Một phần bản dịch của tôi từ truyện "Nghệ thuật trình diễn, một sáng mùa hè, Granada" đã in trong tập "Những gặp gỡ không thể có" của tôi.
Đây mới là bản dịch thô. Sau khi được chỉnh lý, hiệu đính bởi một người bản ngữ có chuyên môn giỏi, nó có thể, theo nghĩa nào đó, "hay hơn bản gốc".
-------
They agreed they would meet in Granada and she did not arrive until after three days. In these three days he seemed to be carrying a bunch of cindering straw tinder in his stomach. When she did appear on the fourth day, a glance at her face was enough for him to decide the better way is not to ask her anything. He restricted himself to show her how glad he was to see her and how ready he was to share with her anything.
They were having breakfast at a restaurant on the slope of the hill, with a view to Sacromonte with its coutours clear-cut like a laser etched photo. His eating became more interesting because he had a chance to eat and at the same time watch how her face seemed to catch the light from the pink ceramic disk, making her facial skin gleam with a pinky hue both organic and mineral. She did not seem to be aware of this pristine trait of herself, and if she was, she did not care. To the left, on the slope of the adjacent hill (La Golondrina, wasn’t it?), at a slightly lower level, unfolded a gorgeous picture: the patio of a hotel. All the walls of the tall buildings surrounding that patio were of a eye-piercing green: a carpet of creepers so thick that none of the adobe brick was able to break through. One could easily think of incredible walls made entirely of branches and leaves. This green backround was criss-crossed with the canopies of the windows all the way from left to right, from top to bottom, following zigzag lines that seemed at the first glance to be chaotic and, if you looked at it more closely, turned out to stick to a common regular and sophisticated pattern. The canopies, of soft fabric, were scarlet and delicate like rose petals.
He knew she was watching the scene as he was. More than once he was on the verge of speaking out the queer, ambivalent doubt that was slightly disturbing him. As far as his memory did not betray him, this hotel had not been existed at this position until several days before; as far as he remembered, there had been, until several days before, a series of breathtaking houses at disparate levels, he wanted to tell that to her and he kept silent. At this very moment, out of blue, she said, “Last night I had a dream where I am a girl from a fishing village…” He felt a shiver down his back. She looked as if she wanted to add something. Instead, she made a brusque, slightly offbeat, incomprehensible laugh. She gazed directly into his eyes, as if to gauge the effect of what she had recently said, then squinted her eyes, gently shaking her head, as if to drive out of her mind what she had just perceived in him. A fishing village in which region, which country, I have no idea, she continued, so gently, so calmly or at least it seemed so to him. Not that I can remember what happened to me there, but when I woke up I wanted to cry. Funny, isn’t it, she said. He continued to look at her smile and then he himself began to smile. She looked at him for about two seconds more and then, the smile intact, again she switched her gaze to the patio down below with its foliary walls and scarlet, delicate canopies.
And an idea occurred to him: what, if even this moment, where they were sitting here having breakfast at a restaurant on a slope of Albaycin, Granada, were also a dream? If this were true, then she had just in fact told about a dream within a dream and, if this was the case, then nobody could ever know there still existed how many layers of dreams, how many dreams overlapping, enveloping each other, whether they were innumerable, and whether the path leading back to their point of departure, their origin was an endless one?
Look, she said, cutting short this flow of thought. He looked at her eyes, then noticed the direction to which she turned, so slightly, her head. He, too, looked at that direction and, for a second or two, wondered whether this was the right one she wanted him to heed. There existed nothing unusual there, at least as compared to one minute earlier. Or it seemed at least. There was the sea, the same sea like yesterday but not necessarily like it had been all the time, with the well-known Mediterranean azure, the all too pure azure, like the dream of an impossible sea, a dream that persisted in daylight. Be that as it may, the fact was that he was failed to see what she wanted him to.
