Spring Essence

Rating:
Summary: Sensual and erotic Spring.
Review: "Over the years, a clever voice echoes," poet-translator John Balaban writes. "On the river, an old moon recalls Xuan Huong" (p. 135). Ho Xuan Huong (whose name means "Spring Essence") was an eighteenth-century Vietnamese poet and concubine. "Often just giving up, but always returning," Balaban spent ten years translating the forty-nine poems collected here (p. 14). Through her poetry, Xuan Huong is known for "her verbal play, her wicked humor, her native speech, her spiritual longing, her hunger for love, and her anger at corruption" (p. 5). She wrote her poems in "Nom," Vietnamese common language. These poems are sensual and erotic, and full of sexual double entendres (e.g., "Weaving at Night," "Swinging," The Paper Fan," and "The Wellspring").

Balaban succeeds in interpreting Xuan Huong's imagery into English verse that resonates with spring essence. In "Autumn Landscape," Xuan Huong writes, "Drop by drop, rain slaps the banana leaves," and "My backpack, breathing moonlight, sags with poems" (p. 19). In "The Scarecrow," she writes, "I've never stepped out on the road to fame/ seeking reward only in a little dew and rain" (p. 99). In "Questions for the Moon," she asks, "Weary, past midnight, who are you searching for?/ Are you in love with these rivers and hills?" (p. 111). In "Spring-Watching Pavilion," she sees "heaven upside-down in sad puddles," and then observes "Nirvana?/ Nirvana is here nine times out of ten" (p. 115).

This sensually-rich collection left me hoping for more. My only disappointment was learning that these hundred pages represent "most of Xuan Huong's extant poetry" (p. 14). This thin book shines brightly.

G. Merritt

Rating:
Summary: disappointing book
Review: As a bilingual native of Vietnam, I was very interested in reading this translation. Unfortunately, it turned out to be quite disappointing. Although the poems are nice, they have little relation to the actual Vietnamese. The translators appear to have simply translated the poems literally word for word, perhaps using a dictionary, without understanding any of the idioms upon which they were based.

Nice poems but they are more the poetry of John Balaban than Ho Xuan Huong.

Rating:
Summary: Spring Essences
Review: These poems by the 18th century Vietnamese poet Ho Xuan Huong (whose name means "Spring Essence") as translated into English by the poet John Balaban are truly delightful. The poems poke fun at self-satisfied government officials, intellectuals--men in general--with good-humored irreverence. "Young Scholars," picturing students who "can't even talk," suggests that "Someone. . . teach these fools/ to take their brushes and paint the pagoda walls." With the voice of a concubine who knows her clientele intimately, HXH writes of the "male member": "Newborn, it wasn't so vile. But now, at night,/ even blind it flares brigher than any lamp." Clearly, this poet is courageous, attacking convention at a time when few Vietnamese women even knew how to write. She does not reserve her wit for men alone, but accuses women of being weak-minded as well, as in this line from a poem offering "consolation" to a young widow: "If you've got weak blood, don't eat rich food."

As any attentive reader can see in the versions of the poems printed in modern Vietnamese, HXH utilizes rhyming forms. Balaban's translations pay homage to the forms by attending to rhyme and sound without being bound by strict rhyme. The near-rhymes in this couplet from a poem on cats offers a good example of the sound-play Balaban engages in : "their only thought is to pounce on a mouse/ then croon from rooftops arousing meows." (The poem, in Huong's clever use of double-entendre, also suggests more than it says). Despite the sometimes rough subject matter, this is an elegant book.
John Balaban and his publisher, Copper Canyon Press, deserve a lot of credit for bringing the poems of Ho Xuan Huong to a contemporary audience in three versions--the original ideographic Nom script, the modern, Romanized Vietnamese equivalent, and Balaban's lyrical English versions.