'the sympathizer', a novel about a soldier, spy and film consultant / by sarah lyall (the new york times)

'the sympathizer' , a novel about the ...
source: the new york times

                                        'The Sympathizer',
                           a Novel About a Soldier,
                                        Spy and Film Consultant
                                                            By Sarah Lyall

                                                                            Viet Thanh Nguyen 
                                                                                                      Pulitzer Prize Winner
                                                                               (photo: internet)


There's a greats comic interlude in Viet Thanh Nguyen's  novel " The Sympathizer" when the unnamed narrator, a Vietnamese Army captain exiled in Los Angeles, critiques the screen-play of  gung-ho Hollywwod movie about America's heroism in the Vietnam War.

By this time, a lot of things have already happened.  Saigon has fallen.  Chaos has closed in.  The captain has secured the bloody, terrifying extraction of his boss, a pro-American general, on one of the last flights out (were there any other kind of flights in Saigon in 1975?) .  Working as an aide and sometime hit man for the general, now a California liquor-store owner, the captain applies himself to his real job: spying on the general, and other members of the Vietnamese diaspora, for the Communists who seized power back home.

In America, he' s in demand for his sophistication and fluent English.  A bloviating Hollywood director summons him to discuss the script for " The Hamlet", a movie in which a clichéd bunch of mostly doomed Green Berets saves, if that is the right word, a Vietnamese village from the Vietcong.  The scene lays bare many of the distressing, absurd, tangled indignities and contradictions that the captain  -- half-French, half-Vietnamese, educated at an Ame-
rican college, author of a senior thesis on symbols in Graham Greene -- contends with as he lives so many lives at once.

He points out that none of the movie's Vietnamese characters have intelligible speaking parts. " Do you not think it would be a little more believable," he tells the director," for a movie set in a certain country for the people in that country to have something to say, instead of having your screenplay direct, as it does now, ' Cut to villagers speaking in their own language' ?"

The great achievement of " The Sympathizer " is that it gives the Vietnamese a voice and demands that we pay attention,  Until now, it's been largely a one-sided conversation -- or at least that' s  how it seems in American popular culture.  As the narrator explains, " this was the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors,"  and so it is that we's heard about the Vietnam War mostly from the point of view of American soldiers, American politicians and American journalists.  We've never had a story quite like this one before.

Mr. Nguyen, who teaches English and American studies at the University of Southern California, was born in Vietnam but raised in the United States.  He is the author of an academic book, " Race and Resistance." How exciting that he also writes fiction, because he has a great deal to say and a knowing, playful, deeply intelligent voice.  His novel is a spy thriller, a philosophical exploration, a coming-of-age tale, the story of what it's like to be an immigrant, to be part- Asian, to be the illegitimate child of a forbidden liaison.  It's about being forced to hide yourself under so many layers that you' re not sure who you are.

The story is framed as a confession addressed to a figure called the Commandant, who, it gradually becomes clear, is keeping the captain prisoner in some unknown location,  (We won' t learn where or why until the book's shattering conclusion.) But the captain's account is less an appeal for absolution than an attempt to explain what he did and the reasons behind it.  It also allows him to be, as he says, an anthropologist of Vietnamese and Ame-rican culture.

The story flits around, intermingling past and present, scenes from childhood with scenes from pre-fall Saigon with scenes from contemporary America, conversations spilling 
together, so it's necessary to read carefully to orient yourself.  The tone is set in the very first sentence.  " I am spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man two faces," the narrator confesses. " I am also  man of two minds." That 's a point Mr. Nguyen will return to over and over again -- the blessing and the curse of finding subtlety where others see certainty.

As children, the narrator and two other boys, Bon and Man, swore blood brotherhood and have remained fierce friends. Bon is pro- American, a veteran of the C.I.A. - sponsored Phoenix program of assassination; he leaves Saigon with the narrator on that plane. Man is a Communist and the narrator's handler; he stays behind.  Once in Los Angeles, the narrator takes a job with his former university professor and begins a sensual affair with an older Japanese-American woman.  Students of Graham Greene, whose spare, precise writing contrasts with M. Nguyen's exuberant, expansive  and sometimes repetitious style, will recognize in her one of Mr. Nguyen' s many sly ripostes to and upendings of " The Quiet Americans", the subject of the narrator' s thesis.  While the love interest in that book is an annoyingly passive cipher, the narrator's girlfriend is a free-love feminist with trenchant views on Asian stereotyping. 

