One Night in Tay-Ninh, Việt Nam, 1952
Một dêm nhà bị bắn One night the house is shot into
và có lựu đạn thảy vào. and a grenade is thrown into.
LAWRENCE-MINH BUI DAVIS’s poetry and fiction have appeared in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Literary Review, New York Quarterly, AGNI online, Fiction International, The Louisville Review, and Pedestal Magazine. A founding editor of The Asian American Literary Review, he is at work on his first novel.
Một dêm nhà bị bắn One night the house is shot into
và có lựu đạn thảy vào. and a grenade is thrown into.
The translation is rough.
She doesn’t conceive of herself
in the first person or the third.
She never thinks “I did this”
or “she felt that.”
She simply
remembers
“in the fall, moved away,”
“ran to the store that morning,”
“breathed,”
“heard.”
She is very young at the time of the attack,
only six.
She has no idea
why someone would shoot or
throw a grenade into the house
or why the family’s chickens
would run away only
to reappear
asleep
in the branches of lychee trees
in the woods behind the house.
Her parents are unsurprised.
Farmers have always trained their chickens
to run skyward up tree trunks.
When soldiers come calling,
as they have for a thousand years,
something
always survives.
She doesn’t conceive of herself
in the first person or the third.
She never thinks “I did this”
or “she felt that.”
She simply
remembers
“in the fall, moved away,”
“ran to the store that morning,”
“breathed,”
“heard.”
She is very young at the time of the attack,
only six.
She has no idea
why someone would shoot or
throw a grenade into the house
or why the family’s chickens
would run away only
to reappear
asleep
in the branches of lychee trees
in the woods behind the house.
Her parents are unsurprised.
Farmers have always trained their chickens
to run skyward up tree trunks.
When soldiers come calling,
as they have for a thousand years,
something
always survives.
LAWRENCE-MINH BUI DAVIS’s poetry and fiction have appeared in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Literary Review, New York Quarterly, AGNI online, Fiction International, The Louisville Review, and Pedestal Magazine. A founding editor of The Asian American Literary Review, he is at work on his first novel.
