Posts filed under ‘Translations’
May 25, 2010
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 Unpublished and unpublishable in Vietnam, Phan Nhiên Hạo’s poetry circulates underground, on-line, and overseas.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.
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