A Christmas Letter
One thing you should know is that I never regard myself a writer. I don't have that kind of lofty self-conception. Rather, I think I am just a weaver of words to while away the time and to seek peace, serenity, and salvation. I weave facts and fantasies into a woven fabric of manifestos, stories, and poems. I need to write just like I need to breathe. Words sustain me.
So now you should know fully who I am. I just told you everything about who I think I am, warts and all, in the recent manifesto, "Who Am I. Why Is My Name Wissai?" I held nothing back. I didn't want you to fall in love with a wrong conception and perception of me. I am too proud and arrogant to stoop low in order to conquer your heart. I always subscribe to the notion that honesty is the best policy. A victory without struggle is not worth fighting for. Don't take me wrong, you are not a target for me to seize and carry away. I just felt that you needed to know how I view the notions and myths of God, paradise, reincarnation, Judgment Day and other crap. I know all these notions and myths are important to you and you believe in them whole-heartedly. I used to look with disdain at those who believe in these notions and myths. But after meeting you, I realize that for some people, religion does do them good. I think that without religion, they are still good, but religion gives them a structural framework to have a moral view about the world. For most people, however, religion is just a superficiality. They are not transformed into better humans by the religion of their "choice". I used the word "choice" sarcastically because very few of them did a conscious study of the main religions available to them and then chose one of them. They just mindlessly adopted and accepted what they were brought up to believe in.
A guy like Nietzsche was an exception. He grew up in a family of clergymen. Fortunately for him, he was endowed with a superb inquisitive and independent mind. He came to believe in his teens that the notion of God was too gross for him. So he became an atheist (for reference, read his strange book "Ecce Homo" written before he broke down under the strains of syphilis). He wrote that "I do not by any means know atheism as a result, even less as an event: it is a matter of course with me, from instinct. I am too inquisitive, too questionable, too exuberant to stand for any gross answer. (Ich bin zu neugierig, zu fragwürdig, zu übermütig, um mir eine faustgroße Antwort gefallen zu lassen.) God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers---at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think!"
Please don't think I became an atheist after running into Nietzsche. I became an atheist at the age of eleven after having doubts about my mother's warnings of the terrible punishments from God if I didn't behave because I saw many wicked individuals in my neighborhood alive and prosperous while some virtuous folks suffered. I began thinking that God was not fair or more importantly, He was just a tool, a concept Man invented. Later, in my late teens and twenties when I read that Nietzsche and Bertrand Russell forsook the notion of God when they were about 15, 16 years of age, I got very proud of my metaphysical precocity. I think a human's views of the world rest on two main pillars of thought: whether or not there is a God and whether or not life is worth living.
But enough about God, let's go back and talk about writing and why people have an urge to write and post their thoughts in blogs and Internet forum groups. I obliquely mentioned that in the recent short speech I gave at a book signing event. The gist of that speech is as follows:
"Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends who love poetry:
It was a honor for me to be invited here by my friend, the poet of the book of poems that most of you are holding in your hands, to read translation of a poem of his into English. Before doing so, I would like to say a few words, if I may, about language, poetry, and poetry translation.
All beings have a need to communicate. Plants communicate via chemicals. Animals do so by secreting chemicals and emitting sounds. Humans, the most developed animal on this planet, has the most elaborate sound system expressed by means of language and music.
Two humans, like two lovers freshly in love, can talk with each other for hours, from dawn to dusk. A person can speak for hours in front of a rapt audience which observes absolute silence. On the other hand, a comedian, via the spoken words, can make an audience laugh rollickingly, their faces radiant with understanding, pleasure, and communion. No other animals on this planet can do so. From ordinary speech, humans have progressed to poetry to express the most deeply felt thoughts in a condensed and suggestive manner. A person who was struggling with the thought of killing himself could say in prose such as, "I feel so depressed that I don't want to live anymore" or he could say in verse as follows:
Mây đã trôi đi tận cuối trời
Mang theo xác chết của hồn tôi
NKB
The clouds have floated to the horizon
Carrying with them the corpse of my soul
I think by expressing his suicidal thought in a poetic and metaphorical manner, he unconsciously struggled to stay alive. To understand poetry is easier than to write poetry. Everybody knows about that. The two processes are different. One process is passive, requiring no quick recollection of words and arrangement of them in a striking, memorable, and musical manner, as in the other process.
Poetry and Music go hand in hand. That's why it is easy to put a poem into a song. And each song is a poem delivered with music. A poem must have musicality. Musicality is more than just rhyme. Musicality is governed by rhythm and cadence. That's why we have free verse and poetry in prose. Poetry has many genres: epic, elegiac, lyric, humorous, and surreal.
