Mountain River: Vietnamese Poetry from the Wars, 1948-1993 by Kevin Bowen

Mountain River: Vietnamese Poetry from the Wars, 1948-1993 Reviews

• 
  Jenna

  I bought this bilingual Vietnamese-English anthology of poetry in large part because I was looking for ways to improve my Vietnamese proficiency. As far as that goes, this book gave me what I wanted, including teaching me multiple Vietnamese synonyms for the words soldier (bộ đội, chiến sĩ), enemy (giặc, địch, quân thù), and widow (góa bụa, quả phụ). Other vocabulary words I jotted down included: ranger (biệt động quân), sniper (bắn tỉa), cannon (đại bác), convoy (đoàn xe), unit (đơn vị), division (sư đoàn), military career (binh nghiệp), march (hành quân), firing line (tuyến lửa), battlefield (chiến trường), front (mặt trận), campaign (chiến dịch), malaria (sốt rét), grave (nấm mộ), comrade (đồng chí), martyr (liệt sỹ), liberation (giải phóng), Resistance (kháng chiến), aggression (xâm lược), and empire (đế quốc).
  
  Like not a few poetry anthologies arising from periods of wartime, this selection has an ideological slant. One of the more glaring examples is a rather strange poem by Tế Hanh that, as translated by Nguyễn Quang Thiều and Bruce Weigl, begins, "Moonlight floods through the window. / The baby sees the moonlight and sings to herself. // Her song's first words: Uncle Ho Chi Minh...." Still, there can be said to be a few interesting outliers, and overall the book remains a valuable document of its times when ranged alongside others.
  
  Another Goodreads reviewer commented that this book makes Vietnamese poetry seem like "prose chopped into lines." That is entirely the fault of the translation process, though. Reading the Vietnamese originals on the verso pages, holding them a moment in one's mouth, makes it clear how musical the Vietnamese verse tradition actually is, with its received forms like "lục bát" and "song thất lục bát," dense with gorgeously disciplined rhythms, rhymes, and tone patterns. The Vietnamese language's supple grammar also enables an almost supernaturally lively degree of compression and condensation not captured in the English translations, with multiple twists and turns of thought often magically boiled down to one sinewy five- or six-syllable line. Here, for example, is Văn Lê's poem "Quảng Trị," whose taut six-syllable lines in ABCB-rhymed quatrains inevitably lose something in translation:
  
  Đâu đâu cũng thấy xương trắng
  Chẳng lẽ đắp lên nền nhà
  Vẻ mặt bạn tôi bối rối
  Không biết xương địch hay ta?
  
  Làm gì còn xương Mỹ nữa
  Nó rút đem hết về rồi
  Còn lại đất này — xương trắng
  Toàn là dân Việt ta thôi.
  
  Here is Nguyen Ba Chung's and Bruce Weigl's rendering:
  
  Everywhere we dug there were white bones.
  What could we do? Could we just leave them?
  What kind of foundation would they make for our house?
  My friends were perplexed. Were they our bones or their bones?
  
  No, I told them, there are no American bones here.
  The Americans left years ago and took their bones with them.
  These skeletons, scattered all over our land,
  Belong only to Vietnamese.
  
  One could imagine a version maintaining the syllable count and rhyme scheme, say:
  
  Here, there, all-wheres: white bones,
  Poor ground for raising towers.
  My friends’ brows looked confused.
  Enemy bones or ours?
  
  Why’d U.S. bones hang ’round?
  Those guys picked up, went home.
  What’s left’s this earth — white bones
  that are us Viets’ alone.
  
  But then you might argue something else had been lost.
  
  Here's my effort at an English version of Xuân Quỳnh’s “Hoa cỏ may” that, unlike this book's, preserves its slant-rhymed seven-syllable lines:
  
  Blank sand, stream filled with daft trees:
  rough air sees the season out.
  Who calls me, hidden by leaves?
  Fall chills my worn homeward route.
  
  White clouds fly off with the wind.
  I'm blue as Eden’s weather.
  Rancor brings back no lost springs.
  Wind blew away our letters.
  
  Foxtail spikes in every nook
  stab at my dress, unnoticed.
  Love’s vows are see-through as smoke—
  perhaps, Dear, you forgot us?
• 
  Angelin

  While poetry is an important form of art for the Vietnamese, and it is a form of art that many of them - regardless of vocation - often turn to, their styles read easy and more like sentences broken into lines. Perhaps because of the translation, the poems lack style and does not have much rhythm. However, one does learn a lot about the pains of the war through the book. One also finds that many of the poems contain common references, thus learning about culture through the times as the poems are also arranged chronologically.