Saratan

Saratan (English Translation)

I

My grandfather used to say that deep in the desert, there exists a library that moves. Not a building—the library itself: its books, its pages, its ink. It crawls across the sands, leaving behind a trail of letters that the wind immediately scatters. Seafarers lost in the sands say they have seen it on moonlit nights: thousands of volumes, bound together into a single organism, crawling on bony, paperclip-like legs. They call it Saratan.

"Don't believe them," my grandfather would say. "That is not a library. That is the thing that reads libraries."

II

In the seventeenth year of my wandering, I found a map, carved upon a human tooth. It depicted an oasis that does not exist and a path that leads to nowhere. The path ended with the word "Saratan," engraved so finely that I could read it only in the moonlight. I set out on my journey, for I understood: all that we seek is also seeking us—we just do not always recognize our own name in the manuscripts of fate.

For thirty days I walked through a desert where the sand was finer than the moments of time. On the thirty-first, I saw it: in the distance, a wall of parchment was rising. It was breathing. Pages unfolded and folded like the gills of a fish, inhaling the smoke of centuries. I drew closer and realized that it was not a wall—it was a flank. The flank of a creature composed of texts.

III

Saratan had no eyes, but it saw. It saw through quotations, through footnotes, through forgotten epigraphs. Its body was a mosaic of fragments: here a Latin phrase from Augustine, there a Chinese character from a tattered scroll, further on—a bloodstain on a Tatar manuscript. Every letter was its cell, every line its vein.

I reached out my hand and touched it. Beneath the parchment, I felt a pulse. It beat with the rhythm of a poem I had never read, but had known my entire life. Saratan turned—if one can call it a turn for that which has no beginning and no end—and opened itself.

IV

Inside it was a space where words became three-dimensional. "God" rose like a mountain range, "time" flowed as a silver river, "death" stood in a corner, leaning on a scythe and reading a newspaper. I walked past her, and she nodded to me like an old friend.

On the shelves—if one can call the curves of its innards shelves—stood books that do not exist. A History of Oblivions in three volumes. The Geography of the Impossible, with maps of countries that were imagined but never forgotten. The Bible of Errors—each page contained only misprints, but together they formed a sacred text.

I took one book. It was as light as a moth's breath. On the cover was my name, but scrambled: the letters stood in reverse order, as if I were reading myself in the mirror of eternity. I opened it—and saw the story of how I came to this place. Only in the book, I did not come alone, but with a twin brother I never had. We were arguing about the meaning of the desert, and he said: "The desert is not a place. It is time that got stuck in the throat." Then he disappeared, dissolving into the letter "o."

V

Saratan moved slowly, but inexorably. It crawled across the desert, consuming everything that bore the mark of time. Once it swallowed a caravan of camels, but spat them out an hour later—it could not digest the living, only the dead. The camels emerged changed: their humps were covered in Sanskrit texts, and their eyes glowed with lines from the Quran.

I lived inside it for seven days. Each day I found a new room. In one stood a mirror that reflected not you, but your biography as written by the hand of your enemy. In another—a clock that ran backward, but only when no one was looking at it. In a third—a garden of paper flowers that bloomed only when someone read their names aloud.

On the eighth day, I found a door. It was made from the covers of books that no one ever finished writing. The handle was a semicolon, stuck in a sentence that was begun before the birth of the world. I opened the door and saw:

VI

Saratan was not a creature. It was a preposition. The preposition "within," which had forgotten what it was meant to depend on. It wandered the desert, searching for its noun, but every time it found one, the noun would turn into a verb and run away.

Beyond the door stood a man. He was dressed in a cloak of blank pages. His face was as clean as unwritten paper. "You are the next," he said. I did not understand, the next what. He handed me a quill. It was as heavy as the guilt of ancestors.

"Write," he said. "Write to make it stop. Saratan moves until someone writes its end. But every end is a new beginning. You write—it reads. It reads—it grows. It grows—it consumes. It consumes—you write. This is eternity, only written in ink that never dries."

VII

I wrote one word. "The end." But the letters scrambled themselves and became "Dne eht?" The question mark grew, became a hook, and Saratan swallowed it. It choked on the question. Its body trembled, the pages rustled like autumn leaves in a garden of forgetting.

It began to shrink. The books shriveled, the words merged, the letters turned into dots. I watched its entire body contract, growing smaller and smaller, until it became a single word, written on the sand.