Or was he wrong? Along the coast of this impossible azure sea run a long stretch of toy-like houses of all possible designs and colours – colours disparate yet similar: they all were soft, subdued ones. Light yellow, like beginning-to-ripe apricots. Light green, like young banana leaves. Half-ripe oranges. Sakura blossoms. Colours and houses he had never imagined to be that beautiful, capable of such a perfect harmony with the unreal azure of the sea. It might also be likely this was what she wanted him to see, what he had seen yesterday and had not seen until now. Still, he felt uneasy, wondering whether she was expecting him to see something she alone could see. What was she seeing? Something concrete, special? Something undistinguished, mundane? He stretched his eyes, pouring into them the intensity in the gaze of an eagle up high in the sky pursuing a chicken on the ground.
And then it came to a point when he felt he had grasped the infinitesimal motion of a tiny object in the background of that scene, tiny because of the distance, not because of its size, perhaps a human hand drawing a curtain. Or was it a slight budging, maybe a sudden respiration of one of or all of those houses, or of the slope onto which they were clinging like children onto the body of a giant mother? His heart seemed to shrink back at the feeling. He drew in a long breath, calming himself by dismissing it as a mere illusion.
And then he realized an infinitesimal motion on the background of that seemingly serene landscape (serene partly because of the absence of winds, partly owing to the fact that the sunshine, though abundant, still had yet to be able to make faraway objects seem to be vaguely vibrant). He blinked once, twice, three times, in order to ensure that was not a hallucination. He continued to sense he was able to discern something moving, albeit in the same way you can sense the movements of a big fish under the surface of a not so transparent body of water. It seemed he would be able to truly take hold of it, that motion, its subject or cause only if he had possessed the eyes capable of seeing through the particle structure of things. Yet he was really able to pin it down! He was aware of this because he was feeling as if an iron ball was slowly rolling on the walls of his heart in rhythm with that motion, which he was sensing more than seeing.
It was something moving in the air, amid the houses. It was flying not very fast and not very slowly, at least to his perception and at least if you take into account the fact that at such a large distance any feeling about the speed of the observed may not be very accurate. His first thought: it was a bird. Simply a bird. If the truth were that simple, however, he would have not been continuing to feel so discomfortingly, incomprehensibly uneasy. Unknowingly he glanced to her, as if to look for an affirmation of this intuition of his. She was looking at that direction like him, and, as if by accident, she squinted her eyes, in an almost inperceptible manner. And a question occurred to him: how could she perceive this movement long before him, and, more importantly, how she did not show any unexpectedness or surprise or uneasiness or excitement: she appeared to be aware of its arrival, waiting for it with considerable patience, an apparent self-restraint, and something like a readiness to accept what is destined to come, what will be, will be.
He took a closer look and now he was sure it was not a bird. It was simply too big in relation to those houses. Perhaps it was an unusually big bird, a bird the size of a normakl human, flying slowly (either in a dignified and majestic or a lethargic, exhausted manner), at a height perhaps similar to the attics of the houses. No, not exactly. Because those houses were situated at different heights according to the terrain of the slope, at times that creature was flying higher than the roofs, almost grazing the top of the antennas planted on the rooftops, while at other times it seemed you can stand on a balcony at the second floor (amid blossoming flowerpots) and extend you hand to grasp one of the parts of this creature, or perhaps, sitting on the last step of the stone stairway leading to your house, look down this creature like you do a winged horse serenely flying upward from the bottom of the valley. A huge, abnormally large bird, now he decided that was the most probable scenario. The reality, however, might not be that simple. With a world like this, a sunlight like this, a ground landscape like this and a crisp and humid air like this, everything could happen.
Now the object had detached itself from the houses along the slope. It had changed its direction and now was heading toward this side of the valley where they were sitting. Abruptly he felt fear, however unreasonable it might be. He looked at her. No doubt she had also perceived the change in the object’s behavior like him, only that she looked and waited for it with an undescribable expression, with calm and love, with melancholy and maybe a bit of nostalgia, as if she was expecting an ex-lover whom she wanted and did not want to meet again. When the thing had considerably shortened the distance and now was moving in the open space between the two slopes of the valley, he begun to discern something with relatively clear form and outlines. It was a creature the size of a normal adult human, a human, not a bird. The distance was still large, he could not make out whether it was a man or a woman, whether he or she was old or young, ugly or beautiful, fat or thin, well-dressed or nude. Nevertheless, the first thing he could record about the human being was: a) yes, it was a human, exactly a human like himself, it could not be any misunderstanding on his part; b) this human had no wings, nor was he/she spreading his/her arms as if they were actual wings, and he/she was not using a parasail, which was the reason why he had been suspecting this was not a bird.
