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Translated by Linh Dihn. Featuring the poetry of Nguyen Quoc Chanh, Phan Nhien Hao, and Van Cam Hai. Slandered and excluded from all anthologies, the three poets in this volume represent the fringe and vanguard of Vietnamese poetry. In a less corrupt environment, they would surely be seen as the best, and the most courageous of their generation Dinh, from the introduction. Nguyen is the author of two poetry collections, Night Of The Rising Sun and Inanimate Weather. Phan is the author of Paradise Of Paper Bells. Van is a writer for Hue Television and the author of Man Who Tends The Waves. English translations of all three authors have appeared in the journals The Literary Review and Vietnam Inside Out: Dialogues. Three Vietnamese Poets
Political repression usually has the opposite effect on surging creativity. Instead of shutting down the artist’s urge to speak one’s mind, censorship only serves to funnel this energy deeper underground, below prying eyes and past the censors’ noses. As Linh Dinh put it succinctly in the introduction to his translation of Three Vietnamese Poets, a poet who lives “in such a stifling environment … had to become subversive to be nourished intellectually.”(3)
For this reason alone Linh chose three men, three viable poets from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to fill the 61 pages of this challenging volume of poetry. The collection begins with the oldest poet of the three, Nguyen Quoc Chanh (b. 1958) and ends with the youngest, Van Cam Hai (b. 1972), with Pham Nhien Hao (b. 1970) firmly in the middle. These poets grew up in a country that is now trying to redefine itself among the community of nations without losing itself entirely. Whether their poetry sheds any light on what life is like in a communist/post-communist Southeast Asian country is not really the point of this book. The point is to allow these three poets to speak their minds and give them an audience, when previously they had few chances to take advantage of either.
The book affords each poet a tiny biography before immediately diving into the poetry. If you’re not big into lengthy introductions, then this style would suit you fine. However, if you enjoy getting to know the author more and exploring the context in which he/she is writing in order to gain a better understanding and appreciation for the work, then the miniscule introductory biographies will disappoint you.
Linh has done an admirable job selecting these poets, who contribute much to Vietnamese literature, specifically, and world literature, in general. No one poet in this collection is a certified, dominant standout. All three poets are isolated observers of both their inner and outer worlds. One gets the sense that they are choosing to distance themselves from the prescribed reality handed down by a government that still doesn’t want to hear anything different from its writers other than unambiguous progress. In his four-part Marsh Dream poem, Chanh led each part with the seemingly incomplete phrase, “Broken fuse.” I took the word ‘fuse’ to mean both the noun and the verb. Perhaps, he was alluding to a startling, systematic breakdown in the political machinery of the day or the less tangible, but no less real, breakdown in social cohesion that serves to maintain the sanity in everything one does.
Pham Nhien Hao, the only one out of the three who lives in the U.S., wrote in his poem “Like The First Time” about his attempts at staying occupied in New York and securing a job in Los Angeles. However, none of these experiences seemed to please him and he felt that his desire to live a vital life has been consumed like a TV image of a fleeing criminal whose only saving grace is to be removed from society with just a single shot. Because Hao is a Vietnamese living abroad (Viet Kieu), his poetry will not see the light of day in Vietnam.
Van Cam Hai’s poetry proves to be the most insular in comparison to the others’. Images of the human body are freely pasted upon the world he inhabits and his dreams are never too far from the truth he feels secure in. In his second poem, “Remembering The Time When Men Appeared As Ghosts,” Hai has sandy hills looking “like thousands of buttocks awakened to dance.”(51) It paints a pretty comical picture. Yet, in his poem “A Morning Purposefully Lazy,” he comes forward with the poignant line: “you still wear an illusion you a person lining a dream.”(54) Crossing from the physical to the metaphysical, Hai shows that he can move in between the alleys of reason and climb through the windows of fantasy to escape into another reality.
Far from being pariahs in their society destined for communist Vietnam’s literary dustbin, these three men have succeeded in documenting their inner lives, regardless of whether they were acceptable or in line with the truth, in the eyes of the ministry of culture. Linh’s translation, if one were to assume that he stayed true to the poets’ words, competently introduces these writers to a foreign audience who deserve whatever positive recognition they receive. 0971219834
