Selections from Chẹc chech 30 poems in English
Bản chuyển ngữ của nhà thơ – họa sĩ Trần Đán
Copyright © 2010 by Nguyễn Đình
Chính
Ghi chú: Thứ tự các bài thơ đã được sắp xếp lại theo ý
người dịch, từ tuyệt vọng đến hi vọng
Selections from Chẹc Chẹc by Nguyễn Đình Chính
Selections from Chẹc Chẹc by Nguyễn Đình Chính
1.
Những
hạt bụi hóa đá (tr. 131) - Dust into stone
2.
Bài
thơ chết (tr.154)
- The death poem
3.
Trống
rỗng (tr.114) - Emptiness
4.
Tia nắng (tr.110) - Ray of sun
5.
Nỗi
buồn rách nát (tr.86) - Sorrow torn to shreds
6.
Tôi
cũng là người vô gia cư (tr.27)
- I too am homeless
7.
Tiễn
biệt chó (tr. 89) - A dog of a goodbye
8.
Bài
thơ tủ lạnh (tr. 96) - The frige poem
9.
Cục
cứt thơ (tr. 60) - Bullshit poetry
10.
Những
bữa tiệc ăn thịt người (tr.62) - The cannibals’ feasts
11.
Zê
xe đạp (tr. 66) - Screw the bike
12.
Thơ
vĩa hè (tr. 70) - Poetry gone wild
13.
Hà
nội mùa rét cởi truồng (tr. 73) - Ha Noi naked in winter
14.
Tự
do ngoáy đít (tr.75) - Freedom shakes its buttocks
15.
Bức
tường (tr.107) - The wall
16.
Nhai
sự thật (tr. 156)
- Chewing the truth
17.
Bài
thơ chẹc chẹc mùa Xuân ( tr. 25) - Smacking elegy for Springtime
18.
Đi
phượt em ơi (tr. 33) - Hey my love let’s go easy riding
20.
Bay
lên (tr. 40) - Up we fly
21.
Cùng
hát lên (tr. 23) - Let us sing
22.
Thông
điệp hoa hồng (tr.151) - Message of the rose
Selected Poems from Tsk tsk
by Nguyễn Đình
Chính
Hanoi,
Vietnam
2010
Selected Poems from Tsk tsk by Nguyễn Đình Chính is a
staccato spouting, street vernacular-jammed, angry smacking of the tongue that
shines a light on present conditions in Vietnam. The selection ends with the poem “Message
from the Rose” - a ray of hope.
Born to a famed father, Nguyễn
Đình Thi, a writer dear to the Vietnamese Revolution, Nguyễn Đình Chính joined
the North Vietnamese People’s Army at 18. He trained in the rugged but
picturesque mountains of Yên Tử, Quảng Ninh, 125 kilometers west of the capital
Hà Nội. It was there that, in the
thirteenth century, King Trần Nhân Tông retreated to, having repelled the
invading Mongols and forgiven his internal enemies. He later founded a Zen sect
– the Trúc Lâm Yên Tử.
The king’s ideas and practices on reconciliation and peace have earned him the
honor of having a study center at Harvard named after him. Perhaps the benevolent spirit of the king
looked out for the young soldier during the war. .
When the war ended in 1975, Chính returned
home to Hà Nội. Over the next ten years,
disastrous economic and political policies sent thousands of the defeated
Southern soldiers into reeducation camps, drove millions of Vietnamese to the
sea, and pitched Vietnam against two traditional enemies – Kampuchea and China. With the Soviet Union dismantled, the leaders
of Vietnam embarked on their version of perestroika to save the economy – and
ultimately their own power. Once the
economy had been stabilized, the leaders turned their backs on their own
people. All calls for true freedom and
democracy were extinguished. Corruption
was rampant; justice, a farce. The conspicuous accumulation of wealth by those
in power led to an obscene gap between the “haves” and “have-nots,” unrivalled
by that of the oft-condemned capitalist societies.
More than sixty years after the
August Revolution, thirty years after the end of the war in 1975, the poet asks
the question: What has happened to the
ideals of liberty, equality, and humanity, for which his generation had fought
so hard? What he sees is disheartening.
my
people stripped naked
my
wounded people
my
people toiling in sweats
shackled
feet to feet
crawling
on all four
must
beg for freedom
&
truth
The Death Poem
What has become of his home-land?
