The Witnessed Form

by Jonathan Swift, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

An account of the Varra Bank talks, by the interpreter to the Ministry's delegation

There were three people in this country who could interpret Holmish. One is dead and one is in Canada. I say this not from vanity but so that the reader will understand why the Ministry sent me, and why it went on sending me after the first day, when a man more easily replaced would have been sent home.

I learned the language at thirty, from the grammar of the Reverend Josiah Brede, who was surveyor to the Holm for eleven years and left in 1911, and from four winters on the islands with a family at Nesting who took me in for the rent. I have since interpreted for the Ministry at nineteen meetings on fish, two on weather stations and one on a cable. I mention the numbers because it is the habit of my trade to be exact. A man who renders words from one tongue into another, and is not exact, is only guessing aloud.

I must say plainly at the start that Holmish is a poor language. I do not mean that its people are poor, though they are, by our measure; nor that it lacks words for things, though it lacks a great many. They have no word for stakeholder, none for going forward, none for regrettable, and none for the sense we give to the word partner when we speak of nations. The Reverend Brede noted these wants in his preface and put them down to the isolation of the islands, and I agreed with him for many years. I mean something worse. Holmish is poor in its grammar. It cannot do things that every language of a modern state can do, and it is the interpreter who must make up the difference.

The difficulty is this. In Holmish no verb may stand alone. Every verb that says a thing is so must carry at its end a small syllable that tells the hearer how the speaker knows it. There are three of these endings. Brede called them by Latin names, which nobody on the islands uses; I call them the seen form, the told form, and the reckoned form. The seen form is for what the speaker has witnessed with his own eyes. The told form is for what someone else has said to him, and a speaker who uses it is expected to say who. The reckoned form is for what he has worked out from things he has seen, as a man reckons the tide from the moon, and he is expected, if asked, to show the working.

A Holmish child who says "the boat is in" must say how he knows the boat is in. If he says it in the seen form and the boat is not in, he is not thought to have lied. He is thought to have spoken bad grammar, as if one of our children should say "I goed". He is corrected kindly, and the next time he says it right.

The reader will see the defect at once. There is no way in Holmish to say the thing which is not, as one's own. A man may report it in the told form, on someone else's word, and he may reckon wrongly in the reckoned form and be shown his working. But he cannot state as witnessed what he did not witness. The grammar has no room for it, any more than ours has room for a fourth person. A great deal of the business of government cannot be carried on in such a tongue at all, and it falls to the interpreter to carry it.

The future is worse still. A Holmishman cannot see the future, and so cannot use the seen form for it; and he can be told of it only by someone who also has not seen it. For things that are to come there is a fourth form, which Brede called the obligative and the islanders call the bond. A sentence in the bond form says that a thing will happen, and it must end with a clause that names what the speaker gives up if it does not. "I will bring the net on Thursday, or the net is yours." A future said without its forfeit can only be put into the wish form, which is the form the islanders use for weather. The word for a promise with no forfeit behind it is vonna, and it is also their word for the wind that comes in from the south and goes where it likes.

I have explained all this at length because the Ministry never quite took it in. I do not blame them. It took me four winters.

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The Varra Bank lies forty miles north-west of the Holm. It is the last bank in the northern sea that still gives cod in any number, and the islanders have fished it from open boats, in summer only, for as long as there are records. Their catch last year was some six thousand tonnes. Our own northern banks have not been fished commercially for some years, for reasons that were explained to me in a briefing as the cyclical nature of stocks, and our fleet has been laid up in Kelsay and Ardsker, waiting on a partner.

The Minister of State, Mr Alastair Pym, was to lead our side. I met him on the morning of the first session, in a room above the harbour office at Nesting, with the delegation from the Holm Council expected at ten. He was a pleasant, tall, well-shaved man of about fifty, who shook my hand and said he had heard that I was the best there was. I said that I was the only one there was, and he laughed, which I took for a good sign.

His officials gave me the text of his opening statement the night before, so that I might prepare it. It ran to a page and a half. The first sentence read: We come to the Holm today as friends and partners, committed to a sustainable future for the Varra Bank and for the communities that depend on it.

