Cổ Thi

Cổ Thi

Âm Hán Việt:

Quy nhân linh xác, thố nhân hào,

Hạc vị đầu hồng, thúy vị mao .

Hoa hữu sắc kiều tao điệp luyến,

Điểu nguyên thanh hảo bị lung lao .

Nhân năng xuất chúng đa tao họa,

Mã tráng bôn trình phản thụ lao .

Hội sự bất như thôi bất hội,

Đắc ta an lạc tối vi cao .

 

 

Dịch nghĩa:

 

Con rùa (bị hại) vì cái vỏ tốt, thỏ vì lông,

Con hạc vì cái đầu đẹp, con chim trả vì bộ lông.

Hoa có sắc đẹp thành ra bị bướm quấn quýt,

Chim nhân vì hót hay mà bị nhốt ở trong lồng.

Người mà tài năng xuất chúng phần đông gặp tai họa,

Ngựa chạy giỏi thì lại chịu khổ nhọc.

Biết việc không bằng thoái thác không biết việc,

Được chút yên vui là điều tốt (cao) nhất .

Thầy Đồ Lương

Facts and Truths, Friendship/Love, and Meanings of Life

Facts, Truths, Friendship/Love, and Meanings of Life

Rimbaud, the enfant terrible of French literature, stopped writing poetry when he turned nineteen or so, and turned to various schemes to make money, one of which was gun running. I read a long time ago that once during a high school exam involving writing poetry in Latin, the teacher found Rimbaud fidgety and distracted and not terribly interested in the task required so he came over, asking in a sarcastic tone, "what's the matter? the great prodigy is having problem with the exam?" Rimbaud complained that he was hungry and therefore couldn't write." "Is that all the problem is?", the teacher said, "go get something to eat and come back here to write."  So, the story goes, Rimbaud left, came came back with a full stomach and wrote feverishly for an hour or so and aced the exam. 

I don't know how true the story was, but it was cute, and I like cute things in life, just cute, not too cute because if too cute, things seem affected and artificial. At any rate, I think the story illustrates a fact, in my opinion, that poetry belongs to the realm of the sublime and the mysterious, and seems to hit people at an early age. Poets tend to write their best poetry when they are young, impressionable, hot-blooded, and morose. Rimbaud and Neruda certainly did that. And all famous poets, in my unscientific estimation once more, are known only for no more than 5 poems. The Muse of Poetry does not stay for long with one poet. She is fickle and unfaithful. And she likes young men and women, usually in their teens or twenties. And the fact is that either you can write poetry or you cannot. There's no way in between. Yes, you can put words together and make them rhyme, but that does not make you a poet. A poet is the one who is drunk with words, crazy with ideas, and he pus them together in a striking, memorable way. Words roll off his tongue like nectar from the gods. We taste them, and we are transformed. For brief moments, we feel like God-like ourselves, powerful and beyond space and time. Yes, I am a "grand" theorist about poetry, but I am not sure if I am a poet myself. Take the latest "poem" I just wrote a few days ago, 

More than kisses, letters mix and mingle souls;
More than words, feelings travel across space.
Tonight they threaten to get out of control. 
They demand a place, they want to leave a trace.
Won't your heart open the door?
Need I say something more? 
I guess I do, so here is some e.e.cummings for you:

since feeling is first
who pays any attention 
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world 

my blood approves, 
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
---the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph 

and Death I think is no parenthesis 

The poem owed its genesis to the line of John Donne, "More than kisses, letters mingle souls". An old, antique, and ancient friend sent me that line, out of the blue. I didn't know what she meant with it, but it resonated deeply with me. The line refused to go away after I read it. It echoed and reverberated in my mind. "Letters" can be more than missives, even the love ones; they can just be the alphabet letters. At any rate, it is a great line, but not musical enough for me, so I add "mix and" to it and I took off from there. The next 6 lines were my own creation, addressing and confronting real sentiments that have been torturing me, then I felt that I had to drag in e.e. cummings, the master of oblique understatements, to further make my point. Taken together, the line of John Donne, my lines, and those of e.e.cummings, constitute a haunting, romantic, beautiful sentiment; a command to seize the time and translate the feeling iinto action for Death, at my age, is real and pressing, and not an afterthought, not a parenthesis. 

