TIN VĂN

 

Nguyễn Quốc Trụ

 

Viết Mỗi Ngày

 

 VIẾT MỖI NGÀY / MAY 05, 2018

 

 

Thời Không Mặt

 

The human face disappeared and also its divine image. In the classical world a slave was called aprosopos, 'faceless'; litteraly, one who cannot to be seen. The Bolsheviks gloried in facelessness.

[Mặt người biến mất và hình ảnh thánh thiện của nó cũng mất theo. Cổ xưa, kẻ nô lệ bị gọi là aprosopos, 'không mặt'; kẻ không thể bị nhìn thấy. Người CS hãnh diện trong "không mặt".]

Nói cho cùng, đó là thời "không mặt". Như một hình ảnh khủng khiếp của Anna Akhmatova, về Cách Mạng:

As though, in night's terrible mirror
Man, raving, denied his image
And tried to disappear

[Như thể, trong tấm gương kinh hoàng của đêm đen
Con người, rồ dại, chối bỏ hình ảnh của mình
Và ráng sức biến mất]

D.M. Thomas: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Một thế kỷ ở trong ta.

 

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In Petersburg we'll gather again,

Around the grave where we buried the sun.

MANDELSTAM


Petersburg, 1913. Lyrical interlude: last recollection

in Tsarskoye Selo. A wind, reminiscent or prophetic,

mutters:


Bonfires cooked the geese of Christmas,

Carriages toppled from bridges,

The whole funereal city swam

On a blind assignation

Down the Neva or against it —

Only away, away from its graves.

All its arches were throbbing black molars,

The Summer Garden's vane was crowing

Thinly, a bright moon turned a colder

Silver over the silver age.

Since, along all roads and

Towards all thresholds, slowly

A shadow advanced, the wind

Was ripping posters off the

Walls, smoke whirled in cossack

Dances on the roofs,

Lilac breathed a graveyard smell, and

The city, demented and dostoyevsky,

Wrapped itself in its fog.

Peter, old genius, old assassin,

Stared again out of blankness,

Beat an execution drum ...

And always, something not thunder

Under the profligate frost, a rumble

Of war before it began.

But then it was heard so faintly

It scarcely touched the ear, as flakes to

The Neva's drifts it drowned.

As though, in night's terrible mirror

Man, raving, denied his image

And tried to disappear, —

While along the embankment of history,

Not the calendar — the existing

Twentieth century drew near.


And now to go home, swiftly,

Through the Cameron gallery,

To the icy mysterious park,

Where the waterfalls are silent,

Where I must make all nine glad

As once I was dear to you.

Beyond the park, beyond the island,

Can it be that our eyes won't

Meet with their dear former gaze?

Won't you really ever whisper
 

To me again that word which kills death

And is my life's one clue?
 

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Part Three 11.687-700. Akhmatova's last double in the poem is mysterious. It is everyone who has perished in the labour-camps. But it is also her son, almost certainly: she does not know in what year he will suffer the most normal fate in those circumstances, death. She may also have in mind, again, her great friend and peer, Mandelstam. Exactly when Mandelstam perished is uncertain to this day, though his widow believed it to be 27 December 1938. And Akhmatova's closeness and loyalty to him was remarkable; his death could not weaken the bond. 'We shouldn't be viewed as twins,' she used to say, 'but neither can we be separated: we go together.' For eighteen years, she and Nadezhda Mandelstam alone kept his poetry alive. 1. 693, 'the Noseless Slut': an obscure reference, perhaps death in the Stalinist era, faceless and indiscriminate. I. 708, 'Hermitage halls': the Hermitage Museum of Art.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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