The Secret of Hoa Sen Read online

  The Secret of Hoa Sen

  Vietnamese Text Copyright © 2014 by Nguyen Phan Que Mai

  English Language Copyright © 2014 by Nguyen Phan Que Mai and Bruce Weigl

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition

  14 15 16 17 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For information about permission to reuse any material from this book, please contact The Permissions Company at www.permissionscompany.com or e-mail [email protected].

  Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd.—a not-for-profit corporation under section 501 (c) (3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code—are made possible with funds from a variety of sources, including public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts; the County of Monroe, NY; the Lannan Foundation for support of the Lannan Translations Selection Series; the Mary S. Mulligan Charitable Trust; the Rochester Area Community Foundation; the Arts & Cultural Council for Greater Rochester; the Steeple-Jack Fund; the Ames-Amzalak Memorial Trust in memory of Henry Ames, Semon Amzalak and Dan Amzalak; and contributions from many individuals nationwide.

  Cover Design: Daphne Morrissey

  Cover Art: “Close-up of a bud of a lotus” by Studio Paggy/Getty Images

  Interior Design and Composition: Richard Foerster

  Manufacturing: McNaughton & Gunn

  BOA Logo: Mirko

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Nguyen, Phan Que Mai, 1973– author, translator.

  The secret of Hoa Sen / poems by Nguyen Phan Que Mai ; translated from the Vietnamese by Nguyen Phan Que Mai & Bruce Weigl.

  pages cm

  Poems.

  ISBN 978-1-938160-52-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-938160-53-0 (ebook)

  I. Weigl, Bruce, 1949– translator. II. Nguyen, Phan Que Mai, 1973– Poems. Selections. III. Nguyen, Phan Que Mai, 1973– Poems. Selections. English. IV. Title.

  PL4378.9.N53515A2 2014

  895.9'2214—dc23

  2014011914

  Lannan

  BOA Editions, Ltd.

  250 North Goodman Street, Suite 306

  Rochester, NY 14607

  www.boaeditions.org

  A. Poulin, Jr., Founder (1938–1996)

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction by Bruce Weigl

  Gian bep cua me

  My Mother’s Rice

  Pho va ong ngoai

  Eating Phở with My Grandpa

  Bai tho chua the dat ten

  The Poem I Can’t Yet Name

  Nguoi lam vuon trong Dai noi

  The Gardener in the Royal Citadel

  Nhung ngoi sao hinh quang ganh

  Stars in the Shape of Carrying Poles

  Co be thuyen nhan

  The Boat Girl

  Khu vuon mua xuan

  Spring Garden

  Co toi

  Pearls of My Aunt

  Nhung nguoi cong nhan det may Bangladesh

  The Garment Workers of Bangladesh

  Bi mat hoa sen

  The Secret of Hoa Sen

  Hai pham tru su that

  Two Truths

  Ngoi nha trai dat

  Earth Home

  Nhip gom

  Ceramic Rhythm

  Thoi gian trang

  The White Time

  Voi mot cuu binh My

  With a Vietnam Veteran

  Hai neo troi va dat

  Separated Worlds

  Thang Tu

  April

  Nghin nam

  Thousand Years

  Bau troi trang

  The White Sky

  Uoc vong may

  The Desire of Clouds

  Mien Tay!

  Mekong Delta

  Ha Noi

  Hà Nội

  Dong song em

  Your River

  Cha toi

  My Father

  Me toi

  My Mother

  Noi cung con

  Speaking with My Children

  Bien

  The Sea

  Que noi

  My Father’s Home Village

  La Viet

  Being Vietnamese

  Cham toc ban mai

  Touching the Hair of Sunrise

  Chuyen tau nguoi

  Journey of the Human Train

  Quang Tri

  Quảng Trị

  Van Anh

  Vân Anh

  Bien hat

  The Singing Sea

  Coi xanh

  The Green Sphere

  Buoc thoi gian

  Steps of Time

  Loi anh

  Your Words

  Tieng dem

  Night’s Whispers

  Khu rung cua me

  Your Forest

  Babylift

  Babylift

  Co

  Grass

  Buc tuong chien tranh Viet Nam

  Vietnam Veterans Memorial

  Len qua ngo hep

  Through a Narrow Lane

  Loi cua rac

  Song of Garbage

  Himalaya

  Himalaya

  Nuoc mam va hoa

  Fish Sauce and Flowers

  Hat ve ba ngoai

  Blues for My Grandma

  Khoc cho Mindanao

  Crying for Mindanao

  Su so hai

  Fears

  Tu long dat

  From the Deep Earth

  Anh

  The Music of Fire

  Coi gio

  Freeing Myself

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author and Translator

  INTRODUCTION

  Lullabies for the Earth and Home:

