The Recipe English Translation

INRI is not an inscription, but a white-hot needle threaded through the spine of the world.

When I first saw it glowing through the skin of the old blacksmith, in a village that had neither temple nor bell, I thought: a man carries a chemical sign within himself. He himself is a vial in which a fourfold spirit boils: water, fire, breath, dust.

The old man did not pray. He stoked the forge and said:
“The Salt must awaken first. Without the sea's tears, it will not remember that it was once a star.”

He threw a pinch of sulphur into the coals—the yellow dust flared blue, and the air turned bitter. In that color, I recognized Nur—the fire that does not warm, but burns away the name. The flame danced in the shape of the letter Nun, arching like a hand writing on sand: “You are not yet born.”

The blacksmith pulled a red-hot iron cross from the coals. Four Hebrew syllables were already engraved on its crossbeam: Yod, Nun, Resh, Yod. He touched the crucified iron to water—and the water did not hiss, but sang. Not with a voice, but with a taste: first salty, then metallic, then empty. The emptiness had the flavor of frozen grapes.

“Drink,” he said. “This is Yam. The liquid moon. He who swallows it, loses the shore.”

I drank. The sea stirred inside my chest, waves crashed against my ribs, striving to break free. In every wave, a memory of a life I never lived. The salt settled on my teeth, writing Yod in white stains—the smallest letter, which contains ten commandments. Ten is the count to infinity, if you collapse a circle into a point.

The second Yod awaited its turn. It hid in the ash, in the dry earth—Yabasha. The blacksmith mixed the ash with blood from his own finger: a drop fell on the iron and instantly crystallized into a red cube.
“This is what will remain when you depart,” he said. “Not the body, not the soul, but a stain. The stain is a portal. One enters it by exiting the self.”

He handed me the cube. It had no weight, but if you held it on your palm for longer than three heartbeats, you began to feel a downward pull—as if within the cube, someone else held their own palm, pulling upward. A paradox: the tighter you grasp the earthly, the faster you fall into the heavens.

At night, the blacksmith led me to a hill where a lone cedar grew. Its branches twisted into a spiral, its roots reaching into the clouds. Beneath the cedar stood a clay vessel, sealed with a plug of mercury.
“Resh,” the old man whispered. “The breath that does not belong to the lungs. Open it carefully: mercury flees upward if not held by a word.”

I removed the plug. A silver cord burst from the vessel—it rose like a pillar, then split into three streams. The first hissed with phosphorus, the second with chlorine, the third became a mirror. In the mirror, I saw myself, but without bones: in their place were four letters, pulsing like arteries. INRI burned white, then red, then transparent.

“Now you are inside the formula,” the blacksmith said. “All that remains is the transformation. Take the cube, throw it into the cord. When the stain meets the breath, Azoth will be born—the dragon that does not fly, but dissolves.”

I threw it. The cube dissolved, but did not vanish: it became an emptiness in the shape of a cross. The emptiness began to spin, sucking in the fire, the water, the spirit. The salt fell like a dusting of snow, the earth melted beneath my feet. From the center of the vortex, a pure alchemical letter grew like a stalk: a Yod, connected to another Yod through a Nun and a Resh. It formed a sign that has no name, but which all recognize the moment they look upon it.

The cedar stirred. Its roots withdrew from the sky and pierced my palms. I felt a sap flow through me, a sap that did not nourish, but transmuted. My bones grew soft, turned to mercury, rose upward, gathering at the point between my brows. There, they ignited—and became a light that does not illuminate, but dissolves the border between inside and outside.

The old man smiled. His teeth, too, were made of Yod—small, square, ten in each jaw.
“Consummatum est,” he whispered in Latin, but I understood without translation: “It is fulfilled in the unfulfilled.”

He vanished. Not dissolved, but became the background. I was left alone on the hill, holding a light that was heavier than any metal. Ash beneath my feet, roots above my head. An abyss before me, but it was directed inward.

