Bones Will Crow: An Anthology of Burmese Poetry

James Byrne, ko ko thett

• Publisher: Arc Publications
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781906570897
• eBook ISBN:
  9781908376527
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Bones Will Crow is the first anthology of contemporary Burmese poets in any language, and includes the work of Burmese poets in exile, in prison and undercover. Introduced by Zeyar Lynn, with a Preface by Ruth Padel.
The poets featured are Tin Moe (1933-2007), Thitsar Ni (b. 1946), Aung Cheimt (b. 1948), Ma Ei (b. 1948), Maung Chaw Nwe (1949-2002), Maung Pyiyt Min (b. 1953), Khin Aung Aye (b. 1956), Zeyar Lynn (b. 1958), Maung Thein Zaw (b. 1959), Moe Zaw (b. 1964), Moe Way (b. 1969), Ko Ko Thett (b. 1972), Eaindra (b. 1973), Pandora (b. 1974) and Maung Yu Py (b. 1981).
James Byrne's second poetry collection, Blood/Sugar, was published by Arc in 2009. He is the co-editor of Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Bloodaxe, 2009). Ko Ko Thett left Burma following detention for his role in the Rangoon student uprising in 1996. His first collection in English, The Burden of Being Bama, is forthcoming.

အမည္မဲ့ - ၁

(UNTITLED 1)

ျဖစ္ရပံုမ်ား

အိမ္မက္ထဲမွာေတာင္ အဆင္မေျပ

အလကားရတဲ့ ဖိနပ္ကမေတာ္

ေကာင္းကင္က ေခါင္းနဲ႔မလြတ္။

ျဖစ္ရပံုမ်ား

ကိုယ့္လက္ဖက္ရည္ခြက္ အေရာက္မွာမွ

႐ုုတ္တရက္ မလိုင္ကုန္သြားရ။

ျဖစ္ရပံုမ်ား

ထီမေပါက္တဲ့အျပင္

ထီေပါက္စဥ္ကလည္း မွားေသး။

ျဖစ္ရပံုမ်ား

လက္မွတ္ဝယ္ၿပီးသား၊ ရထားက

တစ္စီးလံုး ေပ်ာက္သြားတယ္တဲ့။

ကဲ ဘာလိုေသးလဲ

လက္ကပတ္ထားတဲ့နာရီမွာ

ဓာတ္ခဲကုန္ဖို႔ပဲ လိုေတာ့တယ္။

UNTITLED 1

(အမည္မဲ့ - ၁)

So it happens

Life gets bumpy even in my dreams

The gift shoes won’t fit

The sky occludes my head.

So it happens

Without warning

Cream runs out

When I sit down for tea.

So it happens

Never mind winning the lottery

I buy the wrong ticket.

So it happens

The entire train goes missing

After I’ve paid the fare.

Now… what else

What’s left, the battery of

My watch needs to go flat.

Translated by ko ko thett & James Byrne

လက္နဲ႔လမ္းေလွ်ာက္ျခင္း

(HANDWALKING)

ေရႊခ်ထားတဲ့ ဘုရားဆိုတာ

လူၾကည္ညိဳစရာျဖစ္တယ္။

ျမန္မာျပည္မွာ ေခတ္မီသူတိုင္းသာ

ကာရာအုိေက ဆိုၾကတယ္။

ပို႔စ္ကဒ္လွလွ အေပၚမွာသာ

ထာဝရခင္တယ္ဆိုတာ ရွိတယ္။

ယိမ္းသမမ်ား၊ သိုးအုပ္မ်ား၊

ေရလိုက္ငါးလိုက္ ဝါဒ

အေရးေပၚမီး႐ွဴမီးပန္း

တစ္ရာသီက်န္းမာေရး။

ေျခေထာက္နဲ႔လမ္းေလွ်ာက္သူေတြ အၾကား

လက္နဲ႔လမ္းေလွ်ာက္တာဟာ ဆန္းတယ္။

HANDWALKING

(လက္နဲ႔လမ္းေလွ်ာက္ျခင္း)

A stupa, gilded, may

Invoke piety.

In Myanmar

Only modern folk go in for Karaoke.

‘Yours faithfully’ exists

Only on pretty postcards.

Yane d...

