Faínâhind-Arrobauth-Mattai (trích từ "Cospolist Nổi Loạn")

 Một bản dịch tôi vừa mới hoàn thành:

"Faínâhind-Arrobauth-Mattai", một chương trong "Ngoại truyện Gurun" đi kèm với tiểu thuyết "Cospolist Nổi Loạn" sẽ xuất bản trong năm 2025.
(Đây chỉ là bản dịch nháp, còn phải chỉnh sửa thêm)
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“That song from Shwevakenara, it mentions something like ‘girin stone’, right? How does it sound, Ăltâhind?” Faínâhind said, squinting at the warm, soft light emanating from the smoldering ember the colour resembling that of the rising sun.
“It goes like this, ma’am”, Ăltâhind said.
And she began to sing in a ringing metallic voice, with a more pronounced, sharper, silvery edge and a more subdued, softer, velvety one:
As I begin my song full of joie-de-vivre
From the yonder shore he gazes, struck with awe and passion,
His chest the colour of girin stone, so deeply azure.
Knows he me not, and yet all too well he knows
Who of us is the stronger.
Here Ăltâhind stopped, intuitively knowing at which point Faínâhind would like her to stop singing, in the same way as to which dimensions she would build her silence. And, amid the silence that stayed on after Ăltâhind’s last note, as its aftersound was going on vibrating the most fragile walls of human souls, Arrobauth began to speak in his calm, bone-dry voice.
“Your song sounds pretty good, in the Bongora tongue. And yet do you think it’ll shrink a bit if it’s forced into our Siră Kăntânări language at our command? Any Bongora song, I’m afraid, as soon as it’s converted into Siră Kăntânări, will have to reveal its true nature, which is to consist of too much fluid and fat and too few bones and muscles and sinews and blood. D’you think so, you the no-name from that land?”
From a farther, darker corner of the long carpet, Mattai calmly raised his head, not revealing on his face anything inside him, the face which had become a backdrop to the endless, intricate interweaving and transformation of the innumerable shades between brightness and darkness.
“My friend, Arrobauth, is someone with an ample pool of pride”, Faínâhind said. “With a pair of strained ears you can hear, in the heart of nocturnal silence, how the stars murmur among themselves in utmost reverence as they wait for him to decide the moment he’d go to bed. His blood flows much slower than yours, neither sluggishly nor listlessly, but in a dignified and elegant manner. Beware of him, Mattai”.
“Yes, the blood of ours, the people named Bongora, flows at a quicker pace than the Siră Kăntânări one does, and easier to spill out of our bodies”, Mattai said, slowly, deliberately, after a prolonged silence resembling that of “a ripe mango falling to the ground in the dead of night”. “The quicker our blood flows and the more it spills out of our bodies, the more profoundly we learn about the respect for life. You are right, my Highly-Revered Arrobauth. Typically, constantly, the Bongoran body lacks of blood; our blood stays outside our bodies as much as it does inside. We Bongorans, by nature, are much larger than you Siră Kăntânărins. We have this infinite universe which is our larger body; we reach out to the universe more than you do, for we feel the lack of that larger body more poignantly than you do. For you Siră Kăntânărins, you yourselves are large enough for you to contemplate and to feel self-sufficient. We Bongorans leave it to you. That’s not something for us”.
“You Bongorans are said to be a bit larger than your lot, which may be right”, Arrobauth said, sneering. “It does not strike me as strange that you are mentioned among the best story-fabricators on earth. The best thing you can do - your only pride, your sole and pathetic legacy - is to weave, from your imagination as untamed as a herd of wild horses, entirely unreal stories with no aim other than to entertain that throng of pitiably inferior, good-for-nothing types incapable of finding any more dignified way to fill their hollow years and empty selves. You know all too well that those powerful monarchs and rulers and aristocrats are excited by your stories, not by you. A princess falls hypnotised by the nightingale’s song, not by its excrements. What I like about pheasants is their hearts, not the mediocre seeds they consume so they can survive. We Siră Kăntânărins, we are different. Do I have to speak about that?’
