One day no killing cows.
No making love, no office, no rancor, no phone, no coffee, no visits, no sinus disease . . . .
During the day he sinks deeply into his room.
He is a pharaoh buried deep in the catacombs of loneliness with all of his languages.
The First Draft:
We are born with our deaths already inside of us.
No, I have to say it exactly: this idea of death
Is withering
Because we carry the fear of death, because our assumptions are all wrong.
We abandoned our own spirits. Did we ever sit down in a calm and fair way
To watch the documentary of our lives? Time made the documentary and didn’t miss a detail.
Many people watched the documentary of their lives and cried out in horror:
I am no different from a pig.
We have so much in common with the pig. For a long time we forgot our souls. We spend too much time taking care of the pig inside of us that we are born with. When we change our clothes it’s no different from the pig when it molts. To prepare for the day, we keep our heads down at breakfast. The real pigs look at us and laugh: “Look at those men eat from a tiny trough. They are so poor and cowardly. They have meeting after meeting in which they quarrel.”
The pigs continue to cry: those pigs have many reasons for their bad wishes. The pigs spoke many truths about us. Among us, someone cried: Who will advocate this humiliation for us?
Please ask Pham Tien Duat, ask Nguyen Tan Viet, ask Duong Kieu Minh, ask Nguyen Luong Ngoc, ask Trinh Van Sy, ask Le Phuong Chung, ask Luong Tu Duc, ask Hoang A. Sang, ask Do Van Hieu, ask Bao Ninh, ask Ta Duy Anh, ask Nguyen Quyen, ask Tran Le Khan, ask Phan Hoang, ask Tran Hung, ask Mai Van Phan, ask Y Phuong, ask Tran Duc Tien, ask Do Trung Quan, ask Nguyen Viet Ha, ask Thanh Cuong, ask Tran Nha Thuy, ask Nguyen Van Tho, ask Paul Nguyen Hoang Duc, ask Nguyen Thu He, ask Thuy Duong, ask Dinh Thi Nhu Thuy, ask Thiet Cuong, ask Dao Hai Phong, ask Y Ban, ask Nguyen Huy Thiep, ask Nguyen Phuc Loc Thanh, ask Tran Dang Khoa, ask Nguyen Binh Phuong, ask Nguyen Trung Dan, ask Dang Huy Giang, ask Van Chinh, ask Nguyen Dang Diep, ask Pham Xuan Nguyen, ask Charles Simic, ask Yusef Komuniakaa, ask Ko Un, ask Bruce Weigl, ask Larry Heinemann, ask Fred Marchant, ask Martha Collins, ask Carolyn Forche, ask Nguyen Ba Chung, ask Van Cam Hai, ask Phan Triu Hai, ask Tu Le, ask Nguyen Duc Tang, ask Trinh Tu, ask Hoang Phuong Vy, ask Pham Tran Quan, ask Pham Luu Vu, ask Nguyen Duy, ask Bui Chi Vinh, ask Nguyen Quang Lap, ask Ngo Quoc Ky, ask Hoang Tran Cuong, ask Hoang Tran Dong, ask Thanh Hong Linh, ask Vuong Tam, ask Nguyen Phong Doanh, ask Huu Khoi, ask Do Doan Hoang, ask Doi Doan Phuong, ask Le Thi Tan Trang, ask Nguyen Quang Thuat, ask Julian Ramirez, ask Vu Minh Thu, ask Nguyen Thi Tuyet Ngan, ask Tim O’Brien, ask John Deane, ask Xia Lu, ask Sam Hamill, ask Fernando Rendon, ask Do Han, ask Nguyen Thuy Hang, ask Nguyen Thu Uyen, ask Nguyen Chi Hoan, ask Dao Ba Doan, ask Dao Quoc Vinh, ask Dao Quoc Minh, ask Nguyen Linh Khieu, ask Nguyen Thuy Quynh, ask To Nhuan Vy, ask Ha Khanh Linh, ask Ho The Ha, ask Nguyen Tham Thien, ask Le Thieu Nhon, ask Nguyen Quang Hung, ask Huu Viet . . . . (Left unfinished.)
The Second Draft:
Dawn will still come, although there will be no us in the world.
We build so many illusions.
Darkness dyed us all black with its rule of justice. Darkness is a huge blanket, and we are lice. Somewhere, some lice had a dream, but they could not change the other lice.
Sunlight crawls slowly to the slaughterhouse. The flies awake and cry. The cows won’t curse the flies. And the flies glisten in sunlight.
When I was a child I used to think about the blue flies that flew as if they stood in the pure dawn.
Does anyone remember that image?
So few people raised their hand.
