"To Wilt is to Bloom," a Poem by Maung Chaw Nwe

"The World of Poetry," an anthology in memory of the late Maung Chaw Nwe

On her first trip to Burma, my journalist friend Catherine Traywick documented the lives of a number of local poets. The memento she brought me back was a little volume called The World of Poetry (edited by Zeyar Lynn, Moe Wai, and Wai Khaung), an anthology to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the poet Maung Chaw Nwe's death.

On page 99, I stumbled on the piece below, clearly an homage to the political dissidents' defiance. Was Chaw Nwe thinking about the nameless students, monks, and citizens who died on the pavements of Rangoon in the August 88 uprising when he composed these stanzas? I like to think that he was. So, on the 25th anniversary of the fateful event, I did my best to transplant his Burmese lines in new soil, in Shakespeare and Milton's fertile English language. May Chaw Nwe's verses and the spirit of the fallen heroes of 8-8-88 bloom and grow forever!

"To Wilt is to Bloom" in Burmese

To Wilt is to Bloom

For flowers,
To wilt is to bloom.
If you pluck one
One more rises.
If you drop two
Two more spring up.

Come! Knock us down,
Wild gust; tumble us,
Cut us down, storming blades,
Blow your hardest, do your worst.
Litter the ground with our buds,
Trample on us, see if we care.

To wilt is to bloom,
That's the flowers' doctrine.
You may crush us, we may fall,
But when we die we rise again.

A revolution poem
Maung Chaw Nwe

(Translated by Kenneth Wong, August 8, 2013)