Stepping forward, I did not fall. I dissolved into my own formula. Now I am the four that believes itself to be one. The water of my tears, the fire of my blood, the spirit of my breath, the earth of my bones—all reduced to a crystal that beats in my chest like a second heart. It does not pump—it dissolves.

And when someone in a distant village is handed a molten cross, I will be there—not as a saint, not as a demon, but as the salty taste on their lips, as the crystalline dust in their lungs, as the question that cannot be asked without becoming it.

INRI remains seared on the inside of my ribs. It reads differently now:

I – I am the salt dissolved in you.
N – You are the fire I do not quench.
R – We are the spirit that strives upward, until it meets itself below.
I – And I again, yet no longer I, but the point where the cross crosses itself.

It is consummated. But it is consummated each time someone gazes upon their own crucifixion and sees there not suffering, but a recipe.


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Commentary on the Text and Translation

Commentary on the Text Itself

"Рецепт" is a masterpiece of visionary prose. It operates on a level that transcends simple narrative, functioning instead as a sacred text, an alchemical grimoire, and a gnostic poem rolled into one. Its genius lies in several key areas:

Re-coding a Universal Symbol: The story's core is the radical reinterpretation of INRI. It takes one of the most potent symbols in Western culture, tied to suffering and redemption, and transmutes it into an alchemical formula for self-dissolution and transformation (Igne Natura Renovatur Integra). This act is not just clever; it's a profound spiritual and philosophical statement. The crucifixion is no longer a historical event, but an eternal, internal process.

Ritualistic Structure: The narrative is meticulously structured as a ritual, a step-by-step guide to the Great Work (Magnum Opus). Each paragraph corresponds to an alchemical stage, tied to the four Hebrew letters/elements: Fire (Nur/Nun), Water (Yam/Yod), Earth (Yabasha/Yod), and Air/Spirit (Ruach/Resh). This structure gives the text an incantatory, hypnotic power.

Synesthetic Language: The author uses a deeply synesthetic and paradoxical language that bypasses rational understanding and speaks directly to a more primal consciousness. Emptiness has a taste, water sings, a weightless cube pulls you down. This is the language of mysticism, where the laws of physics are suspended in favor of the laws of symbol and correspondence.

Notes on the Translation Process

Translating a text like this is less about finding equivalent words and more about recreating an effect. The goal was to produce an English text that feels the way the Russian text feels: ancient, sacred, dangerous, and transformative. Here were the main challenges and choices:

Preserving the Mystical Vocabulary: The Russian text uses Cyrillic transcriptions of Hebrew and Arabic words (Нур, Ям, Ябаша, Реш). Translating these into plain English ("Fire," "Sea," "Dry Land," "Spirit") would have destroyed their esoteric, incantatory power. I chose to keep them as transliterated terms (Nur, Yam, Yabasha, Resh) to maintain the sense that we are dealing with a secret, sacred language.

Capturing the Rhythm and Cadence: The original Russian prose is stark, rhythmic, and declarative, like a series of pronouncements. I sought to replicate this with short, powerful sentences and a reliance on simple but evocative verbs ("stoked," "flared," "pierced"). The rhythm of the King James Bible was a distant but useful influence.

Translating the Untranslatable: The final reinterpretation of INRI was the most crucial part. The challenge was to make the English lines parallel, poetic, and philosophically potent. The final line, "и снова я, но уже не я, а точка, где крестится крест," is particularly difficult. A literal translation might be "the point where the cross is crossed." I chose "the point where the cross crosses itself" to emphasize the self-referential, paradoxical nature of this singularity, the Ouroboros-like final state of being.

Choosing the Right Word: Every word choice was critical. For example, "раскалённая спица" became "a white-hot needle" to convey both the intense heat and the piercing, surgical precision of the symbol. "Пробирка" became "a vial," which has a more poetic and alchemical connotation than "test tube."

In essence, the translation process was an attempt to follow the recipe of the text itself: to take the "salt," "sulphur," and "mercury" of the original Russian and, through the fire of interpretation, transmute them into a new golden form in English, hoping to preserve the soul of the original work.