"The Spoiled Rice of Hope" by Maung Chaw Nwe

Illustration by Kenneth Wong

In "The Love Song of J. Alfred Profrock," T. S. Eliot's evening is "spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table." In "The Spoiled Rice of Hope," Burmese poet Maung Chaw Nwe (1949-2002) depicts an evening "[striving] to be respectable and human" in her room of seven by ten:

Here,
Evening is
full of injuries and defeat—
she can’t help but be poor.

Sitting under a low-watt light,
this Evening is
a mother who exposes her tired breasts
to suckle her babies.
Young in years but old in age,
she sheds from her face
the yellow tint of humanity,
one layer at a time—
her hopes peel off like dead skin flakes.

Along with "The Spoiled Rice of Hope" ( ေမွ်ာ္လင္႔ျခင္းထမင္းသိုးမ်ား), I also translated "The Flowers of Truth" (သစၥာပန္းမ်ားနဲ႔ ေမလ) and "After my Dinner with the Blue Star" (ၾကယ္ျပာေလးနဲ႔ ထမင္းစားၿပီးတဲ့ေနာက္) into English. They appear in Issue 16 of Eleven Eleven literary journal.

Since Chaw Nwe is no longer alive, I don't have the option to query him when I'm confronted with uncertainties about the right treatment of his lines. In those moments, his contemporaries Zeyar Lynn and Khin Aung Aye, both prominent poets in their own rights, came to my rescue. They were Chaw Nwe's contemporaries and poetry comrades. I'm indebted to the insight they shared on the late Chaw Nwe's works. 

The Burmese title for "The Flowers of Truth" is a double entendre. The word for Gladiolus (thitsar pan) could also be interpreted as truth-flower (thitsar = truth/pledge/promise; pan = flower). So Chaw Nwe's title could be read two ways: "The Gladiolus-Flourishing May" or "The Flowers of Truth in May." Unfortunately, the pun doesn't translate into English. So I had to make a choice. Since the poem catalogs the miseries that converge on, and conspire against, the narrator, I chose to preserve the emotional truth instead of the botanical accuracy in the title.

I believe poetry's bloom is the brightest in the poet's native tongue, in the culture and syntax in which it first sees the light of day. Therefore, all poetry translations, however skillfully done, come at a cost. Some puns and metaphors may lose their potency when rendered in a new language. Certain images and phrases lose their flavor when uprooted from the culture they call home. The best a translator can hope for is that the new version is a fitting tribute to the original, a specimen that retains the noblest characteristics of the source.

The three poems I translated, I hope, give Maung Chaw Nwe's works a second life outside his Burmese audience.

The illustration above is my own, drawn digitally in Autodesk SketchBook Pro for iPad.