~H. PALMER HALL~
JOHN BALABAN'S
VIETNAMESE TRANSLATIONS
Balaban is not so much a “war” poet, though he has written
poems about
the war, as he is a poet immersed in a particular
country and culture
that has suffered from long periods of war,
with China, with the United
States and with other world powers.
“Vietnam. Vietnam, we’ve all
been there.” That’s how Michael Herr ended Dispatches back in 1977, only a
little more than a year after we saw helicopters leaving the U.S.
Embassy roof in what was then called “Saigon.” Since then, we
have seen so many books about that war: novels, memoirs,
political tracts, collections of poetry. Many of the poets have
been particularly important, their works containing some of the most
impressive war poetry ever written. I’m thinking of people like
Bruce Weigl, Yusef Komunyakaa, W. D. Ehrhart, Leon Steptoe, and so many
others.
John Balaban is different. His books are not
so much about the
war as they are about the culture and people of Vietnam. He is
not primarily interested in young men and women working out the demons
of their personal wars as he is about the people with whom we fought
and against whom we fought. Most of the American writers who have
focused on Vietnam have dealt almost exclusively with Americans in the
war itself. And that focus is necessary and useful, and in the
hands of skilled poets can be transformative.
Many of us, though, have felt a need to go deeper
than the immediacy of
the war we participated in or, perhaps, protested against, to learn
more about the people we moved among and too rarely came to know as
individual human beings. I was a Vietnamese
interpreter/translator in Vietnam from 1967-1968 and took great delight
in occasionally discovering a poem, a song, a record, a work of art
that spoke to me of something behind and beyond the war, of a people
who had developed their own culture and identity over more than a
thousand-year span of time.
His books are among the few I have discovered that
share that interest,
but Balaban has gone farther than simply sharing. He has spent
years exploring the culture of Vietnam and the people who inhabit that
place so close to China, so far from . . . whatever. In a number
of
books, he has delved into the poetry of the country from the folk songs
and poetry of the farmers and workers in Ca Dao Viet Nam (Vietnamese folk
poetry) to the elegant and sometimes playfully erotic poetry of Ho Xuan
Huong (whose poetry he translated in Spring
Essence.) He has given us the opportunity to discover for
ourselves some of the things he has already discovered.
Balaban is not so much a “war” poet, though he has
written poems about
the war, as he is a poet immersed in a particular country and culture
that has suffered from long periods of war, with China, with the United
States and with other world powers. And then the war that the
Vietnamese fought against each other, possibly as surrogates of larger,
competing powers. It is hard not to think of that war when I read
a haunting poem like “The Red Cloth” from the Ca Dao book:
Sad, idle, I think of my dead
mother,
Her mouth chewing rice, her
tongue removing fish
bones.
The red cloth drapes the mirror
frame.
Men of one country should love
one another.
“Men of one country should love one another.” A simple statement
that translates the Vietnamese literally, but profoundly weary in its
context of the almost continual wars since the French invasion of
Indochina in the 19th century.
When I walked through the streets of Saigon and
Pleiku and Nhatrang
back in 1967 and 1968, I saw the people in the cities.
Prostitutes, merchants, children, people maimed by war. I did not
meet many people who lived in rural areas, did not hear the people
singing the “ca dao” songs that Balaban translates. But even in
the towns, you saw people like the singer who sang of his dead mother
and longed for people of one country to love one another.
And yet, we bring to the songs our own
experiences. A lyric like
this one, for example, does not necessarily refer to a soldier leaving
for war:
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.
Still, though, read from our own past experience in Vietnam, it seems a
logical, if culturally-derived, reading. I am not at all sure
that Balaban would read the poem in the same way.
I have not spoken of Balaban’s translations as apt
or scholarly.
That doesn’t matter. The few poems I have translated from the
Vietnamese printed next to his translations seem beautifully realized
in English, the poetry translating as well as possible between the two
languages. With translations from Vietnamese, we will always miss
some of the original music: the interplay of the tonalities of
the language, the basic music of the syllables . . . the rising and
falling of monosyllabic tones. What Balaban gives us, instead of
individual tones in syllables, is a fine sense of that other kind of
tone, tonal sensitivity, that informs the music of these poems.
As a veteran of that war, a person who has written
his own poems about
that divisive war, I am grateful to John Balaban for taking us deeper
into the populated landscape of its own culture. That’s something
no one else has done so well in so many fine books. In Vietnam: a Traveler’s Literary
Companion, Balaban introduces the stories by saying that “The
Vietnamese condition is too large and complex to see it solely
through the dark lens of the recent war, although inevitably the war
echoes in some of the tales told here . . ..” He ends the preface
with a translation of a Vietnamese proverb: “Go out today and return
with a basket full of wisdom.” For readers interested in
Vietnam, interested enough that simply reading about American
experiences in the too-long war cannot be enough, John Balaban’s own
poetry and prose and his translations from the Vietnamese are essential.
© by H. Palmer Hall