The captain travels to the Philippines as " The Hamlet " is filmed, a section clearly based on the filming of " Apocalypse Now." He helps wrangle Vietnamese refugees as extras for parts like Desperate Villager, Dead Girl, Lame Boy, Corrupt Officer, Gentle Whore and Crazy Guy in Whorehouse.  The writing is as good s ever, though the episode jars  bit interrupting the flow of the narrative. But when the story picks up again, you cannot look away.

There are so many passages to admire. Mr. Nguyen is a master of the telling ironic phrase and the biting detail, and the book pulses with " Catch-22-style absurdities." It was a smashingly successful cease-fire, for in the last two years only 150,000 soldiers had died without a truce! "  And, as an example of how he undercuts horror with humor and then swings it back around here he is, having described his first adolescent semi-non-solo sexual experience, with a dead cephalopod he finds in the kitchen. " Some will undoubtedly find this episode obscene, " he wites. " Not I! Massacre is obscene.  Torture is obscene.  Three million dead is obscene.  Masturbation, even with an admittedly nonconsensual squid? Not so much."

Toward the end of the book, we find out where the narrator has been imprisoned, who the shadowy Commandant is, and why everyone is afraid of an even shadowier character known as the Commissar.   The harrowing interrogation that follows forces the captain to examine every facet of his behavior -- the killings he witnessed, the killings he caused -- and to consider his possible complicity in a particularly grisly incident from his past.



It takes him to the very edge, and us along with him. (For the last few pages he will refer to himself as " we ", the emotional consequence, he says, of having two minds.) He is released from detention and left to ponder what lessons, if any, have been learned from one of the sorrier episodes in Vietnamese and American 20th-century history. " Revolutionaries can never be innocent," his friend Man has warned him.  Can anyone ?

  Sarah Lyall

louise gluck -- online poems ( http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/ poets/_gluck/online.htm

                               louise gluck -- online poems

                                                             louise gluck   [ 1943-        ]
                                                                 born in 1943, in New York City and grew up
                                                                 in Long Island.  Graduated in 1961  from
                                                                 George W. Hewlett High School, N.Y.  She
                                                                 went to attend Sarh Lawrence College and
                                                                 Columbia University.  Won the Pulitzer Prize
                                                                 for Poetry in 1993 for her collection 'The Wild
                                                                 Iris' ... She lives in Cambridge, Massachussetts
                                                                 and was previously in Senior lecturer in English
                                                                 at William College in Williamston ...
                                                                                        (PoemHunter. com)

     

                                        COTTONMOUTH COUNTRY



                                  Fish bones walked the waves off Hatteras,
                                  And there were other signs
                                 That Death wooed us, by water, wooed us
                                  By land: among the pines
                                  An uncurled cottonmouth that rolled on moss
                                  Reared in the polluted air.
                                  Birth, not death, is the hard loss.
                                  I know. I also left a skin there.

                                        COPYRIGHT 1987 LOUISE GLUCK
                                                            Online Source

                                    -------------------


                                              MARATHON


                                      PART 9 FROM 'MARARTHON'


                                     I was not meant to hear
                                     the two of them talking,
                                     But I could feel the light of the torch
                                     stop trembling, as though it had been
                                     set on the table, I was not hear
                                     the one say to the other
                                     how best to arouse me,
                                     with that words, what gestures,
                                     nor to hear the description of my body,
                                     how it responded, what
                                     it would not do. My back was turned.
                                     I studied the voices, soon distinguishing
                                     the first, which was deeper, closer,
                                     from that of the replacement.
                                     For all I know, this happens
                                     every night: somebody waking me, then
                                     the first teaching the second.
                                     What happens afterward
                                      occurs far from the world, at the depth
                                      where only the dream matters
                                      and the bond with any one soul
                                      its meaningless; you throw it away.


                                           C. 1987 LOUISE GLUCK
                                                                Online Source

                                       --------------------



                                                 THE POND


                                         Night covers the pond with its wing,
                                         Under the ringed moon I can make out
                                         your face swimming among minnows and the small
                                         echoing stars.  In the night air
                                         the surface of the pond is metal.

