A Vietnamese Poetry in English Translation Explicated - The Road

The RoadBy Phan Thi Thanh Nhan
Translated by Tho Phan Thi Thanh Nhan
Explicated by Ramesh Chandra Mukhopadhyay

If you go with your darling just remember a small thing

The road we used to walk on

Please dont go there with another one, not me

The trees are growing faster now

The branches are longer for their leaves to have soft touch

Both of us who knows why

Turn far far away on the separated roads 

If you go for a new darling

Please avoid our first happy road

Emotions such as love and affection are inevitable with human heart. The poem entitled ‘The Road’ is an instance of the same. It is a simple poem depicting wounded love. The poem is a kind of dramatic monologue uttered in the parole of a woman. Since it is a monologue the speaker who is a woman is thinking aloud. The addressee who is a man might be present before her. And again he might not be there. The speaker addresses a man with whom she was engaged earlier. Right now they are separated and far away from each other. The speaker believes that the man, her erstwhile lover, has now taken fancy on another woman. The speaker tells her erstwhile lover that love if he  must another girl but for goodness’s sake he must not go with his new love along the path trodden by the speaker and himself:

The road we used to walk on
Please don’t go there with another one

It raises a problem with us who overhear the speaker thinking aloud. Why should not the man walk along the same road which was pursued by him during his first love? Does the speaker mean that the man must not betray his new love the way he had betrayed his first love, that is, the speaker. But the second stanza of the poem says nope to such doubts. The lady says that neither she and nor her erstwhile lover knows why they were separated from each other:

Both of us, who knows why, 
Turn far away on the separated roads.

This is a singularly unique kind of parole different from the parole of the lovers in literature. While the lovers blame one another for separation between them, if any, here is a deserted lover who does not blame her counterpart for the separation of hers from her counterpart. Thus she debunks causality or rather her vocabulary does not have the notion of cause and effect. Everything is random in the multiverse. The behavior of an electron is random at bottom. Or else, no one cause can explain an event. Here we must invoke Pratitya samutpattivada to explain any event whatever. Since the speaker does not blame her counterpart for getting separated from her the poem speaks of love for everybody or metta of Buddhist lore. She however forbids her erstwhile lover from taking his new love along the road which the speaker and he had trodden earlier. Because

The trees are going faster now
The branches are longer for their leaves to have soft touch

The above lines show that the path earlier trodden by the speaker and her counterpart was a path through a sylvan environment laden with trees. The speaker tells her counterpart that those trees have grown taller than ever. The branches have been longer in the mean time. Their soft leaves are time and again. And the erstwhile lover of the speaker must not destroy that growing natural environment bordering the road taken earlier by trodding the same path with his new lady love. This is a unique imagery. On one level it speaks of ruralisation as opposed to urbanization. Judged on the whetstone of eco-criticism the above two lines are superb because they tell us that Nature must not be polluted and contaminated. Rather we should let Nature grow in her elements. The trees should grow tall the branches should be long their leaves should be soft. The tree is a value here. We can feel the touch of the leaves. Or another plane however true love should go back to Nature to find its consummation. The English poet Wordsworth tells us that when he was amidst Nature with his wife Mary Hutchinson he could put a garland around her neck. Because a man and woman can be in their elements only  amidst Nature.  The poem is singularly unique because it focuses on the  road and does not give that much importance to the travellers along the road. The conflict  between the lovers is not taken into account. But the importance of the road of love has been brought to the foreground. On another level one wonders where the road is. The road exists very much in the mind of the speaker. The trees and the branches have grown only after the lovers are separated from each other. Thus love seems to have its efflorescence only when the lovers are separated from each other. It is only through separation from the loved ones that lovers can feel the love for the loved one in its full manifestation. This is a paradox. But paradoxes are the stuff with which the finest poems are forged. The branches, the speaker says, are longer for their leaves to have soft touch. In other words the experience of the  life's journey with a loved one  passing into memory becomes taller with longer branches with leaves longing for soft touches. The speaker says that the memories of her journey with her counterpart should be remembered with kindness and compassion. One wonders whether this poem itself  is a leaf from the tree of love that has grown taller and that has stretched its branches  in the mind of the speaker in course of the time since her separation from her sweetheart. Any experience that sinks into the mind grows like the plant and could be transformed into poetry. And of course such leaves, such branches or such love poems that spring from emotions recollected should be perused by the readers with love and tenderness.