Context

Michael Wiegers | Copper Canyon Press
Spring Essence, John Balaban

There are few books I’ve ever had the pleasure to edit that have excited me more than John Balaban’s upcoming collection of translations by the Vietnamese poet, Ho Xuan Huong. Spring Essence is that rare book in which all of the pieces come perfectly together. Quite simply, it is right.

In his 1992 memoir, Remembering Heaven’s Face Balaban recounts how he went to Vietnam as a conscientious objector. He became captivated by Vietnamese poetry and by the people’s familiarity with and love for their poetic treasures. During the war he recorded an ancient oral folk poetry tradition known as ca dao. These poems, passed down through generations, were to lead him to the poetry of Ho Xuan Huong.

Ho Xuan Huong was a concubine, born in the latter part of the eighteenth century. During a decidedly patriarchal period in which poetry was the realm of the educated male elite, she dared to write poems which not only criticized the ruling hierarchy and commented upon the politics of her time, but which hid within them double entendres and sexual innuendo. She used sex as a way to symbolically emasculate a ruling elite governed by the principles of Confucianism. Furthermore, she chose to write not in Chinese—as was the fashion of her time—but in the Vietnamese calligraphy Nom, a writing system which represented the spoken language of Vietnam.

Unfortunately, there are only a few dozen people in the world who can read Nom. Most people mistake it for Chinese. French colonists introduced the Latin alphabet to Vietnam in this century and made learning in it mandatory. Within a single generation this carrier of a thousand years of Vietnamese literature became unrecognizable to most Vietnamese. One of those who can read Nom is Ngo Than Nhan, a computational linguist at NYU’s Courant Institute. He has spent years digitizing the calligraphy and with the publication of Spring Essence, his work will appear for the first time. When it does, it will represent the first time that Nôm will appear as moveable type, making Spring Essence both a Gutenberg Bible and Rosetta Stone for Nôm literature. On the surface this is “a little book of poetry.” But what a truly remarkable, historic, and redemptively entertaining one it is.