“Two separate realms”: Nguyen Chi Trung’s New-Romantic paradigm in As I Step Down (2016)

Thi sĩ NGUYỄN CHÍ TRUNG

“Two separate realms”: Nguyen Chi Trung’s New-Romantic paradigm in
As I Step Down (2016)

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise[i].

-         Samuel T. Coleridge, Kubla Khan, ll. 50-54, ca.1797-98

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves

Waited for rain, while the black clouds

Gathered far distant, over Himavant[ii].

-         T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, ll. 396-398, 1922

        Nguyen Chi Trung’s poetry rises like a river in flood, from a deep unthinkable and unfathomable abyss, in Filomena Ciavarella’s words[iii]. The same fascination held by the Ganges, a symbol of the East, blending itself into Trung’s soul.  The genesis of As I Step Down (henceforth, AISD), a poem of ten stanzas following the “Sixth-Eight” words metrical pattern, is closely and Romantically linked to that holy river: “I dreamed to come one time in my life to its border and to boatflow over it”[iv]. Like a vision in a dream, it all came true in winter 2015/16.

Aim of the following study is to illustrate the reinterpretation  of the most meaningful Romantic tenets in AISD, and the way they emerged during the prosodic refinement, to which I contributed, of the first translation  of the poem into English made by Chi Trung, supervised by Linda Kunhardt[v]. An extremely interesting procedure and an honour to have occurred under the care of Trung himself.

1. Understanding a text in order to translate it implies reading between the lines, moving from the explicit to the implicit, allowing access today to a part of what it was intended to express in its time of writing, to a part of its own truth. That is why translation should not be meant as calque of the literal in poetry but as a form of listening to the voice of the poet and as a fulfillment of such a desire in a text that will always pertain to his/her authorship.  Translation as a process should be meant as the direct expression of the author’s inner wish[vi].

To fully understand the purpose of a metrical – and, consequently, formal - revision of Trung’s first translation of AISD from Vietnamese, a very short excursion about the metre employed turns out to be necessary. In Vietnamese, there are only one-syllable words, whose pronunciation is unique. The accents existing in the language are five and only vowels are stressed which means that there are six different variable sounds and six different meanings to a word: for example, “la – là – lá – lã - lạ”[vii]. The metrical choice of Trung’s is a classical one and goes under the name of “Six-Eight”. Such a denomination is due to the fact that each couplet is made up of respectively six and eight words, rhyming alternatingly all the poem long.

All this has resulted in a loss of the high musical cypher intrinsic to the Vietnamese language in all of the translations of Trung’s poems into English or German, up to now. As a matter of fact, the European musical notation system is made up of seven notes; considering the six sounds of Vietnamese words, it recounts for the remarkable musicality of the language[viii]. According to the poet: “I do translate my Vietnamese poems into German or English language. And each time it is painful to see I could never bring a tiny part of the original sound into my translation”[ix]. While Vietnamese is rich in terms related to inner life and feelings as a domain, German is poorer, in the poet’s view; the choice to write in Vietnamese has therefore been unavoidable.

The attempt to render into English such a metrical schemata is undoubtedly a bold one[x]  and could not have taken place without the poet’s consent, both for technical reasons and for his knowledge of the mother tongue. This is a case when the infinite opportunities the translation process usually offers are somewhat restricted, that is when there are many versions from different languages or when you decide to render the poet’s thought as much as possible or privilege his own native language11. Even more difficult when a poet from the Far East chooses German as a second language and Germany as his second homeland in that musicality, rhythm and precision are the typical qualities of Vietnamese that make Trung’s poetry great, as Anna Lombardo has pointed out.

        Moreover, images of Asia as perceived in the English macrotext, necessarily end up by influencing the translator, whose mind is brainstormed by literary echoes starting from Coleridge’s Kubla Khan; Dickens’ Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870); the Opium wars (1839-1842 and 1856-1860) and de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822); Stevenson’s South Sea Tales, the result of a voyage to the South Seas in 1888;  Kipling’s Kim (1901); T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land and Buddha’s Fire Sermon (1922); Forster’s Passage to India (1924); Said’s Orientalism (1978); Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981); Yasmina Khadra’s Swallows of Khabul (2002) or Hwang Sok-Yong’s Princess Bari (2015); or Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Sympathizer (2015), to name but a few.

