In this essay, Thuy Dinh, one of the translators of Vietnamese poet Lâm thị Mỹ Dạ, remembers and reflects on the visual beauty, delicate music, and subtle dissonances of her work, in light of her recent passing.
On July 6, 2023, Lâm thị Mỹ Dạ, one of Vietnam’s major poets whose poetry was featured in Asymptote’s July 2013 issue, passed away in Saigon, Vietnam, due to complications from Alzheimer’s. She was 74.
An author of several acclaimed poetry collections and children’s stories, Mỹ Dạ attended the Nguyễn Du Writing School in Hà Nội in 1983 and Russia’s Maxim Gorky Institute of Advanced Studies in Literature in 1988. In 2007, she was awarded the National Prize in Literature and the Arts ⸺Vietnam’s highest literary honor ⸺ for her three poetry collections: Trái Tim Sinh Nở (The Blossoming Heart), Bài Thơ Không Năm Tháng (Poems Without Years), and Đề Tặng Một Giấc Mơ (Dedicated to a Dream). Her last two collections, Soul Brimming with Wild Chrysanthemums (Hồn Đầy Hoa Cúc Dại) and The Love Poems of Lâm thị Mỹ Dạ (Thơ Tình Lâm thị Mỹ Dạ) were also published in 2007. In the U.S., Green Rice, an anthology of Mỹ Dạ’s select poems, co-translated by poet Martha Collins and myself, represents her poetic legacy in translation.
I first met Mỹ Dạ in the summer of 2000 in Boston, Massachusetts, when she came to the William Joiner Institute as part of an invited four-member delegation of writers from Vietnam. I had come to the Institute that summer to attend workshops in translation and creative nonfiction; serendipitously, Martha, who taught the translation workshop, was looking for a Vietnamese co-translator to work with her on an anthology of Mỹ Dạ’s poetry. I happily embarked on this project, sensing that this collaboration—besides being my first major translation project⸺would also give me an immersive opportunity to study an important female poet from “the other side.” As a young writer whose family had been airlifted out of Saigon by U.S. military personnel near the end of the Vietnam War, I knew very little at the time about literature from the Communist perspective. We were still in the early years of the internet, and barely five years into the normalization of U.S-Vietnam relations.
Most of all, I was drawn to the prospect of translating Mỹ Dạ’s work by the voice of the poet herself—a voice that I have found, in person and through her writing, to be artlessly nuanced. I was born in the south, years after the 1954 separation of North and South Vietnam, but have remained deeply attuned to my family’s Hà Nội accent; as such, I had to learn to decode Mỹ Da’s voice. Her melodious Central Vietnamese cadence gradually revealed a mordant sense of humor that was not too different from my late maternal grandfather’s Northern brand of sarcasm. In my memory, Mỹ Dạ’s speech takes on the resonance of wind chimes, softly rolling pebbles, and rustling waves.
In the process of translating Mỹ Dạ’s poetry, I also wanted to examine my identity as a Vietnamese-American writer⸺the perpetual anxiety of being both outsider and naturalized citizen. In conversations with the poet, I often shifted positions subconsciously, confusingly; I would use “we” to denote the fact that both she and I were compatriots, yet at other times I would use “we” to mean “us Americans,” while discussing cultural differences between the U.S. and Vietnam. By leaving Vietnam in 1975, I have become a “Việt Kiều”⸺a guest /stranger of Vietnamese ancestry.