Those mornings in the countryside the village woke to the odor of dung from cows, pigs, dogs, and with the smell of cooking fires from the kitchens. The blue flies flew, glistening blue dots. Why did they fly that way?
I don’t know.
They flew in the clean and bright air of dawn. They flew over our heads. They don’t descend into the corpses, or the garbage. The children dream passionately to fly like them. They don’t think about disease or vomit when they watch the blue flies in the summer dawn.
No.
Not at all.
Childhood memories shine with justice.
I am recalling the blue flies.
Blood flowed last night in the slaughterhouse,
The knife deeply embedded in the necks of cows last night,
The hammer came down exactly on the heads of cows last night.
The rope was tied so tightly last night.
The wooden pole shook last night.
The heads of cows were severed last night.
A sleepy yawn last night.
Some whispering last night.
World last night.
Everything is silent in the light. The light is sharp like a hammer, a rope, a knife, a jar, a cow’s head, flowing blood, a rat, a rag, a blue fly . . . .
Everything is silent, perfect, and mysterious,
The slaughterhouse as beautiful as a painting in oil.
The windows full of light.
A man passes the time.
:
- The windows of the church, whisper . . . . (Left unfinished.)
from Slaughterhouse
Nguyen Quang Thieu
translated from the Vietnamese by Nguyen Quang Thieu and Bruce Weigl
Several years ago, while I was spending the winter in Hanoi, I was invited to spend the weekend with my old friend Nguyen Quang Thieu, whom I’d known for thirty years, and his family in nearby Ha Dong. We talked about poetry and art, read poems out loud in Vietnamese and in English, sang songs, played the piano, drank, ate, then started all over again.
I remember lying in bed at night in the dark and feeling the happiness like a blanket keeping me warm. During our second evening together, Thieu and I were alone. He was going through some manuscripts that he’d forgotten about. At one point he asked me to listen to part of a poem he wanted to read.
The Vietnamese was particularly difficult for me, and I struggled to get a sense of what the poem was about. It seemed to me to be about a cow, but because of the power of contextual reference in the Vietnamese language, I wasn’t certain initially. I kept listening and began to hear a powerful undercurrent of something driving the poem.
Thieu read for nearly half an hour. When he finished, he sipped from his glass of tea and turned to ask me what I thought. However weak my Vietnamese interpretation skills, which of course are different from translation skills, I had a strong sense that I was in the presence of something important in the form of Thieu’s poem, but I wanted to be sure, so I asked him if we could spend some time translating the beginning of what was a long, fifty-page work. He readily agreed, and we sat down and did it together. With the first few lines I was deeply engaged, and I knew that I’d never seen anything like this poem before in my long career as a poet, translator, educator, and scholar. That evening I committed myself to translating the poem with the author, and that began a six-year journey through the difficult puzzle that is literary translation. Over the course of those six years, our methods were consistent. We would begin by each offering a more or less literal version of the poem in English. What happened when we compared our work was that some of the translations into English came out very similar, while others sounded like they must have been from other planets because of how different they were from each other on the most fundamental levels. These differences formed the basis of our long years of translation. We would bring our literal versions to the table and find a way to fuse the best of each into a new draft. This was especially difficult over the internet and phone, but we also had the opportunity to work together on the translation in Vietnam for several months and during visits that Thieu made to the United States. This work was especially fruitful. Two years ago we spent three months working together in Hanoi to finish Slaughterhouse, just as the pandemic arrived in Vietnam. Feeling the urgency of those earliest days of the virus’s spread, we met every morning for a long breakfast/translation session, and often for shorter meetings during the afternoon. My room was near Thieu’s office, so I could easily walk there when questions came up that I was unable to answer.
I know that my Vietnamese language skills have improved as a result of these many years of translation work on this project, but what was even more important than that education, was the education I received about Vietnamese culture and the Vietnamese people. I remember clearly the first time I saw the end of this great poem in English in my mind. I had memorized a long passage of the poem in Vietnamese, and I kept repeating it to myself out loud whenever I was alone. One night after drinking too much bia hoi, or fresh draft beer, I was sitting alone in my room, repeating the passage again in Vietnamese that ended the poem. I felt a kind of shiver through my body, blinked a few times, and then saw that beautiful ending in English, so that for the first time in many years, the entire poem came together for me like a well-made box that clicks sharply closed.
But anyone involved in literary translation understands that this is just the beginning, and that although the way may seem clear, you know that it will take dozens of versions to arrive there. This was the case with Slaughterhouse. We worked on several drafts together and separately until we found an English expression of the poem that allowed its sometimes shockingly inventive nature to be most fully revealed. It meant that we had to let go and give ourselves to the strange and deeply insightful nature of this epic poem. We think of our work as a true “co-translation,” because all of the most important decisions over the course of several years of work were made with full consideration by both translators. Translation should never be simply working from one language’s dictionary to another, but from one consciousness to another. This is what Nguyen Quang Thieu’s sweeping assessment of the twentieth-century, called Slaughterhouse, offers the reader in English.