Kubla Khan’s exoticism, form and visionary kind of imagination are food for thought while tracing a comparison with AISD, particularly in Trung’s idea of the poet´s main role being to console man over life’s uncontrolled evil events thanks to his lyrical writing. Similarly, the concept of poetical inspiration finds  a perfect embodiment in the last lines of AISD, where a magical ritual is staged that echoes Plato’s Ion. Thus the poet’s inspiration does not sprout from knowledge but from an unattainable (in a normal state of mind) divine source and does not admit any intrusion[xi].

2. AISD could semantically be divided into four main parts, each corresponding to a further step towards the descent into the poet’s inner world and vision. All of such sections are circularly linked from the beginning to the end. Such circularity adds to the idea of life and death as two phases of a continuum where life neither begins with birth nor ends with death, according to the Buddhist rule. The first part’s fil rouge is strikingly represented by the anaphoric position of the refrain-like syntagm “As I step down”, in each of the first three stanzas.

A comparison between Trung’s first translation from Vietnamese into American (henceforward, T1) and Trung and Zilletti’s prosodic refinement (PR) proves to be essential, in order to understand the metrical adaptation of the first translation to the “Six-Eight” line structure so dear to the poet:

1. (T1)

As I step down the stairs

Calling dawn, a voice resounds on the hill.

On the tattered roofs

Birds wake up before sunrise.

5        A man sleeps on the threshold

Or a corpse, on the old stone foundation,

On both sides flowers bloom redundantly.

In my brain something yells animatedly.

1. (PR)

As I step down the stairs,

Dawn awoken, a voice echoes from the slopes.

On the roofs clad in tatters

Birds wake up before the new day happens.

5        A man rests on the threshold

Or a corpse, on the ancient stone foundations,

On both sides flowers bud redundantly.

In my inner mind something yells loudly, animatedly.

The substitution of the present with the past participle (“calling” vs “awoken”, l. 2) finds its reason in the deliverance of a deeper sense of non-life, of “Life-in-Death”, when contrasted with the Provençal archetype of the dawn, typically describing the longing of the lovers who have to separate in order not to be discovered. The lexeme “echoes” was preferred to “resounds” due to the Greek etymology of the verb – meaning “sound” – and the related myth, adding more to the ancestral dimension of the place. The allusion to the Greek myth is close to the mythical dimension of the Ganges as a sacred river. In the same way, the term “slope” was chosen instead of “hill” to go more into the particular[xii].

Besides keeping to the chosen metrical format, the personification “On the roofs clad in tatters” (l. 3) contributes to the new-Romantic vision of the poem[xiii] and at the same time is linked to the general dream-like cypher of the poem. The variation from T1 in line 4 was thought to add to the poem’s rhythm to keeps to the “Six-Eight” line structure of its original Vietnamese version. The word “rests” (l.5)  cataphorically refers to the “corpse”, in the following line. Death here looks as if delivering a sense of peace; the run-on-line seems to emphasise the latter idea. The verb “bud” is concerned with a newly sprung flower, not completely open, like the unfinished sense of man’s life. It reminds the reader more of Chaucer’s engendering of the flower[xiv] in the “General Prologue” to The Canterbury Tales than of T.S. Eliot’s “[l]iliacs out of the dead land”[xv] or “[d]ull roots with spring rain”[xvi] in The Waste Land. Finally, “inner mind” was found more properly fit than “brain” because, according to Gnosticism, it is the closest to the Truth.

The second stanza gets more specifically into the core of the poet’s voyage along the Ganges’ waters, a striking metaphor for Everyman’s travel into Life, inexorably heading for Death, wondering about its sense:

2. (T1)

As I step down into the row boat,

10      Life is bobbing because of no anchor.

The boat wood is too worn out.

Can it overcome the river, conveying the soul?

Softly the sound of water all around

Slowly vanished, the boat is following the stream,

15      A solid gray in the air

Light green of leafage on the charitable river.

2.(PR)

As I step down into row boats,

10      Life is bobbing because of no cast anchor.

The boat wood is too worn out.

Can it overcome the river, conveying the soul?