A pause followed, and then Faínâhind said,
‘Listen, Mattai. I know all too well your riposte ability, which I admire. Do you think, however, that it’s better for you to sing rather than speak now? ‘One night of hearing your singing is worth more than ten years of conversation with you,’ thus goes one of your Bongorans’ sayings, as far as I remember”.
Taking a brief pause, she observed Mattai's momentary silence, perceiving an undercurrent of suppressed emotion pulsating within that quietude. Turning towards Arrobauth with composure and dignity, she then shifted her gaze to the others, raising her voice:
“Our Mattai knows better than anyone when a song of unrequited love deserves our attention more than the grandest martial epic. His most eloquent words always seem to know when to yield their place in the air and the human heart to the first birdsong at the break of dawn. Am I exaggerating a bit, Mattai?”
After a pause a bit longer than a couple of heartbeats, Mattai calmly said:
“All the best songs and most beautiful words on earth deserve being given form and birth even for a single reason, that of the presence of yours, Faínâhind. I would not hesitate to let all those songs and words flow through me on their return to you the same way all the rivers on earth return to the sea, if my time on earth permits. Thus are the workings of the universe. Within this grander scheme of the universe I am just a mud-covered river bed, the same way I am the realm of air through which the sea gives live force and inspiration to the rivers in the form of rains. The ones who sing those songs and say those words are nameless, invisible shadows without their own lives. There is no reason whatsoever for someone like me to be known and remembered, as High-Respected Arrobauth has said. There is no reason whatsoever for us to yearn for an eternal existence alongside that of the quintessence of soul residing inside us and flowing through us. We are blood vessels; the only reason for our existence contains in not allowing blood to spill over the grass.”
And, after a pause, he began to sing.
Ksbyámbâdŏrj-swénlig ăsshúpduven iryín,
Dolgöspāthnay féllâsargăn êrîvgálay íchten.
(...)
And please throw me a piece of bread -
O hot blood spills over moss and grass
And wild wind runs through ravines
And cold rain waters plateaus,
O-oh!
Just throw me a piece a bread.
During the silence that followed, Faínâhind calmly looked at Arrobauth.
Having clapped his hands three times, two of which slower, more leisured, the third one shorter, sharper, Arrobauth said:
“This song I’ve heard before. Yes, I like it a bit. Oh, I might be wrong. I might as well be speaking about another song, a song deemed different, albeit almost entirely similar to this one. In which ways is it similar? Let me think. Blood. Yes, of course. In the way it mentions blood. Words and notes and pitches that make you feel your own blood spill out of your body the same way dirty water flushes out of the drainage hole. That’s the quintessence of soul you mentioned, isn’t it, Mattai. The so-called quintessence that exists in numberless manifestations and permutations and yet always remains the same and gives itself solely to those eyes and ears capable of discerning and recognising it. You who know a myriad of apparently different songs, you can never convey anything other than that, right, you the noname from that land? The quintessence of soul of which you’re speaking with such hilarious and pathetic solemnity, it’s anything but abundant. And the whole of your talent, the whole of your mental power lies in showing this pitiable handful of quintessences in numerous, countless different forms, creating a deceitful illusion of a myriad-faceted, sophisticated world. You feed on the interest caused by this myriad-facetedness and sophisticatedness in the masses whose mind is no bigger than that of ducks and turkeys, you tell one thing and use all possible means to make it seem novel and, on the other hand, you hide, cover, silence the truth that it has been said before, no matter whether in different words or not. You cringe with terror at the thought that someone, upon hearing the words from your mouth, might feel these are something they’ve heard before, already known, or deeply familiar, even if they can’t quite recall when or how they came to know them”.
“Our Great Lord Arrobauth is renowned for being highly idealistic and demanding”, Faínâhind said. “To listen to a song, watch a play, or contemplate a painting, he uses his brain more than his ears, eyes, guts and heart. He judges and criticises before laughing and crying, instead of laughing and crying. That I admire, sometimes. That I like, sometimes. And now, you, Mattai, you ought to know better than I do what is best to be done at this moment. You who know well how to create another air, another realm that lasts for a short while, why don’t you do that right now? If not the blood that spills over the grass and the wind that I feel with the inner walls of my nose, then what?”
