STEALING AND GIVING ODOR.

Rain all yesterday, sunshine again today, and tomorrow more rain. Waking this morning the house full of the perfume of flowers. A red peony floating in a glass bowl on the kitchen table; three more peonies blooming out of a slender white vase, red and red and red; small roses two in a blue vase. Flowers broken by last night’s rain and rescued by my mother’s hand. I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it. Then later this evening we watch on TV the “Garden Roots of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry“.

Flowers–Well–if anybody
Can the ecstasy define–
Half a transport–half a trouble–
With which flowers humble men:
Anybody find the fountain
From which floods so contra flow–
I will give him all the Daisies
Which upon the hillside blow.

Too much pathos in their faces
For a simple breast like mine–
Butterflies from St. Domingo
Cruising round the purple line–
Have a system of aesthetics–
Far superior to mine.

The poems below by Phan Nhiên Hạo are “fueled by a mix of strife, hope, love, and futility.” Phan Nhiên Hạo’s elusive, surreal, yet emotionally charged poetry gives voice to an emergent consciousness and conscience formed in diaspora. The five poems that I translate (“Meeting a Taxi Driver in New York,” “Manufacturing Poetry,” “Sunday, May 10, 1998,” “Paper Bells,” and “E-mail to Nguyen Quoc Chanh”) exhibit to varying intensities the qualities that readers, critics, and fellow poets have admired about Phan Nhiên Hạo’s work: his conversational ease and stripped down idiom in Vietnamese; his spare, matter-of-fact description of physical and emotional geographies; 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 Unpublished and unpublishable in Vietnam, Phan Nhiên Hạo’s poetry circulates underground, on-line, and overseas. Fortunately, for English readers, his work is available in the excellent translations by Linh Dinh collected in Night, Fish and Charlie Parker (2006). I try my hand at translation here, out of a creative and collaborative desire to respond to the call of the poems themselves, which appear in English for the first time. 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.

“They don’t know about my secret life,” Phan Nhiên Hạo tells me. We’re standing in front of his office, having slipped into the library through a back door by the loading dock and taken three sets of escalators up to the fourth floor. “Don’t get me wrong, I love my job, but I don’t live for it,” he says searching his coat pockets for his keys, “my life as a poet is just more interesting.” I notice two students sitting opposite of each other at a study table close by. One glances over at us, momentarily, then turns back to her book. Hạo has been updating me about his job as head librarian of the Southeast Asia Collection at Northern Illinois University, including his recent book finding trip to Burma, Thailand, and Malaysia. By “they” I know he has his colleagues immediately in mind.

His colleagues know him simply as Hao Phan. Some of them call him “Howie.” They may know he was born in Vietnam, and immigrated to the US in 1991, lived in California for many years, went to school at UCLA, where he received his BA in American Literature and Culture, then went on to get a Masters in Library Science, and eventually took the position as curator of the Southeast Asia Collection. They probably know that he doesn’t live in the same town as the university, but in one of the even smaller towns nearby, just down the county road. They might know that he has a family too, a wife, a daughter in the first grade whose name means cloud in Vietnamese but is a spring month in English, and a newborn son, if not from talking with him or from others who have talked to him, then at least inferred from the family photos that can be seen in his office when they pass by. They regard him as their colleague, the curator of a remarkable library collection at an otherwise unremarkable school. But why should they know otherwise? For the most part, he keeps his secret life to himself. And even if they knew about it, he conducts his secret life in a language they do not know.

In his secret life, he is known as Phan Nhiên Hạo. Poet, critic, essayist, and travel writer, he is the author of two collections of poems in Vietnamese, Thiên Đường Chuông Giấy [Paradise of Paper Bells] (1998) and Chế Tạo Thơ Ca 99-04 [Manufacturing Poetry 99-04] (2004). Combining surrealist imagery with a deceptively plain-spoken voice, his poetry digs up the psychic debris left in the wake of war and immigration. His poems are shot-through with veiled allusions to personal memories as well larger histories, the two more often than not entangled. His is a nocturnal poetry, by turns dreamlike and nightmarish, quiet and disquieting, ironic and dead serious, sometimes melancholic, often introspective, and ever vigilant. Night is the secret province of Phan Nhiên Hạo’s poetry, and is emblematic of a limited, limiting freedom. What his poems uncover in the night is too glaring for the light of day. They tell the open secrets of Vietnam’s postwar history of loss, imprisonment, displacement, and cultural amnesia.

I’m visiting Hạo on a quiet and foggy Saturday afternoon in January. He lives just two hours south of Madison in northern Illinois, but what is regularly a short drive was made considerably longer by the areas of dense fog that rolled into the region when I drove down in the morning. And more mysterious! In the fog, crumbling barns became passing shipwrecks, groves of trees turned into distant islands, and the fields into a grey sea of nothing, and there I was floating approximately nowhere. How fortunate I felt when I finally piloted my vessel to the Misty Landing where Hạo lives. A little cloud came out to greet me. I remembered to carry a door on my back. Now on this afternoon with nothing to do, Hạo and I sit down and talk about his secret life as a poet.