From Mantis 2

“Go out one day . . . ”:
Translating Vietnamese Poetry

John Balaban

The Mekong, like the Mississippi, runs flat and muddy. The thatched villages, which climb up on stilts of coconut tree trunks to reach over the river’s tidal shores, look as if they have been there forever and as if they could be washed away in one night’s flooding. From its sources in Tibet, in Yunnan, in the mountain jungles of Burma and Laos, and in the great Cambodian lake, the Tonle Sap near the ruins of Ankor Wat, the river loops and forks through about five thousand miles of rich delta. In Vietnam its branches are called Cuu Long, “The Nine Dragons.” Like a dragon, the river is both ancient and ageless. Sunk in its mucky shallow above My Tho about sixty miles southwest of Saigon are the rib remnants of two huge ships. If legend is correct, they have been there since 1177 A.D. and were part of the great fleet which the Hinduized state of Champa launched into the South China Sea to attack the Buddhist state at Ankor Wat—by sailing through hundreds of miles of open sea to the mouth of the Mekong and by winding up the Mekong through Vietnam and through Cambodia until they reached the Tonle Sap where they sacked and burned Ankor Wat. The river gives up few of its tokens, but every now and then they appear, reminding one of how long people have lived along the rivers of Indochina. Near another branch of The Nine Dragons in the south of Vietnam, the French excavated a site and found a cache of Roman coins.

Like dragons, the great rivers of Vietnam—the Red and the Black in the north, the Perfume in the center, the Mekong in the south—give nurture and good fortune, for it is along the alluvial plains of their many tributaries that the Vietnamese have prospered over the long centuries. But how long? When I first went to Vietnam in 1967 as a voluntary instructor at the University of Can Tho, I had a dim sense of Vietnam as a “young nation.” But of course it existed thousands of years before the United States. But how long? This question of Vietnamese antiquity preoccupied me, especially when my university was bombed and, forced to switch jobs, I became the field representative for a private medical group that treated war-injured children. Perhaps because I often spent my days among the dying, I wanted the Vietnamese past to be ancient—as a denial of the present, as an insurance for the future.

Luckily, like Henri Mouhout, the French botanist who wandered off into the Cambodian jungle in 1860 and discovered by chance not a new herb but the ruins of Ankor Thom, I stumbled upon ca dao, the oral poems of Vietnam which are the living artifacts of a vast cultural tradition—more delicate but more enduring than monuments in stone—that goes back at least two thousand years when the Muong and Vietnamese dialects began to separate from their Mon-Khmer parent language. From there, the origins of the Vietnamese reach back through the Dong Son culture, just before the Christian era, to the much earlier Hoa Binh culture, and even further back into the misty ancestry of the mountain peoples whose agricultural civilization, dating from 13,000 B.C., is being revealed through excavations at Spirit Cave in the extreme northwest of Thailand. Without exaggeration one can speak of a Vietnamese language and identity well over one thousand years old. And as long as that, it is safe to say, there have been ca dao: short lyric poems, passed down by word of mouth and sung without instrumental accompaniment by ordinary individuals—poems whose simple purpose, as Confucius noted of the ancient Chinese folk songs recorded in the Shih Ching, is “to stimulate the mind, train the observation, encourage social intercourse, and enable one to give vent to his complaint.” In the West we sometimes measure civilizations by their physical monuments: cathedrals, walls, fortifications. In Vietnam, in rain forests swept by annual monsoons, thousands of years ago, there arose a wet rice, agricultural civilization which—aside from the magnificent bronze drums of Dong Son—has left few monuments other than this poetry and song.

So the war led me to the edge of a surprising world, which I could enter only as a translator. If I wanted to understand Vietnam through its ancient oral poetry, first I had to learn Vietnamese. I am not good at learning languages, but during an entire summer, for seven hours a day, I studied the language at the University of Hawaii. At the end of the summer, I spoke Vietnamese.

