Interviews
A Conversation with John Balaban
Poet, scholar, and translator John Balaban was a conscientious objector who served in Vietnam, working to bring war-injured children the medical attention they needed. Once his tour of duty was finished, with the war was still raging around him, Balaban traveled the countryside with a tape recorder asking the local Vietnamese to sing him their favorite poems. When his translations began to appear in print, a scholar in Hanoi advised him that "to truly know the heart and soul of Vietnam, you must translate Ho Xuan Huong." Ho Xuan Huong -- whose name tranlsates as "Spring Essence" -- was an 18th-century concubine who wrote suggestive poems as a vehicle for social, religious, and political commentary.
Balaban is the author of 11 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including 4 volumes that together have won the Academy of American Poets' Lamont Prize, a National Poetry Series Selection, and two nominations for the National Book Award. His Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems won the 1998 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is also a past president of the American Literary Translators Association.
Fiction, Literature & Poetry editor Cary Goldstein recently had the opportunity to speak with Mr. Balaban about his remarkable translations of the 18th-century poet Ho Xuan Huong, Spring Essence.
Barnes & Noble.com: Who was Ho Xuan Huong, and how were you first introduced to her poetry?
John Balaban: She is the preeminent Vietnamese woman poet, and maybe one of the five best poets in the country, so it wasn't hard to come to her poetry. In 1971-72, I had a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This is after my military obligation in Vietnam. I was a conscientious objector to the war, and I volunteered to go and work for a group that treated war-injured children. So inevitably I learned Vietnamese, and I also got close to country people and the poetry that is part of their upbringing. When I came back to the States I considered what further connection I had to Vietnam. At first I thought it was all over, and then I thought, "I know this. I'm a poet, and I can translate this oral poetry. Nobody else can -- nobody even knows about it." So I went back on this grant, and in that year, 1971-72, I taped maybe 500 poems of a poetry called ca dao. There is a collection of these I published with Unicorn Press. So I heard about Ho Xuan Huong then, because her name just comes up. You know, if Shakespeare's name comes up in a conversation about what's going on in the tradition of English poetry, John Donne's name would inevitably come up as well.
But I didn't know what I was getting into. I thought that because I had worked with the folk poetry, which has a native word stock -- it's a very Vietnamese vocabulary, hardly any long words from the Chinese in it -- that I could handle this. I don't know Chinese, and the attractive thing about her to me, at first, was that she worked in Nôm, which is the Vietnamese language, and I thought, "Well, I know Vietnamese; I can handle that." So she's different than the other poets of the literary elite. She's a poet who also uses the speech of ordinary people.
B&N.com: Were most of her contemporaries writing in Chinese?
JB: Most of her contemporaries were writing in Chinese, except for one or two great notable exceptions, including the great classical poet Nguyen Du, who was her contemporary. In fact, they wrote poetry to each other. Both of them wrote in Nôm, which is like Chaucer choosing to write in English rather than French, or Dante choosing to write in Italian rather than Latin. And they did it, I think, for political reasons, for chauvinistic reasons. They were aware that the Confucian feudalism of the dynasty they lived under was rigid and had placed restrictions and corruptions upon society that their society wasn't able to bear. And with Ho Xuan Huong, of course, that was much more pronounced. She was angry about what had happened to Vietnamese society. Whereas her classical contemporary Nguyen Du would serve the court of the new dynasty, she in fact was an elder cousin to a rebel dynasty and to a rebel emperor who wanted to throw out Chinese influence altogether.
B&N.com: What do we mean when we refer to Ho Xuan Huong as a concubine?
JB: That's a really good question, because it doesn't mean what Americans will usually think it means, which sort of has a sex-slave connotation. There were all sorts of levels of concubines, and she was the highest rank, which was vo le, as her mother was. She was an aristocrat. She was a relative -- in fact, a cousin to -- an emperor. She bantered in poetry with high-ranking ministers of state. But she was a second wife -- which is how vo le is better translated than concubine -- not the first wife, which is wife of greater prestige, and that was a condition that she resented. And that's what's there in a lot of the poetry.
B&N.com: Would it have been rare for an 18th-century vo le to be given a classical education, or to have an independent political or social life of her own?
