How did poetry walk into your life?

Poetry walked into my life, I think, in two ways. First: the natural way, like my karma. Being a poet is to experience loneliness. A poet chats with himself for most of his life. Since I was a child, I didn’t know why I wasn’t accepted by others — “not a single skip rope circle welcomes you / not a single tree branch offers a leaf to protect you from sunlight / you have to pick one for yourself” (from “For My Lovely Au”). When I grew up, I was still that kid, both in life and in poetry. I’ve spent much time talking to myself. As a result, I’m very sensitive and vulnerable.

Ba Me va Au /
Nguyen Do & His Parents
(Vietnam, 1997)
COURTESY OF NGUYEN DO

Another “source” of poetry for me was my mother, a descendant of Phan Dinh Phung, the famous doctor and a scholar of the Nguyen dynasty. Also, my mother’s village — where I was born and grew up — is one of the best-known in Vietnamese history. Hundreds of noble doctors and famous writers and scientists of the feudal dynasties came from there. A beautiful town, Dong Thai lies along the river La, which is as crystalline and fresh as its people. They are poor in resources, but very well-educated. Most of the best “academic” songs and folksongs I know derive from the region of the river La. My mother sang lullabies to my sisters, brothers, and me when we were children. Poetry, like the other arts, has been in my blood since those days. However, my first poem was not published (in a daily newspaper at my home’s province) until my first year in college.

Ba Me va Au / Nguyen Do’s Parents & His Daughter
(Vietnam, 1997)
COURTESY OF NGUYEN DO

Your poems contain a unique musicality and lyricism. Since folk songs were like your first bridge towards poetry, can you speak more about the musicality in your own writings?

Musical elements appear clearly in classical poetry as melody, rhythm, beat and form… but in modern poetry, a poem relates to music mostly by its tone. In other words, the author’s soul makes readers feel something that is like music. That’s why people can sing a modern poem as a rap song, even without any rhythm or melody. When a mother sings, her spirit comes alive to the baby through the song. But the only one thing that music itself can convey to a baby is its melody. So in fact, even a three-year-old toddler, a child, cannot really “understand” what the mother is singing… My mother’s heart (and my father’s, too, obviously) have made my heart “bigger;” it contains all their loves, including music and poetry.

In the contemporary Vietnamese society, what voice does poetry maintain or possess?

Romanticism is still a strong presence in contemporary Vietnam, but its influence is less pronounced now than a decade ago. Modernism has developed quickly in my country, and today, the most successful Vietnamese poetry in the world associates itself with Modernism. For instance, Black Dog, Black Night, the anthology which I edited and translated with Paul Hoover, is the first anthology of contemporary Vietnamese poetry published in the United States, and it reveals how little the influence of Romanticism exerts upon Vietnamese poetry today. Its tone is characteristically existentialist and nihilist — “loud” and ironic, rather than sentimental and “natural.”

Nowadays, in Vietnam, not only the young poets, but also the established poets of the older generation have moved away from the Romanticism that was introduced during the French colonial period in the early 20th century.

Throughout your life, you’ve faced severe persecutions in terms of censorship. How have you dealt with it in your emotional life, and in your writing?

When composing a poem as an artist, I don’t think and don’t care about the censorship, even if it’s very strict in Vietnam. When I was sending poems to publishers or newspapers (most poems in Vietnam are made public via the daily or weekly news before they are gathered together into a book) and they were rejected, I just got upset.My poems are somber, so newspapers and popular magazines in Vietnam often didn’t like them. They said that my poetry was sad, but the country was not sad. As mentioned before, my poems are somber, so newspapers and popular magazines in Vietnam often didn’t like them. They said that my poetry was sad, but the country was not sad. They also thought my poems were too personal; they didn’t (and couldn’t) see the people in my poems… In fact, they were using the literary standard of socialist realism, dominant in the former Soviet Union and imported to Vietnam in the mid-20th century. Their belief was that poetic matter must come from objects rather than subjects (the poets). All arts should serve the community, not just yourself! Socialist realism is one reason why modern poetry and its “complications” weren’t accepted in Vietnam until recent years. It demanded that poetry be easily understood by everybody, even those unable to read or write!

I had waited to publish my poems until I met an editor who didn’t care about the censorship issue. If an editor suggested that I should change some lines or ideas of my poems in order to pass censorship, I would rather withdraw them than publish them. It’s not just me; many poets reacted to censorship in a similar way. That was the best way to survive as an artist in Vietnam. I understand that poetry’s quality speaks for itself; sooner or later it will be shown.

Censorship in Vietnam is really a big, big obstacle, and it has been going on for 65 years, as long as a human lifespan. A lot of talented artists died before they could se their most important works being published. Notable cases — in our anthology — are Dang Dinh Hung (1924-1990) and Tran Dan (1924-2001).