Smoothly the sound of water around

Slowly vanished, the boat is following the stream,

15      A solid gray in the fair air

Light green of leafage on the charitable river.

The plural “row boats” (l. 9) was justified not only by the metrical pattern of the line, but also by a reference to the cyclical conception of time, to widen the horizon of the ontological level. The wood of the boat is worn out like the poet’s spirit, embodying the human   condition. It is the following question’s aim to highlight the most important of the poem’s achievements, that is “conveying the soul” (l. 12). The adverb “[s]moothly” (l. 13), instead, underlines more the lack of irregularities or roughness in the surface of sound rather than the adjective “soft”.

It is worth noting that  to keep to the “Six-Eight” line structure, some words had to be changed, modified, or altered; others had to be added. That is the case of “fair” (l. 15) creating the inner rhyme with “air”, increasing the poem’s rhythm in an attempt to reproduce the Vietnamese language remarkable musical quality. It must be stated that each change was the result of an attentive choice. It is particularly evident in the third stanza, where the binary opposition “external” vs “inner” world seems to be evident also from the topological point of view:

3. (T1)

As I step down to anxiety

A group of monks pray sutra from a distance

The sound of trumpet and drums permeates.

20      I think: perhaps the transmigrating?

No one around looks at them

Some cows stand silent in the middle of the road

The atmosphere is dense with fog

Or perhaps traffic fumes exude?

3. (PR)

As I step down to angst

A group of monks pray sutra from a distance

The sound of trumpet and drums permeates around.

20      I think: perhaps the transmigrating self?

No one looks around at them

Some cows stand silent in the midst of the roads

The atmosphere is dense with fog

Or is it just the traffic fumes exuding?

        For inner rhyming reasons, the word “angst” (l. 17) reminding of the German language was preferred to “anxiety”. The adverb “around” (l. 19) was added not only to comply with the metrical scheme chosen, but also to create a repetition with the same word in line 21. The term “self” was added to emphasise the law of karma’s Diktat, just like the addition of other words, also for metrical reasons[xvii] e.g., the replacing of “middle” with “midst”, a monosyllable (l. 22). In line 24, the use of the verb tense seems to suggest that the action is taking place in the very same moment when the first-person narrator is speaking. Here the “traffic fumes” of a modern industrialized world suggest neither empathy nor humanity, unlike the “wreaths of smoke” rising up from cottage chimneys as a symbol of solidarity and warmth against solitude in Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey[xviii] (1798).

3. The fourth and the fifth stanzas make up the second thematic nucleus of AISD. The anaphoras “As I depart” (stanza 4, l. 25) and “As I stand still” (stanza 5, l. 33) suggest a topological change: from the hotel to the Indian noisy and crowded streets leading to the “holy place” through a claustrophobic (“muss”, l. 28; “lightless”, l. 29; “narrow”, l. 31) labyrinth of lanes:

4. (T1)

25      As I leave the siege

Of the night in the hotel full of grief

The cyclist drives me

In muss streets as noisy begins the day

I go through the lightless alleys

30      Drying feces of cows evaporate

        The narrow lanes lead me

To enter the matrix of the holy place.

4. (PR)

25      As I depart from the siege

Of the night in the hotel full of grief

The cyclist drives me straight away

In muss streets as noisy begins the day

I go through the obscure alleys

30      Drying feces of cows evaporate in the air

The narrow lanes lead me directly

To enter the matrix of the holy place.

For metrical reasons, a lot of terms were either added or modified; for instance, “depart from”, instead of “leave” (l. 25); the syntagm “straight away” (l. 27) and the prepositional phrase “in the air” (l. 30). Though far from John Keats’s “heifer” (l. 33) being led to sacrifice and described in the fourth stanza of Ode on a Grecian Urn; from the “peaceful citadel” (l. 36) emptied by its people and therefore silent[xix], their reminding is evident. The sense of the sacred is an image where the only escape or way out is offered by a holy entity. In AISD, the lexeme “muss”, meaning in American “chaos, out of any order, disordered, entangled (also figurative)” was kept from Trung’s first translation as the most properly fit to describe the incredibly crowded Indian streets.