  Nguyen Phan Que Mai’s The Secret of Hoa Sen

  At the heart of Nguyen Phan Que Mai’s poetry in English is a heightened sense of tradition that allows the past to be very much alive in our present lives, and the future, a shining world of wondrous possibilities. Conversely, Ms. Nguyen is a poet of the metaphysical, and is never hesitant in these poems to leap away from our world in spectacularly imaginative ways to illuminate a magical parallel landscape where nothing less than our freedom is at stake, and where love overcomes even the power of time. What binds together the wide range of kinds of poems in this collection, however, is a consistent quality of voice, characterized most accurately as a voice of not only witness to history and change, but actor in that history and change as well. In order to speak fully and honestly about the people she embraces in her poems, Ms. Nguyen works very hard to see and experience the world from their point of view, and in so doing reveals a lush panorama of the cultural life of Vietnam. When we learn, for example, about the women struggling to carry heavy bundles of fruit at the ends of their balanced carrying poles, we are standing there beside them because of the poet’s power of observation, and her ability to choose those details which most clearly and most poignantly bring forth the image she wants us to see, or enter even, in order to literally feel the moment at hand. All of this is managed formally in its Vietnamese original by a beautifully musical free verse, modulated by the varieties of tones in that language. Because of the richness of the original diction, and the precision of the poet’s observations, it is possible to find alternative modulations in English, and to closely approximate that richness of diction in these English versions.

  Ms. Nguyen also has had the distinct advantage of living both as a southerner in Vietnam, and as a northerner. When she was six years old her family moved south to the Mekong Delta to escape the hardships of bad weather and insufficient resources i
n the north. She remembers being amazed as a small child at the lush landscape of the delta the first time she saw it, and throughout this collection are expressions of that intimate regard for the natural world and for the enduring forms of that world. In her poems, this northern/southern sensibility takes the form of a graceful nationalism, a vital characteristic of Vietnamese history and culture that has allowed the Vietnamese to survive foreign invasions for over a thousand years.

  Although not educated or trained formally as a writer in university, Ms. Nguyen has read and studied poetry since her childhood, and like many Vietnamese, she has clear memories of hearing poetry read over public address systems as part of national and provincial radio programs, and the poetry that formed an important aspect of her public school education. Still, it wasn’t until 2006, after she returned to Vietnam, once again to the north of her origins, after many years of study and work abroad in several countries, that Ms. Nguyen began to write poetry.

  During the past years, Ms. Nguyen has dedicated her time to translating Vietnamese poetry into English and American poetry into Vietnamese. Her hard work has resulted in six high-quality English-Vietnamese poetry collections and has been acknowledged with an Award from the Vietnam Writers’ Association for Outstanding Contributions to the Advancement of Vietnamese Literature Overseas (2010). In addition, Nguyen’s translation of J. Fossenbell’s poem “In Hanoi, Again” received an Award in the “Poetry about Hanoi 2008–2010” poetry competition.

  The Secret of Hoa Sen gathers Ms. Nguyen’s latest poems with those selected by the author herself from her collections Forbidden Fruit, Freeing Myself, and Stars in the Shape of Carrying Poles. Fluent in English, and an accomplished literary translator, instead of simply translating these poems, in some cases she has rewritten them so that they appeal more widely to English readers. The results are these English poems, some of which are intended to be slightly different from the Vietnamese versions, but with the original spirit.

  Nguyen Phan Que Mai was born in 1973 in the northern province of Ninh Binh, Vietnam, but was raised in the southern province of Bac Lieu, in the delta, where she grew up selling cigarettes on the street and vegetables in the market to help support her family. The daughter of teachers who also worked as farmers to support themselves, her earliest memories are of how hard her fellow villagers had to work to make just a basic living and to take care of their families. This work ethic—and the way it is reflected on the faces of the people—becomes a critical image in Ms. Nguyen’s poetry.

  Ms. Nguyen has overcome her difficult childhood to become a successful development professional and poet of Vietnam. After a Development Scholarship from the Australian government to enable her to study in Australia from 1993 till 1997, Ms. Nguyen worked in several countries and returned to Vietnam to work and assist thousands of disadvantaged Vietnamese. For her compassion and dedication, Ms. Nguyen has been honored with many awards, including the Female Vision Award from the Hanoi International Women’s Club, an award given to a female leader who has made outstanding contributions to sustainable development (2010). She is also the recipient of the Australian Alumni Award for Sustainable Social Development from the Australian Consulate in Vietnam, the Vietnamese Graduates from Australian Club, and the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) (2008.)

  Consequently, Ms. Nguyen’s travels and the varieties of her professional experiences have informed her thinking and writing so that her poetry is generously inclusive with regard to style. Hers then is the new poetry of Vietnam: deeply committed to tradition, but open too to the influences and innovations of Western art and thinking; a global poetry, necessary for our troubled times.