                                          Within, your eyes are open.  They contain
                                          a memory I recognize, as though
                                          we had been children together.  Our ponies
                                          grazed on the hill, they were gray
                                          with white markings. Now they graze
                                          with the dead who wait
                                          like children under their granite breastplates,
                                          lucid and helpless:

                                          The hills are far away. They rise up
                                           blacker than childhood.
                                           What do you think of, lying so quietly
                                           by the water? When you look that way I want
                                           to touch you, but do not, seeing
                                           as in another life we were of the same blood.

                                                from THE HOUSE ON THE MARSHLAND. c. 1975 LOUISE  GLUCK. Online Source


                                                                   ----------------------




                                                                               THE FEAR OF BURIAL


                                             In the empty field, in the morning,
                                             the body waits to be claimed.
                                             The spirit sits beside it, on sa small rock --
                                             nothing comes to give it from again.

                                             Think of the body's loneliness,
                                             At night pacing the sheared field,
                                             its shadow buckled tightly around.
                                             Such a long journey.

                                             And already the remote, trembling lights of the village
                                             not pausing for it as they scan the rows.
                                             How far away they seem,
                                             the wooden doors, the bread and milk
                                             laid like weights on the table.

                                                  from DESCENDING FIGURE. c. 1980 LOUISE GLUCK. Online Source


                                              ----------------

                                           
                                                           CIRCE'S TORMENT


                                              I regret bitterly
                                              The year of loving you in both
                                              Your presence and absence, regret
                                              The law, the vocation
                                              That forbid me to keep you, the sea
                                               A sheet of glass, the sun-bleached
                                               Beauty of the Greek ships: how
                                               Could I have power if
                                                I had no wish
                                               To transform you: as
                                                You loved my body,
                                                As you found there
                                                Passion we held above
                                                All other gifts in that single moment
                                                Over honor and hope, over
                                                 Loyalty, in the name of that bond
                                                 I refuse you
                                                 Such feeling for your wife
                                                 As will let you
                                                 Rest with her, I refuse you
                                                 Sleep again
                                                 If I cannot have you.

                                                      from MEADOWLAND.  c. 1986 LOUISE GLUCK Online Source

                                                   -------------


                                                                SIREN


                                                    I became  a criminal when I fell in love.
                                                    Before that I was a waitress.

                                                    I didn't want to go to Chicago with you
                                                    I wanted to marry you, I wanted
                                                    Your wife to suffer.

                                                     I wanted her life to be like a play
                                                     In which all the parts are sad parts.

                                                     Does a goof person
                                                     Think this way? I deserve

                                                      Credit for my courage --

                                                      I sat in the dark on your porch
                                                      Everything was clear to me:
                                                      If your wife wouldn't let you go
                                                      That proved she didn't love you.
                                                       If she loved you
                                                       Wouldn't she want you to be happy?

                                                        I think now
                                                        If I felt less I would be
                                                        A better person I was
                                                        A good waitress.
                                                        I could carry eight drinks.

                                                        I used to tell you my dreams.
                                                        Last night I saw  a woman sitting in a dark bus --
                                                        In the dream, she's weeping, the bus she's on
                                                        Is moving away. With one hand
                                                        She's waving; the other strokes
                                                        An egg carton full of babies.

                                                        The dream doesn't rescue the maiden.

                                                          Onlines poems by Louise Gluck




                   

book review of 'the sympathizer' / fwd. by ba ngo <... @yahoo.com>

book review of 'the sympathizer'
fwd by ba ngo> ... @yahoo.com>

                book review of 'the sympathizer'
                                      fwd. by ba ngo <... @yahoo.com>

                               the sympathizer / viet thanh nguyên
                                                                                          (courtesy photo: báo Thể thao & Văn hoá)


The more powerful a country is, the more disposed its people will be to see it as the lead actor in the sometimes farcical, often tragic pageant of history.  So it is that we, citizens of a superpower, have viewied the Vietnam.  War as a solely American drama in which the febrile land of tigers and
the elephants was mere backdrop and the Vietnamese mere extra.

The outlook is reflected in the literature -- and Vietnam was a very literary war, producing an immense library of fiction and nonfiction.  Among all those volumes, you'll find only a handful (Robert Olen Butler's  " A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain" comes to mind) with Vietnam-mese characters speaking in their own voices.

