poets-from-vietnam

"Ðưa chàng lòng dằng dặc buồn, Bộ khôn bằng ngựa, thủy khôn bằng thuyền."

"Cùng trông lại mà cùng chẳng thấy, Thấy xanh xanh những mấy ngàn dâu. Ngàn dâu xanh ngắt một màu, Lòng chàng ý thiếp ai sầu hơn ai?"

"Chàng tuổi trẻ vốn dòng hào kiệt, Xếp bút nghiên theo việc đao cung. Thành liền mong hiến bệ rồng, Thước gươm đã quyết chẳng dung giặc trời."

"Lòng hứa quốc thắm son ngăn ngắt, Sức tý dân đụng sắt trơ trơ."

"Thiếp xin chàng chớ bạc đầu, Thiếp thì giữ mãi lấy màu trẻ trung."

"Chàng thì đi cõi xa mưa gió, Thiếp thì về buồng cũ gối chăn."

"Hồn tử sĩ gió ù ù thổi, Mặt chinh phu trăng dõi dõi soi. Chinh phu tử sĩ mấy người, Nào ai mạc mặt, nào ai gọi hồn."

"Hà lương chia rẽ đường này, Bên đường, trông bóng cờ bay ngùi ngùi."

"Thuở trời đất nổi cơn gió bụi, Khách má hồng nhiều nỗi truân chuyên. Xanh kia thăm thẳm tầng trên, Vì ai gây dựng cho nên nỗi này?"

"Bóng dương để hoa vàng chẳng đoái, Hoa để vàng vì tại bóng dương. Hoa vàng hoa rụng quanh tường, Trải xem hoa rụng đêm sương mấy lần."

"Sứ trời sớm giục đường mây, Phép công là trọng, niềm tây sá nào."

"In the end, in every war, whoever won, the people always lost."

"Những mong cá nước vui vầy, Ai ngờ đôi ngả nước mây cách vời."

"Thuở lâm hành oanh chưa mến liễu, Hỏi ngày về, ước nẻo quyên ca. Nay quyên đã giục, oanh già, Ý nhi lại gáy trước nhà líu lo."

"Whatever has happened, the land always lives within us... We are the people and we will endure."

"Lòng lão thân buồn khi tựa cửa, Miệng hài nhi chờ bữa mớm cơm. Ngọt bùi thiếp đã hiếu nam, Khuyến con đèn sách thiếp làm phụ thân."

"I am a bird from mountains you don't know. My throat feels itchy—so I start to chirp when sings the morning wind among the leaves, when dreams the moon at midnight in the blue. Perched on a branch, the bird longs for its brook— it will break into song and not know why. Its ditties cannot make the fruits grow ripe; its carols cannot help the flowers bloom. It's profitless to sing, and yet the bird will burst its throat and heart to sing its best."

"At break of day I feel as if I'm clasping a bouquet of smiling flowers But the wind of time does not cease blowing And the hours wilt like falling petals."

"The Southern emperor rules the Southern land. Our destiny is writ in Heaven's Book. How dare ye bandits trespass on our soil? Ye shall meet your undoing at our hands!"

"Gnawing upon our resentment, we stretch out in an iron cage, Watching the slow passage of days and months. How we despise the insolent crowd outside, Standing there foolishy, with tiny eyes bulging, As they mock the stately spirit of the deep jungle. Here by misfortune, shamefully caged, We are no more than a novel sight to amuse them, some plaything... O stately soul, heroic land, Vast domain where yesteryear we freely roamed, We see you no more. But do you know that during our days of frustration We follow a great dream, letting our souls race to be near you, O formidable jungle of ours!"

"Hỡi chị em ơi có biết không? Một bên con khóc một bên chồng. Bố cu lổm ngổm bò trên bụng, Thằng bé hu hơ khóc dưới hông. Tất cả những là thu với vén, Vội vàng nào những bống cùng bông. Chồng con cái nợ là như thế, Hỡi chị em ơi có biết không?"