  Finally, these are poems fiercely loyal to the sentiments they gracefully express, which is what we mean when we talk about honesty in poetry. Ms. Nguyen is never hesitant to take on grand ideas, and never hesitant to rely on a sometimes raw and direct talk in order to expose the phenomena of our lives. Ms. Nguyen is a poet of a Vietnamese version of romanticism, in which she finds her subjects among the so-called ordinary lives of so-called ordinary people, and she celebrates not the accomplishments of kings or emperors, but of regular Vietnamese citizens who have struggled to stay alive, feed their families, and find their way back home after long, war-inflicted years of exile and despair. Hers is a poetry that instructs us on how to live more fully in the world, and reaffirms the power of clear-headed and direct poetry to transform even our darkest hours into deeply abiding lessons on the complexities of history, time, and love.

  Bruce Weigl

  Oberlin, Ohio, April 2013

  The Secret of Hoa Sen

  MY MOTHER’S RICE

  Through the eyes of my childhood I watch my mother,

  who labored in a kitchen built from straw and mud.

  She lifted a pair of chopsticks and twirled sunlight into a pot of

  boiling rice,

  the perfume of a new harvest

  soaked her worn shirt as she bent and fed rice straws to the

  hungry flames.

  I wanted to come and help, but the child in me

  pulled myself into a dark corner

  where I could watch my mother’s face

  teach beauty how to glow in hardship,

  and how to sing the rice to cook with her sunbaked hands.

  That day in our kitchen,

  I saw how perfection was arranged

  by soot-blackened pans and pots,

  and by the bent back of my mother, so thin

  she would disappear if I wept, or cried out.

  EATING PHỞ WITH MY GRANDPA

  For my grandfather,

  killed in 1954 in the Land Reform Movement of North Vietnam

  A man knocked at the door of my dream

  and poked his mud-smeared face through the layers of mist.

  “I am hungry,” he said and proceeded to my table,

  covered with food I was offering to my ancestors on the occasion

  of Tết.*

  The smoldering bunch of incense suddenly flared up, its billowing

  smoke blurred my eyes so I couldn’t see how the man looked.

  “Nobody offers phở** to ancestors,” he laughed

  and slurped down a spoonful of my soup,

  to which his head nodded in approval.

  As he ate the white strings of noodles and the thin slices of beef,

  I wanted to tell him how my mother had taught me

  to use instinct to measure the right amount of cinnamon, anise,

  ginger, and onions,

  to cook the soup base,

  but invisible fingers forced my mouth to close,

  and I saw the steam from the man’s bowl

  roll down his face like tears

  to clear his skin and my mind of mud

  and his face emerged out of the mist

  so I could put my fingers to my lips

  and touch my grandfather’s name.

  * Tết is Vietnamese New Year, celebrated on the first day of the Lunar Calendar Year.

  ** Phở is the most famous dish of Vietnam—noodle soup cooked with chicken or beef and spices. It is served hot with fresh Vietnamese mints, chilies, bean paste and lemons.

  THE POEM I CAN’T YET NAME

  My hands lift high a bowl of rice, the seeds harvested

  in the field where my grandmother was laid to rest.

  Each rice seed tastes sweet as the sound of lullaby

  from the grandmother I never knew.

  I imagine her soft face as they laid her down into the earth,

  her clothes battered, her skin stuck to her bones;

  in the Great Hunger of 1945*, my village

  was starved for graves to bury all the dead.

  Nobody could find my grandmother’s grave,

  so my father tasted bitter rice for sixty-five years.

  After sixty-five years of searching,

  spirits of my ancestors led my father and me

  to my grandm
other’s grave.

  I heard my father call “Mum,” for the first time;

  the rice field behind his back trembled.

  My feet clung to the mud.

  I listened in the burning incense how my grandmother’s soul

  spread,

  joining the earth, taking root in the field,

  where she quietly sang lullabies, calling the rice plants to blossom.

  Lifting the bowl of rice in my hands, I count every seed,

  each one glistening with the sweat of my ancestors,

  their backs bent in the rice fields,

  the fragrance of my grandmother’s lullaby alive on each one.

  * The Vietnamese Famine of 1945 occurred in northern Vietnam from October 1944 to May 1945, during the Japanese occupation of French Indochina in World War II. Between 400,000 and 2 million people are estimated to have starved to death during this time.

  THE GARDENER IN THE ROYAL CITADEL

  For the people of Huế—Vietnam’s ancient citadel

  Thunder bends tree trunks;

  the gardener engrosses himself in sowing each seed of grass.

  Tempests sink the city;

  the gardener engrosses himself in sowing each seed of grass.

  Plumeria flowers are white around his gray hair.

  Flamboyant flowers red alongside his faded shirt.

  Lotus flowers pink under his cracked hands.

  Royal courts decline;

  the gardener engrosses himself in sowing each seed of grass.

  On the collapsed royal dynasties,

  the sweat of humans rises from their ashes.

  STARS IN THE SHAPE OF CARRYING POLES

  For the street sellers of Hà Nội