I
want to share with you
this
sorrow that no words can express
that
belongs to no one
the
homeless sorrow
like
a whiff of wind
forever
wandering
within
the walls of my homeland
Let Us Sing
Everywhere he goes, the poet
stumbles upon the horrors of the “cannibals’ feasts,” the savage dog-eat-dog
decadence that the communist rulers vilify, yet practice.
where
your soul’s spread-eagled on the banquet table
&
chopped into pieces to be steamed
baked
& roasted
You
tie a napkin around your neck & lunge at it
&
devour it voraciously
smacking
your lips
The Cannibals’ Feast
Alas, this time the enemy is not
the easily identifiable Other: the continent-grabbing, resource-exploiting,
bomb-dropping, herbicide-spraying colonial conquistadores. To the poet, the
enemy hides in
the
arrogant face of the filthy rich son-of-a-bitch
(he
doesn’t steal, he just grabs)
the
intellectual covering his ears shut
the
writer writing in fear
while
the vain and the empty-minded proclaim themselves kings
and
the iron fist rules.
Bullshit Poetry
This time the enemy is within: the corrupted revolutionaries,
the cowed intellectuals, the frightened writers. He was once among them.
conscience
watches over half-heartedly
&
a false morality a thousand years strong smiles sheepishly
while
you [satyr] erect a memorial for your soul
The Wall
To Chính this constitutes the
ultimate betrayal of the ideals of the Revolution. In such a state, the poet and his kindred
souls are submerged in despair.
specks
of dust we are
unable
to die
&
even worse unable to live
in
the paradise of our homeland.
Dust into Stone
A sense of existential
homelessness pervades.
i’m
homeless in my own homeland
every
time I mourn my people in songs
like
casting a bowl of steamed rice throughout the sky
to
feed the sea of starving souls
my
people died in vain
in
a senseless war that only blesses power
&
riches upon a bunch of faceless scoundrels
I Too Am Homeless
The poet can no longer stay
silent, and must raise the voice of the “old soldier of yonder years/betrayed”
(The Message of the Rose.) Scorning the safe subjects of the poetry of
the day – love, beauty, heroism – Chính fearlessly and unabashedly tackles
taboo subjects such as corruption, sex, and cowardliness.
At times his dark and cynical
vision is reminiscent of Sylvia Plath.
nothing
to panic about
death’s
not so bad after all
granted
a funeral’s a bothersome affair but thereafter
your
flesh’s gone (can’t consume any more)
your
soul will run away to a mysterious world of
illusions
scrambling the real unreal christ buddha
(can’t
be a sacrificial lamb any more)
The Cannibals’ Feasts
At other times he’s full of fury
as Vladimir Mayakovsky.
once
in a mad drunken dream
you
[satyr] caught freedom by its balls
wiggling
its oily slithering body
she
coughs like mad
shakes
her buttocks furiously
gasps
desperately for air
causing
you [satyr] to gulp & swallow wildly
(what
you gulp & swallow no one knows)
as
you grope for a way out of the triple-locked dog cage
as
you try to save your soul from
the
dizzying dark strangling chest-crushing
drunkenness
Freedom Shakes her
Buttocks
The enemy is also the stale condition of
poetry, a poetry made subservient to the one-party state, bent on embellishing
reality, a practice he himself once engaged in.
that’s
why your poetry [satyr’s] must crawl on all fours
must beg for a living
in
torn clothes & wearing shit-soaked shoes
must
steal food (steal, not take)
howl like a stray dog,
puke
up all kinds of poison (the plague.)
Bullshit
Poetry
Thereupon Chính unleashes a
street-born poetry, full of street angst.
your
poetry not your miserable body is kicked out onto the pavement
out
of its asskissing sugarcoating habits
all
for the sake of planning guiding educating securing enslaving
(but
if your poetry makes the Man mad he swears
he’ll
beat you silly with his baton
zap
you with his electric whip)
Poetry
Gone Wild
To describe a reality so
incomprehensibly obscene, Chinh employs new literary devices and experiments with new forms of language.
Defying literary norms he jams
street language into poetry, a street language full of vulgar obscenities.
sleep
well my piece of shit
dream
sweet dreams
grow
yourself a pair of wings so clumsy so sorry at first
but
soon swinging to rhythms
of
the vaginal soul
Bullshit Poetry
To critics from the establishment
who accuse him of debasing poetry, Chinh turns Lenin and Mao’s contempt for
intellectuals on their heads: if Lenin and Mao had cast intellectuals as
worthless shit, bound in their ivory tower, running away from reality, then
Chinh is bringing reality into poetry.
