Bones Will Crow: An Anthology of Burmese Poetry E-Book

James Byrne

• Herausgeber: Arc Publications
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: Arc Anthologies
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 148

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Bones Will Crow is the first anthology of contemporary Burmese poets in any language, and includes the work of Burmese poets in exile, in prison and undercover. Introduced by Zeyar Lynn, with a Preface by Ruth Padel. The poets featured are Tin Moe (1933-2007), Thitsar Ni (b. 1946), Aung Cheimt (b. 1948), Ma Ei (b. 1948), Maung Chaw Nwe (1949-2002), Maung Pyiyt Min (b. 1953), Khin Aung Aye (b. 1956), Zeyar Lynn (b. 1958), Maung Thein Zaw (b. 1959), Moe Zaw (b. 1964), Moe Way (b. 1969), Ko Ko Thett (b. 1972), Eaindra (b. 1973), Pandora (b. 1974) and Maung Yu Py (b. 1981). James Byrne's second poetry collection, Blood/Sugar, was published by Arc in 2009. He is the co-editor of Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Bloodaxe, 2009). Ko Ko Thett left Burma following detention for his role in the Rangoon student uprising in 1996. His first collection in English, The Burden of Being Bama, is forthcoming.

Leseprobe

BONES WILL CROW

Published by Arc Publications

Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road

Todmorden, OL14 6DA, UK

www.arcpublications.co.uk Copyright in the original poems © individual authors, 2012

Copyright in translations © individual translators, 2012

Copyright in the preface © Ruth Padel, 2012

Copyright in the introduction © Zeyar Lynn, 2012

Copyright in all editorial material © ko ko thett & James Byrne, 2012

Copyright in the present edition © Arc Publications 2012 Design by Tony Ward ISBN (pbk): 978 1906570 89 7 ISBN (ebook): 978 1908376 52 7 The publishers are grateful to the authors and translators and, in the case of previously published works, to their publishers for allowing their poems to be included in this anthology. The following publications have published translations, or versions of these translations, from this anthology:

ASIA, Asymptote, Cimarron, Modern Poetry in Translation, Overland, Poetry International, PN Review, Poetry Review, Sampsonia Way, SDSU Poetry International, The Wolf, This Corner, Tirade, Wasafiri, World Literature Today Cover art: ‘Gold Mirage’ by Kyu Kyu

Copyright © the artist, 2012 This book is copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part, nor of the whole, may take place without the written permission of Arc Publications Ltd. This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s Writers in Translation programme supported by Bloomberg. English PEN exists to promote literature and its understanding, uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, campaign against persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and promote the friendly co-operation of writers and free exchange of ideas.

www.englishpen.org

15 CONTEMPORARY BURMESE POETS Edited and translated by

ko ko thett & James Byrne with additional translations by

Maung Tha Noe, Vicky Bowman, Zeyar Lynn, Christopher Merrill, Pandora & Khin Aung Aye Introduced by Zeyar Lynn

with a Foreword by Ruth Padel

ko ko thett dedicates this book to his parents and to a little goby James Byrne is particularly grateful to New York University for the support of a Stein Fellowship during the early formation of this project, and to the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

CONTENTS

Foreword – Ruth Padel

Editors’ Preface

Introduction – Zeyar Lynn

TIN MOE

Biographical note

မိုးမေသာက္တဲ့ႏွစ္မ်ား

•

from The Years We Didn’t See the Dawn

ကႏာၱရႏွစ္မ်ား

•

Desert Years

သာမန္လူသားတစ္ဦးရဲ႕ ဆႏၵ

•

from A Standard Human Wish

ဗုဒၶ ႏွင့္ေတြ႕ဆံုျခင္း

•

Meeting with the Buddha

THITSAR NI

Biographical note

ပိုလွ်ံေနေသာ ဝါက်မ်ား

•

from Redundant Sentences

အမည္မ ၁

•

Untitled 1

လက္နဲ႔လမ္းေလွ်ာက္ျခင္း

•

Handwalking

နာေရး

•

Obituary

အမည္မ ၄

•

Untitled 3

AUNG CHEIMT

Biographical note

ေအာင္ခ်ိမ့္႐ုပ္ရွင္ ၾကည့္ျခင္း

•

Aung Cheimt Goes to the Cinema

သတိရျခင္းမ်ားမွတ္စု

•

Flashback Journal

ပ႐ူးဖေရာက္ရဲ႕အခ်စ္ သီခ်င္းကို မီွး၍

•

After Prufrock’s ‘Love Song’

