Translating Aung San Suu Kyi

Aung San Suu Kyi, watercolor and pencil, by Kenneth Wong

The first time I translated Aung San Suu Kyi, she was a strong, steady voice streaming into my headset. The 67-year-old Nobel laureate sat in a chair on the podium below me, facing a crowd of 4,300 that hung on her every word. A former Oxford scholar, she's fluent in the language of Milton and Shakespeare; yet, she had chosen to speak in Burmese, because she wanted to "say what was really in [her] heart" to her fellow countrymen who'd come to hear her, she said.

The audience inside San Francisco University's War Memorial Gym included Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Dean of the University, the Mayor, journalists, reporters, and local folks. It would be up to me to instantaneously relay Suu Kyi's words--punctuated with quintessential Burmese expressions and carefully selected political terms--in English for the benefit of those who didn't speak Burmese. There were very few times in my life when I was nervous to speak English. This was one of those times.

Recently uncaged from a prolonged house arrest by the changing political climate of Burma, Suu Kyi was getting reacquainted with the world in a series of high-profile overseas trips. The September 2012 trip to San Francisco was her first U.S. trip in the last 40 years. She wore white; she wore a strand of flowers. She quipped that she came to the City by the Bay the right way. (To get that reference, you'll have to be familiar with Scott McKenzie's song "San Francisco," which depicts the San Franciscans as "gentle people with flowers in their hair.")

The second time I translated Suu Kyi, she was a poem. At a fundraiser for Jai Bhim International, a nonprofit dedicated to educating India's Dalits, local poet Genny Lim read her poem, named after the Democracy icon of my homeland:

Aung San Suu Kyi

The Lady in the house
disappeared like the moon behind the clouds
No one had seen her for many years
except in photographs or dreams
Who knew if she was real anymore or just a ghost? ...

(From Paper Gods and Rebels. For the full poem, visit Lim's publisher Ishmael Reed's site.)

As Lim read her lines, invested with conviction and hope, I realized here was my chance to translate Aung San Suu Kyi once more--but in the opposite direction. Lim has written a poignant ode to Suu Kyi in English; I could relay her words in Burmese for some of my fellow countrymen who would otherwise never get to read it.

With Lim's permission, I translated her poem into the following. (To see the Burmese script properly, you'll need Zawgyi One font.)

ေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္

အိမ္ေတာ္ရွင္ အမိ်ဳးသမီး
တိမ္မိ်ဳလို႕ေပ်ာက္သြားတဲ႕လမင္းလို
မျမင္ရတာလဲႏွစ္ေတြၾကာခဲ႕ေပါ႔။
အိပ္မက္နဲ႕ဓါတ္ပံုေဟာင္းေတြထဲမွာသာရံဖန္ရံခါေတြ႕ရ
ဧရာဝတီျမစ္ေအာက္ျမဳပ္လို႕ေပ်ာက္သြားတဲ႕ဘဝေတြလိုဘဲ။
တကယ္ေတြ႕ခဲ႕တာလား တေစၧေျခာက္ခဲ႕တာလား မကြဲျပားေတာ႕ဘူး။
ေၾကကြဲတဲ႕မ်က္ဝန္းနဲ႕သံမဏိရာဇဝင္ကိုရင္ေပြ႕ခဲ႕တဲ႕
သူ႕နာမည္ကစုၾကည္။
မမွည္႕ခင္ေႂကြလို႕ေရစုန္ေမ်ာတဲ႕
ေက်ာင္းသားငယ္တို႕ႏႈတ္ဖ်ားမွာ
တိတ္တခိုး႐ြတ္ခဲ႕ၾကတဲ႕နာမည္။
နတ္ပူေဇာ္ဘို႕ေဆးေၾကာထားတဲ႕
စပါးႏွံေတြၾကား မွာေဝ႕လည္ေနတဲ႕
အိမ္ေတာ္ရွင္ အမိ်ဳးသမီး။
ေသြးစြန္းဓါးရႇသူဒုကၡသည္မ်ားၾကားမွာ
ေတာင္းဆုပန္လွ်က္ ပန္းပန္ လွ်က္နဲ႕
ေရခါးနဲ႕ဗြက္ပုပ္ေပၚေျခဖဝါးခ်လို႕
သားေပ်ာက္တဲ႕မိခင္လိုငိုေႂကြးခဲ႕တဲ႕
ကယ္တင္ရွင္ေအာင္ဆန္းရဲ႕သမီး။
က်ားေလွာင္အိမ္မွာေခါင္းခ်အိပ္ရင္း
သံသရာရွည္တဲ႕ညကုန္ဆံုးရင္
သူ႕ရင္ထဲက ခြင္႕လႊတ္ျခင္းၾကာငံုပြင္႕မဲ႕
အာ႐ံုဦးကိုေမွ်ာ္။

--Genny Lim (translated from English by Kenneth Wong)

Speaking to Lim, I learned that her poem was composed around the time of Cyclone Nargis in 2008. At the time, the county was still in the clutch of a military regime, characterized by isolation and paranoia.

The devastation of the storm was made worse by the government's foot-dragging in the relief efforts and its staunch refusal to permit certain foreign aid groups to reach the affected regions. The storm made landfall in Burma in May 2008; in the same month, the government extended Suu Kyi's house arrest by another year. The following year, it would again be extended. The imagery, theme, and language of Lim's poem echo the pent-up angst and helplessness the Burmese felt at the time.

To depict Suu Kyi's tragic circumstances, Lim called upon Llorona, the legend of a weeping woman looking for her drowned children. The legend is of Latin American origin, unfamiliar to most Burmese readers. As translator, I have the choice to (1) address the reference in a footnote; or (2) find a corresponding phrase in Burmese that evokes a similar sentiment. I chose the latter.

Like all translations, this too is just an attempt to capture, in this case, the original's haunting imagery and longing for a new dawn in another language. In several places, instead of choosing phrases that might be much closer to Lim's English in meaning, I opted for expressions that sound more natural to the Burmese ear. 

I don't believe Lim's poem is meant to be a historical document. It's a tribute to someone larger than life. It's history distilled in poetry. What good would my translation do if I manage to convey her lines' meanings but fail to capture her poetry?

More on Genny Lim at this Wikipedia entry.

Lim's upcoming reading and book launch event at Eastwind Books, Berkeley, California.

My English translation of Aung San Suu Kyi's talk at University of San Francisco is posted here.