Translating Vietnamese Poetry

Tony Barnstone’s phrase “the poem behind the poem” offers a useful way of looking at translation. In the translation of a poem—as opposed, say, to a technical document—we are always looking for more than mere denotative equivalencies. We want to feel how the poem felt in its original. We want to inhabit the condition of its first reader or listener. Traveling in English, we seek to cross cultural borders and encounter the poem on native ground. To do this, we must hear “the poem behind the poem.”

What lies behind, or even prior, to the poem depends on several things at once. First is the poem’s historical tradition, including that tradition’s habits of prosody, its abiding themes, its range of language, and its notion of what a poem is (and is not). Second, to hear “the poem behind the poem,” we must consider the poet’s unique operations within his or her poetic tradition. We must be able to feel the dialectical commerce, as it were, between the poem and the tradition it plays against. And finally, for the above to be working in a translation—for our incognito travel to take place—the translator must possess true talent in English poetry so that all prosodic possibilities seem alive and attendant. As Stanley Kunitz writes in the introduction to his and Max Hayward’s beautiful translations of Anna Akhmatova:

The poet as translator lives with a paradox. His work must not read like a translation; conversely, it is not an exercise of the free imagination. One voice enjoins him: “Respect the text!” The other simultaneously pleads with him: “Make it new!” He resembles the citizen in Kafka’s aphorism who is fettered to two chains, one attached to earth, the other to heaven. If he heads for earth, his heavenly chain throttles him; if he heads for heaven, his earthly chain pulls him back. And yet, as Kafka says, “all the possibilities are his, and he feels it; more, he actually refuses to account for the deadlock by an error in the original fettering.”

The discovery of “the poem behind the poem” for a translator of Vietnamese is a long prospect. The literary poetry of Viêt Nam began in the first century c.e. with poetry written in Chinese. From the tenth century and into the early twentieth, Vietnamese poets wrote in nôm, a calligraphic script devised by the literati for Vietnamese phonetics. This nôm literary tradition, with its characteristic forms, subjects, and allusions, was heavily influenced by the poetry of China (particularly the T’ang)—even more than the literary models of classical Greece and Rome influenced English poetry.

These literary poetries are only part of the Vietnamese landscape. Alongside and beneath the nôm and Chinese poetries, an even older poetry known as ca dao runs like a vast river or aquifer. This oral poetry, still sung in the countryside, originated perhaps thousands of years ago in the prayers and songs of the Mon-Khmer wet-rice cultures to which the Vietnamese are tied. The word-stock of ca dao is native, bearing few loan words from Chinese. It is a lyric poetry—not narrative—and its power lies in its allusive imagery and brief music. Its references are to nature, not to books; to delta fish and fowl, to creatures of the field and forest, to wind and moon, to village life. It belongs to the farmers of Viêt Nam, which is to say that it belongs to most Vietnamese because eighty percent live, as ever, in the countryside.

This repository of images, melodic patterns, aspirations, and beliefs is the cultural center of all Vietnamese poetry. Even literary poets—whether they are working in lü-shih regulated verse (thoduòng luât in Vietnamese), modern free verse, or the metrics of the oral tradition, like the great classical poet Nguyên Du—seem always to be working in some relation to ca dao. Ca dao is the fixed foot of the literary culture’s compass. Representing a folk culture resistant throughout the millennia to Chinese acculturation, it is an...