He felt a sudden acute thirst that make his throat dry like dust, despite the water he had drunk a few minutes before. Apart of this, however, he no longer had feelings about his own body, so completely had the object occupied him. It was approaching, growing larger, very fast. Now, at the distance of fifty or sixty meters, he could see clearly it was a man. That was all what he could discern at this point based on the shape of the skull and the bone structure. More exactly, he was able to tell the gender of the flying being thank to something deep inside him that he would hesitate to call sixth sense. Were he a woman, he would have been ready to say he could sense it with something inside his pelvic cavity rather than with his eyes.
A short while later he was able to pick out more details about the object and the newly received knowledge made knots in his heart. When the object came to be no more than fifteen or twenty meters away from him and not too high above him, he knew he no longer needed to dout his senses. And it was not until then, with the odd silence that his senses had failed to record so far, that he realized everybody around the two of them were also looking at that creature with the same way like him, namely, like hypnotized.
It was a very young man, a boy. One of the handsomest boys he had ever seen. The very moment you see such a creature, you understand why humans always crave for and believe in the existence of that which cannot exist. His face, with its infallible perfectness, worked like a knitting needle jabbing into your heart. A masterpiece the Creator had produced only once out of sheer negligence before He came to understand what mistake He had made. And the pain in your heart at seeing such a creature is a reminder that it was the worst mistake of the Creator, much worse than the one He made when He was producing the ugliest or evilest being.
His body went in perfect harmony with his face, an oblong figure, on the lean side rather than the muscular one, taut, exuding vigor, seemingly bursting from inside the close-fitting pale blue shirt and cream-colored khaki trousers. His legs stretching straight, his arms holding tighly to the sides, he glided through the air much like synchronized swimmers do through water, when the kinetic energy accumulated before could give him enough momentum to move for a considerable amount of time without having to do anything, like a leaf drifting along a stream or a feather floating in a breeze, or, what was more, the space itself acted as the default transmission medium for him: it was as if he were able to move in this fashion and also to stop and stay motionless in the space for many hours in a row or else to drop right downward like a stone and then, at the distance of ten centimeters or so from the ground, abruptly dart upward like an arrow, the space being his home, where he can do anything he wants. It was the absolute calm and dignity in the manner and behavior of the young man that struck him most.
Now the hot boy had come closer, hovering nearly right over his head, at the height of perhaps four meters, and he realized, with a bit disappointment, that this flying man/creature/human would not land where he was standing. He turned his head, following the creature as it/he came flying past (and, after a blink of the eye, reached a position at around thirty meters away from him) and, all the time, he had the gut feeling that this head-turning of his was part of a general motion, much larger, consisting of hundreds of similarly insignificant, simultaneous, perfectly synchronized head-turnings of all the people around him. He felt an unconscious impulse to turn back, look to both sides so as to see those people, but a sudden move of the flying-man captured his eyes.
The flying-man, all of a sudden, stopped, changed direction: both of these actions, stopping and changing direction, taking place in a single moment, a single phase in the same uninterrupted fluid. In this one motion, his oblong, lean, taut curled into a curve as tender and elastic as the winding of a sea snake, and he heard all too clearly that from everywhere around him rose a prevailing, low-pitched, thick sound, unevenly undulating like the sea in strong winds, which was the almost simultaneous breathing out from hundreds of human throats. They were witnessing a motion far beyond any known law of the universe.
And then immediately he held his breath, realizing that the flying man was now heading straight toward him. Without knowing it, he stepped back. Right then a hand, a very strong one, grasped his shirt, holding him tight at the spot. Without turning his head he knew whose hand it was. Still holding him, she fixed her eyes at the approaching flying man, and her face exuded a special intensity that struck him as if it were being ablaze. It was as if the appearance of the flying man, not his touch, was enough to set her to fire and the closer he came, the more fuel got added to the fire which was herself. He could almost feel the heat on his face.
