Honoring U Win Tin who passed away Monday 6 AM BST.

Honoring U Win Tin--

Very sad.
I felt this time U Win Tin would not make it, as he has been in a coma? for approximately 3? weeks.
Also when Daw Suu went to see him, immediately after she arrived home from overseas, she was myet hnar ma thar buu--looked sad, and I knew it was not a good sign.


I never knew him nor saw him in person, but I feel I know him as I followed him on line, whatever he said, in interviews and so on.
And I have worked on translating his memoir.
As I have written before, his language in Burmese when he writes is a language that only he could write, poetic and blunt, truthful, short and condensed and full or rhymes and spoonerisms.
I regret that health wise I have had a bad year too, and thus could not give him the satisfaction of showing him more than a few completed translated chapters.
However, I expect I will be able to resume work on What's That?  A Human Hell and see it all the way through, as a posthumous Tribute.
After all, he told me only I could do it.

The life or lives of those who stand up for the truth is always fraught with trouble.

I wish both he and Daw Suu and others had been able to have a more calm and restful life.

But that was not to be.

What I was most impressed by when I read What's That? is that in spite of 19 years of incarceration, U Win Tin was able to create for himself, a respected, generous life within and without prison walls.

He described many people who "lost it" including one political prisoner who laughed his way to death, having lost his mind.

With U Win Tin, he was like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in that he must have been writing in his head all those 19 years.

So when he was released, he just had to write it down in 2 weeks or so.

Show me anyone else who can do that.

Also, to the last, he wore his blue prison shirt and he spoke what he thought was the right thing.

And also, a mutual friend sent me the famous essay Ganan or "Crab" in which U Win Tin pointed out the vulnerability of the armored military government.

"Crab", quite a short, metaphorical and poetic essay, may have been the reason he was so hated by the regime and kept behind bars so long.

I don't know what else to say.

A human being like that comes onto the world stage only once in a while, like Haley's Comet.

RIP, but if he could, I am sure he would give an interview.

So the rest of us should not keep our traps shut.

We should say what we think, just like he did.

KMKaung
Washington, D.C.
4-20-2014