Beyond the Court Gate: Selected Poems of Nguyen Trai translated and edited by Nguyen Do and Paul Hoover

The task of translating East and Southeast Asian poetry into English can often seem like a fool’s errand. The translator is faced from the outset with the utter impossibility of rendering prosodies based on tone into a non tonal language. Most modern translators deal with this daunting challenge by avoiding the issue altogether, instead choosing to translate the highly structured rhyme schemes and meter of the traditional qi lu and wu lu forms into free verse. The translator then must choose how to translate poems that are simple both as a result of aesthetic choice on the part of the poet and as a result of the nature of the language–monosyllabic Classical Chinese, the language of much of Vietnamese poetry until the Twentieth Century. Should a translator choose to represent the simplicity of the original, at the risk of exoticizing the poem? Or should a translator instead choose to translate the poetry into a familiar poetic idiom, at the risk of distorting an aesthetic that is distinctly foreign to many Western readers? Even A.C. Graham, perhaps the most gifted translator of the Chinese language, was forced to concede that “there is no language which gives a translator less cause to flatter himself that he has achieved a perfect re-creation.”

Perhaps this tremendous difficulty is the reason why this collection is the first collection of Nguyen Trai–a poet roughly as significant to the history of Vietnamese literature as Chaucer is to the history of English literature–to be translated into English. It is certainly not for want of quality. In the preface, the translators (Nguyen Do and Paul Hoover) take great pains to contrast Nguyen Trai with the Chinese poet Li Po. Admirers of Li Po will probably instead feel that Nguyen’s technique has a great deal in common with that of the Tang Dynasty master. Take, for example, the remarkable quatrain “On The Painting ‘A Mountain Bird Calling People’”:

Deep in this silent mountain, birds call as if to someone;

The view in this painting is most likely as good as the real one.

So I hang it in a south window when I’m not working.

It makes me dream that I’m living in my old spring garden.

Nguyen Trai’s poetry shares Li Po’s dramatic, practically cinematic shifts between tiny details of everyday life and metaphysical contemplation; the immediately perceivable world and the world of the imagination; the transient and the eternal. Landscapes become canvases in the space of two lines; a reflection on a personal quirk becomes a meditation on the nature of reality. The translators are correct, however, in insisting that Nguyen Trai’s poetry has quite a different character from Li Po’s poetry; his often conversational tone, his wit, his humility and his only occasional mysticism more closely resemble the poetry of the Song Dynasty poet Su Dongpo (or the poetry of Nguyen Trai’s brilliant countrywoman Ho Xuan Huong, who also tends to be shamefully neglected by Western translators and readers). In particular, I found it remarkable how well Nguyen’s humor has aged. “Good books: I have been making a living by them / When starving: I’ve eaten pine roots and gulped down sunlight,” begins one poem. “I clean the little hut, burn incense, and read a book. / I’m not a Buddhist or a fairy but I’m not normal either,” begins another. Like Robert Frost, Nguyen’s good humor and unassuming persona make his metaphysical insights all the more profound.

This translation is a good one, particularly considering that it is the first translation of Nguyen Trai into English. There may one day be more accurate and artful translations, but on the whole, Paul Hoover and Nguyen Do have done an admirable job, vividly rendering Nguyen’s poetry into clear and simple free verse, in a way that more than adequately reflects the original. There are occasional bouts of awkwardness (“Your poverty and infirmity make me feel pity”) and Hoover and Nguyen make the unfortunate choice of translating the frequently mentioned Oriental White Stork as “ciconia,” a word that tends to stop a line like an overturned semi stops traffic on a busy highway. These problems are generally minor missteps on the part of a fine translation that is long overdue. Nguyen Trai’s insistent and eloquent records of daily gripes and hard-won wisdom should resonate strongly with the modern reader. Nguyen Trai was the master architect of the Vietnamese hero-king Le Loi’s successful war of independence from China’s Ming Dynasty, and later lost political favor. His reflections on the vagaries of politics seem uncannily apt for the Obama era:

The country’s shame is over–a thousand years for the full cleansing.

Kept as you are in a golden case, you’re always rewarded.

But when the country’s rebuilding is done,

Who will care about heroes like you?

Reviewed by Dylan Suher

Beyond the Court Gate: Selected Poems of Nguyen Trai translated and edited by Nguyen Do and Paul Hoover
Counterpath, 2010
Paper, 180 pp, $16.95
ISBN-13: 9781933996172