(to be continued)
@Tran Tien Cao Dang
Đây mới là bản dịch thô. Sau khi được chỉnh lý, hiệu đính bởi một người bản ngữ có chuyên môn giỏi, nó có thể, theo nghĩa nào đó, "hay hơn bản gốc".
-------
They agreed they would meet in Granada and she did not arrive until after three days. In these three days he seemed to be carrying a bunch of cindering straw tinder in his stomach. When she did appear on the fourth day, a glance at her face was enough for him to decide the better way is not to ask her anything. He restricted himself to show her how glad he was to see her and how ready he was to share with her anything.
They were having breakfast at a restaurant on the slope of the hill, with a view to Sacromonte with its coutours clear-cut like a laser etched photo. His eating became more interesting because he had a chance to eat and at the same time watch how her face seemed to catch the light from the pink ceramic disk, making her facial skin gleam with a pinky hue both organic and mineral. She did not seem to be aware of this pristine trait of herself, and if she was, she did not care. To the left, on the slope of the adjacent hill (La Golondrina, wasn’t it?), at a slightly lower level, unfolded a gorgeous picture: the patio of a hotel. All the walls of the tall buildings surrounding that patio were of a eye-piercing green: a carpet of creepers so thick that none of the adobe brick was able to break through. One could easily think of incredible walls made entirely of branches and leaves. This green backround was criss-crossed with the canopies of the windows all the way from left to right, from top to bottom, following zigzag lines that seemed at the first glance to be chaotic and, if you looked at it more closely, turned out to stick to a common regular and sophisticated pattern. The canopies, of soft fabric, were scarlet and delicate like rose petals.
He knew she was watching the scene as he was. More than once he was on the verge of speaking out the queer, ambivalent doubt that was slightly disturbing him. As far as his memory did not betray him, this hotel had not been existed at this position until several days before; as far as he remembered, there had been, until several days before, a series of breathtaking houses at disparate levels, he wanted to tell that to her and he kept silent. At this very moment, out of blue, she said, “Last night I had a dream where I am a girl from a fishing village…” He felt a shiver down his back. She looked as if she wanted to add something. Instead, she made a brusque, slightly offbeat, incomprehensible laugh. She gazed directly into his eyes, as if to gauge the effect of what she had recently said, then squinted her eyes, gently shaking her head, as if to drive out of her mind what she had just perceived in him. A fishing village in which region, which country, I have no idea, she continued, so gently, so calmly or at least it seemed so to him. Not that I can remember what happened to me there, but when I woke up I wanted to cry. Funny, isn’t it, she said. He continued to look at her smile and then he himself began to smile. She looked at him for about two seconds more and then, the smile intact, again she switched her gaze to the patio down below with its foliary walls and scarlet, delicate canopies.
And an idea occurred to him: what, if even this moment, where they were sitting here having breakfast at a restaurant on a slope of Albaycin, Granada, were also a dream? If this were true, then she had just in fact told about a dream within a dream and, if this was the case, then nobody could ever know there still existed how many layers of dreams, how many dreams overlapping, enveloping each other, whether they were innumerable, and whether the path leading back to their point of departure, their origin was an endless one?
Look, she said, cutting short this flow of thought. He looked at her eyes, then noticed the direction to which she turned, so slightly, her head. He, too, looked at that direction and, for a second or two, wondered whether this was the right one she wanted him to heed. There existed nothing unusual there, at least as compared to one minute earlier. Or it seemed at least. There was the sea, the same sea like yesterday but not necessarily like it had been all the time, with the well-known Mediterranean azure, the all too pure azure, like the dream of an impossible sea, a dream that persisted in daylight. Be that as it may, the fact was that he was failed to see what she wanted him to.
Or was he wrong? Along the coast of this impossible azure sea run a long stretch of toy-like houses of all possible designs and colours – colours disparate yet similar: they all were soft, subdued ones. Light yellow, like beginning-to-ripe apricots. Light green, like young banana leaves. Half-ripe oranges. Sakura blossoms. Colours and houses he had never imagined to be that beautiful, capable of such a perfect harmony with the unreal azure of the sea. It might also be likely this was what she wanted him to see, what he had seen yesterday and had not seen until now. Still, he felt uneasy, wondering whether she was expecting him to see something she alone could see. What was she seeing? Something concrete, special? Something undistinguished, mundane? He stretched his eyes, pouring into them the intensity in the gaze of an eagle up high in the sky pursuing a chicken on the ground.
