Another watershed or two . . . what a great word, it works so many ways . . .

Night has just come on. Under bulging dark clouds I look out the 12th-story window of my newly-purchased condo on Soi Wachiratham Saathit, admiring the impressive Wat Tham Mongkhon beyond the bushy lot across the way, the illuminated chedi of the temple now blurred and lined as if by brushstrokes: dense sheets of rain whip and plunge onto the traffic below and into the lush herbal forest that this rainy season has brought to life in that "vacant" lot. I'm overwhelmed. This is the kind of thing I came here for. Natural intensity. Release. New growth.

Here is another watershed, ‘tis time to resume the blogging, it seems. Two subjects today. For me the second is, again, what I came here for. The first . . . well, we’ll see.

I.    Thai Politics
First, Thai political life in Thailand is getting close to the boiling point again. There’s an election tomorrow, July 3, so by my next post, we’ll have some kind of resolution, be it boiling over or going back to a steady simmering. If you go back to my single series of “political” blogs, you’ll see that last year’s April-May crisis here centered on a demand for dissolution of parliament followed by early elections. Well, the dissolution and election are upon us, not as early as might have happened, but still earlier than required by law.
   
If you do go back and read those blog posts from May 2010 you’ll have an idea of what this is all about. The players and the issues are largely the same. So I won’t rehash those here, except to note that Thaksin (remember him?) has his sister running for Prime Minister. And, wow, is she a lot cuter than he is! Great figure . . . I mean figurehead . . . anyway Aphisit, the current PM and the guy I want to see there, is probably history at this point, but let’s wait till Monday and see.

But just briefly, here’s an excerpt from a chat conversation I had with a friend, one of the most thoughtful and knowledgeable expats I know. Right now he’s in the States, so we chatted on Skype. By “Institution,” we mean “the monarchy.”

P: Conventional wisdom has it that Pheua Thai will win. I guess that's probably right, hate to say it. But I doubt they'll have an absolute majority, so we'll probably be back in the doldrums, as between the yellow airport closures and the red "sea of fire." Pheua Thai won't be able to get Thaksin back in the country, and will they be able to do anything else? Doubt it, not much, anyhow. So there will be unrest on all sides. Maybe another coup? But if there is a coup, THAT is when all hell will break loose. And, of course, there's the king's health. When that story concludes, let's hope it comes gently and not with great convulsions of its own.

F: Perhaps Phua Thai and Thaksin will be able to buy off the Army.  A large infusion of cash to the military leadership may cause them to change sides and might give the Army white-hat status with a large segment of the population.  The Army has to see the writing on the wall with the continued weakening of the Institution.

P: Who knows? I don't think that's too likely, though. The "Institution" appears to me to be already a separate problem, though a complicating one. I think Thaksin simply has too many enemies. He can't buy enough of them off, they have money, too, and position.

Really interesting are the election posters. Yinglak, Thaksin’s sister, would make about as beautiful a prime minister as the world could hope to see . . . outwardly, anyhow.

I really like Chuwit’s series. Chuwit is from the “Rak Prathet Thai,” or “Love Thailand” party. He’s shown making faces as if he has a headache from all the corruption, clearly running on an anti-corruption platform.

Then there’s the “Just Say No” series. I think this got started from people in the South, and it is focused on getting people to mark the “No Vote” box as a protest against the whole system. The captions say “Don’t let the animals loose in Parliament!”


Enough for now on politics; I imagine there will soon be a lot more to talk about. But on to topic 2:

II.    My Life
Going well, folks. Playing music here in Bangkok three nights a week, down from four because it was distracting from some important thing, now will soon be moving to just 2 nights, Thursday and Friday. Doing a lot of singing in a lot of styles because after all these many years of being self-conscious, my voice is finally coming out and into its own, and I actually like it. Trumpet-playing was getting steadily stronger and better for awhile, but in past months practice has suffered, not because of laziness, but because of something really, really cool that has happened. So why don’t I tell you about that?

My friend Susan Kepner (hi, Susan!), who is well-known for her translations of Thai literature, especially Thai women’s lit, got a call last year to translate a rather long Thai novel into English. It was a tempting project, but after thinking about it for many months, even doing some preliminary work on it, she decided that first of all, the contract terms weren’t as good as she’d want, and secondly, that it would take her away from writing plans of her own. So she approached me about doing it, and put me in touch with the author and the publishing company, and we all seemed to hit it off pretty well, and my standards as a completely unknown literary translator allowed me to accept a contract offer that wouldn’t do for someone more established.

So that translation is what’s going to be taking most of my time for the next six months or so.

The novel is Uthis Haememool’s Lap Lae, Kaeng Khoi, a 444-page opus which won the S.E.A. Write Award for Thailand in 2009. The plan is to publish it early next year and put it in competition for yet another award, the Man Asian Literary Prize, which is for novels by Asians either written in or translated into English.

I’m very honored that 1) Susan recommended me, and 2) that Uthis and the Amarin Publishing Co. trust me to do it right.

I’ve been having a ball with this. It feels as though I should have been doing this kind of work all my life. Yeah, yeah, there were plenty of reasons I didn’t, like raising two kids and trying to keep afloat financially for all those years, but damn! It feels as though I should have been doing this kind of work all my life. (repetition intentional, but you’re smart, I shouldn’t have to tell you that)

I spent several months going over the novel word by word, making sure that I understood the book, its meanings, and how it was put together. Finally my two Berkeley degrees in comparative literature are having some utility in my life! ‘Bout time, hey? Like the M.A. was 41 years ago, hey? Anyway, since then I’ve just been digging into the actual work of translation, thought by thought, page by page, and making good progress. It really should be done in the time planned.

To me, maybe not to others, but to me, there is something so quintessentially cool and fun about trying to bring these thoughts and images to life in a completely different form that it gives old proverb a powerful reality: “Learn a new language and get a new soul.” In my next blogs I’ll be exploring the meaning of this as it pertains to what I’ve been doing.


Another thing that I feel is that this is, in a way, my real “Peace Corps” work. I came here when I was 21, and was only a marginally effective English teacher, and felt Thailand had given me much more than I ever gave it. But now . . . I would not be doing this project if I hadn’t done Peace Corps back then, so it really does feel that this is what it was all about. Learning Thai, getting to understand Thai life, getting connected with the place in the first place, set this up. Now I’m able to do something really kind of significant and unique: bring a little something of this elegant and ancient Thai culture, as it grows with the modern world, to the experience of those who would otherwise never, ever know it.

I wish I could give you a little excerpt of what I’ve been doing. There’s a little fable in Chapter 3 I’d love to post. But no can do, this one’s gotta be done by the numbers, copyrights and all that. I guess y’all haveta wait till it’s out, if you’re interested.

Anyhow, Wheee! This is the beginning of more posts, I’ll be talking about the pleasures and perils of translation . . .

And then, there’s always the election, if you get bored!

It’s good to be back bloggin again.