TRANSLATING VIETNAMESE FOLK POETRY: JOHN BALABAN'S CA DAO

Ca Dao Viet Nam: Vietnamese Folk Poetry. Translated and with an introduction by John Balaban. Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2003. Pp. 88. $15.00 paper.

Long, long ago, a young American fresh out of college roamed the narrow roads and rivers of the Mekong Delta with a tape recorder in hand asking people, "Would you sing your favorite poems?" As John Balaban recounts his first experience, "I walked up to farmers, housewives, boatbuilders, fishermen, seamstresses, herbalists, and older sisters minding their siblings."[1] Who would have predicted that two years later, in 1974, a beautiful and superbly translated bilingual collection of Vietnamese folk poems, Ca Dao, would emerge from Unicorn Press. And now, almost thirty years later, Copper Canyon Press has published a revised edition of the translation.

A recognized name in literary circles, John Balaban is North Carolina's poet-in-residence, a professor of English in Creative Writing, and well known for his award-winning translation of ca dao, Spring Essence—The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong, and his acclaimed memoir, Remembering Heaven's Face. In the spring of 2003, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to re-translate the classic novel-in-verse The Tale of Kieu by the early eighteenth-century Vietnamese poet Nguyen Du, which was previously translated by Yale scholar Huynh Sanh Thong.

Balaban's work started during the Vietnam War, when he volunteered as a social worker for a children's relief organization in the Mekong Delta. Fascinated with ca dao, Balaban traveled, from September 1971 to May 1972, from village to village recording live performances of ca dao. Before Balaban's Ca Dao appeared, most of the existing translations of Vietnamese folk poetry were either difficult for English readers to appreciate or were found piecemeal in journal articles and photocopied translations circulated among scholars of Vietnamese literature.

Within this context, Balaban pondered, "If ca dao still existed, they would be an amazing index to the continuum of Vietnamese humanism. . . . But if they still existed. . . . where would I find them now?"[2] To his amazement he discovered that "ca dao was very much alive outside the city. . . . To Vietnamese farmers who all knew this poetry—I never found one who did not—my poetical interests were perfectly reasonable, and so they sang to me what they knew."[3] Balaban proceeded to collect ca dao and translate his modest, yet representative, sampling of Vietnam's vast folk poetry tradition.

Balaban's ca dao collection presents forty-nine beautifully and meticulously translated poems chosen from approximately 500 original poems that he taped and transcribed. Although not an anthology of Vietnamese folk poetry, this collection provides "a small sampling of a vaster, ever-changing body of poetry that spans the centuries and the length of Vietnam."[4]

Balaban defines ca dao as "always lyrical, sung to melodies without instrumental accompaniment by an individual singing in the first person, not the narrative third person of traditional oral, epic poetry in the West."[5] Ca dao as loosely defined (ca in Vietnamese means "song"; dao means "short unfixed melody") are anonymous poem-songs without fixed melodies (bài hát không có chương khúc) transmitted orally long before they were transcribed onto paper. Balaban, however, speaks exclusively of ca dao as being composed by "ordinary peasants who passed on the poems orally."[6]

Ca dao was not limited to the common people or sung only by "peasants" as Balaban suggests but, at one time, permeated Vietnamese culture and was practiced and treasured by the educated and the illiterate, by city folks and peasants alike. It is nevertheless very difficult to grasp the complexity and dynamism of the process of ca dao making, and equally challenging to determine its place in the Vietnamese society and psyche. Understanding ca dao forms and structure, as well as the multifaceted relationships between the ca dao musician-poets and the audience, presents further challenges to understanding this long-held traditional art form.

Despite the evaluative challenges, ca dao clearly is "nothing but an unstudied voice offering its plaints of love and yearning to the tree in the family orchard, to the baby being rocked in a woven hammock, to the river sliding off into the horizon. This singing of ca dao joined with the rhythms and rhymes to make these delicate, vanishing artifacts—more than any monsoon-crumbled monument—the clearest record of Vietnamese culture."[7]

Balaban maintains that ca dao were sung "because poems were not written down (the people who made them could not read or write)."[8] Although many ca dao certainly were created by illiterate people, there is no true demarcation within the ca dao tradition between the learned and those who could neither read nor write. It is easy to imagine a Vietnamese scholar-poet composing a poem or a retired scholar or poet withdrawing from public life and composing poetry that circulated orally among the village community. It is well documented that for political, religious, and personal reasons, many poets wrote poems communicating their private feelings and chose to remain anonymous in these personal expressions.

