Poetry | Vietnam | Vietnamese
May, 2011Phan Nhiên Hạo's poems are "fueled by a mix of strife, hope, love, and futility," as he writes in Manufacturing Poetry. Phan writes elusive, surreal, yet emotionally charged poetry shadowed by his experience of growing up in post-war Vietnam and living in the diaspora. The six poems translated here, selected from his two collections in Vietnamese, Thiên Đường Chuông Giấy (Paradise of Paper Bells, 1998) and Chế Tạo Thơ Ca 99-04 (Manufacturing Poetry 99-04, 2004), exhibit the qualities that readers, critics, and fellow poets have admired about Phan Nhiên Hạo's work: a poetic idiom drawn from the cadences of ordinary speech and rhythms of everyday life; the way his seemingly smooth surfaces are punctured by arresting images, surprising phrases, and shocks of insight; the spectral presence of war and exile; his faithful acts of excavating buried histories and mourning the unmourned; the bluesy, melancholic, and ironic consciousness at the center and circumference of his complex and moving music. Unpublished and unpublishable in Vietnam, Phan Nhiên Hạo's poetry circulates underground, online, and overseas. Fortunately for English readers, his work is available in the excellent translations by Linh Dinh collected in Night, Fish, and Charlie Parker (Tupelo Press, 2006). I try my hand at translation here out of a creative and collaborative desire to respond to the call of the poems themselves. I hope this small clutch of poems by Phan Nhiên Hạo will do justice to his necessary poetry--or at the very least, shine a spotlight on an unnecessarily neglected poet.
(Hai-Dang Phan)
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