Irony in Cambodia

By Thomas Beller
The cambodia daily

Is there a Khmer word for irony? What is the definition of irony in Khmer? I wonder how the use of irony translates in daily life, or if it does. The added component of irony makes translation even more difficult than it already is.

The face of Hun Sen is on the face of my watch. I’ve been wearing it since last spring when I got it as a present from a Cambodian friend. The wristband is the color of gold. Fake diamonds gleam at six o’clock and nine o’clock.

It’s a flashy watch. Hun Sen himself, in glasses, half smile, jacket and tie, looking very corporate, occupies the space between the watch’s center and high noon. Or midnight, depending on how you look at it.

Henry Kamm, writing in his book “Cambodia: Report From a Stricken Land,” evokes Hun Sen as he first saw him at the end of the Khmer Rouge regime and compares him to the man 20 years later: “When I first met him in 1979 he was painfully ill at ease before foreigners and responded hesitatingly to their questions.
He spoke in the sterile party language that his Vietnamese patrons, to whose side he had defected to escape a Khmer Rouge purge in 1977, must have taught him in an ideological course after he changed sides. The first thing that one noticed was that he had a very perceptible glass eye. Nowadays, Hun Sen is at ease with foreigners and tends to self-assured monologues.

“The gawky young country boy in ill-fitting dark trousers and short sleeved white shirt of 1979 has put on flesh and wears well-cut suits and sober ties. A glass eye of more sophisticated design is barely noticeable.”

Needless to say, the new Hun Sen is the Hun Sen on my watch.
To wear this watch is to be asked, on a regular basis, “Who is that on your watch?”

“Hun Sen,” I reply with a straight face, as though everyone in the world knows who Hun Sen is. No one I say this to knows who Hun Sen is. My deadpan response—“Hun Sen”—usually provokes a momentary conflict in the expression of whomever I’m talking to while they search around trying to decide if they are supposed to know who I am talking about. After a second or two they give up and ask, “Who’s he?”

The other day, though, a woman simply nodded in response and said, “Why?”

She knew who Hun Sen was and went straight to the next question.

“It was a gift,” I responded. “From a Cambodian friend. And I love it because, you know, it’s just.”

The woman looked on expectantly. She seemed prepared to hear why I loved the watch and wore it every day.

“The thing about this watch is that the guy who gave it to me, it’s not like he loves Hun Sen. I mean, it was a joke.”
“The gift was a joke?”

“No. The gift was sincere but the fact that Hun Sen’s face is on the watch is kind of a joke. And it’s such a nice gift, and the watch reminds me of the guy who gave it to me, and I love this guy because, for among other reason, he is the only Cambodian I have met who possesses irony. Which is why he gave me the watch.”

“How do you know he was being ironic?”

“Because,” I said. “I just do.”

This was not a particularly good answer, I realize, and the exchange has lingered with me, and makes me feel bashful somehow, or even a little ashamed. I wonder if I have imposed a meaning on the watch that wasn’t there at all.

The concern is one that seems relevant to the act of writing articles in a newspaper, or writing anything that aims to represent a factual reality—to what extent do you impose meaning on the evidence you encounter in your investigation?

To wear a watch with Hun Sen on it is a way of acknowledging the absurdity of Cambodian politics. But politics in Cambodia is not funny, though it is, in a way, a joke.

Is there a Khmer word for irony? What is the definition of irony in Khmer? I wonder how the use of irony translates in daily life, or if it does. The added component of irony makes translation even more difficult than it already is.

The whole issue of translation is central to the experience of any writer functioning in a country where he or she does not speak the native language.

The hurdle of translation certainly featured prominently in my work for The Cambodia Daily. All the pieces I wrote were reported with the aid of a translator. I would ask questions in English, the translator would repeat in Khmer, and then he would translate the response back to English. It seemed likely that a lot was getting lost in translation.

There was, for example, the occasion of an interview with the coach of the national boxing team. I caught up with him at the training facilities at the old Olympic Stadium, where he was supervising the training of his boxers.

He was an ex-boxer himself, and had an interesting face. While his fighters skipped rope and shadow-boxed, I stood with him and his associates and asked him if, during his boxing career, he had ever had his nose broken.

My translator repeated my question in Khmer. The coach said something in Khmer. My translator responded in Khmer. Then one of the coaching assistants, who was standing beside him, said something. Then my translator said something. Then I asked the translator what everyone was saying, but he didn’t say anything.

A whole conversation erupted. It went on for five minutes. I stood there wondering what in the world could possibly be the topic of discussion. Finally my translator turned to me and said, “No.”
This encounter came to mind recently while I was reading “The Gate” by Francois Bizot. Here, the stakes of the translation, or mistranslation, were considerably higher than with the boxing coach. Bizot’s book is a memoir divided, essentially, into two parts. The first recounts his experience of having been taken prisoner by the Khmer Rouge in 1971. His captor was Duch, later to become the torturer in chief at S-21.

