American's translation of Vietnamese poetry brings life to ancient written language
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This is the story of an 18th-century poet rescued from oblivion, and an American conscientious objector whose service during and after the Vietnam War has helped provide reparation to that ravaged country. The story revolves around a slim book called "Spring Essence," containing 50 poems translated by John Balaban and published by Copper Canyon Press in Port Townsend. Balaban reads here tonight.
The poems were written in the late 1700s by Ho Xuan Huong, who wrote brilliantly during a period when women had few opportunities for education or independence. "She was revered during her lifetime for her wordplay," Balaban said. "The Vietnamese place a high value on poetry."
Ho Xuan Huong was the second wife of a nobleman at a time when women were mostly ruled by the whims of men who could have many wives. Under the strict Confucian guidelines of the day, a man could discard a wife for not having a child, for gossiping, for showing lack of respect for her in-laws, or for having an incurable disease - all in good conscience. There were other sanctified reasons, too, but you get the point.
In her poetry Ho Xuan Huong undermined such beliefs. "Her social values were considered unacceptable," Balaban said. "For example, she wrote poem after poem ridiculing the Buddhist church, which, like everything else in that society, was in decay."
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Poems in ancient script
Details of Ho Xuan Huong's life are scarce, though we do know that she somehow was able to study classical Chinese, the language of scholarship. Nevertheless, she chose to write most of her poems in Nom, a script devised in about the year 1000 to reproduce the common language of the Vietnamese people.
"It looks like Chinese, but if a Chinese speaker tries to read it, they can't," said Balaban, who started learning to speak Vietnamese while doing humanitarian work in that country during the war. "They took some characters and used them as Chinese, but they took others and had them represent sounds. In other words, they stripped a character of its semantic value and gave it a phonetic value in Vietnamese." They also invented about 25,000 new characters.
Nom began to fall out of use after 1651, when a Jesuit missionary devised a simpler way to transcribe Vietnamese speech, a method still in use. Now only about 30 people in the world know how to read Nom, and most of them are old men in their 70s and 80s. That's where Balaban comes in.
Humanities project in Vietnam
John Balaban was a student of Old and Middle English at Harvard University when he registered as a conscientious objector and volunteered for service in Vietnam in 1967. After the war, Balaban returned to Vietnam on a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to record folk poetry, passed on orally for generations, which he then transcribed and translated. That's when he first heard of Ho Xuan Huong. "Once you start any investigation of Vietnamese poetry, you hear her name," he said. "I got interested in her because she chose to write in the vernacular, like Dante and Chaucer."
Basically, there were two classes of society in Vietnam at that time: the gentry or mandarins, and the masses who didn't read or write. The mandarins were educated in Chinese, wrote in Chinese and read Confucian classics. At least the men did. As an educated woman and a poet, Ho Xuan Huong was an anomaly, Balaban says. "She was an aristocrat, an elder cousin to one of the emperors, but unfortunately he was a rebel emperor. She lived in a time of great social decay and stress."
Ho Xuan Huong had some of that rebelliousness in her nature, too. Stunningly gifted with language, she used her skills to construct poems in the demanding ancient Chinese lu-shih form (comparable to the sonnet), then used them as vehicles to deliver subtextual messages about sex, injustice and the corruption prevalent in society. "It's an elevated form with all sorts of propriety attached," Balaban said. "She subverted it." Nearly everything Ho Xuan Huong wrote she spiked with puns and double - even triple - entendres. The sexual innuendo in her poetry is such a hallmark that just the mention of her name to a modern Vietnamese citizen can kindle a blush.
Consider the short poem "Picking Flowers" a tame example:
If you want to pick flowers you have to hike.
Climbing up, don't worry about your weary bones.
Pluck the low branches, pull down the high.
Enjoy alike the spent blossoms, the tight buds.
Balaban's thoughtful translations manage to convey some of the poems' allusions, but still rely on notes to explain the web of meaning in the originals. In a few cases, he had to give up. "Some were impossible," he admitted. "Some are so clever I just gasped and let go of them. The footnotes would be three or four times as long as the poem."
Response to the poems has been enthusiastic. "Spring Essence," already in its third printing, is getting rave reviews, and was mentioned by former President Clinton during a speech to the Vietnamese people.
"I think she's unique: a world-class poet who ranks among the best," Balaban said. "There's something about her that is very attractive to people still. She hasn't aged badly over the centuries."
Balaban, who is now poet in residence and teaches English at North Carolina State University, will participate in an evening of Vietnamese poetry and music tonight at the Seattle Asian Art Museum. See details above.
Sheila Farr can be reached at 206-464-2270 or e-mail sfarr@seattletimes.com.