Hollywood has been still more Americentric.  In films like "Apocalypse Now" and" Platoon", the Vietnamese (often other Asians portraying Vietnamese) are never more than walk-ons whose principal roles seem to be die or wail in the ashes of incinerated villages.  Which brings me to Viet Thanh Nguyen 's  remarkable debut novel.  "The Sympathizer" --Nguyen born in Vietnam but raised in the United States, brings a distinct perspective to the war and its aftermath.  His books fills a void in the literature,  voice to the previously voiceless while it compels the rest of us to look at the events of 40 years ago in a new light.

But this tragicomic novel reaches beyond its historical context to illuminate more universal themes: the internal misconceptions and misunderstandings between East and West, and the moral dilemma faced by people forced to choose not between right and right.  The nameless protagonist-narrator, a memorable character despite his anonymity, is an Amercanized Vietnamese with a divided heart and mind.  Nguyen's skill in portraying  this sort of ambivalent personality compares favorably with masters like Conrad, Greene and le Carré.

Duality is literally in the protagonist's blood, for he is a half-caste, the illegitimate son of a teenage Vietnamese mother (whom he loves) and a French Catholic priest (whom he hates).  Widening the split in his nature, he was educated in the United States, where he learned to speak English without an accemt and developed another love-hate relationship this one with the country that he feels has coined too many "super" terms (supermarkets, superhighways, the Super Bowl, and so on)" from the federal bank of its narcissism."

The narrator's acrobatic abilty to balance between to worlds is his strength and weakness, as he makes clear in his opening lines: " I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not
surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds ... able to see any issue from both sides.  Sometimes I flatter myself that is a talent," he continues, but wonder if what I have should even be called talent. After all, a talent is something you use, not something that uses you.  The talent you cannot use, the talent that possesses you -- that is a hazard." And a hazard it proves to be. The protagonist's narrative, which takes the form of a confession written to a mystery man known as "the commandant," begins in the final days of the war, as Communist forces close in on Saigon.  The narrator is aide-de-camp to "the general"(one of several characters who, like the narrator, is never identified by name), the chief of the South Vietnam's national Police and, with it, of Special Branch, the secret police.

But the narrator is also a mole, a Communist undercover agent assigned to keeps tabs on the general and Special Branch's activities.  His closed friend is Bon, an assassin with the C.I.A.'s Phoenix program, " a genuine patriot" who volunteered to fight after Communists murdered his father for the crime of being a village chief. The narrator's North Vietnamese handler, Man, is also an old chum. Indeed, the narrator, Bon and Man were high school classmates who in their youth melodramatically swore allegiance to one another by becoming blood brothers.  This complex relationship with the narrator in the tenuous middle, riven by conflicting loyalties, is a recipe for tragic betrayals, and those come, one after the other.

Working through a C.I.A. spook named Claude, the narrator dispenses liberal bribes to engineer an air evacuation to the United States for the general, the generals' wife and their huge extended family. Bon is also to be lifted out with his wife and child.  The narrator wants to stay and take his place in a re-unified Vietnam, but Man, convinced that the general and his cohort will plot a counterrevolution from abroad, gives him a new mission that is an extension of his old one:" You general isn't the only one planning to keep on fighting," he explains. "The war's been going on too long for them to simply stop.  We need someone to keep an eye on them."

Nguyen presents a gripping picture of the fall of Saigon, its confusion chaos and terror, as the narra-
tor  flees with the others under a storm os shellfire from his Viet Cong and North Vietnamese
comrades. Bon's wife and child are killed before their plane takes off, giving him to more deaths to avenge.

This rich narrative stew is assembled in the novel's first 50 pages, then set on a low simmer.  From that brief, intense beginning we proceed to a picaresque account of the narrator's experiences as a refugee-cum-spy in Los Angeles.  He lands a clerical job with his former professor, has an affair with an older Japanese-American woman and sends messages to Man (written in invisible ink) via an intermediary in Paris.  here the novel becomes both thriller and social satire.  If you like your humor written in charcoal, this is the funniest part of the book, through it's occasionally spoiled by the zingers that belong on "The Daily Show" more than they do in a serious novel.

The narrator's espionage activities lead him to make a foray into the movie business.  He is hired by a director,"the auteur" (who bears a resemblance to Francis Ford Coppola), to round up the Vietnamese in a Phillipine refugee camp to work as extras in hid film (which bears a resemblance to"Apocalypse Now").  Nguyen adroitly handles the shifting tones of these episodes, now hilarious, now sad,as the narrator tries to do what Nguyen had sone: de-Americanize the Portrayal of the war.  But, unlike Nguyen, he fails.

