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Lượm Tuyết















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A Child’s Christmas in Dalat
The author remembers his first Christmas, in 1969 Vietnam.

Wild orchids and colored, painted pine cones—these things I remember of Christmas in Vietnam. It was in Dalat, the hill station city with its persistent fog and whispering pine forests and littered with French-built villas, that I first celebrated Christmas. My father had been transferred there after the 1968 Tet offensive, and he brought the entire family with him.

The distant bombing and the tropical heat of Sadec in the Mekong Delta were replaced by Dalat's cool fresh breezes and romantic lakes. I was 5 years old, a child running free on fallen pine needles and tall green grass in the forest as I searched for wild mushrooms, pine cones and orchids for Christmas decorations. My older brother, sister and I would each carry a wicker basket and eventually fill them with all that nature had to offer. Those days we never bought any Christmas decorations.

We used to sing. And by singing, I mean spontaneously. As children we were not at all self-conscious and sang with gusto and often off key, but always with gusto. In the woods, early in the morning, we sang Christmas carols and chased each other, and sometimes the neighborhood kids would join in. Afterwards, our sweaters and hair would be embedded with pollen and pine needles. Dalat was a sparsely populated town then, and our laughter and singing echoed and resonated in the dew-covered forest.

At home we helped our mother decorate the Christmas tree. Its fresh pine fragrance brought the whole forest inside with us. My mother would roll cotton into shapes of little chicks and angels with wings and place them on the tree. The cones and mushrooms she painted green and red and blue and hung them everywhere in the living room. These ornaments were all the decorations we needed.

When my paternal grandmother came downstairs all dressed up in her ao dai dress, she would take us to mass. She held my hand and led me and my siblings on the dirt road to a local church whose bells rang out in the air. Though I wasn't a Catholic, I remember feeling a spiritual devotion in that church. Everyone was smartly dressed and smiling. People sang and read their psalms. Afterwards the priest distributed candy for the children. I remember it was early evening, the sun had sunk behind a bank of fog as we walked home, the world was glowing in a lavender hue.

But before going home we would stop by the Hoa Binh market to buy some fruit and baguettes. Children with pink round cheeks held their mothers' hands, and young adults in their best clothes walked around to show off their attire. The strawberries and plums we would eat on the way home.

At home, the best part of the Christmas dinner was dessert. My mother, a consummate baker, would make the traditional buche de Noel, a chocolate covered cake in the shape of a log with a tiny Santa Claus sitting on top. Then my father would open the champagne and pour each of us a glass. We didn't receive any gifts as children did in America, but we didn't need any and never felt the loss. 

That was my favorite memory of Christmas in Vietnam. If you think that such a memory is out of place for a country whose image is full of conical-hatted figures working in the rice fields, then you haven't been to Dalat. Dalat, built by the French as a hill station resort, was for the most part a peaceful town, until near the end of the war. For those of us who had the fortune to live there, the war was often at a distance. Unlike the popular American belief shaped by Hollywood films, Vietnamese did not always live under constant terror and in half-burned villages. Instead, what we had in Dalat was a gentle, small town life that I haven't found again living here in America.

These days our Christmas is a big celebration in the San Francisco Bay Area. My paternal grandmother is long gone, but the Christmas trees are heavy with trinkets and baubles at my siblings' households. We vie to show off to one another how well we decorate our homes. Santa on the roof; reindeer on the lawn. Our Christmas dinner is often replete with seafood and my father's favorite dish, bouillabaisse, and, of course, roasted turkey and wines and champagnes. It is a testament, I suppose, to how well we have fared in the land of plenty.

So many years have passed since the war ended, yet it is not the horrors of war that dwell now in my mind during Christmas time. It's the transcending peace in a tranquil world that is now lost.

Dalat, too, like the rest of Vietnam, is crowded with people and the trees are fewer and the forests thinned. Even the weather had changed, growing warmer with fewer trees.

Still, I bet there are children running and laughing, as before, among the pine needles and singing brooks on that high plateau I once called home.





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December 28, 2012
The Wondrous Mathematics of Winter
Posted by Gregory Buck

Like everyone else I know, when winter comes I think of Plato’s theory of ideal forms. If I say circle or square, you know what I mean, though in some sense you have never seen a circle—the shape in the plane where all the points are exactly equidistant from the center—because in reality everything is always at least a little off. Plato thought truth ought to work this way, that what we understand as truth is always an approximation to an ideal form.