ဖတ္ရပါလိမ့္မယ္

•

You Will Read

MA EI

Biographical note

ခ်စ္သူ မုန္းသူ ဖတ္ဖို႔စာ

•

A Letter for Lovers and Haters

ကပ္… ကဗ်ာ…

•

A Catastrophic Rune

ကြၽန္မေနတဲ့ ကြၽန္း

•

My Island

ဥတုခန္႔မွန္းျခင္း

•

Weather Forecast

MAUNG CHAW NWE

Biographical note

မစၥတာခ်ာလီ ခင္ဗ်ားကို…

•

Mr. Charley…

ပင္မွည့္ေတး

•

A Sun-ripened Song

ဆိပ္ကမ္း

•

Harbour

လူႀကိဳက္နည္းတဲ့ေကာင္

•

Unpopular Chap

MAUNG PYIYT MIN

Biographical note

ေသာ့ ၅၂ ေခ်ာင္း၊…

•

A Bunch of 52 Keys

အခက္ႀကီးထဲခုန္ခ်

•

Shall I Plunge into a Big Bummer?

ေနာက္ဆံုး ျဒပ္စင္

•

The Last Element

တမ္းတျခင္း

•

Yearning

KHIN AUNG AYE

Biographical note

ေပ်ာ့ကြက္

•

Achilles’ Heel

၂ဝ၁ဝ၊ ဗမာကဗ်ာ…

•

2010 the curvaceousness of Burmese poetry

မေပ်ာ္ရႊင္ျခင္း…

•

State of Unhappiness…

ေသနတ္နဲ႔ ဒိန္ခဲ

•

gun and cheese

ZEYAR LYNN

Biographical note

ငါ့သမိုင္းဟာ ငါ့သမိုင္းမဟုတ္ဘူး

•

My History is Not Mine

မုတ္ဆိတ္တို႔၏ သြားရာလမ္းမ်ား

•

The Ways of the Beards

ဆလိုက္႐ႈိး

•

Slide Show

လြယ္အိတ္

•

Sling Bag

MAUNG THEIN ZAW

Biographical note

အပူသည္

•

the heat bearer

မႏာၱန္

•

mantra

ဒုကၡနဲ႔တည့္တည့္နတ္သား

•

deva right in front of dukkha

သဲလြန္စ

•

clue

MOE ZAW

Biographical note

၁၉၈၅ခုႏွစ္က ႏွင္းဆီ

•

Rose, 1985

ဗီရာ

•

Vera

ပံုျပင္

•

Story

လဆုတ္ ည

•

Moonless Night

သူငယ္ခ်င္း သံုးေယာက္

•

Three Friends

MOE WAY

Biographical note

ကိစၥရွိရင္ အျခားအခန္းကသြား

•

If You Need to Piss…

ဝဋ္လိုက္တတ္တယ္ ေမာင္ေမာင္သတိထား

•

Watch Out Maung Maung…

ေဘာင္ထဲက ေၾကာင္မ်ား

•

Misfits within Limits

ေတာင္အာဖရိက႐ိုးရာ ဘူဘူဇီလာ

•

Vuvuzela

စာၾကည့္တိုက္ႏွင့္ ျပတိုက္ႏွင့္

•

So the Library, So Also the Museum

KO KO THETT

Biographical note

… ေရႊက်င္ျခင္း

•

panning for alluvial gold…

ခါေတာ္မ ီလက္ခုပ္တီးျခင္းနဲ႔…

•

timely applause and toothy smiles

ျမန္မာျဖစ္ရတဲ့ဒုကၡ

•

the burden of being bama

ျပတိုက္ထဲက ထာဝရ အခင္းအက်င္းမ်ား

•

from permanent installations

EAINDRA

Biographical note

ညဥ့္သိပ္ သီခ်င္း

•

Lullaby for a Night

လီလီ

•

Lily

စိတ္ ကစားတဲ့ကြင္း

•

Pitch for a Playful Mind

သူ႔ေရေတြေဖာ က္ခ်ခံေနရတဲ့ ငါး

•

Molly, Whose Tank Has Been Emptied

အဲဒီ့ေန႔… မတိုင္ခင္တစ္ရက္

•

The Day (Before That Day)