I remember lying in bed at night in the dark and feeling the happiness like a blanket keeping me warm. During our second evening together, Thieu and I were alone. He was going through some manuscripts that he’d forgotten about. At one point he asked me to listen to part of a poem he wanted to read.
The Vietnamese was particularly difficult for me, and I struggled to get a sense of what the poem was about. It seemed to me to be about a cow, but because of the power of contextual reference in the Vietnamese language, I wasn’t certain initially. I kept listening and began to hear a powerful undercurrent of something driving the poem.
Thieu read for nearly half an hour. When he finished, he sipped from his glass of tea and turned to ask me what I thought. However weak my Vietnamese interpretation skills, which of course are different from translation skills, I had a strong sense that I was in the presence of something important in the form of Thieu’s poem, but I wanted to be sure, so I asked him if we could spend some time translating the beginning of what was a long, fifty-page work. He readily agreed, and we sat down and did it together. With the first few lines I was deeply engaged, and I knew that I’d never seen anything like this poem before in my long career as a poet, translator, educator, and scholar. That evening I committed myself to translating the poem with the author, and that began a six-year journey through the difficult puzzle that is literary translation. Over the course of those six years, our methods were consistent. We would begin by each offering a more or less literal version of the poem in English. What happened when we compared our work was that some of the translations into English came out very similar, while others sounded like they must have been from other planets because of how different they were from each other on the most fundamental levels. These differences formed the basis of our long years of translation. We would bring our literal versions to the table and find a way to fuse the best of each into a new draft. This was especially difficult over the internet and phone, but we also had the opportunity to work together on the translation in Vietnam for several months and during visits that Thieu made to the United States. This work was especially fruitful. Two years ago we spent three months working together in Hanoi to finish Slaughterhouse, just as the pandemic arrived in Vietnam. Feeling the urgency of those earliest days of the virus’s spread, we met every morning for a long breakfast/translation session, and often for shorter meetings during the afternoon. My room was near Thieu’s office, so I could easily walk there when questions came up that I was unable to answer.
I know that my Vietnamese language skills have improved as a result of these many years of translation work on this project, but what was even more important than that education, was the education I received about Vietnamese culture and the Vietnamese people. I remember clearly the first time I saw the end of this great poem in English in my mind. I had memorized a long passage of the poem in Vietnamese, and I kept repeating it to myself out loud whenever I was alone. One night after drinking too much bia hoi, or fresh draft beer, I was sitting alone in my room, repeating the passage again in Vietnamese that ended the poem. I felt a kind of shiver through my body, blinked a few times, and then saw that beautiful ending in English, so that for the first time in many years, the entire poem came together for me like a well-made box that clicks sharply closed.
But anyone involved in literary translation understands that this is just the beginning, and that although the way may seem clear, you know that it will take dozens of versions to arrive there. This was the case with Slaughterhouse. We worked on several drafts together and separately until we found an English expression of the poem that allowed its sometimes shockingly inventive nature to be most fully revealed. It meant that we had to let go and give ourselves to the strange and deeply insightful nature of this epic poem. We think of our work as a true “co-translation,” because all of the most important decisions over the course of several years of work were made with full consideration by both translators. Translation should never be simply working from one language’s dictionary to another, but from one consciousness to another. This is what Nguyen Quang Thieu’s sweeping assessment of the twentieth-century, called Slaughterhouse, offers the reader in English.
Nguyen Quang Thieu is one of Vietnam’s most widely read writers, and the author of over forty books of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, children's literature, and poetry and fiction in translation. For over thirty years, he has worked closely with Kevin Bowen at the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and its Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts, Boston on a variety of translation and cultural exchange projects, forging a new understanding between the United States and Vietnam. He is currently president of the Vietnam Writers’ Association, a ministerial position in Vietnam, where he has devoted his energies to supporting writers in Vietnam and to spreading Vietnamese literature across the globe.
Bruce Weigl won the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for his most recent poetry collection On the Shores of Welcome Home, published by BOA Editions in the fall of 2019. BOA also published Weigl’s innovative short prose book, Among Elms in Ambush, in 2021. Previous publications include The Abundance of Nothing (TriQuarterly Books, 2012)—one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2013; a memoir, The Circle of Hanh (Grove Press, 2000); and more than twenty-five other works of poetry, essays, and translations from the Vietnamese and the Romanian. He lives in Oberlin, Ohio, and in Hanoi, Vietnam.
