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PHAN
XUAN SINH
_______________________________
DRINKING
WITH A NORTH VIETNAMESE SOLDIER
Transl.
By Kevin Bowen & Nguyen Ba Chung
Pour me another drink, buddy
This is an occasion I'd like to savor
Let’s not think about tomorrow
Forget tomorrow, let's enjoy this moment/today
What soldiers aren't frightened at the moment of
battle
Some pee in their pants
Like you I have a young sweet heart/girl friend
Eying anxiously at the gate at home
Death or life is an intractable disease
It isn’t easy to escape one's lot
We soldiers today carry no hatred
Friends or enemies there aren’t
any line
Let’s drink. Leave all problems behind
We might even have a couple more rounds if we
could
Why do we have to play the game of blood
to give water to the seeds of hate
Fie! I am sick of all these nonsense tricks
Playing games that we both lose
Your sweat heart lives
far away in the north
Is she now busily hiding from the falling bombs
or anxiously eyeing the southern front
fearing her lover would return a martyr
And she will learn to forget, like so many things
love has to be treated like an ornament
even if one/she has to lie to
admit it
This round of drinking today, I'll have to get
drunk, buddy so that in that stupor we don't have to see each other as enemies.
WAITING FOR SPRING
BY THE ROADSIDE
Transl.
By Kevin Bowen & Nguyen Ba Chung
By the side of the road, I stand, waiting for
spring
In a world upside down, churning with sorrows
From what's left, can we give each other enough
space
like the vastness of the sky
that never ends
The street is now completely deserted
Spring hasn’t come but there's the moon
I do not know where I will go next
The
moonlit path is buried deep in the snow
Leaning against a corner I can see
I am swimming in a sea of thirsts
Here comes the spring. Should I shout
Or turn my back, hiding behind a shrub.
LIVING LIFE A MISTY VAPOR
Transl. By Kevin Bowen &
Nguyen Ba Chung
Blasts of hurricanes shook the earth
And I a small bird losing/flailing its way
Death specter came near and quick
How many mountains could an ant climb?
Rifles and butts, sweat and despair
A world darkened by fits of terror
Arrests and prisons, roads and dead ends
How many frontier passes without/
[I didn't leave] a footprint?
What voice I still hear now, midnight?
What wailings of ghosts still ring my ears?
The price of clarity is immense sadness
Could I mend, even a bit, the old
wounds?
In the new land, my hair is turning white
The old village roofs disappear in the distant
mist
A life half drawn of a bad lot
The other half lives with the old
nightmares
Is there a home the old bird could return
Or has it been lost to the myth of time
And I condemned to relive the broken past
Living life a misty vapor.
PHAN XUAN SINH
·
THE WRITERS POST (ISSN:
1527-5467),
the magazine of Literature & Literature-in-translation.
VOLUME
7 ISSUE 1 JAN
2005
Editorial
note:
Works published in this issue may be simultaneously published in the printed Wordbridge Magazine Issue 6 January 2005 (ISSN:
1540-1723).
Copyright © Kevin Bowen & Nguyen Ba Chung 1999-2005. Nothing in this issue may be
downloaded, distributed, or reproduced without the permission of the author/
translator/ artist/
The Writers Post/ and Wordbridge
magazine. Creating links to place The Writers Post or any of its pages within
other framesets or in other documents is copyright violation, and is not
permitted.
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