Orwell Gets a Second Chance in Burmese

George Orwell's essays, translated by Thurein Win

On July 14, 1927, Eric Blair, a 24-year-old Englishman, boarded the MV Shropshire at the docks of Rangoon. Assistant District Superintendent Blair, posted to the town of Katha in Upper Burma, first joined the Indian Imperial Police in 1922, at the tender age of 18. Five years later, having just recovered from a severe bout of dengue fever, he was sailing home on leave. But he would not return. A few months after arriving home in London, Blair tendered his resignation. It was the end of his career as a colonial policeman, and the beginning his life as a writer under the pen name George Orwell.

Orwell wrote two of his most notable essays set in Burma -- "A Hanging" and "Shooting an Elephant" -- in 1931 and 1936, respectively. The first one is an eyewitness account of a prison execution. The second is about the time he was summoned to deal with an elephant that had gone on a rampage and killed a man. By Orwell's own admission, the elephant shooting took place in Moulemein, a coastal town at the mouth of Sanlween River.

Nearly 80 years after "Shooting an Elephant" first appeared in print, Thurein Win, an English teacher from Rangoon, found himself in Moulmein. Here, visiting the sites referenced in Orwell's writing, he first got the idea to translate Orwell's essays into Burmese.

Did Orwell Hate the Burmese?
In writing about Burma, Orwell confronted the unsavory tasks he was obligated to perform as a servant of the Empire. To exorcise these demons, he seemed to have consciously chosen to expose the private thoughts of Blair the colonial policeman, including some of the ugliest urges that bubbled up from time to time. In "Shooting an Elephant," he wrote:

With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts.

"That passage is particularly unsettling for the Burmese Buddhist community," Thurein pointed out. "When I discussed it with my friends and mentors, some told me to leave that out. One editor told me, 'This sentence doesn't do anybody any good. Just take it out.' "

To his credit, Thurein stuck to his guns (and Orwell's bayonet). "I left it in. This line is important to illustrate the mental fatigue Orwell was suffering from," he reasoned. "Besides, the essay taken as a whole shows us how he felt trapped as an agent of the colonial system -- or, as I see it, a form of authoritarian government."

Orwell recognized the unjust act he had to perpetrate daily as a colonial officer. He laid bare his troubled conscience in The Road to Wigan Pier:

[In] Burma it was a double oppression that we were committing. Not only were we hanging people and putting them in jail and so forth; we were doing it in the capacity of unwanted foreign invaders. The Burmese themselves never really recognized our jurisdiction. The thief whom we put in prison did not think of himself as a criminal justly punished, he thought of himself as the victim of a foreign conqueror. The thing that was done to him was merely a wanton meaningless cruelty. His face, behind the stout teak bars of the lock-up and the iron bars of the jail, said so clearly. And unfortunately I had not trained myself to be indifferent to the expression of the human face.

Orwellian English
In the same essay, while describing the mangled corpse of the Indian coolie killed by the elephant, Orwell's narrator remarked, "Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful; most of the corpses I've seen look devilish." Such brash asides that usually accompany moments of darkness characterize Orwell's sardonic narrative voice. The effect is difficult to reproduce in a translation, but Thurein managed to do it with the right degree of snide in his Burmese version.

"My biggest challenge came when I was translating 'A Hanging,' in the passage describing the condemned man's walk to the gallows," Thurein said.

The text in question is:

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working -- bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming -- all toiling away in solemn foolery. 

Thurein traded emails with his overseas friends -- including a New York Times contributor, an American poet, and a health writer in England -- to get a better sense of the "solemn foolery" that sums up the lines above. He didn't get a clear answer. He found out even native English speakers struggled to make sense of the phrase. He had to devote a complete sentence in Burmese to do justice.

By pairing "solemn" and "foolery," Orwell seemed to be describing Life as an act of divine playfulness, a paradoxical blend of sacredness and silliness.

Orwellian Honesty
Thurein's first encounter with Orwell was Burmese Days, found on the bookshelf of one of his mentors. He said he poked around to see if earlier translations of Orwell's essays exist in Burmese, but came up empty. So he decided to translate a handful for a start.

Under the previous military government, given the arbitrary way Say Pae See Sit Yay (The Board of Literary Scrutiny) operated, few translators wanted to take the risk with Orwell. He didn't portray the Burmese people as "noble savages"; instead, he wrote them as complex characters, capable of wickedness and caprice just like everyone else. This was certainly the case with U Po Kyin, the conniving Burmese magistrate in Burmese Days.

U Po Kyin took bribes, practiced nepotism, spread rumors, fueled riots, and plotted against his opponents. He is the prototype for the corrupt officials ordinary folks endured under military rule; and he continues to thrive in the so-called reform period of today.

Flawed as the current civilian government of Burma is, it did relax many of the past censorship rules, paving the way for more honest literary endeavors. A recent translation of Orwell's Burmese Days won the country's National Literary Award for translated work, suggesting the country may now be more open to see its own reflection in the Orwellian mirror.

Orwell's writings reveal the way an unjust system condemns and corrupts both the oppressor and the oppressed. His messages were relevant in post-colonial Burma. They still ring true in the country's post-military era. Discussing Orwell gives the Burmese a way to talk about the elephant in the room -- the unjust system some refuse to see.