JB: I think it would have been. Certainly for her class of second wife it was permissible, but it was a real surprise that any woman had the education that she had. It meant that somebody, her father, had invested a lot of money in tutors to educate a girl. In 1790, when she was growing up, that was not a thing that was done. She probably had very unusual parents. We know the names of her parents, but we don't know much about them. And we know where she was born, and where she grew up, outside of Hanoi. The legend says that her father died when she was fairly young, which is probably why she was a vo le, because if he had lived and the family had prospered, the family probably could have produced a dowry. Dowries, for aristocratic women like her at that time, were immense fortunes. Very few women were getting married. A lot of well-born women were becoming second wives, as she did. And it's not something she was happy about.
B&N.com: Did she live to see her own work published?
JB: Yes, in the sense that in her lifetime everyone passed them around, because they were wildly clever, wildly popular, and funny. She was not an oral poet at all, though people memorized and recited her poetry. She worked out of the Tang dynasty classical tradition of lu-shih, which is a regulated verse form. The Vietnamese used it similar to the way that in English we picked up the Italian sonnet, and they used it for similar purposes.
B&N.com: Was this the same form that the great Chinese poets Li Po and Tu Fu were writing in?
JB: Tu Fu made it a classical form. Li Po used the lu-shih, the regulated verse form, but preferred the chueh-chu, the old-style verse, which was less regulated in tones, less restrictive. Tu Fu preferred the very form that Ho Xuan Huong and hundreds of Vietnamese poets over the centuries used, probably on into the 1920s.
B&N.com: You write in the introduction Ho Xuan also wrote poems in Chinese. I'm curious to know how the form -- or in this case the language -- would have effected the poetry.
JB: It's odd, but Vietnamese -- because it shares a lot of syntactic similarities with Chinese, although they are from two different language families, you can use the form equally well in Vietnamese. There are even poems -- and this is absolutely stunning -- that are complete lu-shih -- it's a Vietnamese poem, say, about a lake in Hanoi. You get to the last word and you go backwards, so it's a palindrome, and it's a poem in Chinese about the same thing. In other words, you can mix Chinese words sufficiently into Vietnamese, and the syntax is equally pliable in both languages, so that you can do reversals like that. It's astounding. The poem is about the same place, but it has a different point of view.
This interest in doing two things at once is typically Vietnamese. When I was recording folk poetry, I even recorded palindromes that were sung by children that went on for 20 lines and then went backward. The thing that she did most remarkably that makes her read even more today than she was in her own lifetime is that she had two poems in every poem: One hidden in the other, and that was a double entendre that had to do with sex. And that was absolutely forbidden. It's probably the biggest indication of the kind of nose-thumbing that she was willing to do at the mores of her time, which she found deadly and corrupt. And of course she was right. This was a time of 40 years of warfare, when all the Vietnamese clans were warring against each other, and one of them -- Nguyen -- which finally came out on top, got Portuguese and French help with arms and soldiers, and that's how they ended up on top.
There would always be proper subjects, as well. Part of her subversion was that she used the propriety of the form itself, which was centuries old. It would be a landscape or a description of an object, like a fan, or a natural thing, like a river snail. But within that lu-shih would be hidden another, and that would be about sex. She does it two ways: one through imagery; but also through something that just can't be translated into English, and that's noi lai, or tonal echo. You can say dèo, which means to bear, or carry something. But if you shift the tone just a bit, it means "to fuck."
For instance, there's a poem of hers that's absolutely famous, "Three-mountain Pass." And she uses another tone on dèo, a falling tone. She says, "Môt dèo, mot dèo, lai môt dèo/Khen ai khèo tac canh cheo leo". She says, "A cliffside, another, and still a third" -- she's looking at three mountain cliffs coming together. But with a high rising tone, she's saying, "one fuck, two fucks, and still a third." It doesn't say that, but every Vietnamese knows that there's a tonal echo that says that, and then they start laughing from the first syllable. In English there are words like "cleft" or "mount," and these have double meanings in English, so you can get away with these things, but here the very first line can only be explained by footnote.
B&N.com: What role did Buddhism play in Ho Xuan Huong's life and work? On first reading, many of the poems appear to be spiritual or devotional poems, but a more careful consideration reveals a less pious, more playful, subversive attitude.
