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Review by Craig Perez
Padcha Tuntha-obas’s trespasses belongs to “much more / than what’s to be / in one place”. The poems trespass “normative” poetic borders to claim an interstitial territory of their own. Within this “debordered” space, the interplay of Thai and English opens our imaginations to the experience of being in-between languages, cultures, and forms.
Throughout the book, Tuntha-obas convincingly weaves together the philosophical and lyrical. The poems in the first section, titled “sophos symposium”, express these tones in a single, unraveling sentence:
#0.5
Our speech shall sit
among exact solitude
should you call for more
reference; in time, it is
written to freeze, to
inscribe the gift of
pensiveness on autumn’s
rose and to watch some
eternity among that which
is confined to disappear;
in space, it is to claim a
territory for itself, giving
whimsicality a foreign
birth while demanding
surreal obedience as the
key to unlock the world of
desolation, yearning to be
debordered.
In an end-note, Tuntha-obas describes how she incorporated lines from various philosophical texts, such as Plato’s Symposium and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I appreciate her willingness to reveal methodology because it allows us to more fully experience the source and strangeness of her compositions.
In “a poem composed to call one’s self”, each page consists of four parts: a dispersed poem in Thai (in the “Dok-Soy” form, which contains 60 syllables and a specific rhyming pattern), a variable number of lines in English written above and below the Thai, and a thin, gray band across the bottom of the page, which houses sentences that thread across pages. In the English section, the meditative, lyric tone continues:
differences live beautifully in every
sound; knowledge breathes endlessly
in every language. she speaks three
worlds. she hears three worlds
speaking grace. she listens to one song
so amorphous inside a world she
gathers; nothing she could sustain
would be missed from it.
she hopes.
Tuntha-obas gathers various texts and contexts into one song, while sustaining the differences of each language. The poems teach us that “words are gifts; no one owned them singularly […] and there are all these things wanting to enter and all these beautiful things find their own ways of being uttered”. The title “trespasses” suggests the many different elements that enter the poem, which are then gathered and uttered through the poet.
The section titled “trespasses” incorporates a new form: multiple-choice questions. The poems explore language acquisition, language testing, and grammatical functions. Each poem occupies two pages, with 3 stanzas on the left page, and one grammatically incorrect stanza above the multiple-choice questions on the right page:
these. my. language. these.
of English. I. something.
must be. significant.
perhaps. scrutinizing. this.
through secondary steps.
deviating. those. prides
those commands. incon-
gruity interlaces. you. me.
we might meet.
[…]
9. Someone was silent, and we wonder whose voice it had been.
A.
indefinite / relative / relative
B. indefinite / personal / personal
C.
definite / personal / personal
D. indefinite / personal / personal
Tuntha-obas situates us in the struggle of language acquisition, “a peculiar space. English, we speak. English isn’t ours, but is”. Belonging marginally to English as it trespasses across the globe forces many of us to learn what Tuntha-obas calls “the wheel in-between”, a mechanism that turns between the turning wheels of native language understanding and second language acquisition. Throughout this work, Tuntha-obas reveals the mechanics and interlacing incongruities of “the wheel in-between”.
In “translation in six steps: thai to english”, Tuntha-obas presents a single story in Thai translated six different ways with footnote-commentary. The story appears phonetically in Thai and is then translated in parentheticals:
Choojai kaow kor Seetaow, baow baow.
Seetaow choo kor, porjai.
Manii hua-ror.
Toe mahar Maanii.
Maanii kaow hua Toe.
Toe choo khor, deejai.
Choojai hua-ror.
Maanii porjai.
(Choojai) (scratch) (neck) (Seetaow), (gently) (gently).
(Manii) (laugh).
(Seetaow) (raise) (neck), (satisfied).
(Toe) (approach) (Manii).
(Manii) (scratch) (head) (Toe).
(Toe) (raise) (neck), (happy).
(Choojai) (laugh).
(Manii) (satisfied).
As we progress through the other translations, Tuntha-obas subtly varies the translations to show the possibility and prosody of translation. To capture this transformation, she writes: “(Be) (translator) (one) (transforms) (body)”.
Her work accentuates how “differences live beautifully in every / sound [and] knowledge breathes endlessly in / every language”. While Tuntha-obas erases formal borders, she allows different contents to filter into her poetry. This “debordered” poetry places us within the translated world and the movements of the “wheel in-between”. In the end, trespasses encourages us “to be alarmed by our own created boundary”.
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