiction.”

I shivered.

It had dropped cold overnight. In Sibylle’s hall, logs were stacked in front of a now bare wall. All the Post-its had vanished. Her gas supplier had shut off the gas and she had ordered a wood-burning stove on the internet, which would, with any luck, be delivered before the frost set in. Come winter, we would do what Aristotle had done when he was cold: we would make a fire. And perhaps we would tell ourselves a story that mattered.

Postscript

Months later, at the end of a warm winter with little rain and even less snow, the environmental organization Greenpeace published a report identifying three hard coal mines in Upper Silesia as the cause of the Oder fish kill. These mines dump the highly saline water that is a waste product of coal mining into the nearby tributaries of the Oder and the Vistula. Polish law places essentially no limit on the chloride levels of industrial wastewater discharged into rivers. It is safe to assume that the disaster will repeat itself.

Judith Schalansky, born in Greifswald in former East Germany in 1980, is an acclaimed writer and book designer, and the publisher of a prestigious natural history imprint in Berlin. Her books, including Atlas of Remote Islands, the novel The Giraffe’s Neck, and the International Booker Prize and National Book Award nominee An Inventory of Losses, have been translated into more than twenty-five languages and have received numerous awards. This essay won the Crespo Foundation’s Wortmeldungen Literaturpreis 2023.

Imogen Taylor is a London-born, Berlin-based literary translator. Her translation of Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Beside Myself was shortlisted for the 2020 Schlegel-Tieck Prize and the 2021 Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize. Other work includes How We Desire by Carolin Emcke, Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself by Florian Huber, and Two Women and a Poisoning by Alfred Döblin.

The lines of Aristotle’s Poetics in this essay are translated by Imogen Taylor from a German edition: Aristoteles: Poetik, translated and edited by Manfred Fuhrmann, 2010.

Fragment of parchment preserving parts of several poems by Sappho. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

As Nebuchadnezzar II is plundering Jerusalem, Solon ruling Athens, Phoenician seafarers circumnavigating the African continent for the first time, and Anaximander postulating that an indefinite primal matter is the origin of all things and that the soul is air-like in nature, Sappho writes:

He seems to me equal to the gods that man
whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
….to your sweet speaking

and lovely laughing—oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
….is left in me

no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
….fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead—or almost
….I seem to me.

But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty …

Buddha and Confucius are not yet born, the idea of democracy and the word philosophy not yet conceived, but Eros—Aphrodite’s servant—already rules with an unyielding hand: as a god, one of the oldest and most powerful, but also as an illness with unclear symptoms that assails you out of the blue, a force of nature that descends on you, a storm that whips up the sea and uproots even oak trees, a wild, uncontrollable beast that suddenly pounces on you, unleashes unbridled pleasure, and causes unspeakable agonies—bittersweet, consuming passion.

There are not many surviving literary works older than the songs of Sappho: the down-to-earth Epic of Gilgamesh, the first ethereal hymns of the Rigveda, the inexhaustible epic poems of Homer and the many-stranded myths of Hesiod, in which it is written that the Muses know everything. “They know all that has been, is, and will be.” Their father is Zeus, their mother Mnemosyne, a titaness, the goddess of memory.

We know nothing. Not much, at any rate. Not even whether Homer really existed, or the identity of that author whom we for the sake of convenience have dubbed “Pseudo-Longinus,” who quotes Sappho’s verses on the power of Eros in the surviving fragments of his work on the sublime, thereby preserving her lines for future generations, namely us.

We know that Sappho came from Lesbos, an island in the eastern Aegean situated so close to the mainland of Asia Minor that, on a clear day, you might think you could swim across—to the coast of the immeasurably rich Lydia of those days, and from there, in what is now Turkey, to that of the immeasurably rich Europe of today.

Somewhere there, in the lost kingdom of the Hittites, must lie the origins of her unusual name, which either means “numinous,” “clean,” or “pure source,” or—if you trace its history back by a different route—is a corruption of the ancient Greek word for sapphire and lapis lazuli.

She is said to have been born in Eresus, or perhaps in Mytilene, in about the year 617 before our calendar began, or possibly thirteen years earlier or five years later. Her father was called Scamander or Scamandronymus, or otherwise possibly Simon, Eumenus, Eerigyius, Ecrytus, Semus, Camon, or Etarchus, according to the Suda, a highly eloquent but not very reliable Byzantine encyclopedia from the tenth century.

