Duy Tân, variations...

Variations on a broken lyre

Variations sur une lyre brisée

Emperor Duy Tân translated by Tôn Thất Tuệ

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Shakespeare - The Tragedy of Hamlet

Oh! What a tyranny exerts the gurgling of the fountain. In the night, that sound invades my head, collides with my eardrums, scrubs my nerves like a horsetail branch ... I am sad. My thoughts are kept in turmoil. The humble luminous circle of my oil lamp strives to suggest me the idea of calmness by its staying motionless.

In vain, I wish to induce myself in the mystery roman Koennigsmart; the said prose by Pierre Benoit disgusted me as much as the Parnassian verses by Leconte de Lisle, the verses I have wanted to inebriate myself with, more than once.

The creative duchess of the spot is no more there; she - who embellished the sentences and adorned the words by the charm the world is looking for – she controlled the back and forth. A couple of minutes ago, she followed docilely the pages of my book… But all a sudden, she left, she’s gone….

Somewhere, a dog howls, a yappy one, mangy, meager: token of a whole starving life. He is often seen sleeping on a hip of trash or watching from the distrustful eyes the movements of the passers-by. His protruding ribs should have received more than one kick. His scar crisscrossed head narrates eloquently the history of the stone throwing on him. He howls, that dog. Why?

To whom does he complain about the injustice imposed by the fate? What’s the sort of faith that urges him to moan, which wears out his body?

Why does he howl?

Ah! We are real far from knowing.

Always inside of each of us exists another one who, worried, conducts inquiries.

This may be the march toward the perfection because we all are condemned to be perfectible.

The howl ceases.

My mind was coming back. It flutters around the chamber. I am always sad.

Bizarre!

The mystery of a pupil dilated to see better then entrenched behind the prongs of the eyelashes; a smile with an undetectable meaning, or a cry of a beast full of hope, or suffering or regret…that’s more than enough to render you sad, a sadness people search in vain the motive of.

Anyhow who knows?

In the dark sub conscience, the well frequented asylum of my entire self, is there an adventure the reminiscence of which dyes my mind with a somber tinge?

I am recalling….

Yes, now I do know why my heart beats in such lugubrious a way in my chest.

He, the heart, remembers the evil rendered to him by the bars of his cage, which stopped him from taking off to the light.

Yes, voilà…

I was sitting at the foot of a mossy old tree with its branches hosting the morning dew and shivering in the early breeze. The whole campaign, rejuvenated by the nocturnal somnolence, stretched out between the mountains like a for-festival dress. In this instant, I lived in a great delight, contemplating the joyful waking up of the plants and beasts.

In the arms of her mother, she passed…

While at the turn of the rural path the black reflection of her hairs vanished, I still followed in the emptiness the brief apparition of her face. Motionless and breathless, I was chasing a chimera. A light bird chirping above my head had me raise my eyes.

A man passed and smashed the rapture.

I was leaving the solitude of plants to come back to the solitude of men.

Days are succumbing in the chasm of the past…

One morning, before the sun got felt coming, I breathed the fresh air, when dreaming – I don’t know of what – of something faraway but which, by its presence, could mellow the blueish shadow of the prime daybreak. Up there, in the firmament, the stars quivered, sensing close the moment when they should cease to twinkle.

A rooster, to all, launched the echoes of a rooftop call, an alleluia of love, of life, of clarity. Other fellows, stirred by this fanfare, responded.

Tranquility reigned.

Girded at their heads with cloudy scarfs, the mountains looked like the august Knights of the Round Table, sitting together in wonderful night meetings about armament or majestic Indian Chiefs holding war council discussions, engulfed in tobacco smoke issued from their calumets. Around the Chiefs was mounted the guard with sharp peak weapons.

Everybody was sleeping. During the somnolence, humanity returns to the time when the stupid passions didn’t destroy yet the harmony of the souls and of the nature.

All was submerged in the immense quietness.

Slowly, the clouds were brightened and dispersed. The air took a better transparence, and the sky became less somber.

Suddenly, in the left, the peak of one mountain was tinged with a golden rose; then successively, all the other tops, which got in line with it, lighted up with the same shimmery glow.

Against its own will, the spirit made itself enlarged to catch up with the spectacle of this dawn, a veritable chromatic symphony all the phases of which inspired the same feeling of grandeur and appeasement.

By turn, the imposing range – where my view rested – became violet, then rose, red, orange, golden, and at the end, magnificent with a white reflection in a non-comparable purity.

All waked up.

The woods – which in a short past instant whispered in hardship – spread their branches to the solar caress.

I was looking …

By dint of having attended the spawning of the day, I found myself liberated from earthly miseries.

Joyful, my eyes admired the brilliant silhouettes of the flowers on the uniform green of the landscape. Exactly bordering the alley, two white-thorn hedges extended before me their white garments.

I was looking…

A lesser shuddering… as if to the unexpected approach of a danger or of something wished with too much of anguish.

In the middle of the alley, she exposed her wake.

Anyhow, God knows it, during the hours that flowed since when her apparition among the trees struck me hard, my mind has not been haunted by the idea of seeing her again.

For certain human spirits, the routine of skepticism and the habit of sarcasm about anything, including self, make it hard to master the emotions. In the moral defense, to be skeptic is to bear a cuirass; to use sarcasms is to manipulate a shield. But people cannot all the time carry battle gear. Is coming a moment when people believe they are living in security, when they get rid of the armor, under which they stoically get choked with a smile, when they are sensitive enough to feel a lightest sting or a minor caress.

Beside these, there are minutes when the grandiose beauty of the sky forces us to forget the earth; and there are other ones when a twangy accordion repeats over and over again a well learnt melody but it strips down the atrocious guard mounted around the soul.

On the said morning, I was disarmed. Flowers in garlands which opened timidly under my eyes helped get surging up to my lips the desire of tasting the marvelous honey and what enclosed in these flowers, new due to the nocturnal respite.

“Her” view achieved the work of the dawn.

In middle of this verdure celebrating the new day, I looked for the affinity that makes man dreaming in front of these silent and sudden things; voilà: to the enigma of things is added the enigma of men.

Why, facing this profile hardly distinguishable, did I feel the yearning to stay at this window, to stay there for centuries feeding the consummation of the time? Why did I wish that all be frozen, solidified – regardless of the absolute mobility of the universe – in order that down there, the small white silhouette be not erased?

Like the feverish realize well through their muscular dolor that the fever is imminent, I knew what would result for me from this morning of the sojourn of mine in "the large Spain to build cloudy castles".

Among the pin trees

Glides an idol vague

Down the hill foot whine

The rabbits: all’s gone.

(Rostand)

What for to resist, now that I have been shot down, wounded.

Worth better is to let the evil follow its due course,

Let the evil – which I know is not fatal – let the evil laugh at me.

Thus, and such, ratiocinates my spirit, wishing to heal me up, but in the way of a surgeon who breaks someone's bone on the pretext of getting the guy back on his feet.

The end