PANDORA

Biographical note

လူၿပိန္းမ်ား ၿမိဳ႕ကိုသိမ္းပိုက္စဥ္

•

The Scene of the City Siege by the Daft

ၿမိဳ႕ျပသူေလးနဲ႔တစ္ညေန

•

An Evening with a City Girl

ေဖ်ာ္ေျဖတင္ဆက္မႈ

•

Entertainment

လက္ေျဖာင့္တပ္သား

•

The Sniper

MAUNG YU PY

Biographical note

ဒီလိုနဲ႔ ဒီတစ္ေခါက္

•

Just Like This, Again This Time

ရန္ကုန္ ၂ဝ၁ဝ

•

Yangon 2010

မေန႔ညက…

•

A UFO Sighting…

ေရခဲျပင္ႀကီးေအာက္မွာ

•

Under the Great Ice Sheet

Glossary of Burmese TermsBiographical notes on Editors & Translators

FOREWORD

When the monsoon breaks in Rangoon, the red brick buildings of the old university stream with rain. You can see the vivid green undergrowth swelling before your eyes as the silver sheets down.

Rangoon University was one of Asia’s top universities in the 1940s and 1950s when the first nine poets in this anthology were children but today it is empty of undergraduates. They have been shunted to the outskirts, to huge campuses custom-built for surveillance and control. Yet this university is where Burmese students in the 1920s led nationalist protests against British rule and also brought about a turning point for modern Burmese poetry.

Burmese literature goes back a millennium. Its soul was formed by Buddhism, its language is full of monosyllables and subtle tonalities which make it a perfect habitat for echoes, reflections, intricate rhyme. The earliest surviving writings are stone inscriptions: poetry must already have been written then, since the earliest surviving work that is not an inscription is a very sophisticated poem indeed, ‘The Cradle Song of the Princess of Arakan’, 1455. From the fifteenth century, poetry was the driving literary medium and until the eighteenth century most of it was in four-syllable lines linked by an internal ‘climbing rhyme’: the fourth syllable of the first line was rhymed by the third syllable of the second line and the second syllable of the third line – a style called lei-lon tabaik, ‘four words one foot.’ Then new influences swept in, above all the Indian epic The Ramayana. The eighteenth century was Burmese poetry’s golden age, but in 1885 the British drove out the king and turned Burma into a colony of British India, demolishing poetry’s court patronage.

The one plus of the new regime was that English was taught in schools. This opened up a new language and new literature and, in the 1920s, poetry became important in the nationalist movement against British rule. This is where Rangoon University comes in. The new poetry came not from the court but from the students. While marshalling new political energies, they also wanted a new style and voice: like other twentieth-century poets, they wanted a more direct relation with their readers.

They got it in khitsan, ‘Testing the Times’: poetry which rejected lei-lon tabaik, and court formalities. Khitsan went on into the 1960s and influenced the next generation, including Tin Moe, the oldest poet here. But as the world changes poets want to say new things in new ways. In the late 1960s and 1970s poets inspired by translations of Vladimir Mayakovsky and T. S. Eliot began to write “rhymeless” poems.

This was controversial; it always is. To rhyme or not to rhyme?

Britain’s “rhyming wars” started in the sixteenth century and though they are expressed differently in every decade show no sign of stopping. It is fascinating to see similar battles of form, voice and relation to readers fought out in another language and a different political and cultural landscape.