Thereafter, the book's mood darkens.  The narrator falls into a web or deceit and treachery spun by his dual role and the schisms in his soul.  Man's suspicious prove accurate. The general and some other die-hards, guilt-ridden for not fighting to the death, bored with their mediocre in the States (the general has become owner of a liquor store).plot a counterrevolutionary invasion with the help of a right-wing congressman.

The narrator assists in the planning, while sending reports to Man.  However, to avoid having his cover blown, he is compelled to take part in two assassinations.  One victim is an ex-Special Branch officer,"the other is a Vietnamese journalist at a California newspaper.  The descriptions of the murders are tense, psychologically complex, riveting.  The narrator's conscience becomes as torn as the rest of him.  "Remorse over the crapulent major's death with ringing me up a few times a day, tenacious as a debt collector," he thinks.

(A parenthetical quibble, Good asit is."The Sympathizer' is sometimes marred by overwriting.  Lines like this -- The waiters with the main courses propped on their shoulders" --appear a bit too often.)

The general eventually assembles a ragtag army of former South Vietnamese soldiers, armed and funded by the Americans.  Man, kept abreast of the scheme, orders the narrator to remain in the States even as this army heads back to Asia, but he is once again rent by divided loyalties.  He feels he must go to save Bon, his blood brother from dying in what he's sure will be a suicide mission.  He finds himself caught in his familiar dilemma," with no idea how I would manage to betray Bon and save him at the same time."

The blood of friendship is thicker than the water of ideology.  The narrator joins th general's army.  What happens to it is predictable, what happens to the narrator and Bon is anything but.  I don't want to give anything away, except to say that  in its chapters.,"The Sympathizer" becomes an absurdist tour de force that might have been written by a Kafka or Genet.

As that narrative unfolds, the protagonist makes several starting discoveries, among which is the identity of the commandant's own boss, the commissar.  Under interrogation, the narrator goes temporally insane; but in his madness he achieves a new mental clarity.  He sees that the revolution for which he's sacrificed so much has betrayed him and everyone who fought for it -- as revolutions as prone to do.

Even the people who call the shots must admit that the fruit of victory are rotten,and the narrator in turn must recognize "this job, about how a revolution fought for independence and fredoom could make things worth less than nothing."

But that revelation produces an insight that saves him from complete despair:" Despite it all-- yes, despite everything in the face of nothing," he writes at the end of the "confession" that is this book,
" we still considers ourselves revolutionary.  We remain that most hopeful of creatures, a revolution-
ary in search of a revolution, although we will not dispute being called a dreamer doped by an illusion ... We cannot be alone!  Thousands more must be staring into darkness like us, gripped by scandalous thoughts, extravagant hopes and forbidden plots.  We lie in wait for the right moment and the just cause, which, at this moment, is simply wanting to live."

Philip Caputo is the author of "A Rumor of War" and 14 others books. He is currently working on a novel set in Mexico.

Sent from Yahoo Mail for Ipad.

viet thanh nguyen/  author of 'the sympathizer'

(vietnamese's name: nguyễn thanh việt)

   (courtesy photo: báo Thể thao& Văn hóa)

hoa nước mắt/ flowers of tears by hà huyền chi ( vietnamese int'l poetry society, usa 2008)

                            hoa nước mắt / flowers of tears/
                                                                 by hà huyền chi

                                                  TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH BY DO LENH THUAN
      
                                                
                                                     HÀ HUYỀN CHI  [i.e. Đặng, Trí  Hoàn 1935 -    ]
                                                                                after  April, 30, 1975, he imigrated to USA.
                                                                                           Lives now in Lecay, WA, USA. 
                                                                             (photo:  p. 657  cụm hoa tình yêu/ tập XII)

                                                                                             


  HOA NƯỚC MẮT


  Canarina  anh lính Mỹ Nhẩy dù
  Có mái tóc mùa thu úa lá 
  Mắt xanh sóng biển đại dương 
  Giữa mùa nho anh giã biệt quê hương 
  Sang đất Việt cùng chúng tôi chiến đấu 
  Anh kể với tôi 
  Quê anh bờ xôi giếng mật
  Nhá máy buyn-đinh cao ngất mây trời 
  Tuần lễ 7 ngày đều là Chủ nhật  
  Đèn rực hoa sao rượu thắm môi cười