JB: This is another thing that seems difficult for us to grasp. She's not just a dirty-minded, clever poet. She's a serious Buddhist. She's a Mahayana Buddhist of the Amida school, as most Vietnamese were, and you have to really gauge what to do with those poems of double meaning by her sense of compassion, or karuna, which she's quite well aware of. It appears in a bunch of the poems. Look at the very last poem in Spring Essence, for instance, where she uses tonal echo for ai, or worldly dust. Today, common people refer to themselves as "dust of life," you know, blown away, just like that. But it has a tonal echo on ai, which is "gentleness" or "love," and she talks about that kind of love as well. Those few poems about Buddhism make it clear that that's the perspective that made her anger and her sense of injustice so strong.
B&N.com: Like the poem "Buddhist Nun," which is one of my favorite poems in the collection.
JB: That's a very sly poem. On the surface of it, it's an absolutely admiring poem of the nun's piety, but in fact where it says that she's "clutching Buddha's rosary" all night long, the tonal echo suggests that she's not saying her rosary all night long, but that she's fucking all night long. The Vietnamese get a huge kick out of that. [laughs] I don't want to ruin the poem for you.
B&N.com: But unless I know this, the joke's on me!
JB: That's it. She wanted the reader to have a first reading of a sort of pious sense, and she also wanted the reader to think about it a bit. It's purely on tonal echo. Because nothing's said, certainly nothing in the imagery that would suggest that the nun's behaving improperly.
B&N.com: The lu-shih is an eight-line poem. There are a couple of poems in here that are four-line poems.
JB: There's a variation, a half a lu-shih -- in Chinese it's called chueh-chu -- broken off lines. It's four lines instead of eight. It follows a rhyme scheme of first, second and fourth line. It's considered half a lu-shih and it has a different function. The lyrical density of it isn't so great, but you can do more playful things with it, like those teasing poems.
B&N.com: Is Ho Xuan Huong's poetry still widely read in Vietnam?
JB: Yes, in a surprising way. I wasn't sure it was. Every step of this has been revelation for me. I didn't really understand the full complexity of it. I went two years ago to Vietnam and walked around Hanoi looking in bookshops, and just out of curiosity asking if they had Ho Xuan Huong. That day I found no less than six different editions from six different publishers, including one that could fit in your shirt, a little carry-around. Just the other day somebody brought me back a couple more. So my guess is that there can be as many as a dozen different editions of her poetry. Now if you think about that, what American poet of 200 hundred years ago has that many editions? Even poets that we revere, like Whitman or Emily Dickinson, probably have two or three at most. One, obviously, for college use, maybe one for elegant gift giving, and that's about it.
B&N.com: In which script are these editions written?
JB: Almost all of them -- I'm not including the scholarly editions of her work, in Nôm and in modern Vietnamese national script, quoc-ngu -- almost all of them are in national script, Roman script, which ordinary Vietnamese can read. The sad fact is there are 80 million Vietnamese, and there are about 30 people worldwide who can read Nôm.
B&N.com: Can you?
JB: No. I'm president of the Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation, but I can't read it.
B&N.com: How is the preservation work going?
JB: Well, it just started. We got our first contribution just recently from an American lawyer in Paris, and it's a check for $10,000. Our first project is to -- this is incredible, and so sad -- the first project will be to build the first true dictionary of Nôm and modern Vietnamese. As we're entering each character, they will also be entered in Unicode. Unicode is the international standard for languages. Immediately it will follow an international convention and be accessible to computers. This means that if it's computer accessible, a speaker of modern Vietnamese -- someone who could read the Roman script -- would type that in, any word that he or she speaks, and they will see Nôm on the screen. It will be incredible. It won't just be a dictionary, but it will be an incredible teaching tool.
B&N.com: What does this mean for Vietnamese culture?
JB: What this means is that something like a thousand years of literature will be opened up. And it's not just literature; it's government documents, medicine, religion, philosophy.
B&N.com: The idea that all of this literature exists and only a handful of people can read it is terrifying. A throwback to the Middles Ages.
JB: It's scary. It's a whole heritage going out like the passenger pigeon.
B&N.com: Of the many poems available of Ho Xuan Huong's, why did you choose these?
