Nguyen Do
BY Helen Nguyen

Is there a particular writing aesthetics that you personally champion?

I write everything that my experiences force me to write about. It’s like a poetry diary. All of my poems come from my own fate. It’s like pouring my soul onto the paper or the computer. I rarely smile when writing a poem. Most of the time, I’m sad; even in a poem that contains humorous details, its voice in general is still somber.

You mentioned the word “sad” or “somber” a few times. Why do you think you’re strongly inclined towards writing sad poems? Are they necessarily poems about sadness?

I’ll respond to your question with questions:

What is the circumstance in which a poet usually creates a poem?

(Hints: sadness, darkness, loneliness);

How many of the best poems by the greatest poets in the world are funny, and inspire laughter?

(Hints: Nguyen Trai, Shakespeare, Apollinaire, Eliot, Whitman, and Pasternak);

Isn’t poetry also like all other great works of art (such as the nine symphonies, the violin concertos, and hundreds of other Beethoven’s works) that communicate sadness? The brightness of the color yellow in Van Gogh, isn’t it also sad, and yet is not sadness?

What do you hope to convey to your public through this “sadness”?

Let me quote from my poem “Headache”, from my latest collection, New Darkness (Hanoi: Vietnam Writers Association, 2009): “the darkness illuminates darkness.” In other words, sadness gives birth to happiness; “losing” results in “winning,” hence further motivating others to achieve their goals.

Vietnamese is your mother tongue, and you choose to continue writing in Vietnamese, even after having moved to the States. Why? Since you also translate your own poems from the Vietnamese to English, can you write in Vietnamese without thinking of how it would be like when you translate it?

Vietnamese is my first language, the language of my blood. Obviously, it’s easier to use it to express my heart. I don’t know why sometimes I “fall” naturally into writing English. When this happens, English automatically blocks Vietnamese from my mind. I’m answering you in English now, and I’m not thinking in Vietnamese. Someday, perhaps, my “birth language” will also not feel as “natural” to me as it used to be.