In every heritage, poets must tread not only between modernist and traditional but also between universal and particular, global and local. What happened locally to Burma in the sixties, however, differed radically from what happened elsewhere. It became ‘a Stone Age cave sealed by stones,’ as Maung Yu Py’s poem puts it. Behind all the poems in Bones Will Crow is the shadow of ‘a great country… buried alive’. The last line of all here, so at odds with Burma’s monsoon humidity and warm rain, is ‘under the great ice sheet.’

The ice came down in 1962 with the military coup. Students demonstrated in Rangoon University, troops fired on them and destroyed the student union building, and ever since, Burmese poets have been largely cut off from the oxygen of other poets.

Poets need that oxygen (what would poetry in English be, if British poets of the fifteenth century had not been read Italian poems and discovered the sonnet?) but after 1962 foreign books were considered suspect and were hard to find. When the internet arrived elsewhere, it was forbidden in Burma.

If poetry is hard to get hold of it is even harder to write, in a world where censorship is an industry. ‘I wanted to walk but did not know which way to take,’ says Tin Moe:

And the earth

like fruit too shy to emerge

without fruit

in shame and sorrow

glances at me. (‘Desert Years’)

But censorship, said Jorge Luis Borges (whose mother and sister were imprisoned for opposing Argentina’s dictator), is the mother of metaphor. It was true of Soviet and post-war East European poets; this anthology makes clear it is true today in Burma too. Poetry is the commonest form of literature in Burma, and the most censored, yet poets are constantly inventing new ways of saying what they want, while trying to make sure both that no black oblongs cut out words on the page, and that nothing happens to their families or themselves.

The mother of metaphor is hard at work here behind the wonderful vitality, inventiveness and surreal humour. As in the ‘beards’ of Zeyar Lynn, who in the 1990s renewed poetry yet again by turning from feeling, writing poems apparently from the head rather than the heart. Even under an ice sheet, poets find ways of moving forward, forging fresh ways to make the familiar strange so readers can see their own lives with new eyes.

The poetry landscape here is particular to Burma but also universal. In Pandora’s ‘The Scene of the City Siege by the Daft’, the daft ‘do as the Romans do’ for ‘the daft virus is airborne’. ‘Lily’ in Eaindra’s poem feels like ‘a tiny she-snake from the wicker-basket of the snake-charmer’ but also ‘serves beer,’ pours ‘a froth of giggles’ for ‘masters,’ and feels like ‘God’s glitch’ – in a voicing which could come from any morally live society. In ko ko thett’s work, ‘the burden of being bama’ means ‘living on / sawdust and shrimp paste,’ but also (in ‘Permanent Installations’) feeling a moment’s kinship with ‘a fox on a suburban path at midnight’ as any suburban inhabitant of London might do.

This is a world of surveillance and vigilance and its poetry is up to it – these poems are vigilant too. What comes across most, from this wide variety of voices and styles, is a zest-filled alertness to the here and now, to ‘rice seedlings dancing in the breeze,’ counter-balanced by the long view: by ‘history,’ a word you hear often in Bones Will Crow. History, the poets’ friend, means in this collection a bunch of very different poets taking an ancient tradition forward under almost impossible restrictions; and renewing it, as poets must, by challenging and re-forming the voice and the design: the way a poem hangs together.

We are pattern-making animals. We use form to make sense of the world around us and poetry is one of the most intense ways of doing that. Pattern is what we perceive; pattern is what we make in response. Most of us in the West are unlikely to share many elements in the world to which these voices are responding. Neither its pain (dukkha, the Buddhist concept of suffering, is always in the background), nor its imaginative and cultural subtleties. But the human world these poems speak to through their images, humour, vivacity and grace, is ours too. There is so much here to learn from, to admire – and to love.

Ruth Padel

EDITORS’ PREFACE

How have we selected a handful of poets for Bones Will Crow from probably more than a thousand living Burmese poets, not to mention the late and great ones?

We first thought of including khitsan poets, some of whom remain ‘contemporary’ and living – most prominently, Dagon Taya (b. 1919) and Kyi Aye (b. 1929). There are a great many poems in the khitsan canon, the first modern Burmese poetry movement that came to life in colonial Burma with the publication of Khitsan Stories (1933) and Khitsan Poems (1934) by Rangoon University students.