"The Queen of Nôm poetry."

"The muse lends me a lyre of myriad tunes, her brush of myriad tints—I want to play a wizard working wonders, magic tricks with all the sounds and colors of the earth."

"Cực lạc là. đây, chín rõ mười."

"Here the lake is filled with lotuses. Tell the flower girls to pick some, not stepping on Hô Xuân Hương's grave. In the Golden Springs beyond, she still is angry about lost love. Lipstick dry, powder faded, tomb untended, Xuân Hương is gone...."

"Hồ Xuân Hương is an improbable figure in Vietnamese literature. Vietnamese historians are virtually unanimous in acclaiming her as the "most special" poetry writer who ever lived in Vietnam. ... She wrote poetry which, for all its playfulness, may have been the darkest assault upon Confucian ethics ever delivered by a literate scholar of a classical East Asian society. Most modern Vietnamese writers agree that she often went too far, to the point where her contemporaries regarded her as a "monster," whose influence should be obliterated."

"Can't spit it out, can't gulp it down. My love chokes me—what should I do? Would I could scream one long, loud scream! Oh, it hurts so! Does someone know?"

"To be a poet is to be lulled by the wind, To follow the moon in dreams, and drift with the clouds."

"Love is just a little bit of death in the heart, For how often can one love in certainty that love will be returned? Giving so much love, and receiving so little of it; Because people are fickle, or indifferent? Who knows? During moments together as in hours apart, I'm mindful that the moon fades, flowers wither, souls pass away... They wander lost in the somber darkness of sorrow, Those fools who follow the footprints of love. Because life is an endless desert, And love is an entangling web. Love is just a little bit of death in the heart."

"But alas, I'm going to die! I'm a chap who...clings to life with the fingernails of both hands. One who drinks of love till it overflows his lips, But alas, I'm going to die... The other night I sat alone in agony, Listening to the hours pass, wracked with sorrow... I have arrived to face the cold border of nihility."

"What earthly use are these Confucian graphs? Masters and doctors lie curled up and wilt. Why not take lessons and become a clerk? At night champagne, at break of day cow's milk!"

"Ghé mắt trông ngang thấy bảng treo, Kìa đến thái thú đứng cheo leo. Ví đây đổi phận làm trai được, Thì sự anh hùng há bấy nhiêu!"

"To hell with the fate that makes you share a man... You slave like the maid, but without the pay. If I had known how it would go, I think I would have lived alone."

"Thân em vừa trắng lại vừa tròn, Bảy nổi ba chìm với nước non. Rắn nát mặc dầu tay kẻ nặn. Mà em vẫn giữ tấm lòng son."

"They destroy while we want to live"

"Little sister, do you know why humanity passes down ancient tales, from hand to hand, from generation to generation? It is so that each generation can add something that was not there yesterday. ...The miracle of today is in the hands of those who go unshod, their hearts bare."

"[A] bright star on the literary scene in the late 1930s was a young man from central Vietnam who wrote under the pen name Che Lan Vien. His reputation was based primarily on one slender volume of poems, entitled In Ruins, published in 1937 when he was only seventeen years old. Although he was Vietnamese, his poems are mostly about Champa and written from a Cham rather than Vietnamese point of view. It seems, however, that behind his preoccupation with the long-crumpled glories of Champa, deemed worthy of countless centuries of lamentation and regret, lay a view of Vietnam in the 1930s as a decadent and dying society whose true glory was "in ruins.""

"Pale, cold torchlight. Slender shadows from a row of tall bamboo Flicker dimly on the coffin of a child Carried through the chilling dew. A sobbing old woman lays bare her heart. I stare at the countless stars in silence, asking myself: Since when has my soul been destroyed? And might that dark coffin of a child Not contain my corpse as well? Vaguely, from the immensity of space, I heard a star cast a soft reply."

"Nothing at all is lost When life has clear purpose."

