Dưới đây là phần đầu truyện “Tập kích nhà băng: Quan điểm của nhà thơ” của tôi (đã in trong tập “Những gặp gỡ không thể có”), do tôi tự dịch ra tiếng Anh, với sự hỗ trợ lúc ban đầu của một người bạn.
My own translation of “Tập kích nhà băng: Quan điểm của nhà thơ”, a story from my recently published collection of stories with the title “Những gặp gỡ không thể có” (“Impossible Encounters”).
Lý tưởng nhất là bản dịch này được hiệu đính/nhuận sắc bởi một người mà tiếng Anh là bản ngữ, cố nhiên. Và càng lý tưởng hơn nếu tôi tìm được một người dịch “lý tưởng” của mình, để không phải tự dịch.
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If I were to plan to rob one of America’s top banks, I would recruit a gang consisting solely of poets. The operation would certainly fail, but it would be beautiful.
- Roberto Bolaño
Our bank robbery gang consists of six. We are poets. Six poets. Six guys who consider themselves poets. We decide to rob a bank. We know we are doing an insane thing. Something people deem insane. We know we would definitely fail or almost fail. And we do it. As if we all silently know it is our fate.
We never said anything like that or even remotely like that because we spent most of our time laughing, cracking jokes, singing, reciting poems, or, all the more so toward the end, screaming. Not all of us screamed, of course. Pedro Salinas is one who never screams or almost so. Shin is another one. And Reza. The other three all scream, more or less. And it is not always because of anger or fear or excitement. Sometimes, one of us would scream just to hear the sounds reverberating against the high vaulted ceilings or the undulated walls of the bank’s main hall. We didn’t plan it ahead, but when one of us started screaming then the rest immediately or almost instantly caught on. We usually don’t misread each other’s mind at times like that.
Antonín Neruda listened until the crescendoing and reverberating echoes had faded out or seemed to fade out in the air and become fully absorbed in his breaths and ours, then, in perfectly subdued manner, recalled the acoustics of Albert Hall, London. He sounded as if he had been there hundreds of times even though I knew as sure as hell he had never stepped foot in Albert Hall. He is the tallest of us. That is the most certain thing we know about him, apart from the fact that I know he has never been to Albert Hall or London. And apart from the fact that I’m dead certain he is actually not Czech, not even half. At most, one of his four grandparents has Czech blood in his or her veins. Or maybe Slovakian. Somebody has told me in private that Antonin speaks a Czech tongue resembling that of a Hungarian man who is married to a Czech wife but has never been to Czech Republic. A lame or stunted Czech, so I was told. Anyway, that’s something we cannot know for sure, nor do we care about. None of us understands Czech, which means he never speaks Czech to us. He speaks French, English, German, and Italian, all of them hopelessly badly, so badly that had Hugo or Shakespeare or Goethe or Dante been here to hear him speak they would have clobbered his head with a hammer to shut him up, but we sort of understand what he means or else vaguely grasp perhaps half of it anyway and with that things go on their way smoothly.
Instead he sings, in all four languages, and in such a cursedly, outrageously beautiful voice that hushes our hearts and paralyzes our bodies anytime he wants. He never admits he likes or worships Dvorák (‘worship’ must be the word we need), but I suspect this is the reason why he picked the name Antonín. His (adopted) surname Neruda must be a token of comradeship with Chile, a solidarity ten generations too late with a Chile from the Allende era, although I honestly opine that for old man Pablo alone it is not that late. The truth is, whatever our dear friend Roberto might think, I see Antonín has multiple sound reasons to christen himself Neruda. He dreads cockroaches and mice (a giant like him, think of it!) and he loves to sleep with Pedro Salinas.
Pedro Salinas doesn’t love to sleep with Antonín Neruda, with or without clothes. He only likes to sleep with Takanobori Shin. Shin is our beloved prince, our enchanted princess. We all wanted to sleep with Shin, in the beginning at least. I too have wanted to share a bed with him, though I’m not sure what I would do with Shin in the limbo between sleeps and amidst the dark. Only men with irreparably damaged brain would not be hypnotized by his milky white skin and pearly pink lips. He emits a pure aroma of distilled water and also, from a hidden depth within, a faint lactic scent like a mother’s milk.