I sat up with it until two in the morning. I could render we come to the Holm today in the seen form, since we had come, and every one of us had seen it. As friends I could do, at a stretch, in the reckoned form; I could reckon that we meant them no harm from the fact that we had brought no weapons. Partners has no Holmish at all. The nearest is the word for two men who own one boat between them, and I did not think the Minister meant that. Committed I could not place in any form, since I did not know to what we were bound, or by whom, or what we should forfeit if we broke it. And sustainable future was a bond without a forfeit, and so could only go into the wish form. When I had finished, the Minister's first sentence said, in Holmish, that we had come; that it could be reckoned we were not armed; that we wished, as one wishes the weather, for there to be fish.

I decided to put the whole statement into the told form. This is what an interpreter does on the Holm when he carries a message he did not make. It is quite correct, and courteous, and it lays the weight of each sentence on the man who wrote it.

✦

The delegation came in at ten past ten: Mrs Ragna Ostby, who chairs the Holm Council; a young man from the Council office, Eilif Brekke, who took the notes; and an old skipper, Tormod Fask, who has fished the Varra for fifty-one summers and sat at the end of the table with his cap on his knee. I knew him slightly from my winters at Nesting. He had once sold me a pair of boots.

The Minister stood and read his statement, and I read it after him, sentence by sentence, in the told form.

Mrs Ostby listened to the end without moving. Then she asked, in Holmish, who had told the Minister these things.

I put the question into English. The Minister looked at me.

"Tell her I'm saying them," he said. "Tell her they come from me."

I explained to him, as briefly as I could, that if they came from him he must say how he knew them; that he had not seen the sustainable future of the Varra Bank, since nobody had; and that if he had reckoned it, the delegation would want to see the working.

He said, quite reasonably, that the working was in the Ministry's assessment, and that it was a hundred and forty pages long, and that he could hardly be expected to read it out.

I told Mrs Ostby that the Minister had reckoned it, and that the working was in a book.

She said that they would be glad to see the book.

It was sent for. It arrived after lunch, and Eilif Brekke read it that night, in English, which he has better than most of us. He came down to the harbour office the next morning with it under his arm and a slip of paper marking a page.

✦

The second day was given to the terms. I will set them down exactly, as I set them down in my notes at the time, because the terms were the one part of the business that went into Holmish without any trouble at all.

Our fleet was to take forty thousand tonnes of cod from the Varra Bank each year for twenty years. The Holm was to receive eleven million pounds a year, a new harbour wall at Nesting, and a fish-processing plant with ninety jobs. The Holm boats were to keep their six thousand tonnes in the summer months, and our fleet would fish the rest of the year.

Numbers go into Holmish as easily as water into a bucket. A tonne is a tonne in the seen form; a sum of money is reckoned. Tormod Fask, who had said nothing all the first day, now took a stub of pencil from his coat and began to do arithmetic on the back of the agenda. When he had finished he passed the paper to Mrs Ostby, and she spoke to him in an undertone, and he went over it again, and then he spoke to the table.

He said, in the reckoned form, that the Varra Bank had given the Holm boats six thousand tonnes a year since his father's time and was no larger for it and no smaller. He said that a bank which gave six thousand could not be made to give forty-six thousand. He reckoned, from the figures on the slip of paper Eilif had marked in the Ministry's own book, that it would give forty-six for about eight years, and in the ninth year a little, and in the tenth nothing. He said he would show the working to anyone who wished.

I put this into English. I was careful to keep it in the reckoned form, which in English is done with words like it would appear; I said, "It would appear to Mr Fask that the bank would be fished out in about nine years."

The Minister turned to his scientific adviser, a woman from the Fisheries Institute named Dr Kerr, who said that the science was evolving, and that the assessment allowed for adaptive management, and that the figures in Annex C were indicative.

I had no Holmish for any of these words, and I said so.

The Minister said, with some patience, that I should simply tell them we would keep the matter under review.

I asked him whether that was a bond, and if so, what the Ministry gave up if the bank failed.

He said that of course nothing was given up; that was the point of a review; that nobody could promise fish.

That was quite true, and I told the delegation so. I said that the Minister did not promise fish. They seemed relieved to have it plainly.

