Maurice Collis's She was a Queen, and me--

While growing up in Rangoon, Burma between 1950 and 1957 or 1962, I did not have the honor, nor do I think did my family, or knowing Maurice Collis in person.

We did, as I have related elsewhere, know Saya Luce well.

I first read Maurice Collis's She was a Queen (my father's copy?) and F. Tennyson Jesse's The Lacquer Lady when I was 11 or 12.  Certainly before my father died when I was 13.

So, though I liked both books, I was rather young to appreciate the political aspects, though my father talked a lot of me asking him questions, like Indira Gandhi or her father Nehru, and he answering, but I did not have a clue of what to ask.)

The Lacquer Lady was a library copy from the Methodist High School.

There, with Mrs Rogers, I repeated 2 years of Burmese history in the 8th grade, because my cousin Mongoose and I were "too young" to make the school-leaving Matriculation legal age, and my father and mother, and my aunt and uncle were so upright, they refused to lie on our behalf.

Everyone else's parents lied.

This was because we had had a jump promotion in 5th grade as gifted students.

Anyway, when I think of it now, it must have been in this tiddly boring 8th grade year that I read on my own so much.

When I think of how Z's daughter for instance has been doing college courses since she was in x grade for donkey's years, I think how stupid the Burmese rule-oriented school system was/is.

I know the Harry Tan 7th standard debacle happened when I was in 7th grade, and shortly after my father had to go to Calcutta to print the exam questions, and that was where he died after a car accident.

And since he died in Feb of 1957, I remember the few years after as very traumatic, esp. for me.

And I don't think I had much opportunity to range around reading novels once we lived with Mongoose's parents, and I entered the prep for the 10th grade with perhaps special tuition in math with Miss Hallegwa, I cannot remember very well.

But the second year of 8th grade repeat for me was pretty easy and I did get a lot of attention from Mrs Rogers in history class.  I was her only student.

So maybe that was when I formed an attachment to fiction and historical fiction, but not with the intensity with which I read now.

--

And once I entered the Ecos. Honors or General Honors Program, there was not much time to read "outside stuff" though I read anything I could find and do remember discussing Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, with my ecos. mentor Dr Findlay.

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I did know that Collis had been inspired by GH Luce, as related here in Mya Than Tint's introduction.

https://my.pcloud.com/publink/show?code=XZ8fMXZNhIqB3s6o2BNP0p1xMpqhj91K5pk
My brother would sometimes relate to me anecdotes he learned of from reading magazine articles, such as Collis' account of the wedding of Yadana Nat Mei's mother to Mr Bellamy, "her hair charged with orchids" and his description of nondescript younger sister Amy of Kitty Ba Than (Mrs NW) the dominant sister, so to speak.

And I always remember Collis' description of the nat from Tharabha Gate, "shot through and through with a Mongol arrow."

(I don't know why Mya Than Tint transliterated Mongol as "Mongoke")

I left Burma in 1982 and so enrolled in an MA and PhD program in USA, I did not have much time to read fiction, though I did, buying second hand books 20 to 40 pounds at a time, at yard sales in Princeton.

(Thank you my friends who took me around and hosted me for countless weekends).

--Only in 1998, while working at the radio station I heard Mya Than Tint died, and that's when my brother-in-law found me a copy of his Dah Taung, about his time as a prisoner on the Coco Islands, presented as a semi-autobiographical novel.

That's the time I myself became interested in translating the best of the best of Burmese prison novels into English.

--In about 2003, while I was working at The Burma Fund, NLD Daw San San, sister of Thakin Tha Khin came to DC from Maesod on Burma-Thai border.

It was a cold gloomy day, but Mrs SW wanted to take her to see the cherry blossoms, so I went along.

While having coffee afterwards, I urged Daw San San to apply for asylum in the USA, "because anyone can come across the border and kill you" and in fact this happened to Padho Mahn Sha a few years later.

--She on the other hand only wanted a copy of She was a Queen.

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I cld not give her mine as I had paid $79 for it in 1998, though I only paid $7 for Siamese White (equally good) at Second Story Books.

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The rest, such as Lords of the Sunset, I bought as re-printed (not xeroxed) books in Thailand while traveling.

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What I want to say is the relationship between a reader and a book is closer than that with any other lover.

It is always there, and will resurface, like say, one's love of swimming and the sea, or the taste of salt water, or the salt spray on one's face.

Mya Than Tint has been described as "capable of being a world class writer, if only he had not lived under a repressive regime," and had to make a living translating.

Even then I am told, the regime dislikes Collis's She was a Queen, due to the fictional love affair between the queen and a Chinese diplomat, that Collis put in, for a love interest, no doubt.

MTT says a translator is like someone who adopts a child--gradually, you come to love the adopted as much as your natural child.

Certainly I appreciate U Win Tin's tight rhyming, spoonerism filled sentences and keen observation now I have spent hours translating it.

My sister and I would walk around Bangkok book stores, and she would lament, "They are so far ahead of us now, everything has been translated."

(And she would lament as we drove around, "Pretty soon they will have more teak trees than we do, just you see.")

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All I wish to say is if you have time and you are pretty good at both languages but esp. in English, pl do translate.

Prof Howard Goldblatt said, "Even if I only translated Mo Yan, I could never keep up."

-- and so it goes for me too.

KMKaung
10-25-2015
A Time to Write.