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The Defiant Muse: Vietnamese Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present
This unique collection offers over one hundred poems from over one hundred poets in the only bilingual anthology of Vietnamese women’s poetry available anywhere in the world.
The poems in The Defiant Vietnamese Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present range from some of the earliest oral poetry, the first Buddhist spiritual poems written by women, and bold works by today's youth. Whether it is the historical expulsion of the Chinese or the cultivation of silk worms, this volume speaks to the exceptional moments and everyday realities of women's lives, of love and war, work in the fields and cities, life in their homeland and abroad.
The poems in The Defiant Vietnamese Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present range from some of the earliest oral poetry, the first Buddhist spiritual poems written by women, and bold works by today's youth. Whether it is the historical expulsion of the Chinese or the cultivation of silk worms, this volume speaks to the exceptional moments and everyday realities of women's lives, of love and war, work in the fields and cities, life in their homeland and abroad.
320 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2007
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March 25, 2018
"So many of [these poems] are beautiful. This is because the writers are Vietnamese, they come from a long tradition of an art both elegant and skillful." -Grace Paley, in the foreword
This is the most difficult reading experience I've had in some time: it's the first book of Vietnamese poetry I've ever tried to read in the original language, and, despite my lack of true solid fluency in Vietnamese, I was determined to read it in the original language, using a Vietnamese-English dictionary whenever necessary (and oh boy, was it frequently necessary). While I was reading, I jotted down hundreds of words whose meanings eluded me to varying degrees, which I then diligently looked up and compiled into vocabulary lists organized by part of speech, etc. It was an arduous process, certainly. But I think back to how, when I was studying French as a teenager, reading the Anchor Anthology of French Poetry did more to expand my vocabulary and solidify my understanding of idiomatic usages than almost anything else I tried, so I was resolved to stick with the project.
It helped that this book is intrinsically appealing: an anthology of verse by Vietnamese women poets, ranging from the female-dominated oral folk-poem tradition of ca dao through the classics of antiquity to the present day, published by The Feminist Press, with a foreword by Grace Paley -- how could anyone resist? I was further captivated by the fact that at least two of the poets sampled are distantly related to me: the 19th-century poets Mai Am and Huệ Phố, the 24th and 34th daughters of the Nguyễn dynasty king Minh Mạng, respectively.
With the exception of the inimitable 18th-19th century master Hồ Xuân Hương, each poet included in the anthology is represented by only a single poem, a fact that unfortunately makes it nearly impossible to get any sense of each individual poet's style, personality, etc. One of the book's editors, Lady Borton, tries valiantly to rectify this in an introduction that singles out a few of the more significant poets, limning how they fit into the history of Vietnam and the Vietnamese poetic tradition. Another way in which Borton's introduction is helpful is that it clarifies what is meant by the word "feminist" in the book's title: for some of the poems, it may not be immediately obvious to a western reader why the label "feminist" ought to be applied, as some of these poems are highly personal, apolitical, and inclined toward the sentimental (for example, quite a few are, on the surface, relatively simple, chaste love-lyrics reproaching a male lover for an abandonment or jilting). Borton's introduction makes a persuasive argument for why the tradition of women poets in Vietnam is an inherently feminist tradition: she shows how Vietnamese women poets historically had to overcome many familial, cultural, and societal restrictions to speak their truths in verse.
On the page opposite each poem is an English translation, and, as a welcome aid to the non-fluent reader, most of the translations are fairly literal, with only a few frustrating exceptions. Perhaps because the nuances of how the poets used the formal techniques of rhyme and tonality were not fully comprehensible to my non-fluent brain, some of the poems I found most enjoyable were those that used the more easily grasped techniques of repetition and theme-and-variation to help make that all-important leap from prose to poetry, poems like Thúy Bắc's "Sợi Nhớ Sợi Thương" ("Thread of Longing, Thread of Love") and Đỗ Bạch Mai's "Năm Bông Hồng Trắng" ("Five White Roses"), the latter of which is translated thus by Xuân Oanh and Lady Borton:
Whispering together
Near the red rose
Near the blue rose--
Talking with you, dear,
Five white roses:
Here a flower for distance
Here a flower for longing
A flower here for sulking
A flower here for waiting--
The one flower left?