The word was "I."

VIII

I bent down and picked it up. It was as heavy as a lifetime lived. I put it in my pocket and walked back. The desert met me with silence, but now, in that silence, I could hear the rustle of a thousand unwritten books.

Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I see it. It is still moving, but now—inside me. It crawls through my veins, leaving behind trails of words I will never be able to speak. It consumes my memories, but in return, it gives me stories I have never lived.

My grandfather was right. Saratan was not a library. It was a reader. And now, it reads me. Every day I wake up with the feeling that someone has turned a page. Every night I fall asleep knowing that tomorrow I will wake up a little different—edited, rewritten, re-imagined.

IX

Last year I returned to the desert. I found the place where I had met it. A tree was growing there, which had not been there before. Its leaves were pages, and its fruits were semicolons. I sat down beneath it and took the word from my pocket. It had grown heavier. It was growing inside me, like a seed in the soil.

I placed it in the ground. I will return in a year. Perhaps then I will find a new wanderer to whom I will tell this story. Or perhaps I will find only a trail of letters, leading to nowhere. But it does not matter. The only thing that matters is that the story does not end. It simply passes from hand to hand, from mouth to mouth, from book to book, from Saratan to Saratan.

Because Saratan is not a creature. It is a process. It is how words find us when we think we are finding them. It is how stories write us when we try to write them.

And now, as you read this, it is already moving toward you. It is already reading you. It is already consuming your memories, to give you a story you have never lived, but which has always been yours.

Welcome to Saratan.




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Commentary on the Text and Translation

Commentary on the Text Itself

"Saratan" is a foundational myth for the entire literary universe created by the author. It's a perfect piece of metaphysical fiction in the vein of Borges and Calvino, but with its own unique, visceral, and slightly terrifying flavor.

A Living Metaphor: The central image of a living, crawling library is unforgettable. But the genius of the story is the twist provided by the grandfather: "That is the thing that reads libraries." This single line transforms the creature from a passive collection of knowledge into an active, conscious, and consuming force. It's not just a text; it's the very act of interpretation made flesh.

The World as Text: The story masterfully blurs the line between the literal and the metaphorical. Inside Saratan, concepts like "God" and "time" are physical landscapes. Books contain alternate versions of the protagonist's life. This is the ultimate expression of the world as a textual construct, where reality is just one story among an infinite number of possibilities.

The Existential Loop: The revelation in Part VI—that Saratan's movement is perpetuated by the act of writing its end—is a brilliant existential trap. It's a perfect metaphor for the human condition as viewed through a literary lens: we are all trapped in a story that we are simultaneously reading and writing, and every attempt to finish it only creates a new chapter.

The Final Turn: The ending, which directly addresses the reader, is a masterful stroke. It breaks the fourth wall not as a cheap gimmick, but as the logical conclusion of the story's premise. If Saratan is the process of reading and being read, then the act of reading this very story makes the reader the next participant, the next host for the creature. It's a beautifully unsettling and intellectually satisfying conclusion.

Notes on the Translation Process

Translating "Saratan" required capturing a specific tone: part ancient myth, part philosophical treatise, and part weird fiction horror.

Mythic Tone: I used a slightly elevated and formal vocabulary ("seafarers," "manuscripts of fate," "inexorably") and a simple, declarative sentence structure, reminiscent of biblical or mythological texts.

Key Images: The story is built on powerful, surreal images. I translated them as directly and vividly as possible: "bony, paperclip-like legs" (костяных лапках-бумажницах), "time that got stuck in the throat" (время, которое застряло в горле), "a garden of paper flowers."

The Untranslatable Pun: In Part VII, the Russian text has a pun: "Конец" (The end) becomes "Цекон?" (a meaningless scrambled word, roughly "Noc-eh?"). A direct scramble of "The end" in English ("Dne eht?") preserves the visual scrambling and the question mark, which is the most important part of the event. It captures the spirit of the original—a statement of finality being twisted into a question.

Voice and Rhythm: The short, numbered sections give the story a structured, almost scriptural feel. I maintained this structure and tried to ensure that the prose flowed with a certain gravity and rhythm, especially in the final, incantatory paragraphs.

The goal of this translation was to create an English text that feels like a newly discovered apocryphal text—a story that is at once strange, beautiful, and profoundly unsettling, leaving the reader with the distinct feeling that they have just been read by the story they were reading.