As a translator, for a long time I grappled with Mỹ Dạ’s two most political poems—“Journey into White Night” (“Đi Trong Đêm Màu Trắng”) and “Bomb Crater Sky” (“Khoảng Trời, Hố Bom”), written at the height of the Vietnam conflict to rally Communist morale. As poet and essayist Paisley Rekdal astutely observes in “Iphigenia in Afghanistan,” since the contemporary, so-called progressive reader of poetry is trained to read conflict poems that are critical of war, they would be suspicious of poems that manifest martial or nationalist fervor. It can be “doubly disturbing” to read a pro-war poem written by a female poet from a different ideological perspective, and who, as a civilian, presumably faces different risks than a male soldier at the front. Even now, I struggle with the last two lines in Mỹ Dạ “Journey into White Night,” an otherwise captivating poem that juxtaposes images of pristine beaches, pearlescent birds’ eggs, and flying fish at an idyllic coastal village, with the martial determination of an infantry unit on the eve of a seaside battle:
Gun barrels reach toward the vast open sky
Protecting the thousand white things being born(Những họng súng vươn lên trời cao rộng
Giữ cho nghìn trong trắng mãi sinh sôi.)
Born in Quảng Bình Province, twenty kilometers north of the DMZ, and having grown up near the sites where the bloodiest fighting of the Vietnam War took place, Mỹ Dạ had a bleak childhood, ostracized from educational opportunities due to “bad family connections”—a landowning paternal grandfather and an absent father wrongly suspected of working for the South Vietnamese government. She eventually found solace in poetry and started writing poems at ten, describing her childhood as “a red-stained gloaming / that spatters blood on the town’s black river.” Fortunately, a venerated poet and member of the Quảng Bình Artists and Writers Club took notice of her creative talent and became her mentor. Then, in 1971, Mỹ Dạ won first prize at an annual poetry contest, organized by Văn Nghệ (Literature and Arts) Magazine, for her poem “Bomb Crater Sky.” Centered around a young road builder who “calls the bombs down on [herself] / And save the road for the troops,” it has since become one of her most famous poems.
While “Bomb Crater Sky”, like “Journey into White Night,” can be read as propagandist, Martha and I detected tensions that could be subtly explored via its English translation:
The name of the road is your name
Your death is a young girl’s patch of blue sky
My soul is lit by your lifeAnd my friends, who never saw you
Each has a different image of your face(Tên con đường là tên em gửi lại
Cái chết em xanh khoảng trời con gái
Tôi soi lòng mình trong cuộc sống của emGương mặt em, bạn bè tôi không biết
Nên mỗi người có gương mặt em riêng)
The poem contrasts the heroine’s supposed immortality (having the road named after her) with the static reality of death. The girl will never become a woman. In Mỹ Dạ’s original version, the second line, if translated literally, would be “Your death turns blue the expanse of maiden sky.” Somehow this lyrical image deepens, rather than alleviates, our grief. While upheld as a legend, the girl is now privately conjured by anyone chancing upon the road that bears her name. Thus, a bystander’s imaginative space—away from the collective, monolithic concept of heroism—seems to dilute, even subvert, the patriotic message of “Bomb Crater Sky.” The poem’s ambiguity somehow reminds me of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in which the poet meditates on the contrast between the inanimate urn⸺a memorial vessel ⸺and the life-like, bucolic scenes painted upon it:
Thou silent form! dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
Women’s poetry written during the Vietnam War, while purported to celebrate gender equality, still slotted women in a mostly supportive, non-confrontational role ⸺as Rekdal discerns. Re-reading Mỹ Dạ’s “Night Harvest” (“Gặt Đêm”) nearly two decades after co-translating this poem, I detect a note, more like armored resignation than defiance, coming from the female harvesters who face the imminent threat of cluster bombs:
The golds of rice and cluster-bombs blend together
Even delayed-fuse bombs bring no fear
Our spirits have known many years of war
Come, sisters, let us gather the harvest(Màu vàng bom bi lẫn trong màu vàng của lúa
Bom nổ chậm không làm ta sợ nữa
Bao năm chiến tranh lòng đã quen rồi
Nào chị em mình gặt đi thôi)
Edward Hirsch, in his Poet’s Choice column for the Washington Post, rightly perceives the “playful, stoic” tone of “Night Harvest”⸺ rendered in English as a sonnet. He also asserts that the female harvesters are “completely unafraid.” This reading is reasonable, given that “delayed-fuse bombs bring no fear,” plus the seemingly declarative ending couplet:
We are not frightened by bullets and bombs in the air
Only by dew wetting our lime-scented hair
Actually, the poem’s last couplet sounds more equivocal in Vietnamese:
Đạn bom rơi chẳng sợ đâu
Chỉ e sương ướt mái đầu lá chanh
From its mostly stoic register, the speaker’s voice shifts imperceptibly, yet startlingly, into sarcasm. It’s not that the harvesters are unafraid of the cluster bombs, but since none of them can prevent the bombs from falling, it’s easier to occupy their minds with personal grooming habits, to worry whether their freshly washed, lime-scented hair would be compromised by falling dew. The ending couplet disturbs and fascinates me in its diverting tactic, a show of feminine bravado both to disguise and accentuate the poem’s performative core.