 Tôi dậy cho anh
  Bài học đầu tiên gian khổ
  Của một nước nghèo vì đeo đẳng chiến tranh 
  Đêm ngủ bờ lau chia phiên phục kích  
  Ngày vượt suối băng rừng đuổi địch 
  Khát uống nước sình 
  Trái đắng thay cơm
  Qua những Di lăng, Hà giả, Bồng sơn 
  Rồi Quảng đức, Tà gầm, Đỗ xá 
  Anh thấy không
  Quê tôi đất cằn sỏi đá 
  Vườn trống nhà xiêu mái là xác sơ 
  Người lớn thiếu ăn mặt xanh tầu lá  
 Trẻ thơ bụng ỏng đít vòn 
 Chúng ngơ ngác nhìn anh bằng đôi mắt không hồn 
 Anh đã thấy đồng bào tôi  
 Sống cuộc đời cơ cực
 Bát cơm đổi bát mồ hôi
 Ra sức vỡ rừng phá núi 
 Cầy thay trâu và tát nước thay mưa 
 Vai gầy bọc áo vải thưa 
 Nhọc nhằn quản nắng mưa dãi dầu   ...

    
 Canarina 
 Anh lính Mỷ Nhẩy dù 
 Có mái tóc mùa thu úa lá 
 Mắt xanh sóng biển đại dương
 Sau một năm trời chiến đấu 
 Hơn 2 lần bị thương
 Máu anh chảy thắm mầu cờ đơn vị
 Cho tình thân thêm gắn bó keo sơn
 Anh tập sống ăn như người Việt
Anh cũng gội mưa tắm gió
 Cũng chiếu đất màn trời
 Không ngại khó khăn, chẳng nề gian khổ 
 Mái tóc vàng thêm nắng lửa  
 Mầu mắt thêm xanh vì xót thương đời


 Ngày được lệnh trở về quê mẹ
 Anh buồn hơn buổi lâm hành
 Phút chia biệt anh nghẹn ngào cúi mặt 
 Mấy thằng em tôi cũng khóc theo anh 
 Tình chiến hữu nở bông hoa nước mắt
 Anh nói vài câu tiếng Việt chưa rành
 " Tôi yêu Việt nam nhiều, nhiều và mãi nhớ các anh "...

  Hà huyền Chi -- 1966



FLOWERS OF TEARS


Canarina
The airborne soldier of America,
His hair the yellow of autumn leaves,
His eyes the blue of the rolling seas;
When grapes were ripe he left his native country.
To the land of the Viêt he came,
To share with us the burden of war.
He told me of his country
Land of golden shores ans maple leaves,
Factories and buildings reaching the clouds of Heaven.
Land of seven Sundays,
Nights of million stars, days of song and laughter.
I offered him the first taste of hardship,
An endless war


In a miserable country,
Nights of sleep among swampy reeds, lying in ambush,
Days of crossing rivers and climbing mountains, pursuing the ennemy.
Muddy water for drinks, bitter fruits for meals.
There you see
My country, land of wrinkles, mountains of rocks,
Empty gardens, crumbling hut-desolation,
Undernuorished people, face as green as banana leaves,
Children, round bellies and flat chests,
Greet you with soulless eyes-desperation.
You see my people,
Their lives a perpetual hardship;
A bowl of sweat for a bowl of rice.
There are forests to clear, mountains to level,
Fields to irrigate without rain,
Land to plough  without buffalo,
Bony shoulders covered with thin clothes;
But long days of hard work seem nothing,


Canarina,
The airborne soldier of America,
His hair the yellow of autumn leaves,
His eyes the blue of the rolling seas.
One year of combat,
More than once wounded,
He mixed his blood with ours
Strengthening the bonds of friendship forever.
He learned to live and eat like a Viet;
Together, we had earth for bed and clouds for blanket.
Fearless of obstacles, unappalled by hardship,
His blond hair blonder from the sun and fire,
His blue eyes bluer from the pain of life.
How sad the day for his return home,
Silence and tears in his eyes;
Tears also from my men,
The flowers of tears born out of friendship
He mumbled a few Vietnamese words,
"I love Vietnam and shall remember you ."