JB: I chose these because I like them, and I can work with them. And for the ones in Spring Essence that have the double sexual meanings, which is probably most of them, they seemed the most clever, at least in English translation. There were others that I could have put in, but it would have been tedious and repetitious. She often uses the same phrases. They way she worked was really off the top of her head. She had this form completely intuited, so that she could do it verbally, and I think she often repeated herself. Even in this book you can see many of the same phrases recurring. So I tried to get the full range of what she cared about, which is hunger for love, social justice, and nationhood. These are her big topics, as well as Buddhist compassion.
B&N.com: But in the poem "The Pharmacist's Widow Mourns His Death," Ho Xuan seems to have little compassion for the widow, about whom she writes, "If she loved him, she'd weep more softly/Perhaps she just misses his licorice stick."
JB: Oh yeah. That's an incredible poem. The woman in that poem is also a concubine, but she's lower-level. She's a thiêp, which implies more sex than a vo le. Sometimes the puns there are triple. Go back and look at the end notes, it's just amazing. It was that particular poem that made me realize, "Good Lord, what a ride this is going to be." I have a sense that I've built on what other French and Vietnamese scholars have discovered, and that I was discovering more echoes myself. And I suspect that some person someday will discover even more.
B&N.com: Do you have any intention of publishing a complete volume of Ho Xuan's poems?
JB: The surprising thing about this book is that it's gone into a fourth printing in six months. Another printing has already been ordered, because every time they print they order what for Copper Canyon is a big printing, like 5,000 books, 4,000, and it's never enough. They're always trying to catch up. The last printing was 4,000. Before it left the printer and got into the warehouse, 3,000 of the 4,000 were already sold by back order. And this has been happening again and again.
I was reading at University of Washington, and the university bookstore handled the books for the event. It was a lecture. And the woman in charge of the bookstore said that she'd ordered 50 copies for the event, but they all were sold before the event, so she had to order more. It's bewildering, but happily so.
B&N.com: The New York Times ran a great piece about the book, and that did wonders for sales. But even in the fall of 2000, around the time of publication, President Clinton mentioned Spring Essence at the state dinner. How do you think he knew of the book?
JB: I tried to retrace this, because I was real curious. Here's how I think it worked: The book was launched just before he left, and there were two people at the book launch at the Smithsonian. One was a Vietnamese lawyer who was part of the entourage to Hanoi. He was representing overseas Vietnamese. There was an American, Marc Liebson, who is the arts writer for a magazine called Veteran, which is published by Vietnam Veterans of America. Both of them took copies to give people there. And then after this was all over, I met the Vietnamese ambassador to the United Nations, and he said that he had given it to the Vietnamese ambassador to Washington to give to the president's entourage because he thought it was an important cultural thing. And then there were like two or three others. Obviously, the publicist did that herself. But there were like five or six avenues, so far as I can tell. So I think the book kept coming at them from different ways and different people, all of who thought this was a wonderful book that ought to have some mention if you're going to say anything about cultural exchange, and that's how Clinton picked it up. But the amazing thing is that whoever wrote that speech really understood the value of printing Nôm for the first time, and that's a huge surprise.
B&N.com: When can we expect to see a new volume of original poems from you?
JB: I don't know. This has more or less killed that for a while. The last book was Locusts at the Edge of Summer, 1997, and that was when that was up for a National Book Award, and then I guess later it won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. But this has been one of my main preoccupations since then.
B&N.com: What overall influence has working for so long with the Vietnamese language, translating folk poetry -- Ho Xuan Huong in particular -- had on your work? Certainly your war experience is evident in your previous books of poetry -- biographically, historically, politically, etc. -- but what about artistically?
JB: My discoveries in Vietnamese poetry began in my 20s. The abiding Vietnamese interest in great cleverness was a revelation to me. It opened up a new version of humanity from the rather limited one I had been occupying. In terms of poetry, Ho Xuan Huong reconfirmed my sense of formal dexterity as a humane testament in and of itself. Correspondingly, it made me dissatisfied with my free-verse colleagues and their ersatz endeavors, including my own. I found ways of making a palindrome work in English. I got interested in rove and concealed rhymes. I came to believe in the metaphysical importance of rhythm in poetry. I think Ho Xuan Huong's work has held me to a higher standard of expectation.