Shin and Pedro Salinas are responsible for knocking down and controlling the bank security guards at the front hall. Shin would give his nod to nothing other than his using only knives - many of them, with different shapes and sizes. Even after he has compromised and agreed to carry a Magnus 84 with folded stock, Shin still keeps his knives with him, three of them, or maybe four as far as I know. He can hide them in places on his body where no one can ever think of. The first time Shin actually used his knife, it was as if we‘ve just seen a lightning strike, a small-scale version of a lightning right in front of our eyes, a sudden and blinding apparition that comes from another dimension, a projection from another universe where that lightning is life itself crashing against death. Shin did not kill that drunkard at the time, just made him bleed a bit with a technique that seems to exist only in legends or bogus tales. It was enough to make us realize, utterly awestruck, how we have had wrong ideas all along about the actual depth of the darkness inside Shin.
Reza would not stop reminding us about how we must not use guns, knives, or anything, including our bodies, as weapons, even when our lives are at risk. Usually we would just laugh at him. But we always make fun of too many people or things (the people or things that are beyond our jokes do exist, only that there are too few of them) that it’s hard to know how Reza takes our jokes and our laughter. Sometimes Reza understands us more than we do ourselves, while at other times he would understand us as much as a light pole does. He voluntarily takes on the driving part and we know all too well how impossible it is to assign him anything else. He doesn’t want to see with his own eyes the people whom we are to scare (and we are saying to scare, nothing more). Reza, a fella who can clamp his mouth shut for three or four days straight after having seen a stray dog being taunted and beaten to death by a bunch of hooligans for fun. Robbing a bank is not similar to beating a dog to death for fun, of course, yet I do sometimes think or have an inkling that Reza joins us just to compensate for that dead dog.
Reza is the second tallest among us, just nearly half a head shorter than Antonin. Whenever he goes with his Caucasus or Ottoman or Persian cap on his head, however, he seems to hover in the air, his feet some twenty or thirty centimeters above the floor, and from that height he looks down on us all. Not all Muslims donning a similar fez give us a similar impression, of course. To put it more exactly, I doubt there exists another Muslim like Reza. And I know I will never be able to say whether only a Muslim like him can be such a friend and a companion of ours. There are even times where it seems to me he’s none other than the sole follower of a unique Islam order, in the same veins as Sufi but not Sufi, and should he perish, this order would surely fall into extinction.
Far from being a bogus polyglot like Antonin Neruda, Reza is a genuine polyglot, with the kind of linguistic power that befits no one less than gods or devils. He’s thoroughly competent in Arabic (Standard Arabic and Egyptian Arabic, Tunisian Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, and Levantine Arabic), Persian, Turkish, Hindi, Bengali, Japanese (including Osaka dialect), Korean, Mandarin, Cantonese, Thai, Vietnamese, Afrikaans, English, French, Spanish, Russian, German, Latin, on top on that he possesses advanced reading skills in a more or less similar quantity of other languages, although as far as I know he’d never set foot in the countries where those languages are spoken, and although in some way or other he teaches us or reminds us that the language most difficult to learn and use is silence.
Pedro Salinas is the only among us who dislikes or does not hide his disliking Reza. He would show a malign pleasure (or at least one that reminds of a malign kid) whenever he succeeds or thinks he succeeds in putting Reza to shame. In dire contrast to Reza, Pedro possesses almost no language other than his native Spanish, if you do not take into account a couple of English words enough for him to swear or to know somebody is swearing at him. It is also possible that his English is better than he makes it to appear. This, however, nobody can know for sure.
Pedro is our strongman. He possesses the physique of a born wrestler. Quite a few whores’ ribs have been broken by him, not because he’s inclined towards sadism but because he’s too fervent. His is the sort of poetry forged with a hammer, rough-hewn with a chisel, or wrought with a sledgehammer. Contrary to what many could think, he never uses drug, for the only reason that it weakens him. I like to talk with him, listening to how his sort of Spanish hits me like heavy punches even though that’s not always the case. A wrinkled, purple, long, deep scar runs diagonally across one of his shoulders.
He has a weakness for white lilies and a huge crush for my (ex-)girlfriend whom he’s never met. He saw her photograph in my wallet and from then on would not refrain from occasionally digging from me trifle details about her, based on which he builds, bit after bit, his own version of her and the world inhabited by her. When we had the first discussion about who was to do what in this bankrobbing mission, the task of intimidating the front desk employees with guns went to Pedro in an almost undisputable manner. His deep bass voice, “blasting like a firefighter siren, resonant like a thunder”, would render a normal person petrified before a gun muzzle is directed towards his/her chest. Perhaps this is one reason why he would not scream like hell as some of us did when in the bank hall: the echoes in his head of his own voice are more than sufficient for him.