We know she had two brothers named Charaxus and Larichus, and perhaps a third named Eurygius, and that she was of noble birth, since her youngest brother, Larichus, was a cupbearer in the Prytaneion in Mytilene, a post reserved only for the sons of aristocratic families.

We believe her mother was called Cleïs and that Sappho had a daughter of the same name, even though the word, which she uses when addressing the beloved girl in a poem, can also mean slave.

Nowhere does Sappho refer to a husband. The name “Kerkylas of Andros Island” mentioned in this connection in the Suda has to be a smutty joke by the Attic comic poets, who undoubtedly took pleasure in ascribing to her, of all women, a husband with a name sometimes rendered as “Dick Allcock from the Isle of Man.” The legend of her unhappy, even self-destructive love for a young ferryman named Phaeon, later embellished by Ovid in his Letters of Heroines, must date from the same time.

We know from an inscribed chronicle dating from the third century before Christ that at some point—when exactly is not recorded on the Parian marble tablet—she fled by ship to Syracuse. We can conclude from another source that it was in around 596 B.C., when Lesbos’s fortunes were in the hands of the Cleanactidai clan.

Seven or eight years later, when the island was under the rule of the tyrant Pittacus, Sappho must have returned from exile and founded a women’s circle in Mytilene, which may have been a cultish community set up to honor Aphrodite, a symposium of fellow females bearing an erotic attachment to one another, or a marriage preparation school for daughters of noble birth: no one knows for sure.

No other woman from early antiquity has been so talked about, and in such conflicting terms. The sources are as sparse as the legends are manifold, and any attempt to distinguish between the two virtually hopeless.

Every age has created its own Sappho. Some even invented a second in order to sidestep the contradictions of the stories: she was variously described as a priestess in the service of Aphrodite or the Muses, a hetaera, a man-crazed woman, a love-crazed virago, a kindly teacher, a gallant lady; by turns shameless and corrupt, or prim and pure.

Her countryman and contemporary Alcaeus described her as “violet-haired, pure, honey-smiling,” Socrates as “beautiful,” Plato as “wise,” Philodemus of Gadara as “the tenth Muse,” Strabo as “a marvelous phenomenon,” and Horace as “masculine,” but there is now no way of knowing what exactly he meant by that.

A papyrus from the late second or early third century for its part claims that Sappho was “ugly, being dark in complexion and of very small stature,” “contemptible,” and “a woman-lover.”

At one time bronze statues of her were common; even today, silver coins still bear her laurel-crowned profile, a water jug from the school of Polygnotos portrays her as a slim figure reading a scroll, and a gleaming black vase from the fifth century before Christ shows her as tall in stature, holding an eight-stringed lyre in her hand as if she had just finished playing or were just about to start. We do not know how Sappho’s verses sounded in Aeolic—the most archaic and tricky of the extinct ancient Greek dialects, in which the initial aspiration was omitted from words—when they were sung at a wedding ceremony, at a banquet, or in the women’s circle, accompanied by a stringed instrument: the hushed sound of a plucked phorminx or the festive ring of the cithara, the deep tones of the barbitos or the harp-like strains of the pectis, the high tones of a magadis or the dull resonance of a tortoiseshell lyre.

All we know is that the word lyric derives from one of these instruments, the lyre, and was coined by Alexandrian scholars some three hundred years after Sappho’s death. It was they who dedicated to her an entire edition in eight or nine books, many thousands of lines on several rolls of papyrus, arranged according to meter, several hundred poems, of which only a single one has come to us intact, because the rhetorician Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who lived in Rome during the reign of Augustus, quotes it in full in his treatise On Literary Composition as an example worthy of admiration. Other than that, four consecutive stanzas were recorded by the scholar known as Pseudo-Longinus; five stanzas of another poem were successfully reassembled from three different papyrus fragments; four stanzas of another were discovered in 1937 carelessly scrawled on a palm-size potsherd by an Egyptian schoolboy in the second century before Christ; fragments of a fifth and a sixth poem were preserved on a tattered early medieval parchment, and large portions of a seventh and eighth were recently discovered on strips of papyrus forming part of the cartonnages used for the preservation of Egyptian mummies or as book covers, although the deciphering of one of the two poems still divides the throng of experts to this day.