But the title of this "essay" is about facts, truth, friendship//love, and meanings of life, not poetry. But poetry is a fact of life, and it is sometimes a way to higher truths. I don't know why I've been obsessed with facts and truths, even when I was a young boy, more so than most people I know. These people seem to lie more easily and to believe in nonsense more readily than I do. I suppose my penchant for and predisposition to facts and truths have something to do with my desire to get to the bottom and into the marrow of things. I also want to know if I just act and show who I really am, without going through the charade of lying and putting on a facade of being somebody who I am not, whether or not people would still like and love me. As a social being, I can't help but long to be accepted, liked, and loved. However, as a person with pride and ego, I want to be accepted, liked, and loved on my own terms. I happen to have a disdain for conventional wisdom and social mores. To me, they are for morons, cowards, politicians, and "religious" leaders. I think it is the search for friendship, camaraderie, even love, that led people to join gangs, cults, and ISIS. Humans would do anything to fill the void they feel within. To be a human being is to be cursed with the longing to be understood and loved. To be loved means one must be lovable. For that to happen, one must be fair and unselfish. Selfish people are the loneliest people in this world. They only know their needs; they don't know or bother to know the needs of others. Emotionally they are stunted. They remain children. They don't know the meanings of friendship, love, and life. 

More than kisses, letters mix and mingle souls

To Cherry Ginkgo 

More than kisses, letters mix and mingle souls;

More than words, feelings travel across space.

Tonight they threaten to get out of control. 

They demand a place, they want to leave a trace.

Won't your heart open the door?

Need I say something more? 

I guess I do, so here is some e.e.cummings for you:

since feeling is first

who pays any attention 

to the syntax of things

will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool

while Spring is in the world 

my blood approves, 

and kisses are a better fate

than wisdom

lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry

---the best gesture of my brain is less than

your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then

laugh, leaning back in my arms

for life's not a paragraph 

and Death I think is no parenthesis 

Bragging

Bragging

Everybody knows living is not easy for all kinds of sentient beings. Everyday there's a danger of being eaten or destroyed by superior or more numerous foes. To enhance the survival probability, organisms have evolved and adapted and developed defense mechanisms. For humans, the mechanisms involve deception, outright lies, exploitation of the gullible, the trusting, and the feeble-minded. Some insecure, fucked-up, inferiority complex-ridden assholes and motherfuckers even resort to badmouthing and slandering those humans who are more gifted than them. I personally know three assholes and motherfuckers who behave exactly like that. Two hailed from North Vietnam. One came from Hue, the former capital of Vietnam when it was a kingdom in name under the stupid and ineffectual Nguyễn Dynasty. These assholes and motherfuckers managed to graduate from college and hold jobs. They obviously regard themselves as smart. I concede that they are smart all right, but animal-smart, not human-smart. I mean, they lie, cheat, slander, and are envious of the achievements of others. They have not accomplished what sub-humans cannot do. They can't write, can't paint, can't sculpture, can't  produce anything that distinguishes them from others or ensure their names would live on in posterity. They don't read, therefore their knowledge is abysmal. In addition, they don't reason worth a damn. They all assert without any substantiation.

One thing I hate and despise most about them is that they meaninglessly love to brag about themselves. One of them brags about being a fighter for human rights but the motherfucker is a coward. He dares not set foot in Vietnam. He dares not make himself known as a fierce anti-VC fighter. He labors in obscurity because he is a chicken shit "human rights fighter" ( sic!). 

One bragged that he is a womanizer and has the most girlfriends in the 200-plus-members organization. When asked to produce evidence, he sheepishly backed off. 

The one from Hue is a sly back stabber and a hidden "envier". He pretends to be a soft-spoken, sharply-dressed gentleman, but everybody knows he is a cheap bastard. The wedding present he brought to my wedding was a joke!

