THAT LITTLE SOMETHING

for Li-Young Lee

 The likelihood of ever finding it is small.
It's like being accosted by a woman
And asked to help her look for a pearl
She lost right here in the street. 

She could be making it all up,
Even her tears, you say to yourself,
As you search under your feet,
Thinking, Not in a million years ... 

It's one of those summer afternoons
When one needs a good excuse
To step out of a cool shade.
In the meantime, what ever became of her? 

And why, years later, do you still,
Off and on, cast your eyes to the ground
As you hurry to some appointment
Where you are now certain to arrive late?

Charles Simic 

Dịch theo kiểu classic : 

Một chút gì 

Sẽ chẳng bao giờ biết được đâu
Chút gì rất nhẹ ... tựa hôm nào
Nàng đến kề bên, nhờ tìm giúp
Giữa đường rơi một hạt minh châu 

Có thể rằng Nàng bịa đấy thôi
E rằng nước mắt cũng vờ rơi
Mắt dò dưới chân, lòng thầm nghĩ
Tìm suốt triệu năm cũng chỉ hoài 

Hôm ấy, một chiều của mùa hè
Cuồng chân trong bóng mát im che
Viện trăm ngàn cớ mà ra khỏi ...
Còn Nàng , vì cớ gì vậy kìa ? 

Thế thôi mà sao sau bao năm
Thi thoảng mắt lại dò mặt đường
Những lần vội đến nơi hò hẹn
Dù biết mười mươi, trễ, chuyện thường (1)

K

Tks. NQT

GCC biết đến cái tên Li-Young Lee là qua bài thơ trên.

Li-Young Lee (a)

WHEN LI- YOUNG LEE visited Pearl London's class in March 1995, he was thirty-seven years old and had written two books of poems. His visit coincided with the release of a third book, his prose-poem memoir, The Winged Seed: A Remembrance. In lush language, the book unfolds Lee's extraordinary biography: his father was for a time Mao's personal physician, but on the establishment of the People's Republic his parents fled to Indonesia, where Lee was born in Jakarta in 1957. The following year, with Indonesia becoming increasingly anti-Chinese under President Sukarno, Lee's father was arrested and imprisoned for nineteen months. After his release the family traveled in exile for five years, moving from Hong Kong to Macao to Japan before arriving in the United States. Lee's father then attended seminary in Pittsburgh and settled the family in the small town of Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, where he became minister of a Presbyterian church.
The themes of memory, father, language, God, selflessness, and humility that animate Lee's memoir play out as well in his first book, Rose (1986) and even more deeply in The City in Which I Love You (1991), honored as best second volume of poems by the Academy of American Poets. In London's copy of this second volume, one line in "The Cleaving" is marked with especially urgent asterisks and underscoring: "What is it in me would / devour the world to utter it?" In their conversation London asked Lee about that line, and Lee's response illuminates his impulse toward the visionary: “As I was writing the poem," he answers, "I wanted to write from a place of unknowing, not from knowledge .... My wish was that the poem would move toward a kind of ecstatic utterance."
Lee, who studied biochemistry before shifting to poetry in his senior year at the University of Pittsburgh, now lives in Chicago with his wife and two children. Over the years he has worked in warehouses and as a karate teacher, and he has taught poetry at Stanford University and the University of Iowa. Since his visit to London's class he has written two additional volumes of poetry, Book of My Nights (200I), which won the William Carlos Williams Award, and Behind My Eyes (2008).
* 

LEE: I feel a poetic truth is closer than any truth that we can approach. The closer something is to poetry, the closer it is to reality. Let's just take the lyric poem as an example-the manifold quality of a lyric poem, the instantaneousness of a lyric poem, the feeling that many consciousnesses are simultaneously being enacted-that is closer to reality. The lyric moment is reality. But we don't always live in that reality. The lyric moment is closer to the truth, to me, than a narrative which is a fictive process.
My hope when I was writing this book was that I could proceed by a deeper compass than narrative fictive logic. I don't think I escape narrative in this book, but I wish I could.

Note: Câu trả lời trên chứa chất trong nó tham vọng viết văn của GNV:

Văn phải được chuyên chở bằng thơ. Gấu này không thể chịu nổi văn Bắc Kít, câu cụt thun lủn, chưa viết đã hăm he lên lớp, hăm he giải thích, hăm he chính luận.
Không tin, đọc SCN là thấy liền!

Gấu nhớ là, khi viết xong câu văn dưới đây, trong truyện ngắn đầu tay, Những Ngày Ở Sài Gòn, Gấu sướng mê tơi, lấy xe chạy rong suốt 1 cõi Sài Gòn, ta sẽ là nhà văn, ta sẽ viết 1 cuốn tiểu thuyết nối liền hai thành phố….
Ui chao, sao mà rồ dại một cách tuyệt vời như thế cơ chứ!

Niên học cuối cùng của Lan Hương ở bậc trung học bắt đầu bằng những buổi sáng sớm giá lạnh xô đẩy trí nhớ tôi tìm lại Hà Nội, tôi thức giấc sớm, thân thể rét run, bàng hoàng tưởng như đang run rẩy trong một buổi sáng nào đó trong Hà Nội, tưởng như chiến tranh đã hết. (1)

Cuối cùng/bắt đầu/ xô đẩy/… câu văn chạy tới đâu, tình yêu BHD rạt rào tới đó!

---

Self-Help for Fellow Refugees

If your name suggests a country where bells
might have been used for entertainment

or to announce the entrances and exits of the seasons
or the birthdays of gods and demons,

it's probably best to dress in plain clothes
when you arrive in the United States,
and try not to talk too loud.

If you happen to have watched armed men
beat and drag your father
out the front door of your house
and into the back of an idling truck

before your mother jerked you from the threshold
and buried your face in her skirt folds,
try not to judge your mother too harshly.

Don't ask her what she thought she was doing
turning a child's eyes
away from history
and toward that place all human aching starts.

And if you meet someone
in your adopted country,
and think you see in the other's face
an open sky, some promise of a new beginning,
it probably means you're standing too far.

* *

Or if you think you read in the other, as in a book
whose first and last pages are missing,
the story of your own birthplace,
a country twice erased,
once by fire, once by forgetfulness,
it probably means you're standing too close.

In any case, try not to let another carry
the burden of your own nostalgia or hope.

And if you're one of those
whose left side of the face doesn't match
the right, it might be a clue

looking the other way was a habit
your predecessors found useful for survival.
Don't lament not being beautiful.

Get used to seeing while not seeing.
Get busy remembering while forgetting.
Dying to live while not wanting to go on.

Very likely, your ancestors decorated
their bells of every shape and size
with elaborate calendars
and diagrams of distant star systems,
but with no maps for scattered descendants.

* *

And I bet you can't say what language
your father spoke when he shouted to your mother
from the back of the truck, "Let the boy see!"

Maybe it wasn't the language you used at home.
Maybe it was a forbidden language.
Or maybe there was too much screaming
and weeping and the noise of guns in the streets.

It doesn't matter. What matters is this:
The kingdom of heaven is good.
But heaven on earth is better.

Thinking is good.
But living is better.

Alone in your favorite chair
with a book you enjoy
is fine. But spooning
is even better.

Li-Young Lee

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