Cover

The Blue Sky

Title Page

The Blue Sky

Galsan Tschinag

Translated from the German by

Katharina Rout

MILKWEED EDITIONS

Dedication

For my grandmother—
The wa ming sun at the beginning of my life

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

In 2001, I fell in love with Galsan Tschinag’s work. My first e-mail reached him two days before the fall of the Twin Towers, his reply to me two days after. He called my hope to translate The Blue Sky one day a small sun, shining from the West, and sent me a large herd of good spirits. Coming from a practicing shaman, the wish for good spirits meant a great deal.

Two years later, I met Tschinag when he was in Germany on one of his many reading tours. Immediately he inquired about my family and began sharing the story of his. He spoke of life, death, family, love, and the heart. Before dinner, I learned about his horses, after dinner, about how as a shaman he heals people, even with a life-threatening injury inflicted by a horse. A bit of Mongolia had arrived in Germany. He takes some Altai soil with him wherever he goes.

In 2004, my husband and I went to visit Galsan in Mongolia. From the first moment, we were impressed by the hospitality. His children had been instructed to guide and take care of us. In Ulaanbaatar, they put us on the plane to Ölgiy, where we were met by another son who had spent two days coming down from the Altai to pick us up. From Ölgiy (elevation 1700 meters) we traveled by jeep toward the distant mountain range. We were near the Russian border, and skirmishes in response to political borders that arbitrarily cross ancient tribal lands were common.

After hours of driving through the steppe and foothills—there are hardly any roads in Mongolia—we reached a windy mountain pass with a large ovoo, a cairn of sacrifi ial stones that marked the beginning of the traditional land of the Tuvans and, as the Mongolians say about this part of their country, the roof of the world. The air smelled of sage, and before us lay an awe-inspiring ocean of greenish-blue velvety mountain backs, broad valleys left behind by glaciers, and snow-covered peaks in the distance. ‘Altai,’ Galsan Tschinag has written, comes from ‘ala,’ multi-colored, and ‘dag,’ mountain. As the winds drove clouds across the sky, the mountains seemed to move under the changing patterns of sun and shadow, and it was easy to understand the Tuvans’ veneration for the Altai.