Balaban's experience clearly was with peasant people, and he makes a very good observation when he remarks that "the conditions for nurturing ca dao lyrics are not the din and rush of the city, or the entertainment of radio or television, or even the power of literacy."[9] Ca dao, he asserts, "prospers among people who do not have easy access to writing or electronic media."[10] Balaban accurately remarks that people sang ca dao because "the poetry's tight formal structures organized the accidental musical tones of Vietnamese words into a natural melody line sung by a single person offering his or her voice to the cricket-churning backdrop of the Delta."[11]

Balaban's grasp of the melodic nature of the poetry captures the tonal nature that makes music inherent or embedded in spoken Vietnamese words. Ca dao can be characterized as a form of folk poetry as well as of folk music. It is not uncommon for many Vietnamese folk songs to also be folk poems and vice versa. Vietnamese poetry is unique because of the intense melding of poetry and music. The words, rhymes, alliteration, and rhythms create a musical quality resulting in a poem-song. Ca dao is sung rather than read or recited; its unique performance characteristic distinguishes it from other poetic forms. Balaban is fully aware of this inherent nature of Vietnamese language and has made every attempt to prevent translation from killing ca dao.

The melodic and lyric qualities of ca dao are captured in Balaban's graceful and faithful translations of forty-nine poems that demonstrate an instinctive feel for the fluidity and rhythm of the Vietnamese language. The collection's first poem, "Inked Verses," reads: "The wind plays with the moon; the moon with the wind / The moon sets. Who can the wind play with?" This couplet is cleverly translated from the original version ("Gió đưa trăng thì trăng đưa gió/ Trăng lặn rồi gió biết đưa ai?"). Remaining true to the original, Balaban does not change the word order, and his English word choices are skillful. For instance, he uses the word play for the Vietnamese verb đưa ("to sway" or "to swing gently from side to side"), and also uses play for the main verb đẩy ("to push") in the third couplet ("The wind plays [đẩy] through watercress and chives [đưa] / A pity that you have a mother, but no father"). The word play serves to create a sense of ambiguity, movement, and playfulness that is suggested in đưa and đẩy. Balaban's word choice enlivens and illuminates the intimate relationship between the wind and the moon.

Another ca dao, "The Saigon River," is beautifully composed in the "song thấ lục bát" or "double seven and six-eight" meter: "The Saigon River slides past the old market / Its broad waters thick with silt. There / the rice shoots gather a fragrance / the fragrance of my country home / recalling my mother home, stirring deep love." Balaban has again carefully chosen English words that accurately reflect the original. The expression slides past is employed instead of flow to (chảy dài) and this choice of words interestingly preserves the original meaning while giving a sense of movement. The alliteration of the s sound (Saigon, slides, silt, shoots, stirring) enhances the rhythm of the lines, which become regular and smooth. The English is compressed and intensified, remaining true to the original work. The translation also pays close attention to the speaker's aesthetic awareness of an internal state being shaped by an extremely beautiful and animated landscape. Many poems in Ca Dao speak of human emotional states. Ca dao is full of images and movements that imitate the ups and downs, the đẩy and đưa, the wind and moon, the day and night of everyday life in Vietnam.

While a small number of ca dao have been translated into English and other languages, a readable and faithful translation of Vietnamese folk poetry such as John Balaban's is still a rare feast. Like retired Yale scholar Huynh Sanh Thong, Balaban has consistently and actively contributed English translations of Vietnamese poetry that help share the treasure of Vietnam's literary heritage with an international audience. He clearly assists the reader in moving beyond the war images and wounds left by the war to help English-speaking audiences heal and open to a different Vietnam: to a people of peace and humanity, loving, living, and learning like all human beings. John Balaban has preserved the salt of the earth, while presenting it in flavors that fit the tastes of a Western audience. His superb work gives me hope that others will follow in his footsteps and roam the countryside of Vietnam with digital video cameras in hand to continue the effort that Balaban so courageously began thirty years ago.

NOTES

1. Ca Dao Vietnam: Vietnamese Folk Poetry. Trans. John Balaban (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2003), xi.

2. John Balaban, Remembering Heaven's Face (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2002), 248.

3. Remembering Heaven's Face, 248.

4. Ca Dao Vietnam, xii.

5. Ca Dao Vietnam, 4.

6. Remembering Heaven's Face, 248.

7. Remembering Heaven's Face, 249.

8. Remembering Heaven's Face, 249.

9. Ca Dao Vietnam, 11.

10. Ca Dao Vietnam, 11.

11. Remembering Heaven's Face, 249.