Note: Một bài viết thật lạ về Mùa Đông, Mùa của Toán Tuyệt Vời.

Nhưng, đọc khúc dạo đầu, thì Gấu Cà Chớn lại nghĩ đến Vòng Tròn Ma Quái, hay Sự Chúc Dữ Của Cái Vòng Tròn, la malédiction du cercle, khiến ngành thiên văn học mất mẹ nó hai ngàn năm, và là đề tài của cuốn Những Kẻ Mộng Du của Koestler!
Winter Tale


Note: Bài Lượm Tuyết, do sơ ý, GCC “delete” mất tiêu. Xin thay bằng bài của Stephen King, trong khi chờ dịch toàn bài, và viết thêm cái phần của Gấu, những ngày đầu đến Xứ Tuyết, gặp lại cô bạn, cùng ngồi ngắm những bông tuyết rơi, lần đầu tiên trong đời, tưởng tượng ra Mùa Thu năm tới:
Nghe nói mùa Thu ở đây đẹp lắm

Mùa Đông 

Con chó đen đùa với bãi tuyết
Người đàn ông đi hết mùa Đông
Cây khắc nét khô vào nền trời xám 

Nghe nói mùa Thu ở đây đẹp lắm
Tụi mình chạy xe đuổi theo lá đổi mầu
Trên xa lộ
Trong thơ Nguyễn Du
Trong hạnh ngộ. 

Lạnh, 

Hai vợ chồng ôm cặp
Đứng đợi xe
Ở đầu ngã tư
Cuối cuộc đời
Học giùm mấy đứa con còn kẹt lại

Tuổi năm mươi gấp sách lại đứng nghe

Đi trong gió
Nỗi nhớ Sài-gòn buốt trên đầu ngón tay

Nhân tiện thông báo, tuần tới, GCC đi Cali thăm "bạn, tưởng là bạn, nhưng đúng là bạn"!

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Sách Mùa Thu & Giả Tưởng Mùa Đông

Cái tít bài viết về ông Trùm phê bình Harold Bloom, của Larissa Macfarquhar, trên tờ Người Nữu Ước, số 30 Tháng Chín 2002, mới ghê, cứ như là viết về Thầy Cuốc: Harold Bloom is dangerous to know. Thầy Cuốc thì rất nguy hiểm để mà biết!

Bài viết được lắm. TV post bản tiếng Anh, và nếu có thì giờ, đi lai rai, nhân đó, lèm bèm lai rai về phê bình, gợi hứng từ câu phán của ông tiên chỉ VP: Mít đếch có phê bình gia.

Nhờ câu phán của ông, mà chúng ta có nữ phê bình gia Thụy Khê, vì theo như bà trả lời phỏng vấn, sở dĩ bà viết phê bình, là vì nghe VP than, cõi văn Mít đếch có thứ “của hiếm” này !

Số Mùa Đông 1999, cũng thần sầu! Có bài viết thú lắm, về "Xì Ta Lỉn", của 1 ông “giống ông bố VTH”, 1 cận thần của Xì. Chưa  kể mấy giả tưởng, thí dụ, của Tatyana Tolstaya, về tuyết, và nhất là bài điểm sách Hãy nói đi, Hồi Ức, của chính tác giả của nó, là Nabokov

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Tiếc thật!
Gấu cứ nghĩ Gấu được Ông Giời ban cho Phép Lạ Bí Ẩn, theo đó, sau ngày 30 Tháng Tư, chỉ được sống tới năm 70.
Thế là đọc như điên, và đốt như điên, để kịp chết!
Rồi thêm Gấu Cái nữa, mỗi lần dọn nhà, là mỗi lần than, khi còn trẻ, khổ vì mi, về già, khổ vì sách báo của mi.
Câu mà Gấu Cái hay than nhất, là, tao có quá nhiều đứa mê, khi còn con gái, thế mà lại lấy đúng mi, đứa chẳng hề mê ta, nếu có chăng, là tí ti thương hại!