Afterwards, the poet’s solitary wandering (see l. 35, “I move out though not knowing”) looking for the entrance to the “holy place” (l. 24) ends up to the “empty house”. His inner quest is exemplified by an unanswered call for help, dating back to the “beginning of time”. Such a movement from the interior world to the outer world marks the poet’s (and man’s) inability to find a sense to his living, a state of confusion, disorientation and spatial loss intensified by the lack of human empathy surrounding him:

5. (T1)

33      As I stand still and wavering

People call, I need to go.

35      I go though I do not know where to

Where to go, I only come to the empty house.

Noise and rumor sounds loudly

How to find one hand of whom

How many hands cover how many hands

40      They are lost from the beginning of time until now

5. (PR)

33      As I stand still and hesitant

I hear people calling, I need to go.

35      I move out though not knowing

Where to, to the empty house I go.

Noise and rumours echo loudly around.

How can I find one hand, of whom?

How many hands cover up how many other hands

40      Lost from the beginning of time until now

Also in this case, some words were annexed (such as “I hear people calling” - l. 34; “move out” - l. 35; “around” - l. 37; “up” – l. 39); other substituted (i.e. “sound” for “echo” – l. 37), always to keep to the “Six-Eight” line structure. Line 37 was modified for rhyming reasons while the spelling of the word “rumor” was changed into “rumour”, that is from American to British English. The importance of the question asked in line 38 (“How can I find one hand, of whom?”) is somehow paradigmatic: is a question more suitable to render the poet’s search?  The addition of the preposition “up” to the verb “cover” (l. 39) was thought to deliver the impression of veiling the Truth.

The fifth stanza ends up by asserting the inevitability of the incessant flowing of Time, linking with a circular movement the “beginning of time” (l. 40) to the present. All this is reinforced by the first two lines of the sixth stanza, acting like a watershed in the poem:

6. (T1)

41      When I want to ask what time is it?

The answer: Time does not wait for you.

Across the river the sunlight

Does not cross through the dim smoke.

45      Villages are in the dark realm

A blind man walks on crutches, a life prison

Seagulls cloud over the river

The boat with the pretty woman has gone far away.

6. (PR)

41      When I ask: What time is it?

The answer: Time does not wait for you.

Across the river the morning sunlight

Does not cross through the faint dim smoke.

45      Villages are in the dark realm

A blind man limps on crutches, a life prison

Seagulls cloud all over the river

The boat with the pretty woman has gone far away.

        The question formula in line 41 was conceived to fit more to the poem’s rhythm. The verb “limp” (l. 46) increases an idea of unhealthiness and of general dysphoria both the landscape and the seascape depicted suggest; it can be inferred from the adjectives “faint dim” (l. 44); “dark” (l. 45); by the nouns “crutches” and “prison” (l. 46); by the verb “cloud” (l. 47). The opposition “prison” vs “seagulls” (a universal symbol of liberty), unmarked by any punctuation surely emphasises the new-Romantic cypher of Trung’s conception of Nature as presented in the sixth stanza: it offers  consolation[xx], like Time[xxi], to the human suffering. In our globalized world, even Beauty turns out to be an ephemeral, elusive and transient concept (see l. 48). Truth remains metaphorically unattainable. Only Nature is endowed to act as a permanent touchstone with reference to such lacks as stressed in AISD. The sacrality of the second thematic nucleus turns out to be an idyll revisited; it is far from being pointless in that it provides some peace,  consolation, and help to the human mankind, according to a New-Romantic vision.

        4.  It could be objected that Romanticism features a set of themes and archetypes which can hardly be detected in contemporary poetry and in our 21st-century literary world, at least the way they were conceived. Nevertheless, it is possible to trace some similarities between Trung’s idea of Life and Death as a continuous process and of unity of life out of diversity of Dylan Thomas[xxii]’ and New Romanticism in general. It is particularly evident in the last thematic nucleus of AISD, composed of four stanzas, the last of which constitutes the poem’s explicit, deserving a more detailed analysis. Such unity is better exemplified in stanza 7:

7. (T1)

49      As I step down in the realm of ghost

          Then I realized that is my realm

          My heart was bleeding from time to time

          And the two tears just floated into the soul

          The river is full of wandering souls

          Puzzled in the crowd of people

55      Life and death, two separate realms,

          Or are they all about the world?

