กลอนสามบรรทัด
ชนบทห่างไกลแห่งหนึ่ง
การฆาตกรรมแมวตัวเอง
เป็นเรื่องสุดแสนวิเศษ
Three line poem
In one remote area,
murdering your own cat
is the most fantastic thing.
Three-line poem
In one remote area,
Murdering one’s own cat
Is the most magical thing.
Mui told us that Uten Mahamid writes a lot of these three line poems, which are popular amongst young Thai writers and are a kind of Thai haiku, but with no real strictures beyond the number of lines. We were most intrigued by the ones which seemed to distill a whole story in such a small form. This one evokes a distant rural community so dull that the only pleasure is the destruction of your own pleasure. In the literal translation it was the most ‘magical’ thing. We thought ‘fantastic’ heightened the deadpan humour, whilst still maintaining a sense of the fantastical – something outside of normal reality.
Clare Pollard