Languages

In a sleepless night, an old man remembers how he and his wife have spent a lifetime speaking the language of feet.   One sleepless night typical of the old and insomniac, Mr. Thuyết suddenly remembers the eyes of his daughter when she was three or four years old. For decades, he has kept that evening in near-complete oblivion without once recalling the eyes of the child who was always attached to him, the eyes of the child who would lie with her head in his arms,...

A Different Context I first came to know another side of Vietnamese poetry, outside of the formal education system, through “virtual encounters” and friends in distant places, writers and works on internet forums like Talawas, Tiền Vệ, Evan, Gió-O, Hợp Lưu, Tạp Chí Thơ, and overseas Vietnamese publications passed from hand to hand between friends inside the country. The circulation of these publications over many years even now...

A piece of furniture in an unusual location sparks a series of interrogations.      a velvet chair             standing by itself                         on a highway a chair standing by itself on a highway             means its life is over a life of ups and downs             before it was...

A Vietnamese woman visiting her ex-husband's family in Denmark remembers the many men she's loved in her life.    At fourteen I fell in love with a man, a writer, older than me by thirteen years, already with a family. He resembled a young Anthony Perkins, that guitar-playing wanderer who roams the forest and happens upon the doe eyes of Audrey Hepburn in the foliage. At twenty-one I lost my virgin body to a person who specialized in the old lục bát...

What begins as a meditation on love soon meanders past a lighthouse, past an ox with broken horns, until it reaches consciousness.    1 Love I liberate the captive herd within me I summon back the fossilized kisses 2 If things have souls then things bear static souls 3 Hungry birds are building nests in space Affliction gathers in the handkerchief of a bride on her wedding day 4 We kidnap fear by the sharp-edged tongue of a knife 5 The sound of your crying purifies the...

Trần Dần’s novel, Crossroads and Lampposts, is set in Hanoi in late 1954 and 1955, immediately following the withdrawal of the French and the takeover by the Viet Minh under the terms of the Geneva Accords. Duong, the main character in the novel, is under suspicion of being a collaborator with the former French regime. In this excerpt from chapter three, Trinh (aka Com), Duong’s wife, talks about life under the new regime and her husband’s state of mind....

These translated, cut-up and reassembled Vietnamese texts are by Nguyễn-Hoàng Quyên, originals by Nguyễn Quốc Chánh (“Syndrome,” “Fucking Skulls Open”), Bùi Giáng (“Sương Tỳ Hải”), and Nhã Thuyên (“taste of waters”).   birds one by one penetrates a gap, disappearing wings disappearing songs, beaks remain, cut open one another’s eyes, napes, death...

In this surrealistic piece, a sleeping man wakes up to find a visitor watching him.    He comes to find me on a day I don’t remember, by the time I’ve gotten up he is already sitting on the other side of the table to watch as I eat my breakfast. He does not say a word as I stir the coffee, the spoon’s collision with the side of the glass making a dispassionate clang. I’ve been sleeping for a while, not sure how long a while, he must have arrived as I...

Uncurbed by either pretense or punctuation, Vietnamese poet Nhã Thuyên plays with nothingness as the tangibility of meaning.  ___________________________________________ In the ongoing fruitless search for a third-person-singular and gender-neutral term that remains both familiar and human in English, as "hắn" does in Vietnamese, the author and translator have settled on “that one.” I don’t want to construct an obvious...

In “Sage on the Mountain,” Vietnamese writer Đỗ Bích Thúy reveals the little-seen world of a Tay ethnic minority village in the northern province of Ha Giang near the Chinese border.  The protagonist, Dzin, has returned to visit her aged mother, a war widow who feels caught between the old ways and the new.  Ma and my nephew, Sinh, met me at the fork where the trail turned up the slope that led to the house on stilts. It perched...

The day you came, the world knew how to breathe, earth worms suddenly knew how to sing, and the earth's surface trembled with life. My mother had kept my embryo inside for days and months where I wriggled, the world too small. I howl inside of my own hoarse voice. Wind blows me into your hands, so I feel the pain pierce my fingers and toes. Your gaze opens the sky. The sun rises and forgets to set. You place me on your lips and on your chest. Our hands join to make a...

One day the wind lifts me high so I look down and see an ant imprisoned in a multi-folder email box, in a mobile phone ringing from time to time. One day the wind lifts me high so I look down and see a bird imprisoned in the praises of his flock, in the limits of a sense of beauty pre-arranged. One day the wind lifts me high; the wind hands me a pair of wings and tells me to free myself from wings and fly above my thoughts. Translation of “Coi Goi.” First...

Yellow lamps, prostitutes' eyes Lines of sad provincial poems On a farewell afternoon, yellow leaves are falling Ocean winds have no ports or borders Ocean clouds go their own way Like dates, the harbors have no names In the Lap River the tide rises Fishing boats go and come Someone waits at the Binh ferry for someone A smile is blurred by cement-plant smoke The people of Hai Phong are like sea-wind and sun Off they go, with the dawn Their footprints cover the...

Is there, out there, a sky Sunny or windy or humid with autumn A sky at dawn, or a sunset sky? Are there, out there, human faces Strange or familiar Happy or hurting Friendly faces, or faces like beasts'? Is there, out there, a nothingness With no future, and no past? Was it I who drew the curtains across the window? Is there, out there, dark earth That buries all flesh that once was beauty That buries all glances, all shut lips? Is there only this place?...

I will find myself in a mirror My name in a line of poetry My destiny in a person I've never met Once I lay in the sun by the Caspian Sea Listening to songs of seaweed and foam A sleepwalker with nothing to lose or gain In that Khuong Co land, the sun set under my feet Now I raise my eyes Dim with the red dust of time Or is it the dust of remembered mountains? Invisible candles shine in the night There is hope in every moment In the crossroads of my window...

Like a falling leaf in a dream Or an arm in a dream, dangling A night flight, with eyes wide open A June night, an astonished look No one sees the vanished smile The soldier's dark face above the barrel No one fears the barrel now— An eel sniffing the mud In a garden, banana leaves still catch dew On tall bamboo, a nest of storks sleeps soundly Only an ancient bat startles In a closed house, a mother turns up her lamp Not knowing she will be lonelier now And...