Analysis of Four poems of Ngu Yên translated by SLTA
From the selection:
Colors From The Dead’s Eyes
(Màu Sắc Từ Mắt Người Chết)
Color of Assassination
"Death" is always present with "Life,"
but often, forge something
familiar to everyone.
Then turns up in the word "accident."
It appears slowly in the word "sick."
It flashes last in the word "breathless."
"Death" is not a twin with "Life,"
not lovers, not friends,
not acquaintances either.
"Dead" is the murderer.
It finds "Life" for assassinate.
"Death" always kills "Life" at the right time,
before "Living" discovers the truth.
Color of Soul
A truck rushed down
from a high slope
collided with a gray Toyota car
in a town that appeared to be a forest.
A black buffalo collided
with a gray wolf
who flew high, falling
and flipping a few times.
I expected to be in excruciating pain,
weeping miserably.
But I stood up expressionlessly.
The hunter had no gun,
gazed at the buffalo and the wolf
Who killed them?
A soul is a miniature version of God,
It never hurts,
never knows how to cry
in the next life,
which appears to be a vast forest.
Color of Grilled Funeral Homes
Every barbecue smells like death.
The restaurant passionately burns a mass of meat in the fire.
No restaurant has a name: Hell.
The restaurant is a funeral home where they burn animals.
Dead meat buries in the stomach,
liquefying into the blood.
Every barbecue is scented.
Nobody calls it the odor of death.
To evade committing “living,”
caller: “fresh” meat.
Fresh meat is dead meat.
The funeral home serves as a restaurant
where they grilled people.
So who are the dinners?
Devils or deities?
All funeral homes have chimneys,
captured out of the cremated rooms,
the stink of barbecue.
Color of Sad Corpses
Every single corpse looks sad
in a coffin or anywhere.
Within the living world,
one is useless
before he has a chance to prove his success.
All decent people have wrong behavior.
Any accomplishment can lead to disappointment.
There is a place of boredom in any desire.
There’s waste in any youth.
There’s always repentance for old age.
All morality has guilt in it.
In great intelligence, there is blindness.
There is no excellent truth or no little truth.
Only one truth in mirrors produces many realities.
All that one knows or does not remember,
the void will take them all forever.
All that is most loving has a reason to be hated.
Anything truthful has a false covering.
Such are the reasons
why the corpses all looked sad.
Scheme | AXB A CDA EXF CXG GX XH I XXXJKLDX XBIALX XXXCJ X MGXXXNKMDOO XXXP PXX X QX XFXG EG HXXF HP GGND XQ |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 10010 101011 11111111111 1010010 1111011 110110 010110 111001100 101100011 110100110 1110111 11011 1010010 110100 1111010 11111011 011001001 1011 0111 1011 0101010101 00110111010 0110010 1011 11110 010011 101011001001 101000 11111 010111 11010001 111 01101001011 1101 101111 0011 101110110 10111001 10010111 0101000101110010 1101011 010101001111100 11100010 10101 10010110 11101011 10101010 1011 11111 0100111010 11110 111010 101100 11001110 101101001 01110 101110 10010111 0010110 010101 1110 01110111101 1101011010 100100111010 1101110010010 110101 11010111 101001101 0101001110 111100111101 10110100101010 1111111010 011111010 11111010101110 1010101100 11010 1010111 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 2,491 |
Words | 441 |
Sentences | 42 |
Stanzas | 23 |
Stanza Lengths | 3, 1, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 1, 8, 6, 5, 1, 11, 4, 3, 1, 2, 4, 2, 4, 2, 4, 2 |
Lines Amount | 77 |
Letters per line (avg) | 26 |
Words per line (avg) | 5 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 86 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 18 |
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Submitted on March 31, 2021
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 2:12 min read
- 41 Views
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"Four poems of Ngu Yên translated by SLTA" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 30 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/96880/four-poems-of-ngu-y%C3%AAn-translated-by-slta>.
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