Bizot recounts in detail his experience of being Duch’s prisoner, including many conversations that he was able to conduct with the Khmer Rouge.

He managed to convince Duch that he was not working for the CIA. Once convinced of this, Duch himself was prompted to lobby his immediate superiors, Ta Mok and Pol Pot, for Bizot’s release.
He even managed to get the Swiss watch that had been taken from Bizot returned. It was let go of reluctantly by the man who had been wearing it, Ta Mok.

This almost unfathomable intimate portrait of the man who would go on to be one of Cambodia’s most brutal and efficient murderers takes up only the first half of the book.

The second half of the book takes place in 1975, during the period right after the fall of Phnom Penh. Most of the foreign community, and many Cambodians, sought refuge on the grounds of the French Embassy, at whose gate many fates were determined.

This part of the book commences with a vivid scene in which the Khmer Rouge and the French senior spokesman are sitting down to their first meeting.

Bizot writes, “The revolutionary high command had been taken unawares. The problem of our presence hit them like a bolt from the blue.”

A series of demands were made: The Khmer Rouge would protect the embassy grounds, but the grounds themselves and the assets therein were considered spoils of war; only holders of foreign passports were authorized to remain in the embassy, and Khmer who had entered illegally were ordered to leave; foreigners could not leave the enclosure.

In response Jean Dyrac, the French ambassador issues his own demands, which concerned medicine, water and food.

“And just to show that we were not making unwarranted demands,” writes Bizot, “Dyrac was specific: ‘Rice and dried fish will be sufficient!’”

The interpreter translated the consul’s words literally, and we saw the faces of the Khmer Rouge freeze: their mouths set in a forced smile, they sat in silence; they were troubled by something.”

But thinking back to those pieces and the experience of reporting them, with the words filtering back and forth through the invaluable translator, I now feel that even though their subjects were Cambodian citizens making a living, and a life, in Phnom Penh and elsewhere, their real subject was the membrane that separated me from my subjects.

The atmosphere became tense, and only after tempers began to rise on the Khmer Rouge side did Bizot realize a mistake had been made.

“Right away the misunderstanding became apparent: he was translating not ‘dried fish,’ but ‘smoked fish:’ a request as inappropriate as if we had requested smoked salmon from people who had been surviving on bread and water.”

Bizot’s book is fascinating on many levels, including, but not limited to, the historical. For me, the book prompted thoughts about how close one can get to a culture that one is not part of.
Bizot had married a Khmer woman and had a child with her. He lived in the countryside and was working as a Buddhist scholar.

He had the extremely unfortunate fate to bear witness to the savage destruction of the culture, and the people, that he immersed himself into.

I was quite surprised to read a review of “The Gate” by James Fenton in The New York Review of Books in which Fenton, who was a journalist in Phnom Penh in 1975, takes Bizot to task for several inconsistencies in his book.

For example, Bizot describes witnessing, while a prisoner of Duch in 1971, a column of Vietnamese soldiers on bicycles going past. He itemized their supplies, including pornography that the Vietnamese army had supplied them with. Bizot recounts the whole experience of his imprisonment under Duch as though it were happening in real time, yet Fenton points out that he could not have known about the government-supplied pornography until later.

What surprised me about the review was the reluctance to enter into the emotional realm of Bizot’s experience. However much he tries to restrain himself and stay composed enough to tell the tale, Bizot’s prose is fraught with emotion.

It seemed to me that Bizot’s book had crossed over to a place where geopolitics, and the realities of war and genocide, were at once completely front and center and yet not entirely the point.
The point was the immersion in life, as it is, or was, lived in Cambodia. The drama was human, not political, even if politics completely informed the human experience.

It would be silly for me to compare my own experience as a visiting journalist to an unfamiliar country to what Bizot went through. But that one anecdote about the mistranslated dried fish made me reflect on the pieces I had been drawn to writing during stints at The Cambodia Daily in 1994, 1995 and 1996. Those pieces were all little snapshots of city life in Phnom Penh, as superficial as gliding one’s hand over a piece of wood, yet hopefully with just enough texture so as to give a sense of which way the grain ran.

The subjects were the watch fixer, the traffic cop, the sign painter. They were quoted and described, flickered briefly on the page, and were gone.

On one hand this superficiality is an inevitable byproduct of the craft of newspaper journalism, which will always lean more toward providing facts and information and pictures, as opposed to analysis and context.

But thinking back to those pieces and the experience of reporting them, with the words filtering back and forth through the invaluable translator, I now feel that even though their subjects were Cambodian citizens making a living, and a life, in Phnom Penh and elsewhere, their real subject was the membrane that separated me from my subjects.

It was a membrane that goes beyond the direct translation of words. Language is not just a money exchange in which words find their counterparts in value of the other language. It is, as linguists have observed, a road map of time and space that travels across generations.

Which is an extremely roundabout way of saying that my Hun Sen watch will always mean different things to different people.