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Central Railway Station in Yangon, Myanmar, Feb 2017, Tonkinphotography / Shutterstock.com |
I read it, and was quite taken by his clever phrase turns. So I began working on his piece right away. The next day, I had an English version for him. My translation of "10:10" eventually appeared in Be Untexted, an online literary journal.
Then Lynn Moe Swae sent me another poem to translate, titled "Train, Train." I promised to take a look at it, but I never did. Life got hectic, so I forgot about Lynn Moe Swae, and, it seemed, he about me.
On September 18, his name began trending among the Burmese poets' Facebook updates. The news that rang out loud that Monday was, at the age of 41, Lynn Moe Swae had passed away.
His obituary in The Los Angeles Review of Books was penned by Ko Ko Thett, a renowned translator and Burmese poet. Chronicling Lynn Moe Swae's final journey, Ko Ko Thett wrote:
While Lynn’s body lied in wake at his home for around 12 hours, a typical Burmese concrete tomb was hastily built for him at a cemetery nearby. By 5 p.m. on the same day of his death, the funeral procession, a few cars and dozens of scooters, three wreaths from three different Myanmar poets organizations and one from a Monywa library where he was a volunteer, headed for the cemetery ...I owe Lynn Moe Swae a translation. He's no longer alive to receive it personally, but I'm providing it here nonetheless, in the hope that his poetic soul may find it worth the wait.
In the entombment, the coffin, carried by a number of his friends and relatives, was simply placed in the huge tomb, much like a matchstick drawer pushed into a matchbox, and sealed off with brick and mortar. At his funeral no earthen pot was smashed. One of his colleagues from his school read out an order terminating him from his duties. Another from a public library where he was a volunteer relieved him of his responsibilities.
Note: Translator Ko Ko Thett pointed out that soldiers and policemen often use "Ya htar," the Burmese word for train, to acknowledge messages received in radio communications, much in the same way English speakers use "Roger" for this purpose.Train, Train
Gazing ....The little teashop by the stationIs gazing at the train’s footsteps.What I ordered hasn’t come,What I didn’t order has arrived.That’s my table;That’s my life.Everyone has his own fate.Don’t blame the young waiter.He kept looking at his boss’s face,Couldn’t see his own life.The saucer that fell and brokeMust have been his future.The funeral of the flyIn my teacupIs much too sweet.The hot tea I’m blowing off with my own sighsWon’t cool down.Politics in journalsFlutters like a fan,Runs reckless.Truth doesn’t last a week; it’s renewed in every weekly issue.When I say, the train’s going to be late,I mean, I’ll be late going to the train;The train carrying its own tracksDoesn’t stop at any station;Carrying its own path, it carries on.Too late,Too late for the train,The train has already left;Like the police man with a walkie-talkie,I kept calling,Train, train!I kept shouting ...Lynn Moe Swae, November 8, 2015
Translated by Kenneth Wong, October 6, 2017
ရထား...ရထားေငး...လို႔ဘူတာရံုေဘးက လက္ဖက္ရည္ဆိုင္ေလးရထားေျခရာကို ေငးလို႔...။မွာထားတာေတြ ေရာက္မလာေသးဘူးမမွာတာေတြ ေရာက္ေရာက္လာတယ္စားပြဲေပၚမွာငါ့ဘဝမွာ...။သတၱ၀ါတစ္ခု ကံတစ္ခုစားပြဲထိုးေလးကို အျပစ္ဆိုဖြယ္မရိွဆိုင္ရွင္မ်က္ႏွာ လွမ္းလွမ္းၾကည့္ေနရတာနဲ႔သူ႔ဘဝသူ မျမင္ေတာ့ဘူးက်ကြဲသြားတဲ့ပန္းကန္ေလးက သူ႔ေ႐ွ႕ေရးပဲ။လက္ဖက္ရည္ခြက္ထဲကယင္ေကာင္ တစ္ေကာင္ရဲ႕စ်ာပနအခ်ိဳကဲလြန္းပါတယ္။သက္ျပင္းေတြနဲ႔မႈတ္ေသာက္ေနရတဲ့ ေရေႏြးမေအးေတာ့ဘူး။ဂ်ာနယ္ေပၚက ႏိုင္ငံေရးယပ္ေတာင္အျဖစ္နဲ႔ လႈပ္ေနတယ္ရမ္းေနတယ္အမွန္တရားက တစ္ပတ္မခံဘူး အပတ္စဥ္ထြက္ေနၿပီ။ရထားေနာက္က်လိမ့္မယ္ ေျပာတာကရထားဆီသြားဖို႔ ေနာက္က်လိမ့္မယ္ကို ဆိုလိုတာပါသံလမ္းေတြကို တင္လာတဲ့ရထားဘယ္ဘူတာမွ မနားကိုယ္လမ္းကိုထမ္းလို႔ ခုတ္ေမာင္းသြားၿပီမမီေတာ့ေတာ့ဘူးရထား မမီေတာ့ေတာ့ဘူးရထားက ထားသြားၿပီစကားေျပာစက္နဲ႔ ရဲသားႀကီးလိုငါကရထား... ရထားနဲ႔ ေခၚေနတယ္ေအာ္ေနတယ္...။ ။လင္းမိုးေစြ ၁၁.၈.၂၀၁၅
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