And then Mattai, with a light smile, began to sing.
A young girl prays to god:
Give me please the eyes of a dove
Give me please the eyes of a dove
Give me please the wings of a falcon
Give me please the wings of a falcon
So I can fly over the River Duna
So I can fly over the River Duna
And I can find a love for me
And then God gave her wings of a falcon.
And she found a boy that she loves.
And she found a boy that she loves.
After a prolonged pause, waiting until the last aftersound of the song dissolved in the world the way salt would dissolve in blood, Mattai said:
“So as to spare you any misunderstanding, Lord Arrobauth, I would like to assure that here is a song you have surely heard before, albeit perhaps through too many channels and passages and intermediate forms that now you can no longer recall its original source. This is a song titled ‘Malka Moma’ sung by a woman named Neli from a country called Bulgaria which lies in Terra, the world that, as they say, none of us have ever set foot in and never will and yet exists alongside us in every moment, every breath, like our own shadows cast into the depths of our very selves. Neli’s songs, as well as her own existence, are not unlike the first ray of sunlight, the first breeze, the first cloud of water mist in the world on the first day after it was born; by no way and in no future can we become like her and sing like her. It’s not because of this, however, that we don’t sing her through ourselves, don’t live her by means of our own lives. And when I begin with
When it is brought back, this apple
On a branch the bee hangs himself
And, leaning against this wall,
I weep.
just let him who hears this discern within it the echoes of something they’ve heard before, perhaps in another life or in a dream or in a dream within a dream; what is for someone else the echo or the aftersound or the silence that follows an aftersound is for us the pristine sound; the pristine voice of some part of the universe, yet another combination, occasional and inevitable, within the grand design of the Creator, the design according to which the pristine voice from someone can very well be the echo of something familiar to us, and yet there exists something much simpler than that: each of us is at the same time both the body and the shadow of ourselves and of each other, both the pristine voice and the echo of ourselves and of each other. Our job is nothing more than to give voice and shape to this inseparable interweaving of shadow and body, of pristine voice and echo. We are proud of our existence, our greatness being measured by the dimension of that endless interconnectedness between all things, unliving and living”.
Throughout the long silence that followed, all what could be heard was the crackling of something in the process of transformation within the carefully tended fire, and, alongside it, something else with a soundless voice that did not seek attention, a voice that, effortlessly and naturally, could be heard by the human soul.
Arrobauth said:
“One of my masters at the Börâkhon, Kărâdángy, would definitely accept you as His principle without putting you through any test as He had done with me”. He let out a short, dry laugh. “With that tongue of yours, sharpened and honed to perfection through decades of grueling practice under His guidance, you wouldn’t have needed more than a few words to turn a hero into a coward, a stalwart into a traitor, or a devout son into a despicable prodigal. And the other way round, of course. You are making me feel small and insignificant for I am lack of the capability to discern your Form inside me and my Form inside you. That capability you seem to possess, don’t you. I’m asking myself whether it is necessary to ask myself about that. That feeling of self-magnitude of yours, does it deserve a bit of my attention in my leisured time, you the noname from that land?”
Faínâhind’s hand-clappings, deliberately slow, with long, perfectly equal pauses, seemed to tear apart the dangerously taut, near-snapping silence.
Faínâhind said:
“My Arrobauth always treats the world cruelly, no matter how deeply he loves it—or, perhaps, precisely because he does. Poor Mattai! If you think Arrobauth does not cherish the songs flowing from your lips, or the souls that dwell within those songs, you are gravely mistaken. He knows this universe is vast enough to always open himself to welcome it, embrace it. If his disdain for you and your art ever cuts too deep, consider it as another face of love. Have you never known a man who scorns the woman he loves most? Can it truly be that the nature of love—of the romantic relationship between men and women—does not reach such heights of unpredictability? I do not believe such truths are not woven into your songs.”