"One translucent day I leave the city to visit my home, the land of Champa.Here are stupas gaunt with yearning, ancient temples ruined by time, streams that creep alone through the dark past peeling statues that moan of Champa.Here are dense and drooping forests where long processions, lost souls of Champa, march; and evening spills through thick, fragrant leaves, mingling with the cries of moorhens.Here is the field where two great armies were reduced to a horde of clamoring souls. Champa blood still cascades in streams of hatred to grinding oceans filled with Champa bones.Here too are placid images: hamlets at rest in evening sun, Champa girls gliding homeward, their light chatter floating with the pink and saffron of their dresses.Here are magnificent sunbaked palaces, temples that blaze in cerulean skies. Here battleships dream on the glossy river, while the thunder of sacred elephants shakes the walls.Here, in opaque light sinking through lapis lazuli, the Champa king and his men are lost in a maze of flesh as dancers weave, wreathe, entranced, their bodies harmonizing with the flutes.All this I saw on my way home years ago and still I am obsessed, my mind stunned, sagged with sorrow for the race of Champa."

"Listen to me, skull! Under your thin brittle boneplates what black memories haunt you? What do you want? What do you dream of? ... Is it your soul you think of, flickering through frightful nights? ... Skull, I must have been raving mad to smash you with my bare fist. Scarlet blood thickens on my fingers, plagues me to spew these rhymes, and still my teeth want to tear you to pieces! Like a raven I'll swallow even the sucked-out bones to get a fresh taste of the past, a drop from the torrent of months and years."

"O Heaven! Today I am sick and tired Of the colors and forms of this world! ... I close my eyes to disregard the present, Gradually shifting into the past upon my eyelids. I close my eyes to let the dark shadows arise boundlessly, Immense as in the deep of night, To let my soul grow dark with the artificial, In the world of the dead so long awaited. Let the shades of ghosts and demons one by one appear. Let their cries, their shouts of epilogue, reverberate in my ear. Let me roll about, my soul intoxicated with illusion, To put out of mind for a few minutes the scenes of this world! Let my soul soar rapidly over great distances In the dark night shadows of my eyelids, And proudly assert: Here is a world Created in a moment of grief."

"Khen ai khéo vẽ cảnh tiêu sơ."

"Men, be vigilant! Those are killers. They don't care about introspection, still-lifes, structuralism, colours and sounds: They kill. They don't care about Chuang-tzu, Kafka, the unconscious and the subconscious, Breton and surrealism, Hamlet and "to be or not to be," they just don't care; They kill. They sweep on us as the twitter of birds greets the coming of dawn Or during starlit and love-laden nights Or when the sky is at its bluest When gardens are fragrant with the scent of flowers And the fruit sweet like human lips."

"...[E]ach moment of joy but prompts the more That madness buried at the base of dreamy souls, That sadness in the dark citadel of the heart, And in sorrowful eyes, images of innocence from the past. All the Past is but an endless string of days, All the Future is but a series of graves not yet fulfilled... In the summer sun, fresh leaves begin to change in hue, Weaving the autumn whose arrival is imminent—as in our lives The green days follow in fading succession, Weaving the shroud that covers our souls."

"Ơ hay, cánh cũng ưa người nhỉ."

"Thiện căn ở tại lòng ta, Chữ tâm kia mới bằng ba chữ tài."

"Trời còn để có hôm nay, Tan sương đầu ngõ vén mây giữa trời."

"As a medium for literature in Vietnam, the native tongue had been fighting a difficult battle against classical Chinese since the early part of the fifteenth century, when Nguyễn Trãi (1380–1442) wrote his short poems of four or eight lines. In a poem of over three thousand lines, Nguyễn Du led that fight to a victorious conclusion... By triumphantly rescuing Vietnamese poetry from the stranglehold of classical Chinese, Nguyễn Du performed for the vernacular what Dante had once done for Italian, liberating it from its position of subservience to Latin."

"Trông vời cố quốc biết đâu là nhà."