To Nguyen Tuan: moonstruck seer of the night

Quế Anh (oil pastel on paper) The life-theater play

To Nguyễn Tuân ( vietnamese writer)

The moonstruck seer of the night

Wearing a mask and slowly taking it off

To be confronted with innermost innocence

And with all the turmoils in our life

To see unconsciously on our face lightning-wrinkles

Of fore-reality and past adventures

To have with our hands a fatal healing touch

On unbearable immaterial wounds

And with piety listen to the celestial symphony

Cursing though these dumb shadows

Unknown ghosts or distorted images of ourselves

Appearing and disappearing in the life-theater play

Would you come, moonstruck seer of the night

Leaving behind the twilight - sunset of the world

And give me the haunting thought, deeply mine

Humanly wavering between darkness and daylight

As if the empty world could be filled up

With no meaning words and vain murmurs

Fleeting appearance with power to appease

Our failed rebellion and submissive despair

Shady misery-drive on endless road

In the penumbra of our dream and life-sorrows

Would you come, moonstruck seer of the night

And give me so for no reason

The destiny-burden

incandescent burning stone from the far-away star

II-

From the bottom of the depths

On evanescent screen of desires

Waning ray in a visionary dream

I would come out alike to your image

Endowed with a gift of messenger

To see and to apprehend

In a country where it was happy to be alive

Death could be pleasant

In our land of sufferings and sorrows

It could be meaningless if we have to die

I would walk as if in a sleepless night

Passageway of a gloomy motel

Dazzled by intense light

Loneliness full of anguish

And silence pregnant with ghostly murmurs

I would confront the dark world with challenge

A retained cry of distress

For all the lost opportunities of my life

Nightmares of my childhood

Losing my mind and my heart

I would wait for my perdition

An apparition bursting out from a hidden corner

To cradle me in a sea of wrecking waves

III-

To defy banality, we have the sea

Swell foam of wrath

In the deep night, a gleam of hope

I could realize boundaries of my fate

Innermost cave of secluded life

But with you, I would look for mirages

At the far end of desert

Treading on the sand with childhood wonders

And with lay wisdom

Bringing back the past over the dim present

I had strength, heart and memory

Remembered the pubescent breasts

Girly body under uneasy touch

Close to young boy’s breaths

In his wakening to life

Away from rice fields and fragrance of primroses

Wakening to the world mystery

Strikingly lost between life and death

I recalled the languid lady

Quietly seated in her long red gown

A wedding-night full of sensuality

And her milky body in the dismal next morning

Yet unfulfilled secret desires

With already apparent wrinkles of time

I could listen to your cries coming from nowhere

Winds whispering through flying clouds and fluttering leaves

Nuptial murmurs or delirious complaints

Ruffianly soldiers reeling at taverns’doors

Loose puppets in their hidings

Men assuming though to be leaders or princes

Giving orders to Aediles and settling the laws

Continuous stuttering to conceal their anguish

Senile acts in front of eternal oblivion

I went up tottering stairs to the seventh floor

In a shabby room open to the sun

Half-naked, “she” was waiting for me

Seemingly “mine” but so far away

I would put my head on the windy window sill

Hearing all the city’s noises

Finding myself so old in spite of my youth

A limpid look on the blurred lines of “her” beauty

I had a gust of life

And bitterness in existence impossibilities

My image reflected in the dark river

Between gliding barges

Carrying away tatters and stinking loads

Between the crowd I was a fleeced man

Amid multitude, I was so distracted

Having no more anxiety for life and death

In a long waiting line, chilled in the cold

I went to the fountain for a water-drink

For the whole night, standing with hunger

I realized our day-dream: the purity

Very drunkness in our perennial destitution

IV-

Waste land deep in the night

there were us, unhappily moulting for a season

re-born sea-gull, hampered wings beating

monotonously moving to remind futile struggles

throughout the ages repeated messages

scattered sheets of a forgotten photo-book

we had our dream from many other dreams

human condition in human society

and cried at the end of endless hours:

“Help! Help!”

madly we were looking and waiting for

the soap bubbles amid tree’s branches

the bursting iridescent bubbles

that the next door girl blew

barefooted and in tatters

her body so slender and so pure

yet with stigma of oblivion

still white cloud in the background

Would you come, moonstruck seer of the night

Fugacious phosphorescent apparition that I was waiting for

And give me so without reason the heavy stone

Burning dream for a day

Fading away in the twilight

12.08.2010

Ngovantao

(english version of the original long french poem: “A Nguyen Tuan: Le visionnaire de la nuit” .ngovantao-1982)