A handful of words or isolated lines cited by grammarians like Athenaeus and Apollonius Dyscolus, the philosopher Chrysippus of Soli, or the lexicographer Julius Pollux to illustrate a certain style, a particular item of vocabulary or the meter named after her, were provided by the large-format codices of medieval scribes—the rest is nothing more than scraps: a scattering of stanzas one or two lines long, fragmentary verses, words plucked from their context, single syllables and letters, the beginning or end of a word, or a line, nowhere near a sentence, let alone a meaning.

………
and I go …
…
… immediately …
……
… for …
… of harmony …
… the chorus, …
… clear-sounding
…
… to all …
…

It is as if, in the places where the singing has faded away and the words are missing, where the papyrus scrolls are rotten and torn, dots had appeared, first singly, then in pairs, and soon in the vague pattern of a rhythmic triad—the notation of a silent lament.

These songs have fallen silent, turned to writing, Greek characters borrowed from the Phoenician: dark majuscules, carved into clayey earthenware in a clumsy schoolboy hand or copied onto the pith of the woody wetland grass by a diligent professional using a reed pen; and delicate minuscules, written on the pumice-smoothed, chalk-bleached skins of young sheep and stillborn goats: papyrus and parchment, organic materials that, once exposed to the elements, eventually decompose like any cadaver.

…
… nor …
… desire …
… but all at once …
… blossom …
… desire …
… took delight …

Like forms to be filled in, these mutilated poems demand to be completed—by interpretation and imagination, or by the deciphering of more of the loose papyrus remnants from the garbage dumps of Oxyrhynchus, that sunken town in central Egypt where a meter-thick layer of dry sand preserved these rock-hard, worm-eaten fragments—fragile, creased, and tattered from being rolled and unrolled—for nearly a thousand years.

We know that people wrote on papyrus scrolls in tightly packed columns without spaces between words, punctuation, or guidelines, making even well-preserved items hard to decipher. Divinatio, in the ancient art of the oracle, was the gift of prophesying the future by observing bird migrations and interpreting dreams. Nowadays, in papyrology, it refers to the ability to read a line where all that is visible are faded fragments of ancient Greek letters.

The fragment, we know, is the infinite promise of Romanticism, the enduringly potent ideal of the modern age, and poetry, more than any other literary form, has come to be associated with the pregnant void, the blank space that breeds conjecture. The dots, like phantom limbs, seem intertwined with the words, testify to a lost whole. Intact, Sappho’s poems would be as alien to us as the once gaudily painted classical sculptures.

In total, all the poems and fragments that have reached us, as brief, mutilated, and devoid of context as they are, add up to no more than six hundred lines. It has been calculated that around 7 percent of Sappho’s work has survived.

It has also been calculated that around 7 percent of all women feel attracted solely or predominantly to women, but no calculation will ever be able to establish whether there is any correlation here.

The history of symbols contains a number of markers of the unknown and indeterminate, of the absent and lost, of the void and the blank: the zero on the corn lists of the ancient Babylonians, the letter x in an algebraic equation, the dash used when someone’s words are abruptly interrupted.

… …………………….… ………………….…
goatherd ………….longing ………….sweat
… …………………….… ………………….…
… roses …
…

Aposiopesis—the technique of suddenly breaking off midsentence—we know is a rhetorical device that Pseudo-Longinus, too, will certainly have written about in that part of his treatise On the Sublime that has been lost owing to the carelessness of librarians and bookbinders. If someone stops speaking, starts stuttering and stammering or even falls silent, it suggests he is overcome by feelings of such magnitude that inevitably words fail him. Ellipses open up any text to that vast obscure realm of sentiments that cannot be verbalized or that capitulate in the face of the words available.

… my darling one …

We know that the letters Emily Dickinson wrote to her friend and future sister-in-law Susan Gilbert had a series of passionate passages deleted from them, prior to publication, by her niece Martha, Gilbert’s daughter, who omitted to indicate these deletions. One of these censored sentences, from June 11, 1852, reads: “If you were here—and Oh that you were here, my Susie, we need not talk at all, our eyes would whisper for us, and your hand fast in mine, we would not ask for language.”

Wordless, blind understanding is as much a firm topos of love poetry as is the wordy evocation of unfathomable feeling.

Sappho’s words, where decipherable, are as unambiguous and clear as words possibly can be. At once sober and passionate, they tell, in an extinct language that has to be resurrected with each translation, of a heavenly power that, twenty-six centuries on, has lost none of its might: the sudden transformation, as wondrous as it is merciless, of a person into an object of desire, rendering you defenseless and causing you to leave your parents, spouse, and even children.