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WHEN I was a kid, there was only one real tourist season in Maine: the three months between Memorial Day and Labor Day. But in recent years the tourists have been reappearing a month or so later, as leaf-peepers. In October, their cars (most seem to be Volvos) fill the back roads between Kittery and Fort Kent, moving slowly, weaving back and forth across the center line as the drivers gawk out their windows, looking for that leaf-peeper El Dorado known as "peak color." You also see their cars in New Hampshire, parked bumper to bumper along the break-down lane as the owners train their Nikons down the gorges and ravines and frantically burn film, as well as farther west, in Vermont, where there's a cider stand around every bend and folks from Wisconsin hobnob with folks from Illinois about where the color is best (they agree that it's always north of where they are). But by late October-as the leaves start to dull and the trees show their branches (leaf-peepers don't come for branches)- they've gone home to eat their Thanks-giving dinners and Think Snow, as their bumper stickers say, only to return after New Year's Day, no longer summer people or leaf-peepers but ski bums, with roof racks mounted on their all-wheel drives. Between the leaf-peepers' going and the skiers' coming, there is a hiatus which has taken me fifty years to appreciate. The weather is quiet. The back roads empty out, and the vehicles are different: they are pulp trucks, panel trucks, pick-'em-ups (usually jammed with wide-bodied fellows in orange down vests), and old cancerous Buicks. In the general stores of towns like Lovell and Sanborton, the talk relaxes, becomes less stagey. One hears less "ayuh" and "Coss we will." The season tilts. Everything creaks. One can hear it-the sound is the bony skitter of small animals moving through the trees, doing the last of their pre-winter shopping. In these weeks, the woods give up their secrets. A squirrel moves with indiscreet fanfare through the fallen leaves, and you can also see it; there is no concealing greenery except for austere pines and spruces. It's possible that you'll spot a deer (or a moose) moving among the freshly opened lanes of the forest: before the first real snowfall, they're stuffed full with all the forage they can gobble, and look like a child's drawing, their squarish bodies somehow unlikely above their long, spindly legs.

Our house in western Maine juts out of a steep slope above a long finger of lake that in the summer we never see (there are winks of blue amid the trees in the late afternoon) and which late in the winter we see only as a flat, uninteresting expanse of snow. But in December the lake is suddenly there, all of it, a flinty arrowhead under what is usually a sunless gray sky. With no dazzle to distract the eye, one sees the water in a single, effortless north-south sweep. There is grimness to this sort of landscape, but also a thin-lips-and- no-makeup beauty. After the leaves fall, geography tells its tale with great simplicity. The drifts of fallen leaves can't obscure the thinness of the soil: rocks break free everywhere, and hill-sides become graveyards full of tumbled, unlettered tombstones. In the occasional sunlight, almost all shadows fall straight. Romantics compare the cycle of the seasons to the cycle of human life, a comparison I have never really trusted. And yet now, at the age of fifty-one, I find something in it, after all. Sooner or later, life takes in its breath, pauses, and then tilts toward winter. I sense that tilt approaching. When the idea threatens to become oppressive, I think of the woods in New England tilting into winter-how you can see the whole expanse of the lake, not just the occasional wink through the trees, and hear every movement on the land that slopes down to the water. You can hear every living thing, no matter how cunning, before snow comes to muffle the world.

-STEPHEN KING

Note: Bài Lượm Tuyết, do sơ ý, GCC “delete” mất tiêu. Xin thay bằng bài của Stephen King, trong khi chờ dịch toàn bài, và viết thêm cái phần của Gấu, những ngày đầu đến Xứ Tuyết, gặp lại cô bạn, cùng ngồi ngắm những bông tuyết rơi, lần đầu tiên trong đời, tưởng tượng ra Mùa Thu năm tới:
Nghe nói mùa Thu ở đây đẹp lắm

Mùa Đông 

Con chó đen đùa với bãi tuyết
Người đàn ông đi hết mùa Đông
Cây khắc nét khô vào nền trời xám 

Nghe nói mùa Thu ở đây đẹp lắm
Tụi mình chạy xe đuổi theo lá đổi mầu
Trên xa lộ
Trong thơ Nguyễn Du
Trong hạnh ngộ. 

Lạnh, 

Hai vợ chồng ôm cặp
Đứng đợi xe
Ở đầu ngã tư
Cuối cuộc đời
Học giùm mấy đứa con còn kẹt lại

Tuổi năm mươi gấp sách lại đứng nghe

Đi trong gió
Nỗi nhớ Sài-gòn buốt trên đầu ngón tay

Nhân tiện thông báo, tuần tới, GCC đi Cali thăm "bạn, tưởng là bạn, nhưng đúng là bạn"!
Hà, hà!
["May I see U there, my [not] sad seagull, @ SJ"?
Take Care. NQT]