Table of contents

• BONES WILL CROW
• Contents
• Foreword
• Editors’ Preface
• Introduction
• TIN MOE
• from The Years We Didn’t See the Dawn (Burmese)
• from The Years We Didn’t See the Dawn
• Desert Years (Burmese)
• Desert Years
• from A Standard Human Wish (Burmese)
• from A Standard Human Wish
• Meeting with the Buddha (Burmese)
• Meeting with the Buddha
• THITSAR NI
• Redundant Sentences (Burmese)
• Redundant Sentences
• Untitled 1 (Burmese)
• Untitled 1
• Handwalking (Burmese)
• Handwalking
• Obituary (Burmese)
• Obituary
• Untitled 3 (Burmese)
• Untitled 3
• AUNG CHEIMT
• Aung Cheimt Goes to the Cinema (Burmese)
• Aung Cheimt Goes to the Cinema
• Flashback Journal (Burmese)
• Flashback Journal
• After Prufrock’s ‘Love Song’ (Burmese)
• After Prufrock’s ‘Love Song’
• You Will Read (Burmese)
• You Will Read
• MA EI
• A Letter for Lovers and Haters (Burmese)
• A Letter for Lovers and Haters
• A Catastrophic Rune (Burmese)
• A Catastrophic Rune
• My Island (Burmese)
• My Island
• Weather Forecast (Burmese)
• Weather Forecast
• MAUNG CHAW NWE
• Mr. Charley, I Have Picked You (Burmese)
• Mr. Charley, I Have Picked You
• A Sun-Ripened Song (Burmese)
• A Sun-Ripened Song
• Harbour (Burmese)
• Harbour
• Unpopular Chap (Burmese)
• Unpopular Chap
• MAUNG PYIYT MIN
• A Bunch of 52 Keys (Burmese)
• A Bunch of 52 Keys
• Shall I Plunge into a Big Bummer? (Burmese)
• Shall I Plunge into a Big Bummer?
• The Last Element (Burmese)
• The Last Element
• Yearning (Burmese)
• Yearning
• KHIN AUNG AYE
• Achilles’ Heel (Burmese)
• Achilles’ Heel
• 2010 The Curvaceousness of Burmese Poetry, Poetics and an Unknown (Burmese)
• 2010 The Curvaceousness of Burmese Poetry, Poetics and an Unknown
• State of Unhappiness Das Kapital (Burmese)
• State of Unhappiness Das Kapital
• Gun and Cheese (Burmese)
• Gun and Cheese
• ZEYAR LYNN
• My History is Not Mine (Burmese)
• My History is Not Mine
• The Ways of the Beards (Burmese)
• The Ways of the Beards
• Slide Show (Burmese)
• Slide Show
• Sling Bag (Burmese)
• Sling Bag
• MAUNG THEIN ZAW
• The Heat Bearer (Burmese)
• The Heat Bearer
• Mantra (Burmese)
• Mantra
• Deva Right in Front of Dukkha (Burmese)
• Deva Right in Front of Dukkha
• Clue (Burmese)
• Clue
• MOE ZAW
• Rose, 1985 (Burmese)
• Rose, 1985
• Vera (Burmese)
• Vera
• Story (Burmese)
• Story
• Moonless Night (Burmese)
• Moonless Night
• Three Friends (Burmese)
• Three Friends
• MOE WAY
• If You Need to Piss, Go to the Other Room (Burmese)
• If You Need to Piss, Go to the Other Room
• Watch Out Maung Maung (There Is Such a Thing as Retribution) (Burmese)
• Watch Out Maung Maung (There Is Such a Thing as Retribution)
• Misfits Within Limits (Burmese)
• Misfits Within Limits
• Vuvuzela (Burmese)
• Vuvuzela
• So the Library, So Also the Museum (Burmese)
• So the Library, So Also the Museum
• KO KO THETT
• Panning for Alluvial Gold (at the Confluence of Her Dreams) (Burmese)
• Panning for Alluvial Gold (at the Confluence of Her Dreams)
• Timely Applause and Toothy Smiles (Burmese)
• Timely Applause and Toothy Smiles
• The Burden of Being Bama (Burmese)
• The Burden of Being Bama
• from Permanent Installations (Burmese)
• from Permanent Installations
• EAINDRA
• Lullaby for a Night (Burmese)
• Lullaby for a Night
• Lily (Burmese)
• Lily
• Pitch for a Playful Mind (Burmese)
• Pitch for a Playful Mind
• Molly, Whose Tank Has Been Emptied (Burmese)
• Molly, Whose Tank Has Been Emptied
• The Day (Before That Day) (Burmese)
• The Day (Before That Day)
• PANDORA
• The Scene of the City Siege by the Daft (Burmese)
• The Scene of the City Siege by the Daft
• An Evening with a City Girl (Burmese)
• An Evening with a City Girl
• Entertainment (Burmese)
• Entertainment
• The Sniper (Burmese)
• The Sniper
• MAUNG YU PY
• Just Like This, Again This Time (Burmese)
• Just Like This, Again This Time
• Yangon 2010 (Burmese)
• Yangon 2010
• A Ufo Sighting Yesterday at the Edge of Town (Burmese)
• A Ufo Sighting Yesterday at the Edge of Town
• Under the Great Ice Sheet (Burmese)
• Under the Great Ice Sheet
• Glossary of Burmese Terms
• Biographical Notes