"Mid-River Love Exchange" by Kyi Aye

A girl with Thanakha by Kyaung Daw Gyi (Atlantis Images / Shutterstock.com)

Kyi Aye, one of the most influential Burmese writers, was born in Burma's Hle Dan district in 1929. In 1948, the year Burma regained its independence from the British, she began attending Rangoon University. She began as a medical student, but changed course in her third year, finishing school with a bachelor of arts instead.

In 1953, Kyi Aye married a bank manager. While overseeing her flock of six children, she somehow managed to work as a lecturer in the English Department of Rangoon University, resume her interrupted medical studies to completion, and maintain a successful literary career. Her debut short story "Hto Nya (That Night)" appeared in Taya magazine volume 1, issue 4, 1947. In December 1972, she immigrated to the U.S. (Biographical data from the 2003 edition of her novel A Pyin Ga Lu, The Man Outside, produced by Yee Mon Oo, printed by Theingaha Press.)

Kyi Aye's writings include magazine articles, short stories, full-length novels, and poems. She currently writes a series of biographical sketches titled "Sayawun Pon Pyin Myah (Doctor's Tales)" in Hnin See Phyu (White Rose) journal, published in Burma. Her followers maintain an unofficial Facebook fan page. 

"Mid-River Love Exchange" is one of her early poems, published in Taya magazine, volume 1, issue 5, 1947. The poem largely maintains a rhyme scheme consistent with the classic Dwe Cho format -- something impossible to reproduce in a translation, but can be heard in the Burmese audio recital.

The English version is read by Jennifer Barone, a San Francisco-based American poet. The Burmese version is read by Khin Thiri Nanda, a San Francisco-based Burmese poet.

Mid-River Love Exchange

By Kyi Aye

Translated by Kenneth Wong

My love and I

Tumbled downriver in a boat

To pluck some flowers.

The moon teased, the stars smiled,

On the night we stole

Into the bird-cuddled bush

That gave birth to poetry.

The cold breeze blew

As I sank in his chest;

Our songs flew

All along the river.

Our rhymes perched

On dainty flowers;

Then the cloud-covered moon

Hid the misty mid-river spot.

In the mid-river mist

Where the clouds hid the moon,

I grew bashful.

The tide turned wondrous strange

By the shadowy crest;

My heart was aflutter,

My skin in a shudder,

And his smile was soft.

Steadily we rowed

Back to the shore;

Giddy waves parted

By the prow of the boat.

Our village shrine rose

With emblems of good luck;

We snuggled neck to neck

With Love as our witness.

မြစ်လယ်မှာ ချစ်လှယ်တုန်းက

မြစ်ရေပြင် လှေလူးလို့

ချစ်ဦးမယ်နှင့်မောင်

ပန်းခူးရအောင်။

လမင်းကလှောင် ၊ ကြယ်ရောင်ကပြုံး

ညဉ့်ဦးကဗျာတည်တဲ့

ငှက်ပလီ ချုံနွယ်ရိပ်မှာ

တိတ်တိတ်ကွယ်ပုန်း။

လေအေးကခုန်ပြန်

ကြင်ဦးရင်မှာမှီလို့

ဆိုတေးစီ မြစ်တစ်ကြောမှာ

စိုးတဲ့အသံ။

လှပသည့် ကာရန် ၊ ပန်းမန်မှာနား

လဝန်းတိမ်မှာကွယ်တော့

မြစ်လယ်မှုန်ဝါး။

လဝန်းတိမ်မှာကွယ်

မြစ်ယံလယ် မှုန်တဝါးမှာ

ရှက်အားကကြွယ်။

တတ်ရေးဆန်းကြယ်

ကမ်းစွယ်ရိပ်အကွေ့

ကြက်သီးတလှိုင်လှိုင်ပ

မယ့်သက်ပိုင်ချို နှလုံးရယ်

ပြုံးတထေ့ထေ့။

ကမ်းဆီကို ဝိုက်ကွေ့လို့

တရွေ့ရွေ့ စိုက်လာ

ယက်ပန်းကဖွာ ။

ရွာဦးမှာ၊ သာစေတီမြတ်မြင့်မား

ဗျာဒိတ်တလွင်လွင်မို့

လည်ယှက်တင်ပျော်ပုံသစ်ရအောင်

ချစ်သက်သေထား။ ။

ကြည်အေး

တာရာ ၊ အတွဲ ၁ ၊အမှတ် ၅ ၊ ၁၉၄၇