On Henri Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy

Lam Thi My Da


Henri Rousseau. The Sleeping Gypsy. 1897.


Amazing night
Mysterious desert moon
A young woman pillows her head on the sand
A lute, a simple jug of wine
Does the woman sleep or dream?

Desert night
A lion bends down and looks
Touching the woman's hair
The light of his eyes is hypnotic
Will the lion kiss the woman, or swallow her up?

Is the lion a manifestation of time
Coupled with cruelty?

White desert night
Black woman
Lute, jug of wine
Abundant full moon
Is this the riddle of naïve art?

Will the lion kiss the woman or consume her?
Who knows what the lion thinks?

I understand, Henri, I understand
Cruelty and time will bow in homage
To pure, harmonious beauty

Gentle desert night
A woman sleeps calmly
Lute moon
Jug of wine moon
The lion bends down and looks


translated from the Vietnamese by Martha Collins and Thuy Dinh

Read the original in Vietnamese

Listen to the poem read in the original Vietnamese by Thuy Dinh:

Lam Thi My Da lives in Hue, Vietnam. She has worked as a reporter and a literary editor, and serves as an Executive Board Member of the Vietnamese Writers' Association. She has published six collections of poems and three books for children in Vietnam, and has won several major prizes for poetry. Green Rice, a bilingual collection of her poems with translations by Martha Collins and Thuy Dinh, was published by Curbstone in 2005.

Martha Collins is the author of Blue Front (2006) and White Papers (2012), as well as four earlier collections of poems. She has published two volumes of co-translated Vietnamese poetry: Nguyen Quang Thieu's The Women Carry River Water (UMass, 1998), which won an award from the American Literary Translators Association; and Lam Thi My Da's Green Rice(Curbstone, 2005).

Thuy Dinh is coeditor of the Vietnamese literary e-zine Da Màu. Her poetry translations have appeared in Asymptote, Prairie Schooner, Manoa, Rattle, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Santa Fe Broadside, among others. Green Rice, her co-translation of the selected poetry of Lâm Thị Mỹ Dạ, was published by Curbstone Press in 2005, and nominated for the Kiriyama Prize in 2006.