          7. (PR)

49      As I step down in the ghostly realm

          Then I became aware that is my realm

          My heart was bleeding now and then

          And the two tears floated into the soul

          The river is full of wandering souls

          At a loss in the crowd of people

55      Life and death, two separate realms,

          Or are they all about the world?

The adjective “ghostly” (l. 49) was chosen for metrical reasons, just like “became aware” instead of “realized” in line 50; “now and then” instead of “from time to time” in line 51 and “at a loss”, instead of “puzzled” in line 54. In the same way, the adverb “just” (l. 52) was eliminated, to comply with the metrical scheme. The final couplet literally quotes the main dichotomy featured in the poem, that is the opposition life vs death. The scene reminds of the spirit passing into the realm of the dead and having to pay passage to cross the river Styx into Hades.

Such a hellish image, suspended half-way between life and death, is full of deadly images, reinforced by the use of a lexicon pertaining to the semantic field of death: “ghostly” (l. 49); “bleeding” (l. 51); “tears” (l. 52); “at a loss” (l. 54). The final question embodies the whole poem’s quest: is everything in the world limited to life and death separately or as a unity, a continuum, a Life-in-Death status? The idea is further explored in the following stanza:

8. (T1)

As I step down the betrayal

Those blue colors are gone all along

People bring Love in a time

        60     Then silently gone without a word

I look for the whispers over the river

On the waves of smoke, nothing but

The white shirt crowd like a ghost

The chanting pray can’t pass the shore

8. (PR)

As I step down the betrayal

Those blue colours have died out all along

People bring Love at all once

        60     Then in silence gone away without a word

                 I search for the whispers over the river

                 On the waves of smoke, nothing but

                 The white-shirted crowd like a ghost

                 The chanting pray can’t go past the shore.

The verb “die out” (l. 58) was meant as a cataphora of the fire dying out in the following stanza. The phrase “all at once” (l. 59) is meant for everything at once, all in one go. “In silence” (l. 60) and “gone away” (l. 60) were added for metrical reasons, while the verb “search” (l. 61) was chosen to emphasise also the idea of inner search. In line 64, “past” was added to follow the “Six-Eight” scheme. The isotopy of blue, of sadness and melancholy permeates the stanza: the idea of a meaningless, silent love, personified in AISD, in lines 59-60, is a reminder of the sordid encounter between the clerk and the typist depicted by T.S. Eliot in the third part of The Waste Land, that is The Fire Sermon. Man tries to find a consolation in a prayer even though ineffectively. The “chanting pray” (l. 64) remains unheard, only  a divine entity is called for help.

The image of death becomes more and more real in the ninth stanza:

9. (T1)

         65    As I step down to the blur

I hear the bell ringing the time of death

The river shore is full of temples

A black river segment full of muddy ash

Fire is over on the cremation scaffold

         70    Smoke is still spreading over the river

Only the smell of burning flesh is remained

Then melt minutely in the lead air

9. (PR)

         65    As I step down to the blurriness

I hear the bell tolling our Death’s hush

The river shore teems with temples

A black river curve full of muddy ash

Fire is quelled on the cremation scaffold

         70    Smoke still sprawls over the river

Only the smell of burning flesh is left

Then melted minutely in the lead air.

The verb “toll” (l. 66) was chosen because it reminded of John Donne’s “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”[xxiii] and surely of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). The possessive adjective “our” (l. 66) was added to imply a sense of communion among men. Death was personified to indicate a more abstract idea which was reinforced by the onomatopoeia “hush” (l. 66). The sense of personification was increased in line 67 by the verb “teem”, while “quell” (l. 69) suggested the idea of rebellion and disorder. To connote the idea of expansion and stretching of the smoke the verb “sprawl” (l. 70) was used while the chromatic isotopy of grey was marked by “ash” (l. 68) and “lead” (l. 72). On the other hand, the isotopy of death was explicitly rendered thanks to many terms referring to the cremation process in the Ganges (i.e. “muddy ash” – l. 68; “fire” and “cremation scaffold” – l. 69; “smoke” – l. 70; “burning flesh” – l. 71; “lead air” – l. 72), a sort of extra spiritual bonus for the Hindus, who also believe that dying in Varanasi releases from the reincarnation cycle of life and death.