Burmese for ‘contemporary’ is khitpyaing, which literally means ‘parallel with the times’. The question that kept returning to us was how poets from Burma are responding to the times in what has been seemingly a hermit state since the 1960s – the decade which can be properly termed post-khitsan and that provides a starting point for Bones Will Crow. The poets represented here have come a long way from khitsan in their characteristic use of free verse, speech rhythm, colloquial language, khitpor and what Zeyar Lynn calls ‘non-khitpor’ poetics.

Zeyar Lynn introduces ‘Burmese’ poetry as ‘Burmese / Myanmar’. The official name of the country is ‘Myanmar’, which also refers to what we call Burmese, the lingua franca of Burma, though the Burmese themselves often recognise either term. We are not trying to transcend the political, nor submit to it. For practical reasons alone, we have kept ‘Burma’ and ‘Burmese’, the terms most familiar to readers in the West. The same argument can be applied to our general preference for exonyms over autonyms. However, when it comes to near-untranslatable Buddhist concepts (such as dukkha and metta) and specific cultural references (for example, mohinga and thanaka), we have retained the originals. Burmese words are transliterated into English by conventional sound-to-sound correspondence or ‘Burglish’, often forgoing their tonal phonemics for the ease of the non-Burmese reader. A glossary can be found at the back of the book.

Gender representation is an ongoing issue for poetry in Burma. Burmese poetry (and Burmese society in general) continues to be male-dominated, even though there are encouraging signs of progress, particularly in the blogosphere. Ultimately we accept that a ratio of one to five in favour of men is an unfair balance for any anthology, yet this equation might be considered somewhat favourable in light of the apparent gender imbalance in Burmese literature today.

A few words about the cover artist, Kyu Kyu. Her image struck us as a ‘Gold Mirage’ as soon as we saw it on her online gallery in New Zero (a group that features leading Burmese artists). Gold is the holy metal in Burma and Burmese living in the diaspora often refer to themselves as ‘shwe’ or gold. We would like to thank Kyu Kyu for her participation in this anthology.

As translators, we have felt privileged to receive invaluable comments and feedback from many of the poets themselves, including Maung Pyiyt Min, Khin Aung Aye, Zeyar Lynn, Eaindra, Pandora and Maung Yu Py. Along with all the poets who appear in this anthology, our sincere gratitude goes to Vicky Bowman, Htein Lin, Ruth Padel, Maung Tha Noe, Christopher Merrill, Anna Allott, Justin Watkins, Niall McDevitt, Kyi Aye, Khet Mar, Sandeep Parmar, Kyaw Wunna, Moe Cho Thin, Moe Moe Hnin, Patricia Herbert, Yusef Komunyakaa, Deborah Landau, Timo Virtala, Ian Bourgeot, Kyaw Kyaw Latt, Gerhard Köberlin and Yee Yee Htun.

ko ko thett & James Byrne

INTRODUCTION

What is ‘Contemporary’ in Twenty-first Century Myanmar / Burmese Poetry?

There are three main ways in which the term ‘contemporary’ is used and understood in the current Myanmar / Burmese poetry scene which reflect notable changes in the country’s poetic landscape of the new century. Today, post-modern, language, conceptual, performance and online poetries mingle somewhat uneasily with khitpor, whose origin dates back to the Moe Wei movement of the early 1970s. Khitpor, originally avant-garde and regarded as ‘modern poetry’, has become mainstream as it ages, in the way literary movements often do. Teasing out the differences in the use of ‘contemporary’ may shed light on the current situation of Myanmar / Burmese poetry and the trends and tendencies of its emergent poetics.

The first interpretation of the term takes the neutral view of seeing diverse poetries as existing at the same time, ‘of the time(s),’ so to speak. It is neutral in the sense that while it accepts the different styles and modes of expression that have emerged, it overlooks the underlying oppositional and conflicting ideas about poetry, and the struggle for recognition that new poetries face. Its espousal of ‘peaceful co-existence’ of khitpor and non-khitpor poetries in general plays down the conflict the latter had to face in carving out a space in khitpor