(to be continued)
@Tran Tien Cao Dang
My own translation of “Tập kích nhà băng: Quan điểm của nhà thơ”, a story from my recently published collection of stories with the title “Những gặp gỡ không thể có” (“Impossible Encounters”).
Lý tưởng nhất là bản dịch này được hiệu đính/nhuận sắc bởi một người mà tiếng Anh là bản ngữ, cố nhiên. Và càng lý tưởng hơn nếu tôi tìm được một người dịch “lý tưởng” của mình, để không phải tự dịch.
--------------------
If I were to plan to rob one of America’s top banks, I would recruit a gang consisting solely of poets. The operation would certainly fail, but it would be beautiful.
- Roberto Bolaño
Our bank robbery gang consists of six. We are poets. Six poets. Six guys who consider themselves poets. We decide to rob a bank. We know we are doing an insane thing. Something people deem insane. We know we would definitely fail or almost fail. And we do it. As if we all silently know it is our fate.
We never said anything like that or even remotely like that because we spent most of our time laughing, cracking jokes, singing, reciting poems, or, all the more so toward the end, screaming. Not all of us screamed, of course. Pedro Salinas is one who never screams or almost so. Shin is another one. And Reza. The other three all scream, more or less. And it is not always because of anger or fear or excitement. Sometimes, one of us would scream just to hear the sounds reverberating against the high vaulted ceilings or the undulated walls of the bank’s main hall. We didn’t plan it ahead, but when one of us started screaming then the rest immediately or almost instantly caught on. We usually don’t misread each other’s mind at times like that.
Antonín Neruda listened until the crescendoing and reverberating echoes had faded out or seemed to fade out in the air and become fully absorbed in his breaths and ours, then, in perfectly subdued manner, recalled the acoustics of Albert Hall, London. He sounded as if he had been there hundreds of times even though I knew as sure as hell he had never stepped foot in Albert Hall. He is the tallest of us. That is the most certain thing we know about him, apart from the fact that I know he has never been to Albert Hall or London. And apart from the fact that I’m dead certain he is actually not Czech, not even half. At most, one of his four grandparents has Czech blood in his or her veins. Or maybe Slovakian. Somebody has told me in private that Antonin speaks a Czech tongue resembling that of a Hungarian man who is married to a Czech wife but has never been to Czech Republic. A lame or stunted Czech, so I was told. Anyway, that’s something we cannot know for sure, nor do we care about. None of us understands Czech, which means he never speaks Czech to us. He speaks French, English, German, and Italian, all of them hopelessly badly, so badly that had Hugo or Shakespeare or Goethe or Dante been here to hear him speak they would have clobbered his head with a hammer to shut him up, but we sort of understand what he means or else vaguely grasp perhaps half of it anyway and with that things go on their way smoothly.
Instead he sings, in all four languages, and in such a cursedly, outrageously beautiful voice that hushes our hearts and paralyzes our bodies anytime he wants. He never admits he likes or worships Dvorák (‘worship’ must be the word we need), but I suspect this is the reason why he picked the name Antonín. His (adopted) surname Neruda must be a token of comradeship with Chile, a solidarity ten generations too late with a Chile from the Allende era, although I honestly opine that for old man Pablo alone it is not that late. The truth is, whatever our dear friend Roberto might think, I see Antonín has multiple sound reasons to christen himself Neruda. He dreads cockroaches and mice (a giant like him, think of it!) and he loves to sleep with Pedro Salinas.
Pedro Salinas doesn’t love to sleep with Antonín Neruda, with or without clothes. He only likes to sleep with Takanobori Shin. Shin is our beloved prince, our enchanted princess. We all wanted to sleep with Shin, in the beginning at least. I too have wanted to share a bed with him, though I’m not sure what I would do with Shin in the limbo between sleeps and amidst the dark. Only men with irreparably damaged brain would not be hypnotized by his milky white skin and pearly pink lips. He emits a pure aroma of distilled water and also, from a hidden depth within, a faint lactic scent like a mother’s milk.
