"An Essay on Pickle" by Tha Gaung Thar (Translated from Burmese)

Memories pickled in bottles, photo by Kenneth Wong

To read the original in Burmese, go here.

Pickles are meant to be consumed after a period of fermentation. It’s intended to be savored in a leisurely fashion. Practically anything is ripe for pickling. You write diary entries to preserve your life as a pickle. Note that you’re able to read this pickle essay because you’ve been marinated in basic education. The longer Peace is fermented in War, the stronger its flavor.

In English, it’s called pickle, but every culture has its own pickling method. You can get a delicious pickle simply by preserving a photo of your first love. The Earth is a pickled fruit of the Universe, to be consumed at a certain time.

Those who immerse their mind in the Law of Impermanence and Dharma shall be allowed to taste the pickle of Nirvana. The mere act of living seasons you, in order to transform you into a tasty pickle. Some age their hearts in alcohol and smoke their lungs in nicotine. Others choose to stew instead in equal measures of excessive anger, greed, and envy.

We are the pickles of uncertain taste produced by our parents. We were fermented in male and female sperms in a woman’s womb for a period of roughly seven to nine months. Currently there are about 6.5 billion pickles who call themselves “I,” according to census documents.

Burying a corpse can be viewed as a kind of fermentation, or geographical pickling. Those who believe in the afterlife steep their current life in donations, hoping to taste the pickled merit in their next life.

Some say we can create poetic pickles if we know how to soak and reshape our experiences in language. The God of Rain seems to want to soak everything in water, but it’s unclear what kind of pickle he hopes to make. Perhaps the God of Rain himself is a pickled dish, a creator cooked up by Humanity.

To sum up, anything can be pickled, and everything tastes better fermented. Even Time, when seasoned and aged, turns into tasty bits of History.

By Tha Gaung Thar (translated from Burmese to English)

The Long March of the Revolutionary Cat

Tha Gaung Thar, a Burmese poet, writer, and singer, was born in 1983 and educated in Dagon University. This essay appears in Taw Hlan Kyaung Kha Yee Shay Chi Tet Pwe (The Long March of the Revolutionary Cat), a Burmese literary anthology released last December. In his essay, a quintessential Burmese condiment becomes an existential metaphor. 

Unlike the cool cucumber pickle offered alongside hotdogs and buns in the west, the Indian-style mango pickle that typically accompanies Burmese meals is pure fire. Over time, the small cubes of green mangoes steeped in chilli oil, turmeric powder, and mustard seeds turn into a pungent paste. What it lacks in crunch, it amply makes up in punch. If you take a peek into the jar, beyond the paisley-bordered label, you will indeed behold a supernova, complete with swirling sediments and floating chunks, still unsettled, always in a state of metamorphosis. That's the pickle that fermented Tha Gaung Thar's imagination and produced this piece. I only hope that I'd managed to capture half of its original flavor in my English translation. --Kenneth Wong