Don't take me wrong. I am not against bragging and braggarts. I understand the need to brag. If you are not your own best fan, who is? Bragging is good for lonely, insecure, self-doubting souls. It boosts up much needed confidence. It props up sagging self-confidence. But bragging must be about real, true, concrete accomplishments, not about airy, masturbatory, dreamed-up achievements. 

Take Nietzsche, if you want an example of real bragging. The only not quite correct bragging he did was about his military service in the Prussian Army. He did serve, but not as gloriously as he insulated. The rest of his bragging were borne out by evidence. He predicted that he would be famous and an event in the history of human thought and he was right. He asserted that only he and Heine were the best stylists in the German language and he was right. He inspired me to take up German because I said to myself that if he was so good in English translation, he must be awesome in the original. Nietzsche has influenced generations of thinkers and writers. He had penetrating insights about humans. He had original thoughts about morality and the sick, unhealthy doctrines embraced by Christianity. He was also a poet, a philologist,  and a musician. Not knowing Nietzsche is a sin! To read him is to be transformed. 

Okay, I am fond of bragging myself. Why not? I never respect social conventions. They are for morons and cowards. So what have I bragged about? Let me count the ways:

1. To start off, I look really good and sexy at the age of 65. I am likely to stay so for the next 10 years. 

2. Women have flocked to me like bees to honey because I possess a magnetic, dynamic personality besides my looks. I can be funny and witty. I crack jokes. I have the best one-liners in this part of the hemisphere. I am endowed with a "feminine" personality, so I understand women. I know what they want to hear. If not for my thriftiness, I would have a hard time to keep women from knocking on my door. The line would be ten miles long!

3. I read widely. I can think, reason cogently, and boy, can I write! I am the best translator of Vietnamese poetry, hands down. When I am turned on, I can write beautiful, lyrical poems in English. I know I have about six poems that will live on after I die, one of which is Laura, a poem originally written in French by me and marvelously translated into English by yours truly. It was about the bitch Laura whom I foolishly loved and pined for over 30 years until one Sunday morning when I suddenly realized, got a satori, an aha moment, that she didn't deserve my love and that emotionally I am constitutionally better than she is. 

4. I know several languages. From my studying them, I have come up with some theories about the functions of the human brain, the nature of language, and the process of language acquisition.

5. Like Nietzsche, I am no mere man. I am dynamite. I am a phenomenon.

Have I turned you off yet? Anyway, another Happy Holidays greetings from me. The sun came out to play today. Sunlight was dancing on my way to work this morning.   

Thus Spake Wissai

December 20, 2014

Christmas of 2014 Is Here. Not Far Behind is New Year

Christmas Is Here; Not Far Behind is New Year

I used to write an annual rumination as the old year was drawing to a close, reflecting on what I had accomplished and set up resolutions for the new year. I stopped the practice a few years ago because then I was caught up (?)  in an "epic" struggle to put my finances in order. Now I have weathered the storm and become "wiser" emotionally and socially, the urge to write is upon me once more. So dear readers, I am going to let loose whatever in my mind, bare my soul, unchain my heart, mix and entangle facts and fiction, and throw caution to the wind.

Sometime ago, a friend slyly made an inquiry,, posited a question to me as to what gave me the greatest pleasures in life. I answered unhesitatingly, "to read, to think, and to write." Upon hearing my lightning fast reply, he was stunned and speechless, looking at me intensely like he was trying to detect if I was being flippant and facetious in my answer. When he found none, he sighed and said, "I know you are strange and different, but I didn't know you were that strange and different." To that pedestrian remark, I retorted, "What did you expect me to say? That to fuck, to accumulate a lot of money, to have power and lord over others, and to seek fame? Those goals are for stupid, insensitive, unenlightened human animals. I have told you time and time again I ain't no fucking regular human animal. I am a real human with real human aspirations. I want to do things that sub-humans can't do."