Poem by Ha Huyen Chi, translated by Do Lenh Thuan
(We The Vietnamese, page 257- 259. Edited by Francois Sully, Preager Publishers, 1971.)



                                                                                  (p. 502- 505  CỤM HOA TÌNH YÊU   (thi tập XII.)

                                                                                
                                                                 CỤM HOA TÌNH YÊU/  FLOWERS OF LOVE / FLEURS D' AMOUR
                                                            Hội thơ Tải tử Viêtnam Hải ngoại/  Vietnamese Int'l Poetry Society, USA 2008)

queques poèmes de wislava szymborska : vietnam -- la gare -- dans le fleuve d' héraclite ( bengricheahmed.over-blog.com )

             quelques poèmes de wislava szymborska:
          viêtnam -- la gare -- dans le fleuve
                       d'héraclite

 

wislava szymborska  [1923- 2012]

 " la poétesse Wislava Szymborska, prix de Nobel de littérature 1996.

Critique littéraire, chroniqueuse, tradutrice, W.S. a écrit plus

                           de 250 poèmes.  Elle est auteure d'une vingtaine de receuils parmi lesquels

        'La mort sans exagérer'(1996) et 'Je ne sais quelle gens' (1997), tous deux

traduits du polonais par Pior Kaminskiet publiés chez Fayard, ou de

'Dans le fleuve d' Héraclite' (Maison de la poésie Nord-Pas-de-Calais, 1955).

Sa poésie limpide et raffinée, teinlée d' ironie et d'inspiration philosophique."

    

            VIETNAM 


            Femme comment tu t'appelles?  -- je ne sais pas
            Où et quand es- tu née? -- je ne sais pas
            Pourquoi as- tu creusé ce trou? -- je ne sais pas
            Combien de temps tu t'es cachée? -- je ne sais pas

            Pourquoi tu as mordu la main que je te tendais -- je ne sais pas
            Sais tu que nous sommes là pour l'aider -- je ne sais pas
            De quel côté es-tu?  -- je ne sais pas
            Dans une guerre il faut être d'un côté ou de l'autre -- je ne sais pas
            Est-ce que ton village existe encore? -- je ne sais pas
            Ce sont tes enfants? Oui.



            LA GARE


            Ma non- arrivée dans la ville N
            s'est passé à l'heure ponctuelle

            Je te l'avais annoncé
             par une lettre non envoyée.

             Tu as eu tout le temps
             de ne pas arriver à l'heure


             Le train est arrivé quai trois
             Un flot de gens est descendu.

             La foule en sortant emporta
             l'absence de ma personne

              Quelques femme s'empressèrent
              de prendre ma place dans la foule

              Quequ'un que je connaissais pas
              courut vers une d'entre elles
              qui la reconnut immédiatement.

               Ils échangèrent un baiser
               qui n'était pas pour vos lèvres
               Entre temps une valise disparut
               qui m'était pas la mienne


                La gare de la ville N a passé
                son examen d' existence objective

                Tout était parfaitement en place
                et chaque détail avancait
                sur des rails infiniment bien tracés.

                 Même le rendez-vous a eu lieu
                 
                 Mais sans notre présence.

                  Au paradis perdu
                  de la probabilité

                      Ailleurs
                    ailleurs
                   Combien résonnent ce mots.



                     DANS LE FLEUVE D' HÉRACLITE


                     Dans le fleuve d' Héraclite
                     poisson pêche poisson
                     poisson écaille poisson qvec poisson tranchant
                     poisson construit poisson, poisson habite poisson
                     poisson s'enfuit de poisson assiégé

                      Dans le fleuve d' Héraclite
                      poisson aime poison
                      tes yeux, lui dit-il, brillent comme poissons dans le ciel
                      voudrais- tu partager la mer avec moi
                      Ô toi la plus belle du ban

                       Dans le fleuve d' Héraclite
                       poisson vient d' inventer le poisson des poissons.
                       poisson s'agenouille devant poisson, chnte poisson
                       poisson prie poisson de lui rendre la vie plus facile.

                       Dans le fleuve d' Héraclite
                       moi poisson solitaire, poisson différent
                       (tout au moins du poisson arbre et du poisson rocher)
                        j' écris petit poisson d' argent
                        couvert d' écailles scintillnates
                        serait-ce les étoiles qui clignent la nuit étonnée.

                        Wislava Szymborska