And then it came to a point when he felt he had grasped the infinitesimal motion of a tiny object in the background of that scene, tiny because of the distance, not because of its size, perhaps a human hand drawing a curtain. Or was it a slight budging, maybe a sudden respiration of one of or all of those houses, or of the slope onto which they were clinging like children onto the body of a giant mother? His heart seemed to shrink back at the feeling. He drew in a long breath, calming himself by dismissing it as a mere illusion.
And then he realized an infinitesimal motion on the background of that seemingly serene landscape (serene partly because of the absence of winds, partly owing to the fact that the sunshine, though abundant, still had yet to be able to make faraway objects seem to be vaguely vibrant). He blinked once, twice, three times, in order to ensure that was not a hallucination. He continued to sense he was able to discern something moving, albeit in the same way you can sense the movements of a big fish under the surface of a not so transparent body of water. It seemed he would be able to truly take hold of it, that motion, its subject or cause only if he had possessed the eyes capable of seeing through the particle structure of things. Yet he was really able to pin it down! He was aware of this because he was feeling as if an iron ball was slowly rolling on the walls of his heart in rhythm with that motion, which he was sensing more than seeing.
It was something moving in the air, amid the houses. It was flying not very fast and not very slowly, at least to his perception and at least if you take into account the fact that at such a large distance any feeling about the speed of the observed may not be very accurate. His first thought: it was a bird. Simply a bird. If the truth were that simple, however, he would have not been continuing to feel so discomfortingly, incomprehensibly uneasy. Unknowingly he glanced to her, as if to look for an affirmation of this intuition of his. She was looking at that direction like him, and, as if by accident, she squinted her eyes, in an almost inperceptible manner. And a question occurred to him: how could she perceive this movement long before him, and, more importantly, how she did not show any unexpectedness or surprise or uneasiness or excitement: she appeared to be aware of its arrival, waiting for it with considerable patience, an apparent self-restraint, and something like a readiness to accept what is destined to come, what will be, will be.
 |
| Juan Miro - "Painting" |
He took a closer look and now he was sure it was not a bird. It was simply too big in relation to those houses. Perhaps it was an unusually big bird, a bird the size of a normakl human, flying slowly (either in a dignified and majestic or a lethargic, exhausted manner), at a height perhaps similar to the attics of the houses. No, not exactly. Because those houses were situated at different heights according to the terrain of the slope, at times that creature was flying higher than the roofs, almost grazing the top of the antennas planted on the rooftops, while at other times it seemed you can stand on a balcony at the second floor (amid blossoming flowerpots) and extend you hand to grasp one of the parts of this creature, or perhaps, sitting on the last step of the stone stairway leading to your house, look down this creature like you do a winged horse serenely flying upward from the bottom of the valley. A huge, abnormally large bird, now he decided that was the most probable scenario. The reality, however, might not be that simple. With a world like this, a sunlight like this, a ground landscape like this and a crisp and humid air like this, everything could happen.
Now the object had detached itself from the houses along the slope. It had changed its direction and now was heading toward this side of the valley where they were sitting. Abruptly he felt fear, however unreasonable it might be. He looked at her. No doubt she had also perceived the change in the object’s behavior like him, only that she looked and waited for it with an undescribable expression, with calm and love, with melancholy and maybe a bit of nostalgia, as if she was expecting an ex-lover whom she wanted and did not want to meet again. When the thing had considerably shortened the distance and now was moving in the open space between the two slopes of the valley, he begun to discern something with relatively clear form and outlines. It was a creature the size of a normal adult human, a human, not a bird. The distance was still large, he could not make out whether it was a man or a woman, whether he or she was old or young, ugly or beautiful, fat or thin, well-dressed or nude. Nevertheless, the first thing he could record about the human being was: a) yes, it was a human, exactly a human like himself, it could not be any misunderstanding on his part; b) this human had no wings, nor was he/she spreading his/her arms as if they were actual wings, and he/she was not using a parasail, which was the reason why he had been suspecting this was not a bird.