The poetry of my friend Lưu Nguyễn Đạt is imbued with musicality while exhibiting both lyricism and surrealism, hence resistant to rendition. His poems are laden with unusual words and ideas. The French have a saying, "traduire, c'est trahir" (to translate is to betray.) I have translated into English some poems of several Vietnamese poets. Mr. LNDat's poems stretched to the limit my linguistic abilities. It was exceedingly harder for me to translate them than even the poems of Bùi Giáng and Phạm Công Thiện. In my opinion, to translate is not necessarily an act of betrayal. It is a creative process of giving birth to the twin of the original. Each language is a world of its own. It reflects the special way its speakers have learned to express themselves over thousands of years. Two peoples can walk together in the same path but the footprints of each people cannot be identical. To translate is to convey the same journey while recognizing the differences in footprints. The translation done by the computer does not and cannot recognize the subtle differences in footprints. The machine tries to match the footprints by means of literal translation. The result is that the translation sounds stilted, awkward, clumsy, and sometimes nonsensical. Most translations I have seen in the Internet forums are not much better than those done by Google translation algorithms. The translations may consist of end rhymes, but lack rhythm. Most of the time, they fail to capture the essence, the spirit of the original. To know a language in depth requires a lifetime of dedicated immersion. One can tell the level of mastery by the way a person expresses himself in writing, let alone a poetry translation.
To translate a poem is a labor of intense love. When we translate, we engage in a process of falling in love with the words of the original text. We wrestle with them, we make love with them and we make them become our own. We want to prolong the pleasure of making love; we wish we could write those words ourselves. A translated poem that has merit is the one that meets our wish and the challenge of the original. An elderly Vietnamese gentleman could say the following line to his newly found young love:
Yêu em là đi ngược lại thủy triều của thời gian
T'aimer, c'est marcher contre la marée du temps
To love you is to march against the rising tide of time
I think when he added the adjective "rising" in the English translation he knows something about musicality and he has a feel for the rhythm of the English language. He is not a translation machine. He has become a poet himself.
Now I invite you to enjoy the lyricism and surrealism of a poem of Mr. Lưu Nguyễn Đạt in three languages:
ĐUỔI BẮT MẶT TRỜI
ta bay đuổi bắt mặt trời
kéo đêm bừng sáng vợi vời bên em
cánh mây bát ngát gió mềm
vuốt ve giấc ngủ tụ xuyên bóng thừa
thân yêu thai nghén hạt mưa
rừng thiêng núi biếc vẫn chưa nối liền
quanh đây tiếng gọi triền miên
thời gian hé mở góc thiền trong tâm
LNDat
ATTRAPER LE SOLEIL
je vole pour attraper le soleil
tirant de la nuit
la lumière à ton côté
les ailes de nuages au vent immense
caressent le sommeil
sur les oreillers d'ombres
tu portes dans ton corps
un embryon de pluie
à l'appel incessant de la nature mystique
les forêts sacrées s'éloignent des collines vertes
et le temps s'ouvre en béance
dans l'âme éveillée
Traduit par l'auteur
TO SEIZE THE SUN
i fly high in the sky
to seize the sun
from the stillness of the night
to bring light by your side
vast wings of clouds
take off in flight
with the help of gentle winds
caressing the sleep lying in superfluous shades
you carry inside
a seed of rain
the sacred forests haven't linked with green mountains
in response to the unending call time unfolds itself
in the Zen corner of the awakened soul
Translated by Roberto Wissai/NKBa'
Cherry, this letter is getting much longer than I intended. I'm going to say a few more words then I will sign off.
A poem worth its name must be written in blood, sweat, and tears. It must have its gestation in the throbbing heart and was born via the restless mind. It is a cherished, wanted child of the poet. Each word and each line were chosen and nourished with care and consideration. They were not withdrawn from the storehouse of the ready made words, available for use on demand. A good poem commands attention of the reader at once. It forces the reader to slow down, savoring each word. And when he gets to the end, he goes back up reading the poem again and again. The immortal poems have that hypnotic effect on the reader. Le style, c'est l'homme. Văn là Người. Thơ là Tất Cả. The Style is the Man. Poetry is Everything. It is the Logos.
Anybody can write verse. However, to write good poetry is very difficult, as difficult as to be a true human. A true poet must be free, transcendental, noble in sentiments, romantic but not lewd, serious but not severe, sensuous but not sentimental, friendly but not clownish.
Man is a social animal. He has a need to share his thoughts and feelings, and to be understood. To write prose is to share one's thoughts and feelings in a formal, lasting manner. To write poetry is to journey in a land of metaphors and suggestions. To translate is to attempt the impossible. And for me, a dyed-in-the-wool atheist, to write this kind of Christmas letter to a devout Christian like you is an act of romantic suicide. Nevertheless, I harbor an undying wish some day you come to understand that you left some beautiful, unforgettable memories with me.
Happy Holidays of 2015!
Wissai
December 12, 2014
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