Slow-Textured Mandalay by Maung Chaw Nwe

Mandalay U Bein Bridge, photo by Michael Arnault, licensed from Shutterstock

To be perfectly honest, I'm not so sure I should have translated this delicate poetic beauty by Maung Chaw Nwe. It's a poem that conveys a dreamy mood, a hazy scene, but refuses to be pinned down in concrete meanings.

The first time I read it, I choked on the title. The Burmese word ဆေးသား (hsay thar) could be interpreted as some type of fleshy chunky texture, like oil paint, but what does ဆေးသားအနှေး (hsay thar a hnay), or "slow texture" mean? Since Maung Chaw Nwe is no longer alive for me to query, I asked his contemporary and fellow poet Khin Aung Aye to help me make sense of it.

"It's like a scene in slow motion, like colors and shapes slowly emerging," he explained. Then everything began to make sense.

I felt the urge to share the sultry, sweltering taste of the original but the puns and wordplays were almost impossible to translate.

The word ရေချိန် (yay jain) has several possible meanings. It could be a carpenter's spirit level, an instrument to verify if surfaces are perfectly aligned. It could also be any type of benchmark for judging a skill, virtue, or capacity. It's also part of the phrase ရေချိန်ကိုက် (yay jain kait): to have a buzz, to be sufficiently tipsy. With all these competing meanings crammed into the same line, the cityscape it describes, appears to be perfectly balanced along the horizon, but is also intoxicated to just the right level.

In the original Burmese text, the slow, sluggish motion is evident not only in the tangible, such as the wooden buses, but also in the intangible, such as the scent of thanaka paste on a Mandalay girl's cheeks.

The line နေရှိန်အဝေးပြေးမန္တလေး (nay shain away byay Mandalay) is a string of words that suggests an image or a mood, but remains staunchly ambiguous. It's constructed out of the phrases sun scorch or heat stroke, followed by long distance, trailing off with the name Mandalay. Reading it, one might envision the city of Mandalay as a long-distance bus, like a mirage in intense heat, but the jumble of nouns and adjectives also invite other meanings.

With all these linguistic pitfalls, perhaps my English translation is merely a shadowy cousin of the Burmese original -- like the Nangyi thoke, a classic Mandalay noodle dish, reborn in an overseas restaurant in Seattle or San Francisco, remade with local ingredients. It's the same flavor profile, yet not the same thing. It's authentic in spirit, but not exactly a faithful reproduction.

May it please the spirit of the late Maung Chaw Nwe.

Slow-Textured Mandalay

by Maung Chaw Nwe
translated by Kenneth Wong

Here,
Gazing at Mandalay Hill, blissful and drowsy,
The city’s breezes blow, heavy and sunny,
The cityscape nodding off, tipsily,
The city’s wall and moat, sweaty and sticky,
The wooden buses roll along languidly,
The thanakha on a Mandalay girl’s cheeks perfumes steadily,
Mandalay beer goes down (in a brisk tempo),
Cosmopolitan Mandalay spikes it with rum,
Mandalay straps it to its bike and rides away,
Mandalay’s flesh and blood are slow motion,
Mandalay’s inner flesh is slow motion,
In slow motion runs Mandalay,
Sunstroke, long-distance Mandalay,
Mandalay runs in a slow pace,
Bathe in sweat, Mandalay,
Run in sweat, Mandalay,
Mandalay scented with fresh new houses,
I want to
Gently put you on my bike,
And ride to a sticky sweat. 

About the text
The Burmese text is from The Collected Poems of Maung Chaw Nwe, published by နှင်းဆီဖြူ (Hnin Zi Byu, White Rose) publishing house, Yan Kin District, Yangon (Rangoon), Myanmar (Burma), November 2016. The poem first appeared in မြားနတ်မောင် (Myar Nat Maung, Cupid) magazine, February 2004.

Original poem in Burmese

The Collected Poems of Maung Chaw Nwe