Movie house or makeshift booth, you are the temple we urchins worship
going to the afternoon shows with loose change
still reeking of scallions that our mothers thrust into our palms
The ticket collector would admonish
Don’t holler and cuss if the film skips
But ten times out of ten the film
would skip
at the climactic moment
Not the close-up of a lover’s kiss
here they don’t show love
only hardcore adventure themes
Tarzan
Western cowboys
Roman gladiators
At times the Little Tramp
Tarzan airborne while arrows are flying, skip
A cowboy draws a gun, flips its trigger guard round his index finger, skip
A gladiator trapped in a net as a hungry lion pounces, skip
A dozen pair of eyes swivel in the dark
glaring toward the square black window
Hey, hey! Not fair! We want our money back!
But no one leaves
The projector’s whirring noise resumes
Turbid column of smoky light
The cowboy’s gun is back in his holster
Tarzan reaches the forest edge
The gladiator calmly shuffles his sandaled feet
while his enemies’ corpses scatter about the scene
Good triumphs over evil
FIN
The lights are on, the urchins file out of the theater
trying to fill in the gaps where the film has skipped
The first attempt at creation, fill in the blanks
Peanuts in pockets,
mouths forming expressions,
eyes blinking, the kids take turns connecting the plot
They will go home to eat dinner, by oil lamp, gas mantle, and if
from better households, neon light
They will gather on someone’s porch, resuming their film chat
not minding their younger siblings’ cries, or their elders’ mosquito slapping
(There were no artillery sounds during the prewar years)
xxx
Theater at Cồn Market, you were the Đà Nẵng winter
along with a ship’s sirens late at night
taking us on the farthest voyages
until the time of our parting
until our last film
in which there was no gladiator, no hero, no border saloon, no fighting arena,
no mountain, no jungle, no sidewalk, no bowler hat, no cane
A most unusual film
with military costumes full of glitter, high boots, swastikas, open jeeps
German shepherds
A black-and-white film, boring
and sleep-inducing
A column of radon
A room
jam-packed with women
shaved and denuded
A room sealed tight
where upturned faces waited
under large showerheads situated
only an arm’s reach away
No water
No water
Only the sound of gas
Terror
The only time
the film did not skip
the urchins went home sullen, mute
Cold season, cold day, cold memory.
Translator’s Note
“Theater at Cồn Market” reminds me of the film Cinema Paradiso (1988) by Giuseppe Tornatore. In Cinema Paradiso, moviegoers from a small Sicilian village are subject to cutaway shots whenever they are about to witness kissing or erotic scenes in romantic films. The village priest has pressured the theater’s projectionist to cut all “morally unsuitable” scenes from the films he shows. In Thường Quán’s poem, the parts cut from films at the theater at Cồn Market are not erotic scenes but direct depictions of bodily harm.
The fabled world of Đà Nẵng urchins—at once resembling Vittorio de Sica’s indolent neorealist universe and Francois Truffaut’s restless New Wave vision—is pregnant with adolescent desire: the intense need to fill in the blank, to pierce through life’s mysteries. These youths have yet to experience death “because there are no artillery sounds during the prewar years.” But unlike Tornatore, who gave his mass audience a facile ending, Thường Quán shows us that art does not necessarily help men triumph over evil. Art can be just as indifferent and forgetting as evil; think of the death of Icarus in Brueghel’s painting, as depicted by W. H. Auden in “Musée des Beaux Arts.” Only the starkness of experience (“cold season, cold day, cold memory”) can withstand the ruthless march of history.
Vietnamese only has one tense—the present tense—and thus temporal shifts are understood from context. The use of appropriate verb tense(s) then becomes an interpretive issue in English translations from the Vietnamese. For instance, the past tense used in the last sections of the poem confirms that evil has happened.
“Chợ Cồn” can become “Con Market” in English—a serendipitous transformation. A temple of illusion, the theater momentarily insulates the urchins from chaos, until the day when they are confronted with the horror of evil.
Copyright © by Thường Quán. Translation copyright © 2025 by Thuy Dinh. All rights reserved.