My collaboration with Martha, from 2000 to 2005, would result in translations of Mỹ Dạ’s poetry that went on to appear in Six Vietnamese Poets, ed. Nguyen Ba Chung and Kevin Bowen (Curbstone, 2002), and Green Rice (Curbstone, 2005). In the Introduction to Green Rice, Martha discusses the “surprisingly calm tension[s]” that not only “manifest and resolve themselves” throughout Mỹ Dạ’s poetry, but also in our “richly rewarding” teamwork, between “a Vietnamese poet who wrote [poems] during the war, [that were] translated by a Vietnamese-American writer who left at the end of it and an American woman who protested it with little knowledge of the country in which it occurred.” Martha’s introduction gracefully captures the alchemic nature of our translation process, in which a single voice seemingly emerges to connect syntactical and cultural gaps, making its construction legible to an Anglo readership. To illustrate, Edward Hirsch also praises Mỹ Dạ’s four-line poem “Garden Fragrance” (“Hương Vườn”) ⸺ as resembling a “tiny metaphysical poem by Marvell or Donne, the quatrain creates an argument that hinges on the word but at the start of the second line”:
Last night a bomb exploded on the veranda
But sounds of birds sweeten the earth this morning
I hear the fragrance trees, look in the garden,
Find two silent clusters of ripe guavas.
Actually, Mỹ Dạ’s original second line is “Sớm ra, trời vẫn ngọt mềm tiếng chim” (“This morning, the sky remains softly sweet with bird sounds”), which indicates less of an argument than a fluid acceptance of the existing contradictions in the speaker’s environment.
Besides the illusion of textual unity, another promise of translation seems to be its eternal youth, precisely because no translated text is ever definitive. Looking back at Green Rice with the hindsight of experience, I think there are still poems that can be revised to plumb their linguistic elasticity. Recognizing the fact that the translation process is potentially endless, I also believe that ideas negotiated through language, culture, and our cumulative reading experience can bridge time and space. Mỹ Dạ’s grilled green rice uncannily reminds me of Proust’s madeleine:
Like a dragonfly drifting out of reach
Green rice, green dewdrops dissolve
Oh green rice on my tongue, I wish
You could turn me back into a child.(Như cánh chuồn vụt bay không níu được
Hạt sương xanh – hạt cốm nhỏ tan dần
Cốm xanh ơi, ước chi người có phép
Khi chạm vào người ta hóa trẻ con
Ultimately, the impermanent, cyclical notion of time, paradoxically akin to a translated text’s eternal possibility, represents the central theme in Mỹ Dạ’s poetry. Despite the traumatic legacy of war, her poetic universe is suffused with green: green rice, green areca, green custard apples, green camphor trees, and green grass. Even the poet’s intimations of mortality assume the viridescent hue of rebirth.
Thuy Dinh is coeditor of Da Màu and editor-at-large at Asymptote Journal. Her works have appeared in Asymptote, NPR Books, NBCThink, Prairie Schooner, Rain Taxi Review of Books, and Manoa, among others. She tweets @ThuyTBDinh.
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