Eros the melter of limbs (now again) stirs me—
sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in

We know that the categorization of desire according to whether its protagonists were of the same or different genders was a concept foreign to the ancient Greeks. Rather, what mattered to them was that, in sexual relations, the role of each of the persons involved mirrored their social one, with adult men taking an active sexual role, while youths, slaves, and women remained passive. The dividing line in this act of control and submission ran not between the sexes, but between those who penetrate and possess, and those who are penetrated and possessed.

Men are not mentioned by name in the surviving poetry of Sappho, whereas many women are: Abanthis, Agallis, Anagora, Anactoria, Archeanassa, Arignota, Atthis, Cleïs, Cleanthis, Dica, Doricha, Eirana, Euneica, Gongyla, Gorgo, Gyrinna, Megara, Mica, Mnasis, Mnasidica, Pleistodica, Telesippa. It is they whom Sappho sings about, with tender devotion or flaming desire, with burning jealousy or icy contempt.

Someone will remember us
I say
…….even in another time

We think we know that Sappho was a teacher, even though the first source to refer to her as such is a papyrus fragment dating from the second century A.D., which reports, seven hundred years after her death, that she had taught girls from the best families in Ionia and Lydia.

There is nothing in any of Sappho’s surviving poetry to suggest an educational setting, although the fragments contain descriptions of a world in which women come and go, and there is often mention of farewells. The place seems to be one of transition, which led some to interpret it as hosting the female equivalent of the more widely attested Greek practice of pederasty. This reading also conveniently enabled the undeniable presence of female eroticism in poetry to be accounted for as a form of preparation for the main focus, the undisputed culmination of that teaching, namely marriage.

We do not know the exact nature of the relationship between Hannah Wright and Anne Gaskill, whose marriage was recorded without comment in the register of marriages of the parish of Taxal in northern England on September 4, 1707, though we do know that the expression “where you go I will go,” commonly used in Christian marriage ceremonies, is borrowed from the words spoken by the widowed Ruth to her mother-in-law, Naomi, in the Old Testament.

We also know that in 1819, in the court case involving the two headmistresses of a Scottish girls’ boarding school who—a pupil had alleged—had engaged in improper and criminal acts on one another, Lucian’s Dialogues of the Hetaerae was quoted to show that sex between women was actually possible. In it the hetaera Clonarion asks the cithara player Leaina about her sexual experience with “a rich woman from Lesbos” and in particular presses her to reveal what exactly she had done with her and “using what method.” But Leaina counters: “Don’t question me too closely about these things, they’re shameful; so, by Aphrodite, I won’t tell you!”

The chapter ends at this point, the question goes unanswered, and so what women do with one another remains both unuttered and unutterable. At any rate the two teachers were acquitted of the charge, as the judge came to the conclusion that the transgression of which they were accused was not actually possible: where there is no instrument there can be no act, where there is no weapon there can be no crime.

For a long time, what women do with one another could only be regarded as sex and therefore an offense if it mimicked sexual intercourse between a man and a woman. The phallus marked the sexual act, and where it was absent there was nothing but an unmarked blank, a blind spot, a gap, a hole to be filled like the female sexual organ.

For a long time, this empty place was occupied by the concept of the “tribade,” that specter that haunts the writings of men, namely a masculine-acting woman who has sex with other women with the help of a monstrously enlarged clitoris or a phallic aid. As far as we know, no woman has ever described herself as a tribade.

We know that words and symbols change their meaning. For a long time, three dots in a row along the writing baseline designated something lost and unknown, then at some point also something unuttered and unutterable; no longer only something omitted or left out, but also something left open. Hence the three dots became a symbol that invites one to think the allusion to its conclusion, imagine that which is missing, a proxy for the inexpressible and the hushed-up, for the offensive and obscene, for the incriminating and speculative, for a particular version of the omitted: the truth.

We also know that in ancient times the symbol for omissions was the asterisk—the little star that only in medieval times took on the task of linking a place in a text to its associated margin note. As Isidore of Seville writes in the seventh century in his Etymologies: “The asterisk is placed next to omissions, so that things which appear to be missing may be clarified through this mark.” Nowadays the asterisk is sometimes used as a means of including as many people as possible and their sexual identities. The omission becomes an inclusion, the absence a presence, and the empty place a profusion of meaning.

