From Woodcuts to Bytes for a Vietnamese Poet
By SAM HOWE VERHOVEK
FORT TOWNSEND, Wash. - By the time Copper Canyon Press was ready to publish "Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong," the project was something more than a book, for it entailed the preservation of the fading calligraphic way of writing Vietnamese.
A nearly extinct ideographic script known as Nom, similar to Chinese but representing Vietnamese, was painstakingly put into a computer program, and thus did the works of Ho arrive in Western bookstores. Considered one of Vietnam's greatest poets, Ho was born in the late 1700's and wrote with unusual irreverence and shockingly erotic undertones for her time.
Ho's work really "jumped from woodcut to digitization, skipping the whole Gutenberg process," said John Balaban, the North Carolina poet who translated her folk poems and helped oversee their presentation in the strikingly designed book. Each poem is presented in three versions, across facing pages: in the original Nom, in modern romanized Vietnamese, and in English.
For Copper Canyon, a small nonprofit press that specializes in poetry and operates out of a former cannon repair shop at Fort Worden State Park in this windy old port on Puget Sound, the publishing of Ho's poems was an especially intricate proposition as well as a sweet triumph. The book has drawn glowing reviews on both sides of the Pacific and was mentioned by President Bill Clinton in a toast during his trip to Vietnam in November. It has sold surprisingly well, as poetry books go, and is in its third printing after two runs totaling about 10,000 copies since October.
"For a late-18th-century Vietnamese concubine not widely known in the West, that's pretty amazing," said Michael Wiegers, the managing editor of Copper Canyon. "She's doing very well for herself." There are many remarkable turns in the tale of how this book led to the effort to preserve Nom, a script so arcane that scholars say that just a few dozen of the 80 million people who live in Vietnam can read it with proficiency. "Sometimes books really do change the world," said the Utne Reader in its review. "This one will set in motion a project that may transform Vietnamese culture."
It begins, of course, with Ho, a concubine (meaning second wife, and "like the maid/but without the pay," as she put it in one poem) whose life is clouded in some mystery but whose poetry was by turns scholarly, strident, bawdy and funny, steeped in double-entendres and altogether questioning and even mocking of the Confucian strictures of the day. (Under the Confucian Book of Rites, notes Mr. Balaban in his introduction, a woman "when unmarried, should obey her father; when married, her husband; and, if widowed, her son.")
The tale of the book stretches to the Vietnam War, during which Mr. Balaban was a conscientious objector who nonetheless went to Vietnam and worked for a children's relief agency providing medical care in war-damaged villages. After that, even while the fighting continued, Mr. Balaban, fascinated by the Vietnamese language, started traveling the countryside with a tape recorder to collect folk tales and people's recitations of Vietnamese poetry.
"Imagine a Vietnamese walking up to an American farmhouse during the war and knocking on the door, introducing himself and saying, `I wonder if you would sing me your favorite poem,'" Mr. Balaban said in a telephone interview. "Instead of being driven off with a shotgun, I was welcomed."
Over and over Mr. Balaban heard the earthy poems of Ho (whose full name is roughly pronounced hoe swan who-ung), which are deeply popular in the oral tradition across all classes of Vietnamese society and are passed along in hand-drawn copies. Using puns and elaborate rhymes and playing on tonal differences in the language, her poems are often good for a laugh and many have not-so-hidden sexual imagery.
Others use timeless natural images and simply sound beautiful, both in Vietnamese and now in Mr. Balaban's translations, as in "Questions for the Moon":
"How many thousands of years have you been there? Why sometimes slender, why sometimes full?" the poem asks, and later continues:
Why do you circle the purple loneliness of night and seldom blush before the sun? Weary, past midnight, who are you searching for? Are you in love with these rivers and hills?
Mr. Balaban also came across spoken renderings by village women that are attributed to Ho, though they struck him, after further research, as modern imitations of the poet's voice. No one knows for sure, which in a way makes her influence more intriguing. One common such poem is called "The Condition of Women":
Sisters, do you know how it is? On one hand, the bawling baby; on the other, your husband sliding onto your stomach, his little son still howling at your side. Yet, everything must be put in order. Rushing around all helter-skelter. Husband and child, what obligations! Sisters, do you know how it is?
Mr. Balaban is poet in residence and a professor of English at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.
"For 10 years I have pecked at these translations, often just giving up but always returning," Mr. Balaban, who has written several volumes of his own poetry and been nominated twice for the National Book Award, explains in the introduction to the collection of Ho's poetry.
The translations into English would have been important in their own right. But now the story shifts to New York City, where Dr. Ngo Thanh Nhan, a Vietnamese-born computational linguist at New York University, had been collaborating for years on a project to digitize each stroke of each Nom character for printing.
Though Mr. Balaban can't read much Nom, he and Copper Canyon saw the book as a way to highlight Dr. Nhan's work and to preserve the language. Ho's poetry uses about 1,000 characters, but there are more than 25,000 uniquely Vietnamese characters in the complete Nom script. They and several other Vietnamese scholars have formed the nonprofit Vietnamese Nom Preservation Foundation (its Web address is http://nomfoundation.tripod.com/) and hope to keep the written language alive by digitizing all Nom characters and creating a Nom dictionary.
That work will help in the translation of Nom texts that cover hundreds of years and are now in libraries in Hanoi, Paris, the Vatican (taken there by French and Portuguese priests), London, Washington and elsewhere. Their topics include literature, poetry, history, law, Buddhism, medicine and philosophy.
With the preservation work under way, the story of the poetry book shifts finally to Port Townsend, a small, artsy town about 25 miles northwest of Seattle.
Copper Canyon Press was started in Denver in 1972 and moved here a few years later. It has become known in poetry circles as the domain of Sam Hamill, a brooding, strong-willed co-founder, who became a conscientious objector while in the Marine Corps in Okinawa in the early 1960's and then a Zen Buddhist. He has written several books of poetry, translated dozens of works by Chinese and Japanese masters, and overseen the roughly 250 books that have been published by Copper Canyon.
Along with its focus on translations of Asian poets, Copper Canyon has also published collections by Pablo Neruda, Czeslaw Milosz, Denise Levertov, Hayden Carruth, W. S. Merwin and Jim Harrison. The house publishes about 18 books a year and operates with revenues from them and contributions from the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts and others.
"For us, a book is a mission," explained Mr. Wiegers, the managing editor, and this one might serve as a bridge between the two countries. Mr. Clinton described the book as an example of cultural exchange in his Nov. 17 toast at the presidential palace in Hanoi: "The 200-year-old poems of Ho Xuan Huong are published in America," he said, "in English, in Vietnamese, and even in the original Nom, the first time ancient Vietnamese has come off a printing press."
Of course, it also simply serves to introduce Western readers to Ho. "My persistence was sustained by admiration and awe," Mr. Balaban said, "which I hope the reader will experience: for Ho Xuan Huong's lonely, intelligent life, for her exquisite poetry, her stubbornness, her sarcasm, her bravery, her irreverent humor and her bodhisattva's compassion."