5. The poem’s explicit closes it cyclically with an allusion to the circle of life and death:

10. (T1)

As I step down. What do I see

Love, friendship, what is real?

         75    Or is it true only the heart

Of myself, besides nothing

Here over is the sky long gray

The boat is now approaching. Please wait

Let me write a few lines

         80    Before dissolving, becoming coal and ash

10. (PR)

As I step down. What can I

See? Love, friendship, what is true and real?

         75    Or is that my own heart

Only, besides nothing…

Here over is the long grey sky

The boat is now approaching. Please wait

Let me write a few lines

         80    Before dissolving, becoming coal and ash

         The run-on-line in lines 73-74 particularly stresses the involuntary action of seeing (“See” – l. 74). The adjective “true” was added in

that the search for Truth is at the basis of man’s eschathological quest. Also the possessives “my own” (l. 75) were added not to imply the idea of possession but rather of a self-reflexive action with no real meaning in this line, stressing the uniqueness of what was going on and being described. The syntactical reversion in line 77 (“the sky long gray” becomes “the long grey sky”) implied a return to reality. The poem’s last three lines were left untouched as they perfectly rendered both the idea of life as a voyage and of the consoling, eternal and life-giving function of poetry.

        Translation  must help the work in its most difficult effort, that is self-awareness about its achievements, as far as poetic transgression is concerned. It should be meant to shed light on the work’s inscription on History. As many scholars have pointed out, nowadays there are still many  things still to be learnt about the East[xxiv].

         It must not have been easy comparing the native monsoons with the cold winds of Baden-Württemberg, choosing to be a Poet

in the newly-come millennium. There is a consolatory mission to accomplish, though, and, in line with the Romantic tradition,

a duty to accomplish: spreading Hope among the ordinary men. All this, in a world that seems to offer no way out and Trung has

managed to depict it in all its sordid details.

        The alternation between the two states of mind (hope vs desperation) is described in quite a subtle way in Trung’s poems. Of course, the choice to embody the figure of the Poet in a globalized society Romantically complies with the function of preserving the keeping of such hope for a change towards Love and the beauty of Art amidst the general decay. The uniqueness of life only lies in the written word, love being the result of

misunderstandings and the heart is “a human stone consuming itself”16.

        Similarly, in autumn 1992, in a stormy and windy night, the Poet’s imagination gallops in the intricate labyrinth of stories, memories and thoughts, resulting in the poem Winds. It echoes in the most ancient Indian philosophy (Brâhmana) where “the blow and the wind” are the keys of life, reminding

of the Big Bang theory. Man remains at the mercy of the winds, being substance himself. A religious without religion, Trung often seems to alternatingly wobble between Being and Nothingness, according to the best German philosophical tradition, Heidegger’s particularly17: “Winds of heaven, which

divide it,/ heaven that will be torn tonight/through no doing of any human being,/ still void of the past. Are they definitely/lost, the most inherent lives of art?”18.

Trung’s poetry manages to touch the highest levels of melancholy, as well as of humanity. It succeeds in rendering the bottomless depth  of universal grief in such a way as to bridge the East with the West. It is a rebirth synergically linking the eastern dawn with the western sunset, in an inviolated sphere coming from Ganges’ holy waters[xxv].  The trance-like state under which AISD was conceived[xxvi] should be considered as the result of an incessant thinking process leading to the inspiration to write[xxvii]. The strategical importance of the lexeme “inspiration” in AISD, so dear to the English Romantic Movement as well as to Trung himself, a profound expert of Dylan Thomas’s New Romantic macrotext, is just a piece of the puzzle depicting the influence of some of the leading cyphers of Romanticism in this long poem. Among them: exoticism; the role of the poet; an attraction for the East and the hazardous connection of the latter with the West, in the attempt to poetically render the present Waste Land.

        A voice against the tide, Trung´s, all absorbed in his Beaudelairian self:

Tôi là một giọt sương trong

Qua đêm đọng lại giữa lòng lá sen

(nct)

I am just a limpid drop of dew which

After the night settles at the midst of one lotus sheet

(nct)

Claudia Zilletti