September 12, 2020

Learning Late Letters

Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng

^{translated from Vietnamese by the author}

The dead don't let us go, I say to my friend Sirius, putting my father's letters in a drawer. It is the plight of Mezentius that I endure, attached to a dead man, hand in hand, mouth in mouth, in a sad embrace. The letters stopped arriving from the country of my childhood. The man who wrote them died a solitary death and was buried at the edge of a stream. But he is there, his skin touches my skin, my breath gives life to his lips. He is there, I say to Sirius, when I speak to you, when I eat, when I sleep, when I take a walk. It seems to me that I am dead, whereas my father, the dead man who refuses to leave me in peace, overflows with life. He possesses me, sucks my blood, gnaws my bones, feeds on my thoughts. 1

“Die fresh. Die withered.
Die sore. Die throbbing.
Die hard. Die standing up.
Die lying down. Die
nightwise. Die more. Die
horrified. Die gradual. Die
corroding. Die squashed.
Die choking. Die fainting.
Die everything. Die all.
Die falling. Die swooning.
Die tense. Die loose. Die
now. Die spinning. Die
quashed. Die quelled. Die
rotting. Die crushed. Die
everyone. Die clean. Die
raw. Die bruised. Die
sitting. Die morningwise.
Die afternoonwise. Die
departing. Die undoing.”2

In the last letter, the dying man taught me a lesson of 36 deadly tricks. He called them the 36 documentations of secret agencies, 36 spells of horror, 36 faces of vanity, 36 tactics of being deadly, 36 stratagems of dying. All night long, I chant his weird song over and over like a crazy heart. Dripping drops of time, the tune flies far from the propaganda of a human life. When Sirius asks why I keep murmuring the lines, I say, It helps me learn my fathertongue, glide into my childhood siesta, melt into my red hot girdle of earth. The letters of the dead burn me, urge me to speak to them, speak them, have them speak me, even in my sleep. Every dream is a chamber where the language drills, like vital winds, hum me anew, blowing me closer to the waters where my father lies. Every night he still sleeptalks his fatal rhythm through my broken tongue.

^{1 Linda Lê, Thư Chết, trans. Bùi Thu Thuỷ dịch}^{(Hà Nội: NXB Văn Học, Nhã Nam, 2013), 7.

2 Trần Dần, Những Ngã Tư và Những Cột Đèn (Hà Nội: NXB Hội Nhà Văn, Nhã Nam, 2017), 259.}

Chant Chữ Chết

Người chết không buông tha chúng ta, tôi vừa nói với anh bạn Sirius vừa xếp những lá thư của cha tôi vào ngăn kéo. Đó là nhục hình Mézence mà tôi phải chịu, tức là bị buộc vào một người chết, tay áp tay, miệng kề miệng, trong một nụ hôn buồn. Những lá thư đã ngừng đến từ đất nước của tuổi thơ tôi. Người viết thư đã chết, một cái chết cô đơn, và được chôn bên bờ nước. Nhưng người vẫn đây, da người chạm da tôi, hơi thở tôi thổi sống làn môi ấy. Tôi bảo Sirius, Người ở đây này, khi tôi đang nói chuyện với anh, khi tôi ăn, khi tôi ngủ, khi tôi dạo chơi. Dường như tôi mới chính là người chết, còn cha tôi, người chết không để tôi yên ấy, lại đang ngập tràn sự sống. Người ám tôi, hút máu tôi, gặm xương tôi, ngốn suy nghĩ tôi. 1

“Chết tươi. Chết
héo. Chết đau.
Chết điếng. Chết
cứng. Chêt đứng.
Chết nằm. Chết
đêm. Chết thêm.
Chết khiếp. Chết
dần. Chết mòn.
Chết toi. Chết
ngóp. Chết ngất.
Chết tất. Chết cả.
Chết lử. Chết lả.
Chết đứ. Chết đừ.
Chết ngay. Chết
quay. Chết ngỏm.
Chết ngoẻo. Chết
thối. Chết nát.
Chết hết. Chết
sạch. Chết tái.
Chết tím. Chết
ngồi. Chết sáng.
Chết chiều. Chết
bỏ. Chết dở.”2