After a short silence, Mattai said:
“What I feel in my heart towards Lord Arrobauth is not an expression of love, such a thing I have never said. I love him in the same way I love the beauty and power of a lightning as it spreads its magnificent and deathly branches across the sky. This one thing is etched deeply in the mind of storytellers, or rather, our minds are shaped by it: each act of creation is an act of love. No matter which what elements this love is mixed and hence how dissimilar it seems in comparison with love proper, if we accept it with an open and indiscriminative heart, which is at its core an act of love, then we’ll recognize it.
“Each time we sing a song and someone accepts it into her heart, then one more act of love is realised, accomplished. Each time such an act of love exists, we can feel it in our marrow, and we come to realise at this very moment the simplicity of the secret of existence: it’s the moment where death can be welcome with bliss and joy, in the same way life is. What we have just brought to life is sufficient for us not to hold on to life any more”.
“Yes, the whole of your life equals in cost precisely with the moment you make people shed tears, fall into daydreaming, or burst into laughing,” Arrobauth said, with a smile which he wanted others to perceive as merciful. This having been uttered, he intensely stared into Mattai’s eyes, calm and profound like the bottom of a closed bay. “All right”, after a short pause he said. “I’m going to clarify my point, so that you won’t misunderstand me with your narrow, tiny head.
“You know the story about Oglosméten and the magical or sinister playing of his instrument, don’t you? That, under the spell of his music, the souls of fallen heroes would appear and stand once more beside their living comrades and continue the endless battle against the enemies from the land of Kinka, enemies as powerful as God Himself? Now I have to tell you that I cannot bring myself to believe in such things. A reasonable man who builds his dignity on the basis of reason, I accept only those truths not hidden or hiding themselves from me. I’m telling you this so that you, someone perhaps more profound, though less informed, than I am, would not be faltered or enticed by the dark, deceiving aura of that story; instead you should concentrate on the sole essential point: To raise the dead, force them to stand again, and use them until they collapse once more—is it the best thing people like you are capable of doing? The soul of a woman who lived a thousand years ago, or that of a girl from Terra, the never-get-there world as you said, again it comes to life, throbbing, moving, captivating, driving you to tears. Yes. Very much so. In a blink of an eye. A blink of an eye which resonates with the eternity, as you said. Which is possible, I don’t deny. And yet, once this blink of an eye has ended, what is left are all the other moments which shape your real life, and you live your real life no matter there exists that particular moment or not. Is this not the truth? Ah yes, you can say whatever you can, in the most powerful, elegant, insightful manner of yours. And yet there exists one truth which you never say and which I do, and which nothing coming from you can ever reach or affect. Which is the following: For this world, the world where I reside, the world that exists for me and belongs to me, you and the like of you are nothing more than a bunch of inferiors specializing in entertaining the crowd by way of forcing the dead to reappear like the living and forcing people to accept these as true living. To create truly living things is something too far from of your reach. I consider my friends and peers no one less than those who work to pave each of the stones that make up the many roads linking the Empire and each of the finest buttons I caress with my fingers, who bring me the grapes which I put one after another into my mouth with full deliberation and in all solemnity, and who offer to me each of the arrows which I let go so lovingly from my bow, the arrow that shines and dazzles in the sun and heads toward the softest spot on a bird’s body into which it blissfully, hastily buries itself.