Yes, since day one, since the dawn of my consciousness when I was eleven years of age, I've been eternally aware that I was blessed of being born as a human being, and not as a dog or a pig. I know my mission in life is to conduct myself as a human being. Sometimes I fall short in my mission. Sometimes I stumble, fall down, even regress, but I always get up and resume my march in the journey from darkness to light, from ignorance to knowledge, from banality to sublimity. Yes, I set a high bar for myself. Yes, I am prideful and arrogant. Yes, I am in love with myself. 

I recently wrote that a man's worldview rests on two pillars of thought: whether or not there is a God who takes an interest in his creation, mainly human beings on this planet; and whether or not life is worth living. Now I would like to add that besides getting to know a man's worldview by inquiring and investigating his attitude about God and suicide, a man's true character and color can be determined by his conduct regarding power, money, fame, love and sex. 

The issue of God and religion can be used to gauge the depth, the true caliber of a person's intellect as well as his emotional strength. I read today that religion is a palliative for the masses. Yes, it really is, and no more. Sadly, the masses stupidly think religion is a way to truth. They don't know to reach truth, they must take the route of philosophy. Maybe, for them, that route is  inaccessible. You must have a mind and a courage to tackle philosophy. A person first must know himself and his intellectual limitations. The masses never know and understand Alexander Pope's exhortation, "the proper study of man is man himself. Man is the measure of all things." Yes, Man, not God, must be the starting point of inquiry. To do otherwise is to put the cart before the horse. 

So Truth and Knowledge and Justice and Beauty should be the ideals, the goals for a man's endeavors in life. They must be the same ideals and goals when he writes. There is nothing more shameful than to lie and to put oneself in the service of distorting and twisting the words of others in order to annoy and hurt those one hates. But I see human animals do that day in and day out. I can cite the names of those human animals which, not who, fancy that they are educated because they managed to graduate from college, but they cannot write worth a damn in either their mother tongue or in English. I can back up my observations with specific examples of the lame, crippled prose, replete with weak, infantile, unsubstantiated "arguments" of these human animals. But I won't, but almost anybody who has even a cursory interest in what has come out of the pens of these animals know who they are. My contempt for them is immense. They serve a function to remind me that I am lucky of not being like them.

To combat the inevitable ill effects these human animals have on me, I turn to the pleasant memories associated with certain friends who understand and value the beauty of my words and the power of my intellect. The sight of a smiling lady friend embracing a majestic tree has reminded me of the communion of life force and beauty. The saintly character of my friend Omar has alleviated my cynicism. The help my friend Bob has given me in connection with electronic matters as well as his honesty and sense of fairness have soothed my turbulent, lonely soul. The unforgettable dinner outing at a Korean BBQ restaurant in Los Angeles has deepened my appreciation of friendship. And of course, the memories of a friend who embraced me warmly upon seeing me have inspired me to write essays and poems and short stories. I hope one day the friend would understand how deep my feelings and reveries are. 

Happy Holidays and a wonderful year of 2015. 

A Prayer in French

Seigneur, faites de moi un instrument de votre paix.

Là où il y a de la haine, que je mette l'amour.

Là où il y a l'offense, que je mette le pardon.

Là où il y a la discorde, que je mette l'union.

Là où il y a l'erreur, que je mette la vérité.

Là où il y a le doute, que je mette la foi.

Là où il y a le désespoir, que je mette l'espérance.

Là où il y a les ténèbres, que je mette votre lumière.

Là où il y a la tristesse, que je mette la joie.

Ô Maître, que je ne cherche pas tant à être consolé qu'à consoler,

à être compris qu'à comprendre,

à être aimé qu'à aimer,

car c'est en donnant qu'on reçoit,

c'est en s'oubliant qu'on trouve, c'est en pardonnant

I Thought Getting Old Was...

JE CROYAIS QUE VIEILLIR...

 

                                                              

 

 

 

JE CROYAIS QUE VIEILLIR...

Marcelle Paponneau

 

Je croyais que vieillir me rendait bien maus​sade,

Craignant chaque saison, les années, le tapage,

Le grand vent et la pluie, l'esprit qui se dégrade,

Les cheveux clairsemés, les rides du visage.