Shin and Pedro Salinas are responsible for knocking down and controlling the bank security guards at the front hall. Shin would give his nod to nothing other than his using only knives - many of them, with different shapes and sizes. Even after he has compromised and agreed to carry a Magnus 84 with folded stock, Shin still keeps his knives with him, three of them, or maybe four as far as I know. He can hide them in places on his body where no one can ever think of. The first time Shin actually used his knife, it was as if we‘ve just seen a lightning strike, a small-scale version of a lightning right in front of our eyes, a sudden and blinding apparition that comes from another dimension, a projection from another universe where that lightning is life itself crashing against death. Shin did not kill that drunkard at the time, just made him bleed a bit with a technique that seems to exist only in legends or bogus tales. It was enough to make us realize, utterly awestruck, how we have had wrong ideas all along about the actual depth of the darkness inside Shin.
Reza would not stop reminding us about how we must not use guns, knives, or anything, including our bodies, as weapons, even when our lives are at risk. Usually we would just laugh at him. But we always make fun of too many people or things (the people or things that are beyond our jokes do exist, only that there are too few of them) that it’s hard to know how Reza takes our jokes and our laughter. Sometimes Reza understands us more than we do ourselves, while at other times he would understand us as much as a light pole does. He voluntarily takes on the driving part and we know all too well how impossible it is to assign him anything else. He doesn’t want to see with his own eyes the people whom we are to scare (and we are saying to scare, nothing more). Reza, a fella who can clamp his mouth shut for three or four days straight after having seen a stray dog being taunted and beaten to death by a bunch of hooligans for fun. Robbing a bank is not similar to beating a dog to death for fun, of course, yet I do sometimes think or have an inkling that Reza joins us just to compensate for that dead dog.
Reza is the second tallest among us, just nearly half a head shorter than Antonin. Whenever he goes with his Caucasus or Ottoman or Persian cap on his head, however, he seems to hover in the air, his feet some twenty or thirty centimeters above the floor, and from that height he looks down on us all. Not all Muslims donning a similar fez give us a similar impression, of course. To put it more exactly, I doubt there exists another Muslim like Reza. And I know I will never be able to say whether only a Muslim like him can be such a friend and a companion of ours. There are even times where it seems to me he’s none other than the sole follower of a unique Islam order, in the same veins as Sufi but not Sufi, and should he perish, this order would surely fall into extinction.
Far from being a bogus polyglot like Antonin Neruda, Reza is a genuine polyglot, with the kind of linguistic power that befits no one less than gods or devils. He’s thoroughly competent in Arabic (Standard Arabic and Egyptian Arabic, Tunisian Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, and Levantine Arabic), Persian, Turkish, Hindi, Bengali, Japanese (including Osaka dialect), Korean, Mandarin, Cantonese, Thai, Vietnamese, Afrikaans, English, French, Spanish, Russian, German, Latin, on top on that he possesses advanced reading skills in a more or less similar quantity of other languages, although as far as I know he’d never set foot in the countries where those languages are spoken, and although in some way or other he teaches us or reminds us that the language most difficult to learn and use is silence.
Pedro Salinas is the only among us who dislikes or does not hide his disliking Reza. He would show a malign pleasure (or at least one that reminds of a malign kid) whenever he succeeds or thinks he succeeds in putting Reza to shame. In dire contrast to Reza, Pedro possesses almost no language other than his native Spanish, if you do not take into account a couple of English words enough for him to swear or to know somebody is swearing at him. It is also possible that his English is better than he makes it to appear. This, however, nobody can know for sure.
Pedro is our strongman. He possesses the physique of a born wrestler. Quite a few whores’ ribs have been broken by him, not because he’s inclined towards sadism but because he’s too fervent. His is the sort of poetry forged with a hammer, rough-hewn with a chisel, or wrought with a sledgehammer. Contrary to what many could think, he never uses drug, for the only reason that it weakens him. I like to talk with him, listening to how his sort of Spanish hits me like heavy punches even though that’s not always the case. A wrinkled, purple, long, deep scar runs diagonally across one of his shoulders.
He has a weakness for white lilies and a huge crush for my (ex-)girlfriend whom he’s never met. He saw her photograph in my wallet and from then on would not refrain from occasionally digging from me trifle details about her, based on which he builds, bit after bit, his own version of her and the world inhabited by her. When we had the first discussion about who was to do what in this bankrobbing mission, the task of intimidating the front desk employees with guns went to Pedro in an almost undisputable manner. His deep bass voice, “blasting like a firefighter siren, resonant like a thunder”, would render a normal person petrified before a gun muzzle is directed towards his/her chest. Perhaps this is one reason why he would not scream like hell as some of us did when in the bank hall: the echoes in his head of his own voice are more than sufficient for him.
(to be continued)
@Tran Tien Cao Dang
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