“Of course,” he says, raising one hand as if to forestall any objection even before it begins to form in someone’s mind, “I know, of course, that you—like others before you—will say that those songs of yours, as well as the tears, the laughter, the daydream, the turmoil, the torments caused in whomever happens to hear them, they are all the different faces and manifestations of a forgotten kingdom, a kingdom that has long lost its standing amid a world of trivial concerns and ephemeral pleasures. Oh yes, I know you all too well. I know you far better than what you could ever imagine, right? Ah I know you all too well, no matter how much I differ from you, or precisely because I differ from you that much. Ah, that’s what it all comes to: I despise you, knowing or not that you can also be more wealthy and profound than I am in some sense. Nothing is more natural and logical than that in the world we are in. To despise you and the like of you is one of the elements that make my essence, in the same way to run fast makes the essence of horses and to possess poison the essence of the tiny, lovely snake that you see lying coiled, doleful and sorrowful, in this jar of wine. Yeah, keep on saying, till your last breath if you like, about the universes that you and the like of you seem to be able to create and I don’t, the universes inhabited by those quasi-living or half-living or temporarily-made-alive-again of your making. To create a fake universe, it’s what you are born to do. What is it that I am born to do, you may ask. Let me tell you. The universe I am in, the real universe, I am having it in my hands, above me, under me, around me, inside me. It’s mine, this universe. It’s me, and you, one of the numberless petty things under my feet, you have no way whatsoever to affect me. Thus are the workings of the universe. You twist and turn, you wriggle, you thrash about in your cubbyhole, the most modest among the most modest ones, trying to give beauty and richness to this world in your way, according to how that brain of yours can ever perceive beauty and richness. Yeah, keep on doing that, man; that I allow you. That said, whenever I, Arrobauth, a citizen of the Siră Kăntânări Empire, speak to you about the place to which you and what you create are actually allotted in this world, then you must listen to me and understand precisely what I want you to. There exists a constant, insurmountable distance between you and I. No matter where you are, what you do, or sing, or say, or think, bear in mind that tiny cubbyhole, the only place you are permitted to stay.”
What followed was a short pause where everything that existed in the universe appears to have closed. And then, with a calmness that seemed to be a perfect mixture of a deep feeling of intimacy and a fine touch of sarcasm, Faínâhind said:
“Hey, Mattai. Where are your spirit and your tongue?”
“Tongue and spirit do not always go together, Lady Faínâhind,” Mattai said, in his calmness that never abated. “Who is it among us the one who has the right to assert, as an ultimate truth, that a rock that has existed from primordial times does not possess a spirit of itself? What I say is not as essential as what I think, this perhaps you understand. Is it not the truth that what I think is always infinitely greater, deeper, weightier than what I say? What I carry in my mind and heart is far heavier than what I carry in my stomach, yet only a handful like me truly grasp this. I have an only world in which I live, and yet within my head and my heart I carry hundreds and thousands of other worlds, they reside in me and in them dwell countless beings—people and animals, birds and fish, reptiles and insects, plants and herbs, to which those worlds I carry within myself are boundless, infinite. Thus, my body, mind, and soul are passages between the finite and the infinite. What is finite here is infinite there, and vice versa. Even if I die, the countless worlds within me do not cease to exist. Their passage through me may end, but they remain. They exist. Just look for another passage, and again they will open themselves for us in their entirety, primordial, intact. That is why we sing, we tell stories, handing over the songs and stories living inside us to those ready to receive and continue them and let them flow inside their bodies like blood and return once again to the infinite. Our profession is such that, as long as we are alive, as long as we still have a last drop of life inside us, we will continue to sing and tell about what is greater, better, finer than we are and to keep silent about ourselves. Yes, it’s the ethos of our profession: to have our say forever and to keep silent forever.
“And, on the other hand, there are moments when we must keep silent—because while we tell stories of our heroes and heroines, someone else may be telling stories about us. This storyteller, too, is human, shaped by a life of ups and downs much like our own. And so, it is entirely possible that one day, some misfortune may befall him, preventing him from continuing his stories about us and this would leave us in a state of both existence and nonexistence. That is why we persist in telling stories of our heroes and heroines: by doing so, we allow them to continue existing and keep their worlds from vanishing. And whenever one of us dies while in the midst of telling a story, another among us will take it up and continue it, ensuring it does not end: in this way, we fulfill our duty to those other worlds, keeping them within the realm of existence, and thus, when our time comes, we can depart with the quiet pride of knowing we have not lived in vain”.
He stopped. And then, from the bottom of the silence that was only infinitesimally punctured here and there by the cracklings of the woods being burned in the fire, rose Faínâhind’s voice, thin, vulnerable, trembling, not a bit resembling that of the ordinary Faínâhind, like the voice of a creature that has just returned from the other world, still unable to believe she’s now flesh and bone again and not only a bodyless soul.
“The infinitely remote realm that you said no one from us has ever set foot to, how is it called, Mattai?”
