Out of the Shadows of Angkor: Cambodian Poetry, Prose, and Performance through the Ages
At a certain point during the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal reign, survivors corralled at a refugee camp on the Thai–cambodian border realised that the children at the orphanage there needed more than just shelter and food. Not long after the appeal to help lift their mood went out, anyone at Khao-i-dang ‘holding centre’ with a modicum of skill in the arts, music, dance or poetry began stepping forward. ‘What little knowledge people had protected and hidden by necessity to stay alive under Khmer Rouge rule, they now oered up,’ recalls Cambodianamerican novelist Vaddey Ratner in Out of the Shadows of Angkor’s foreword. ‘Some fashioned musical instruments from bamboo and coconut shells and nylon cord. Others pooled together to recollect fragments of song. Watching the buzz of activity around me, I realised it wasn’t just the children who were hungry.’
No less a team eort or testament to the unyielding human spirit, this English anthology of Cambodian poetry, prose and performance through the ages also aims to sate the hungry – namely the thousands of survivors, both at home and in the diaspora, who have long been denied the spiritual nourishment of arts so centrally and viscerally connected to their identity. Texts included in this volume range from thirteenth-century Sanskrit poems to excerpted prison memoirs, retellings of sacred dance dramas and Sinn Sisamouth’s soulful song lyrics, as well as wistful accounts of personal literary journeys. These blend evocations of cultural yearnings and ‘intergenerational hauntings’ with speculations about how this ambitious collection – a followup to In the Shadow of Angkor (2004), an anthology of contemporary writing from Cambodia – might spur reconnections and new journeys. For example, in an essay on Cambodian-american writers, the Bronx-based poet, writer and musician Sokunthary Svay urges educators to consider a comparative literature that parses these texts alongside Southeast Asian or African literature or the diasporic works of other immigrant groups. She also suggests that, wherever possible, these works be ‘read aloud in a variety of venues, the songs be sung, and the plays staged’.
Such reasonable hopes on the part of the readership (English-language readers at large stand to benefit from this drive to make Cambodian literature more accessible) beg a practical question: do the translated verses and lyrics sing? The answer is no, not like mellifluous, metred Khmer does. One of several translators, Trent Walker, asks: ‘How can we hope to capture in English the beauty generated through subtle arrangements of Khmer sounds and musical tones?’ Only one work, a Buddhist poem from the eighteenth or nineteenth century, ‘This Life is Short’, aims for rhythmic and syllabic fidelity – a risky mode of translation that only partially pays o, as any assonance or alliteration is lost (‘This life is short: you are born / with bodily form that can’t last. / You’ll never be free or get past / the shadow cast by distress.’). The transmission and reception of Cambodian texts, Walker adds, have also long been shaped by their physical form, be it the manuscripts of early Middle Khmer literature, or the novellas hand-copied on notebook paper and rented out during the 1980s. Distanced from the musicality and materiality of written Khmer, the reader receives only dulled echoes of what Ratner calls ‘the pralung (spirit, soul, or lifeforce) that animates and sustains us’.
More than just a glorified reading list that throws together ancient and modern legacies with the spikier output of emerging writers and spoken-word poets, this well-produced tome illuminates friendships and collaborations – between authors and translators, chapei dang veng (long-necked lute) masters and rappers, journalists and booksellers – rooted in a love of Cambodian arts. These fresh engagements with a cultural timeline that spans empires and golden ages, as well as unspeakable horrors, bode well for the future of a scene – and people – still processing the multigenerational legacies of trauma. Max Crosbie-jones