He felt a sudden acute thirst that make his throat dry like dust, despite the water he had drunk a few minutes before. Apart of this, however, he no longer had feelings about his own body, so completely had the object occupied him. It was approaching, growing larger, very fast. Now, at the distance of fifty or sixty meters, he could see clearly it was a man. That was all what he could discern at this point based on the shape of the skull and the bone structure. More exactly, he was able to tell the gender of the flying being thank to something deep inside him that he would hesitate to call sixth sense. Were he a woman, he would have been ready to say he could sense it with something inside his pelvic cavity rather than with his eyes.
A short while later he was able to pick out more details about the object and the newly received knowledge made knots in his heart. When the object came to be no more than fifteen or twenty meters away from him and not too high above him, he knew he no longer needed to dout his senses. And it was not until then, with the odd silence that his senses had failed to record so far, that he realized everybody around the two of them were also looking at that creature with the same way like him, namely, like hypnotized.
It was a very young man, a boy. One of the handsomest boys he had ever seen. The very moment you see such a creature, you understand why humans always crave for and believe in the existence of that which cannot exist. His face, with its infallible perfectness, worked like a knitting needle jabbing into your heart. A masterpiece the Creator had produced only once out of sheer negligence before He came to understand what mistake He had made. And the pain in your heart at seeing such a creature is a reminder that it was the worst mistake of the Creator, much worse than the one He made when He was producing the ugliest or evilest being.
His body went in perfect harmony with his face, an oblong figure, on the lean side rather than the muscular one, taut, exuding vigor, seemingly bursting from inside the close-fitting pale blue shirt and cream-colored khaki trousers. His legs stretching straight, his arms holding tighly to the sides, he glided through the air much like synchronized swimmers do through water, when the kinetic energy accumulated before could give him enough momentum to move for a considerable amount of time without having to do anything, like a leaf drifting along a stream or a feather floating in a breeze, or, what was more, the space itself acted as the default transmission medium for him: it was as if he were able to move in this fashion and also to stop and stay motionless in the space for many hours in a row or else to drop right downward like a stone and then, at the distance of ten centimeters or so from the ground, abruptly dart upward like an arrow, the space being his home, where he can do anything he wants. It was the absolute calm and dignity in the manner and behavior of the young man that struck him most.
Now the hot boy had come closer, hovering nearly right over his head, at the height of perhaps four meters, and he realized, with a bit disappointment, that this flying man/creature/human would not land where he was standing. He turned his head, following the creature as it/he came flying past (and, after a blink of the eye, reached a position at around thirty meters away from him) and, all the time, he had the gut feeling that this head-turning of his was part of a general motion, much larger, consisting of hundreds of similarly insignificant, simultaneous, perfectly synchronized head-turnings of all the people around him. He felt an unconscious impulse to turn back, look to both sides so as to see those people, but a sudden move of the flying-man captured his eyes.
The flying-man, all of a sudden, stopped, changed direction: both of these actions, stopping and changing direction, taking place in a single moment, a single phase in the same uninterrupted fluid. In this one motion, his oblong, lean, taut curled into a curve as tender and elastic as the winding of a sea snake, and he heard all too clearly that from everywhere around him rose a prevailing, low-pitched, thick sound, unevenly undulating like the sea in strong winds, which was the almost simultaneous breathing out from hundreds of human throats. They were witnessing a motion far beyond any known law of the universe.
And then immediately he held his breath, realizing that the flying man was now heading straight toward him. Without knowing it, he stepped back. Right then a hand, a very strong one, grasped his shirt, holding him tight at the spot. Without turning his head he knew whose hand it was. Still holding him, she fixed her eyes at the approaching flying man, and her face exuded a special intensity that struck him as if it were being ablaze. It was as if the appearance of the flying man, not his touch, was enough to set her to fire and the closer he came, the more fuel got added to the fire which was herself. He could almost feel the heat on his face.
(to be continued)
@Tran Tien Cao Dang
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