The last flower
I don't dare say,
The last flower
You don't dare ask.
The one flower left
Has a subtle fragrance--
By the way, on the back cover, this book is touted as "the only bilingual anthology of Vietnamese women's poetry available in the world." In my scouring of bookstores I've been able to find one other bilingual Vietnamese-English anthology of poetry, Mountain River (ed. by Kevin Bowen, Nguyễn Bá Chung, and Bruce Weigl), but indeed no other Vietnamese-English anthology of women's poetry specifically.
This is the most difficult reading experience I've had in some time: it's the first book of Vietnamese poetry I've ever tried to read in the original language, and, despite my lack of true solid fluency in Vietnamese, I was determined to read it in the original language, using a Vietnamese-English dictionary whenever necessary (and oh boy, was it frequently necessary). While I was reading, I jotted down hundreds of words whose meanings eluded me to varying degrees, which I then diligently looked up and compiled into vocabulary lists organized by part of speech, etc. It was an arduous process, certainly. But I think back to how, when I was studying French as a teenager, reading the Anchor Anthology of French Poetry did more to expand my vocabulary and solidify my understanding of idiomatic usages than almost anything else I tried, so I was resolved to stick with the project.
It helped that this book is intrinsically appealing: an anthology of verse by Vietnamese women poets, ranging from the female-dominated oral folk-poem tradition of ca dao through the classics of antiquity to the present day, published by The Feminist Press, with a foreword by Grace Paley -- how could anyone resist? I was further captivated by the fact that at least two of the poets sampled are distantly related to me: the 19th-century poets Mai Am and Huệ Phố, the 24th and 34th daughters of the Nguyễn dynasty king Minh Mạng, respectively.
With the exception of the inimitable 18th-19th century master Hồ Xuân Hương, each poet included in the anthology is represented by only a single poem, a fact that unfortunately makes it nearly impossible to get any sense of each individual poet's style, personality, etc. One of the book's editors, Lady Borton, tries valiantly to rectify this in an introduction that singles out a few of the more significant poets, limning how they fit into the history of Vietnam and the Vietnamese poetic tradition. Another way in which Borton's introduction is helpful is that it clarifies what is meant by the word "feminist" in the book's title: for some of the poems, it may not be immediately obvious to a western reader why the label "feminist" ought to be applied, as some of these poems are highly personal, apolitical, and inclined toward the sentimental (for example, quite a few are, on the surface, relatively simple, chaste love-lyrics reproaching a male lover for an abandonment or jilting). Borton's introduction makes a persuasive argument for why the tradition of women poets in Vietnam is an inherently feminist tradition: she shows how Vietnamese women poets historically had to overcome many familial, cultural, and societal restrictions to speak their truths in verse.
On the page opposite each poem is an English translation, and, as a welcome aid to the non-fluent reader, most of the translations are fairly literal, with only a few frustrating exceptions. Perhaps because the nuances of how the poets used the formal techniques of rhyme and tonality were not fully comprehensible to my non-fluent brain, some of the poems I found most enjoyable were those that used the more easily grasped techniques of repetition and theme-and-variation to help make that all-important leap from prose to poetry, poems like Thúy Bắc's "Sợi Nhớ Sợi Thương" ("Thread of Longing, Thread of Love") and Đỗ Bạch Mai's "Năm Bông Hồng Trắng" ("Five White Roses"), the latter of which is translated thus by Xuân Oanh and Lady Borton:
Whispering together
Near the red rose
Near the blue rose--
Talking with you, dear,
Five white roses:
Here a flower for distance
Here a flower for longing
A flower here for sulking
A flower here for waiting--
The one flower left?
The last flower
I don't dare say,
The last flower
You don't dare ask.
The one flower left
Has a subtle fragrance--
By the way, on the back cover, this book is touted as "the only bilingual anthology of Vietnamese women's poetry available in the world." In my scouring of bookstores I've been able to find one other bilingual Vietnamese-English anthology of poetry, Mountain River (ed. by Kevin Bowen, Nguyễn Bá Chung, and Bruce Weigl), but indeed no other Vietnamese-English anthology of women's poetry specifically.
Displaying 1 of 1 review