Reproducing the chaotic din of
the streets, Chính powers his poems with sounds of dog barking - woof woof woof , ruff
ruff ruff - and untranslatable teenage music sounds - xap
xinh xap xinh. Chính is no doubt
inspired by the heavy metal music played by his 8X daughter and her band, the Gỗ Lim.
To further rile the old guard of
language, Chính rigs his poems with 8X generation slang such as đao mèo(fuck it,) thắng chí ẩu (what’s the hell).
As blunt and in-your-face as he
can be, Chinh is also as adroit at the uniquely Vietnamese linguistic
sleight-of-hand known as nói lái. The writer or speaker starts with a word-pair
whose meaning he seeks to obfuscate. The
original word-pair is usually socially subversive - sexually or politically. By recombining the vowels, consonants and
accents , he generates several word-pairs that are either socially acceptable
or meaningless. Thus, thơ lồn (poetry of the cunt)
becomes thờ
lôn (elegy to
the meaningless lôn,) and đeo mào
(fuck it)
becomes đao mèo (a cat’s saber.) This is a very
common practice used by both the highly educated and the common people when
they aim to mock a powerful establishment. Deciphering the double entendre is a
challenge thrown at the foe. Hồ Xuân Hương, the nineteenth-century poetess revered for her
unrivalled sex-laced innuendoes, is a master at such technique. Both Huong and
Chinh share a deep contempt for the stale state of language to describe
reality, as well as the desire to taunt censors.
With the same impatience he does
away with punctuation as an unnecessary linguistic encumbrance. The only punctuation he allows is the
end-of-poem period. His poems read thus as one fast-tempo breath, not unlike
those of Alan Ginsberg.
In the end, the poet refuses to
let despair have the upper hand. In the
“Message of the Rose,” he looks towards the coming of “the rose storm “- the
ultimate soul-redeeming, poetry- liberating tsunami.
January’s
feet
sleepwalking
drearily
cold
tip
toeing with the news of the coming
of
the rose storm
glorious
feverish
rising
at the horizon
burning
to sink the whole world under her feet.
Message of the Rose
This awakening has not come easy
to Chính. After the war he wrote and
published several novels, most of which he later called “utterly tamed.”
In 1999, he executed an
about-face. His one thousand odd page
novel Night of the Saints shook the
literari scene. His readers could hardly
recognize the old Chính. In a complex web of tales crammed with misfits, the
downtrodden, the mentally ill, who are at every turn preyed upon by corrupt
officials, rapacious opportunists and sex-crazed exploiters, Chính painted a
society in decay. Despite his denial, the style is unmistakably magical-realist
– the most appropriate style for the exploration of the psycho-socio-political
landscape of a contemporary Vietnam.
Perhaps in recognition of the sheer creative power of his fiction, the
government-backed publishing house Literature decided to publish the first of
two tomes in 1999. Backpedaling one
month later, it rescinded its decision and withdrew the work from circulation,
banning all publication until 7 years later. In 2007, the Vietnamese Writers
Association published his novel Online
Backpack. The novel sold out. One month later, the Association denied his
request for a reprint.
Imbued with a new spirit, Chính
took on theater, film and poetry. Like
his work in prose, his other work has not fared any better with the cultural
censors. Of the 15 plays he wrote, only two have been approved for
production. Of the four scripts he
authored, only one has made it into film.
To circumvent censorship, Chính took to the Internet highway. He published poems on sympathetic blogs, and
made them available on Kindle. A
collection of 75 poems in Vietnamese were finally published in the U.S. in
2010. Twenty-two of them are translated into English in this selection.
In today’s Vietnam Chính is the Rimbaud of the
Internet age, the indomitable rebel of poetry, the raging bull of beat
culture. He rails against oppression
under any form – political, economic or sexual. He liberates poetry from its
old stale form. He drags poetry down
into the gutters of life, makes it stare straight into deep-pocketed eyes and
fractured skulls, and has it listen to soul-wrenching wails.
A German shepherd who swears allegiance to literature alone, he sniffs,
scratches, howls, until anything that smells of hypocrisy is spilled onto the
streets into broad daylight. In the end,
the only thing worth saving from the sewer is bits of truth - remains of broken
promises and broken dreams that refuse to die.
In exploring the lows of
modern-day Vietnam, Chính takes Vietnamese poetry to new heights.
Trần Đán is an
American-Vietnamese writer & visual artist living in the US.
&&&
Tuyển
tập thơ Chẹc Chẹc
Nguyễn
Đình Chính
Hà Nôi, Việt Nam
2012