 

Et puis je m'apercois* que vieillir n'a pas d'âge,

Qu' il ne faut point gémir, au contraire chanter.

Et même, à petits pas, les jours ont l'avantage

D'être beaux et trop courts quand ils sont limités.

 

Je croyais que vieillir c'était le ciel tous gris,

Le printemps sans les fleurs, les lèvres sans sourire,

Les fleurs sans chansons, les arbres rabougir,

Un livre sans histoire, un crayon sans écrire.

 

Et puis je m'aperçois que vieilir rendre bien sage,

Que je vis chaque instant sans penser à demain,

Que je ne compte plus les anneés de mon âge,

Peu importe le temps, le crayon à la main.

 

Je croyais que vieillir transformerait mon âme,

Que je ne saurais plus contempler les étoiles,

Que mon coeur endurci n'aurait plus cette flamme,

Qui transforme ma vie lorsque le ciel se voile.

 

Et puis je m'aperçois que les plus belles roses

Fleurissent à l'automne et sous mes yeux ravis,

Je respire très fort ce doux parfum que j'ose

Garder pour embaumer l'automne de ma vie.

Tuổi vào thu

Tôi cứ nghĩ tuổi già đầy nỗi sợ,

Sợ mùa sang, sợ năm tháng qua mau,

Sợ gió mưa, sợ tâm hồn băng hoại,

Sợ tóc phai màu, sợ cả nếp nhăn.

 

Nhưng nhận ra tuổi già không giới hạn,

Không muộn phiền còn đem lại nguồn vui.

Tôi chậm bước trên đoạn đường còn lại,

Hưởng ngày vui ngắn ngủi chẳng còn bao.

 

Tôi vẫn tưởng tuổi già trời ảm đạm,

Xuân thiếu hoa và vắng cả tiếng cười,

Hoa không nở và cây không nẩy lộc,

Sách không lời cầm bút chẳng ra thơ!

 

Chợt nhận ra tuổi già lòng lắng lại,

Sống hôm nay chẳng nghĩ đến ngày mai.

Thôi không đếm tuổi đời thêm chồng chất,

Mặc ngày qua, cầm bút họa thành thơ.

 

Tôi cứ ngỡ tuổi già hồn băng giá,

Quên đắm mình ngắm vũ trụ đầy sao,

Tim chai đá chẳng dấy lên ngọn lửa,

Cả bầu trời u tối phủ đời tôi!

 

Bỗng nhìn thấy những đóa hồng đẹp nhất,

Nở vào thu bằng đôi mắt reo vui,

Hít thật sâu ôi mùi hương tỏa nhẹ,

Ướp cho đầy hương vị Tuổi Vào Thu

Chú thích của Wissai:

Bản tiếng Việt "đưa tới" (forwarded) từ một ông bạn già sống bên Úc

I Thought Getting Old Was...

translated by Roberto Wissai/NKBa'

I thought getting old was getting morose, 

Fearing the passing of each season, the years, the pace,

The raging winds and the rains, the sinking spirits,

The thinning hair, the lines on the face.

And then I realize getting old is not about age,

That no point for me to tremble with fear, but to chant.

The days, moment by moment, now have the upper hand

For they're beautiful when they're in short supply.

I thought getting old was the sky was all gray,

Spring without flowers, lips without smiles,

Flowers without songs, trees without growth,

A book without story, a pen that can't write.

And then I realize getting old makes me become wise,

That I live for each moment without thinking about tomorrow,

I no longer count the years of my age,

Time matters little, neither does the pen in my hand.

I thought getting old transformed my soul,

That I would no longer know how to count the stars,

That my hardened heart would not have this burning flame

That modifies my life when the sky is covered with clouds.

And then I realize the most beautiful roses

Are blooming right under my joyful eyes in the fall,

I deeply inhale this gentle perfume 

In order to sweeten the autumn of my life

Wissai

December 17, 2014