Allegory of the Land

Inrasara – Alec Schachner
The collection, The Purification Festival in April / lễ tẩy trần tháng tư, where “Allegory of the Land” comes from, represents a broad range of Inrasara’s poetic oeuvre to date, tracing his diverse journeys through storytelling, forays into a varying array of narrative modes and transitions through lyric and narrative verse. Like all great storytellers, Inrasara pulls from a wide network of experience, weaving together the past and the present into a tapestry of the personal and collective, blending the real and the mythical. Wandering across history, literature, folklore, music, philosophy, Hinduism, Buddhism, pop culture, myth, war, peace, harvest, community, tradition, dream, language, ritual, epic and the everyday, Inrasara’s poems sing not only the song of the Cham people in modern Vietnam, but also of all human experience – of our imagining of self and of the myriad innermost emotional lives of globalization and modernity. Deeply rooted in his readings of the Cham epics, Inrasara’s verse somehow also resonates with the flowing lines of Whitman and Hughes, a montage of human experience and insight, capturing essences both singular and universal. (Pictured: Inrasara)

Ariya Bini – Cam by English

Nguyên tác tiếng Chăm, Ariya Bini – Cam và bản tiếng Việt của Inrasara, trong Inrasara, Văn học Chăm I – Khái luận – văn tuyển, NXB Văn hóa Dân tộc, H., 1994, tr. 296-321.
Translated by William B. Noseworthy
Sinh viên thạc sĩ – Lịch sử Đông Nam Á
UW-Madison Wisconsin

I.
And so I came from Mecca
As you passed through Harok Kah Harok Dhei (Quang Binh)
And arrived at Ma Lâm (Pajai)
Before returning home by sea
with the great waves of the South China Sea knocking on the side of your boat Continue reading

Ariya Cam – Bini by English

Nguyên tác tiếng Chăm, Ariya Cam – Bini và bản tiếng Việt của Inrasara, trong Văn học Chăm I – Khái luận – văn tuyển, NXB Văn hóa Dân tộc, H., 1994, tr. 322-338.
Translated by William B. Noseworthy
Sinh viên thạc sĩ – Lịch sử Đông Nam Á
UW-Madison Wisconsin


*
This is an epic poem that I will now reveal before you
That I will bring out for all to hear

Why, I ask, must love be like this, oh my love (do you hear?)
For love, I have composed myself and built up (falsely, I fear) Continue reading

Inrasara: Fly away, rain

Thanhnien Daily, March 29, 2009.
(Bản Anh ngữ của Thanh niên, dịch từ truyện ngắn “Bay đi những cơn mưa”


* Múa cùng giông tới – Photo Inrajaya.

10 p.m. October. Kate season. Every Kate, it rains, persistently. God seems to overflow. Rain from the tile roof dripped into the porch. The croaking of bull-frogs from the bushes resounded in the house. From afar, the sound of insects. Nearby, the sound of the rain. Switching on the neon light, I half lay down on the sofa, looking out at the night sky through the slightly opened window, listening to the rain fall. Though the door was shut tight, the excited conversations of the men toasting in the main room pierced through the planks, trying to drown out the voices of insects and the rain Continue reading

Living in reverse

Translated by Phan Khế

I live in a town where all things go in
reverse. The bushes grow reversely,
shrink smaller back into seeds, and roll back
into the past-life seeds. The river flows

reversely, very swiftly. My friends,
my nephews and nieces, my siblings, and
my parents walk reversely, and
steadily become smaller, younger. Continue reading

The Purification Festival in April

Translated from the Vietnamese by Alec G. Schachner (in The Purification Festival in April,
third edition)
8-The Purification-3.1
Sunshine begins to warm the hills of April
starting earlier than many centuries past
when the ocean had yet to awake
earlier than all the memory of the elder ceremony priests. Continue reading