•••

A large territory of human experience still remains unexplored in South East Asia. In the south of Vietnam alone, there are nearly forty minority groups: the Bru, Pacoh, Phu-Ong, Katu, Takua, Jeh, Duan, Dua, Katua, Sedang, Todra, Hre, Kayong, Rengao, Halang, Bahnar, Hroy, Jarai, Man, Rade, Muong, Mnong, Rolom, Roglai, Gar, Nung, White and Black Tai, Stieng, Koho, Chru, Chrau, Rai, Khmer, and Cham. Who ever heard of them? We thought the Vietnamese lived in Vietnam.

It is safe to assume that each of these groups has its own oral poetry. Some of these poetries may be interesting for purely ethnographic reasons (rice planting songs, verse prayers to appease spirits, etc.); other oral poetries, like that of the Vietnamese, can be appreciated as literature. Nonetheless, extending this wide range of artistic endeavor throughout Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, Yunnan, and related parts of Tibet, one can see how little is known and how much remains to be understood about this ancient corner of the globe. These are the “one hundred peoples” of South East Asia, prehistoric lineages which the Vietnamese believe were hatched from the one hundred eggs created through a union of a female mountain spirit, Au Co, and a coastal dragon, Lac-Long.

In 1971-72, I returned to Vietnam to collect ca dao. My only clue to what I might find was a copy of Nguyen Van Ngoc’s Tuc Ngu Phong Dao, a sizable collection of poems and proverbs published in Hanoi in 1938. From Saigon, I made about ten excursions: to the old imperial city of Hue in the center, to Ban Me Thuot in the central highlands, and to Can Tho and Con Phung Island in the Mekong Delta. When I arrived in Saigon, I tried recording two student folk singing groups. Both groups sang ca dao that had been written down for piano accompaniment; both had the same repertoire of only about twenty poems. It was a bad sign. I despaired of finding a live oral tradition even before a leader of one of the groups told me flatly that the oral tradition no longer survived, for during the war, as the cities were cut off from the countryside, to many literate, city-bred Vietnamese, ca dao do not exist except for a few, widely-popularized “folk” songs. Cities, of course, even in peacetime are the death of oral poetry. More than warfare, literacy and the electronic diversions of modern life are the main destroyers of ca dao. Why recite a poem if you can write it down? Why even bother to do that if instead you can listen to the professional singers on the radio or watch on television the performers from the Cai Luong operas?

An important rule for a translator of an unrecorded oral poetry from South East Asia is to get into the countryside, as far beyond the reach of city life as possible. In 1971, except for Hue where cultural traditions were consciously guarded, my best recordings were among rural villagers. In 1971, this rule of getting into the countryside as quickly and as far as possible posed a serious problem for me, for while it was true that the farther I could get from the cities, the richer was the poetry I could find, it was equally true that the farther I traveled in a country at war, the more dangerous it might become.
One solution was Con Phung Island about sixty miles southwest of Saigon and downriver from the provincial capital of My Tho. Con Phung, or “Phoenix Island,” was then a haven from the war for the followers of Nguyen Thanh Nam, better known as Ong Dao Dua, or the “Coconut Monk,” a wizened S-shaped (back broken in a fall from a tree) little man with a chirpy voice, a practitioner of “crazy wisdom,” who organized—if that is the word—the island community through a wacky amalgamation of Taoism, Buddhism, and Christianity. Huge figures of the Virgin Mary and Quan Om, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy (hand in hand), Christ and Buddha (arm in arm), and a Taoist patriarch (potbellied, laughing) hovered over the prayer circle which was divided into Yin and Yang sections and, built on pylons above the Mekong. Plaster-of-Paris dragons with light bulbs popping from their stalk eyes danced on the columns. At night, the whole place was lit by Christmas lights, and day and night the island resounded with the gongings of two massive bells cast from spent artillery casings. Strange as all this sounds, this was the only place in the south which both sides left alone and which the war never ravaged. Peasants fled to Con Phung from all over the war-torn Delta—country people, farmers, fishermen, shipwrights—and luckily for me I could go and meet them on Con Phung where they inevitably pooled their various repertoires of ca dao.

