La montagne magique (english version)

Quê Anh (oil pastel on paper) The flame of life

Der Zauberberg

(The magic mountain)

I

Thinking and hoping, to become and to despair

Turning it back but unable to live it again

To be full of desires and let in oblivion

The tiny dust, engraved somewhere

On the line of wrinkles leading to eternity

To love wholly with our heart and be unfaithful

Ourselves and deplore it into the wind

Blowing off our name and the love’s one

Longing, as if it was possible, for a permanence

In the dwelling of the exiled, lost travelers

Oh! Just going up and quietly departing

Into the blue sky, serenely over the mountains

I’ll have hideout up in the mountains

The North Star to guide your paths

If ever we are going to meet

We’ll glide endlessly in the sky

II

To be here or to be there

Anywhere away from homeland

Expectations and confounded aspirations

You had a shining look in the sun

Trying to sway the course of our history

Looking for prescient signs

Grand becoming of our destiny

But hollow searches, futile struggles

The world has to stay in its trite vanity

The people could not get to be free

And us always as human in our self-bondage

To be here or to be there

Anywhere in the North plain of exile

For a change to defy our fate

You would like to lift up

The crow-bar of impossible comprehension

In the endless asphalt-silence of the city

With deceptive lights and our boundaries

By the concrete walls extending to nowhere

We will go and will find out

Futility of lost civilizations

And listen to the blowing wind

Continuous litany of flaking snow

To be here or to be there

Anywhere in this living-world

Sanctuary of the past and of fleeting future

Would you tell our fortune

The obscure law of life and death

Leafless branches in the dark days of winter

I’ll not look for my innermost being

The naked man at every early morning

Holding out the wreath of laurels

To fight and to be desperate

For an illusory crown in this grandiloquent play

I resign with no greedy spirit

III

As much in our dreams as in our despair

You were the perennial vow for another life

In the dim light of summer mornings

Singing anew our plaintive ballad

For to love you we accepted to suffer

Though with a simple word we could fall apart

Having no more desires and expectations

Albeit the spring shining on our road

The summer sun deep in your eyes

To look at you without any flutter

My heart would be wounded

In a sudden and permanent break

To resign to the loss

To the silence whisper

As we would have to cross

The separation line leading to the mountain-tops

The ones which we were beholding

Beyond the plain of fallen trees

The wind sweeping through the burst of inert stones

The burst of our soul

Alas! What a heart break

That page could be written

These words could be repeated forever

But no one could ever realize again

Your very beauty and your true being

Might I have the lucidity

To take the leave before due time

To get to other shore before the end

The end of our love

Of these moments

To fall in oblivion

IV

Live and forget the essential

Love with all desires in a fleeting world

Her body was to be in my embrace

The memory forever in my heart

And the distresses and the pains

For not to protect her from life sorrows

Love with all desires in a fleeting world

Have to part and keep on hoping for permanence

Her figure was so warm and tender

Strong the taste of bitters-spirit

Winter evenings I spent in gracious silence

Alone by the fire looking up to a star

Have to part and keep on hoping for permanence

Suffer with the eyes full of sunlight

There was a very old tree

In the land of my childhood

And I knew the despair in departing on a boat

To be wrecked in the high sea

Suffer with the eyes full of sunlight

Live and forget the essential

A slender thread binding beings to shadows

I had the ethereal sky

Looking for a way up to the mountains

To leave the valley in its passing time

The cycle of pains and vanities

2009-2010

(English version of the original french poem: “La Montagne Magique”, dedicated to Van Cao, the vietnamese national musician – in the poetry collection “Nuages- Mây”. Ngo Van Tao- Montreal 1988)