Trong thư cuối, người dạy tôi tổng cộng 36 kế chết người. Người dặn đây là 36 tài liệu công tác nguỵ quân nguỵ quyền, 36 phép rùng rợn, 36 vẻ phù hoa, 36 món chết người, 36 món chết. Suốt đêm, tôi niệm bài ca quỷ ám của người, tụng đi tụng lại như một trái tim điên. Chảy ròng những giọt đồng hồ, giai điệu người bay xa kiếp giáo lý. Khi Sirius hỏi sao tôi cứ lẩm nhẩm lời người, tôi đáp, Để tôi học tiếng cha tôi, dạt vào giấc trưa tuổi thơ tôi, tan vào đất đỏ nhiệt đới tôi. Chữ người chết nung tôi, thúc tôi nói với họ, nói họ, rồi họ nói tôi, cả khi tôi ngủ. Mỗi giấc mơ là một căn phòng nơi những bài luyện chữ, như gió thổi, ngân tôi, tái thiết tôi, mang tôi cận kề con nước nơi cha tôi nằm. Hằng đêm người vẫn nói mớ một thứ phách nhịp chết người thấm xuyên lưỡi vỡ tôi.

^{1 Linda Lê, Thư Chết, trans. Bùi Thu Thuỷ dịch (Hà Nội: NXB Văn Học, Nhã Nam, 2013), 7.

2 Trần Dần, Những Ngã Tư và Những Cột Đèn (Hà Nội: NXB Hội Nhà Văn, Nhã Nam, 2017), 259.}

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Celebrating National Translation Month

Today’s Poem-a-Day poem is presented in partnership with Words Without Borders and is a winner of their Poems in Translation Contest judged by David Tomas Martinez. We will feature each of the four winning translations on Poem-a-Day every remaining Saturday in September, which is National Translation Month, and the first Saturday of October.

“Anatomically, the poem, whose aboutness evades me still, assembles and (re)translates two literary fragments: one from the Vietnamese translation of Lettre Morte (1999), a French-language novel by Linda Lê, and one from the Vietnamese original of Những Ngã Tư Và Những Cột Đèn (Crossroads and Lampposts, 1966), a novel by Trần Dần. The extracts are spliced together with spices of mine. This bricolage, made up of materials by writers too sophisticated for me to talk about, totters toward a diffused originality in my writing. The result is a small (fan) fiction that involves living and dying in an imagined archipelago of exiles, where the demons of the father(land) possess, disfigure, or nourish one’s self-shadowing letters. The poem, a dream-ode, thinks with and thanks two distinct authors who infuse all my molecules with possibilities of shaking the fanatic demarcations of my ‘Vietnam’ (the country, the syntax, the party, the horror, the delicacy, the bewildering crossroads)—that is, possibilities of revival in a minor key inside the pretaxonomic wind of irregular rhythms, stranger tongues.”
—Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng

Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng is a translator, writer and art curator based in Việt Nam.

Judge’s Citation by David Tomas Martinez

“‘Learning Late Letters’ blends and disforms sampled lyrics from Vietnamese-French writer Linda Lê and Vietnamese-Vietnamese writer Trần Dần. The juxtaposition of the former gaining recognition while writing outside Vietnam and the latter’s largely posthumously praised writing from within Vietnam, created for me a triangulated experience of diaspora, particularly with the poet’s own voice indecipherably connected to the two already melded voices. What is literature but us writing with our ancestors? And is not history but an adoption of ancestral perceptions? This epistolary poem eruditely juggles historical and literary complexities while also maintaining an exquisitely bedecked language. And like culture, it cyclically tumbles ideas about the frequency of the number thirty-six, about death, about speaking, over and over changing them as we experience each line.”

Black Lives Matter Anthology

“No woman wants to bear
whatever could be the name for this grief.”

—“My Mother and Lucille Clifton Have Tea” by Parneshia Jones

“Land Where My Father Died” by Fatimah Asghar

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“My Father's Love Letters (audio only)” by Yusef Komunyakaa

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Thanks to David Tomas Martinez, author of Post Traumatic Hood Disorder (Sarabande Books, 2018), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read a Q&A about Martinez’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year.

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"Learning Late Letters" by Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng

Learning Late Letters

Subscribe to the Poem-a-Day Podcast

Celebrating National Translation Month

Judge’s Citation by David Tomas Martinez

Black Lives Matter Anthology

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"A Proclamation" by Ashaki M. Jackson

"Slippage, a Provocation" by Sharan Strange

Poems for Hispanic Heritage Month

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