I recorded there at night by kerosene lamp, to the slapping of the river against pilings, the tolling of the pagoda bells muffled by the misty air, the squeaks of lizards stalking mosquitos along the walls, and, every now and then, the crackle of small arms fire and the slam of mortars as the war nattered on across the river. My tapes recorded all of this as background to the singing as we sat on the tile floor of my room over the river where children played in the shadows and chased after big, brown palmetto bugs to which they tied little paper chariots which would become fluttering kites as the huge clumsy insects took to the night air. From Con Phung (and from Hue, Ban Me Thuot, Can Tho, and Saigon), I recorded thirty-five singers and about five hundred poems. About five thousand ca dao are thought to exist. The fifty transcribed and translated in my Ca Dao Vietnam: A Bilingual Anthology of Vietnamese Folk Poetry are only a portico or gate to a much larger edifice.

Although I recorded singers of all ages and both sexes—the youngest was a boy of five, and the oldest was a woman of seventy-some years—most of my recordings came from a half-dozen men with wide repertoires of several hundred poems each. In age and occupation they ranged from a 19-year-old Mekong Delta farmer to a 70-year-old former palanquin bearer in Hue. From these various singers I gathered love laments, poems about birds and beasts, poems about war, society and the nation, lullabies, proverbs, riddles having male and female replies, and children’s game songs. Almost all of them followed a strict metric involving a six-syllable line linked by internal rhyme and word tone placement to an eight-syllable line, a haiku-like couplet that could be linked to others as the singer “gave vent to his complaint.”

A Tiny Bird

A tiny bird with red feathers,
a tiny bird with black beak
drinks up the lotus pond day by day.
Perhaps I must leave you.

“Di ra mot ngay, ve mot sang khon,” runs the villager proverb: “Go out one day, come back with a basket full of wisdom.” For a year, fate allowed me to enter a sung world of Taoist sages, parted lovers, melon patches, concubines, exiled kings, wheeling egrets, rice paddies, bamboo bridges, shimmering moons and fishtraps. I followed a great tributary that flowed into a Mekong of the heart.

•••

Now, nearly thirty years later, I am once again following that river. Poetry in Vietnam flows in two great streams: the oral folk poetry and the literary poetry. Pursuing the one led me to the other, and in 2000, after working on a manuscript for some ten years, I published Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong (Copper Canyon). Ho Xuan Huong (her given name means “Spring Essence”) was an aristocrat and a “second wife,” or concubine of the latter eighteenth century as well as the quintessentially cleverest Vietnamese poet writing in the lu-shih, “the regulated verse” form made classical by Tu Fu in the eighth century. Almost all of her poems were actually doubles, with a quite proper and lovely surface poem hiding within it a complete double entendre and a sexual landscape.

The Paper Fan

Seventeen, or is it eighteen . . .
Ribs? Let me have it in my hands.

Thick or thin, opening its lovely angles.
Wide or narrow, inserted with a stick.

The hotter you get, the more refreshing.
Wonderful both night and day.

Cheeks juicy soft, persimmon pink.
Kings and lords just love this thing.

Along with poems that thumb their noses at the rigid Confucianism of her time, there are poems of social commentary, of national pride, of Buddhist compassion, as well as sketches of people around her. To enter her world, as I entered the millenial world of country people when I recorded their oral poetry some thirty years ago, is to enter a world of class privilege and dispossession, wit, verbal play, lost love, and great compassion. “Go out one day; come back with a basket full of wisdom.”

Spring-Watching Pavilion

A gentle spring evening arrives
airily, unclouded by worldly dust.

Three times the bell tolls echoes like a wave.
We see heaven upside down in sad puddles.

Love’s vast sea cannot be emptied.
And springs of grace flow easily everywhere.

Where is nirvana?
Nirvana is here, nine times out of ten.

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