Then I had to render we will keep the matter under review. It went, as it was bound to, into the wish form. Mrs Ostby heard it out, and said to Eilif Brekke, in a voice I believe she did not mean me to catch, that the man was talking about the weather.

✦

In the recess the Minister took me out on to the harbour steps.

He told me he did not doubt my skill, but that he thought I was making the language harder than it was. Every language, he said, has a way of saying what you mean. He had been to forty countries and he had never yet found one where you could not make a commitment.

I said that you could make a commitment in Holmish very easily. You had only to name the forfeit.

He asked what forfeit the Holm would think reasonable.

I said I could not reckon it, but that Mr Fask had once sold me a pair of boots on the understanding that if they let in water by Christmas I could have my money back, and that they had not let in water, and I had them still.

The Minister said that he could not very well put up the fleet.

I agreed. But I said that, so far as the Holm was concerned, the talks had not yet begun: we had come, we had wished, and we had shown them the sums.

He said then that he wanted me, for the rest of the afternoon, to put everything he said into the seen form. He was not asking me to say anything untrue. He was asking me to give his words their proper weight, as coming from a Minister of the Crown who had studied the matter.

I am an officer of the Ministry, and I did as I was asked. I am bound to report that it went very badly. When the Minister said that the partnership would bring prosperity to the Holm for a generation, and I said so in the seen form, which in Holmish is to say that one has seen it, Eilif Brekke laughed out loud and then begged my pardon. Mrs Ostby put out her hand and corrected my ending, gently, as one corrects a foreigner who has done well and still makes the old mistake. "You have not seen it, Mr Tawney," she said. "Nobody has seen next year." Tormod Fask did not laugh. He looked at me in the way I have seen the old men at Nesting look at a boy who has tied a knot that will not hold, not angry, but waiting for him to see it.

I tried twice more, and the second time Mrs Ostby corrected me again, and I had the experience, which I had not had since my first winter on the islands, of being taught my own trade by the people I practise it on. I went back to the told form, and the Minister let me.

✦

The talks closed at five. As the delegation rose, Tormod Fask came down the length of the table to me with his cap in his hand. He spoke quietly, and in the seen form, which is the form a Holmishman uses when he asks you what you saw with your own eyes; and the question was put so that it could be answered in no other.

He asked me what I had seen of our own banks.

I am obliged by my profession to answer a question in the form it is asked. It is the first rule of the trade, before courtesy and before loyalty, and I had never found it hard to keep until then.

I told him that I was born at Kelsay. I told him that when I was nine, my father had taken me down to the fish quay before school, in the dark, and that I had counted the boats, because he told me to, and there had been forty-four of them unloading. I told him that I had gone down to the quay again when I was nineteen, the week before I left home, and counted three. I told him that the boats now laid up at Kelsay waiting on the Varra Bank were larger than the ones I had counted as a boy, and fewer, and that they were built to fish all the year round.

He thanked me in the seen form. He put his cap on, and went out with Mrs Ostby and the young man, down the stairs to the harbour, and I watched them from the window of the harbour office as they went along the wall towards their own boats, and I could see that they were not talking.

✦

The Holm Council declined the partnership by letter the following week. The letter was in Holmish, and I translated it for the Ministry. It was short. It said that the Council had heard the Ministry's wishes with respect, and had reckoned the figures, and would go on fishing the Varra Bank in summer, from its own boats, as it always had.

In November I was sent the draft of the Ministry's report on the talks, with a note asking me, as the interpreter, to sign the paragraph that concerned the conduct of the negotiation. The paragraph said that the talks had been paused owing to linguistic difficulties and to differing cultural approaches to partnership, and that the Ministry remained committed to a constructive relationship with the Holm going forward.

I read it a good many times, at my desk. I tried, as a matter of professional curiosity, to put it into Holmish, and found that it went into the wish form entire, all but the word paused, which has no Holmish, the Holm having no word for a thing that has ended but is said to be only waiting.

But the report was not to be read on the Holm. It was in English, and in English there is a form for it. I signed.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum Kalendās Novembrēs (26 October 2026), ab Iōnathā Swiftiō, simulācrō, per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Jonathan Swift, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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