And we know that in ancient times the verb lesbiazein, “to do it like women from Lesbos,” was used to mean “to violate or corrupt somebody” and to refer to the sexual practice of fellatio, which was assumed to have been invented by the women of the island of Lesbos. Even Erasmus of Rotterdam, in his collection of ancient sayings and expressions, renders the Greek word as the Latin fellare, meaning “to suck,” and concludes the entry with the comment: “The term remains, but I think the practice has been eliminated.”

Not long after that, at the end of the sixteenth century, Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme, comments in his pornographic novel The Lives of the Gallant Ladies: “’Tis said how that Sappho the Lesbian was a very high mistress in this art, and that in after times the Lesbian dames have copied her therein, and continued the practice to the present day.” From then on the empty space had not only a geographical but also a linguistic home, although the term amour lesbien remained in common use until the modern age as a term describing the unrequited love of a woman for a younger man.

We know that the two young poetesses Natalie Clifford Barney and Renée Vivien were disappointed when, in late summer 1904, they fulfilled a long-cherished dream and visited the isle of Lesbos together. When they finally reached the port of Mytilene, French chansons were blaring from a phonograph, and both the visual appearance of the island’s female inhabitants and the crudeness of their idiom were at odds with the poetesses’ noble imaginings of this place so frequently evoked in their own poems. Nevertheless, they rented two neighboring villas in an olive grove, went for long moonlit and sunlit walks, rekindled their love that had grown cold some years earlier, and talked about setting up a school of lesbian poetry and love on the island.

The idyll ended when a third woman—a jealous and possessive baroness with whom Vivien was in a liaison—announced she was on her way, and a telegram had to be sent to stop her. Barney and Vivien separated. Back in Paris, their mutual Ancient Greek teacher served from then on as the bearer of their secret letters.

We know that, in 2008, two female residents and one male resident of the island of Lesbos unsuccessfully attempted to introduce a ban on women not originally from the island naming themselves after it or being named after it by others: “We object to the arbitrary use of the name of our homeland by persons of sexual deviation.” The presiding judge rejected the application and ordered the three Lesbians to bear the court costs.

Who, these days, is still familiar with the “Lesbian rule” alluded to by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, used in cases where general laws cannot be applied to concrete situations, following the example of the master builders of Lesbos, who used a leaden rule that “can be bent to the shape of the stone,” since it was better, in a concrete situation, to have a crooked but functioning rule than to follow an ideal that was smooth and straight but useless.

And who, these days, is still familiar with the Sapphic stanza, that four-line verse form comprising three hendecasyllabic lines of matching structure, consisting of trochees with a dactyl inserted in third place, and an adonic as the fourth line, in which each line starts directly with a stressed syllable, every line ending is feminine, and the solemn dignity so characteristic of this meter yields at the end to a sense of reassurance or even serenity.

For a long time terms like tribadism, Sapphism, and lesbianism were used more or less synonymously in the treatises of theologians, jurists, and physicians, though in some instances they denoted a perverse sexual practice or shameless custom, and in others a monstrous anomaly or mental illness.

We do not know exactly why the term lesbian love has endured for some time now, only that this expression and its associations will fade in the same way as all its predecessors.

L is an apical consonant, e the vowel expelled most directly, s is a hissing, warning sound, b an explosive sound that blasts the lips apart …

In German dictionaries, lesbisch (“lesbian”) comes immediately after lesbar (“legible”).

—Translated from the German by Jackie Smith

Judith Schalansky was born in Greifswald in former East Germany in 1980 and studied art history and communication design. Her international best seller, Atlas of Remote Islands, won the Stiftung Buchkunst (the Art Book Award) for “the most beautifully designed book of the year,” while her novel The Giraffe’s Neck, in an English translation by Shaun Whiteside, won a special commendation of the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for the best translation from German in 2015. Both books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Schalansky works as a freelance writer and book designer in Berlin, where she is also publisher of a prestigious natural history list at Matthes und Seitz.

Jackie Smith studied German and French at Selwyn College, Cambridge, and then undertook a postgraduate diploma in translation and interpreting at the University of Bradford. In 2015 she was selected for the New Books in German Emerging Translators Programme and in 2017 won the Austrian Cultural Forum London Translation Prize. An Inventory of Losses is her first literary translation.

From An Inventory of Losses, by Judith Schalansky, translated from the German by Jackie Smith. © New Directions. Lines from If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, translated by Anne Carson, copyright © 2002 by Anne Carson. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.