“That I cannot say for sure, o my beautiful Lady Faínâhind. There’s one thing I know, which is this: the place has a number of different names according to the different languages of the different peoples living there, one of them being Terra. It is one of the names most usually uttered from the lips of its inhabitants whenever they want to mention it, with love, nostalgia, pain, rage, or cold reason. Terra, or one of its many variants in several languages. Terre. Tierra. Tèra… Another name, even more often heard, is Earth. That world is as vast as ours, containing as many seas, rivers, mountains, forests, plains, ravines, deserts, and glaciers as ours does. There one can find many different countries exactly like here in our world, where numerous peoples vastly different from each other in sizes, appearances, temperaments, customs, and beliefs, exactly like here, in our world. And these people, no matter how hopelessly dissimilar from us they seem to be, in fact they are like us, very much like us. If such a person from Terra were ever to move to our world under some unknown circumstances, it’s entirely possible that someone from us would fall in love with him and be faithful to this love until her last breath, and vice versa. From this, countless wonderful songs and stories could be born. Alas, never can it happen. Terra is our shadow and we are its shadow. We cannot become our own shadow so as to fall in love with another shadow”.
“If it’s so,” Arrobauth said, trying to suppress a snicker, the hidden meaning of which eludes all efforts to fathom and discern, “what is the point of you going on about Terra? Letting our body be our body and our shadow our shadow, each secured in its allotted space and fate, is that not a better choice? Instead, why not take delight in contemplating this shadow, immersing yourself in it as if it were a dream you refuse to forget, and yet, at the same time, bear in mind that it is a world of shadows—shadows that are nothing more than apparitions, breezes, wisps of smoke, and, live to your last drop of blood, to your final breath, to the fullest of your being, in the real world—the only world that truly exists, the world of bodies, full of dirt and feces, and perhaps, fragrances as well. The world of Faínâhind. Of yours. Of mine. Are you capable of doing that? You do not sound like you are”.
“Those who cannot see, hear farther than those who can”, Mattai said, in a soft voice. “He who cannot stand on his own legs can make a fallen man pull himself and stand up with one word. Yes, it’s possible that we storytellers cannot stand on the face of earth as firmly as the workers who build roads for the Empire or the lumberjacks who fell down giant trees do—our bodies are not cut out for such tasks. And yet, with a pair of ears deep inside us and also countless miles away of us, we can hear someone in Terra tell stories about us, about no one else but us, thus making us more real to people living there, in that world. Whenever we keep a profound enough silence, we can hear our own silence there, in Terra. When, out of joy or wrath, we give forth a wholehearted scream, we can hear our own scream over there, Terra, not an echo but rather an alter ego of that scream. It’s then, and only then, we can fathom the truth that we live each of our moments here in order for us to live each of our moments there. Our body cannot get there, yet our spirit can. We tell stories about Terra in order to remind each of us of this truth, in the same way people from Terra tell stories about us. They and we exist alongside each other, live alongside each other through stories. The bodies and lives of ours, storytellers, are nothing more than the ends of the invisible threads connecting both sides. We cannot attach ourselves too tight to the visible lest we risk loosening the bonds between us and the invisible”.
Mattai stopped, and again the only sound that occupied the space and the human ears and hearts was the woods crackling in the fire. Several pairs of eyes were turned towards Arrobauth, who was sitting there engrossed in meditation. Faínâhind looked at him with infinite tenderness. If he ever looked back at her, he would realize that she had never looked at anyone with such tenderness, one that was boundless, infinite. He did not look at her, however. He seemed to see, through the warm flesh and blood of some living creature he loved, the blurred, elusive image of some remote dream returning to him, ephemeral, haunting, like a solitary chilling breeze in the burning heat of the driest summer. He seemed absorbed in some unusual sadness, “like the faint aura of a black star”. He who took a glance at Mattai at this moment would not fail to discern the unmeasurable softness with which he was looking at Arrobauth. It was as if Mattai was looking at his beloved blood brother who was going to kill him—he knew his brother was doing it without knowing what it was that he was doing. And the silence emanating from these two men—Arrobauth, lost in contemplation of something only he could see, and Mattai, contemplating something within Arrobauth that only he could perceive—was a silence that everyone knew they should not break, even though they could not fathom its essence.


@Trần Tiễn Cao Đăng