I have been trying to finish a translation of a poem called “Cô Lái Đò,” by an early 20th Century Vietnamese poet named Nguyen Binh. I first picked up this poem a few years ago when I was living here, and in a fit of hubris and pretense, tried to memorize it and recite it to people. Of course, native Vietnamese speakers had no idea what I was saying, which led me back to Vietnamese class, and more prosaic discourses with my teacher such as “How are you today?” and “I am fine thank you. And you?” (Which I am still trying to perfect). In any case, by dint of persistence, here I am finally with a translation of the poem that I can live with. The original poem, the recordings and the translation are all at the beginning of this post, and are followed by a rather lengthy digression on Vietnamese language, poetry and poetic form, which I wrote to explain to myself what was going on in the poem, so I thought I would share it.
The Poet Nguyen Binh
Vietnamese Poetry in A Nutshell
This poem is by a Vietnamese poet and thefore it involves spring. Poets in Vietnam employ spring in the same way that country and western singers in the U.S. employ honky tonk bars. For example, the word “xuan” (or spring) appears seven times in the poem, and it is a 16-line poem. Because it is a Vietnamese poem, it will also involve heartbreak, a young woman, a fisherman or farmer, green bamboo and deep and unfulfilled longing – usually for the woman but maybe for Hanoi in the fall. (Nobody seems to long for my fair city, Saigon.) While I truly enjoy the simplicity and beauty of Vietnamese imagery, the action, and the fun, in Vietnamese poetry for me is in the language.
Notes on Translation
The poem I translated here was based on a late 19th century classical Vietnamese poetic form consisting of a four-line quatrain, with each line consisting of seven syllables. While there is plently of internal rhyme, this form uses end of line rhymes, albeit in an uneven way. Nguyen Binh adopted this model to include, in this case, four quatrains. Because I found it impossible to capture the meaing of the lines in the original seven English syllables (see BPS issue above), I expanded the number of syllables per line from seven to ten. This was an arbitrary number that I chose because many of the lines ended up being that long anyway. Second, there is the eternal question as to whether rhymes should be preserved in translation or not. I have no preference, really, but for fun, and for the purposes of this poem (and to drive myself crazy) I tried to preserve the original rhyme scheme, and try to sprinkle in internal rhymes when I could think of one. Finally, finally, I thought I would mention that this poem has one of my favorite lines in all of poetry, and that is “Bỏ thuyền, bỏ lái, bỏ dòng sông/Cô lái đò kia di lấy chồng” which means “farewell boat, farewell rowing, farewell river/The boatgirl went off to marry a man,” which sounds pedestrian in English, but to my ear at least, fairly sublime in the original. It has end of line rhyme, internal rhyme, it has rhythm (from repeating “bỏ”), it has symmetry in the three syllables cluases at the end both lines, and there is of course the bittersweet conclusion to the poem.
Recordings
To help bring the language alive, I have inserted two recordings of the poem, one by a friend from the south, one by a friend from the north. The two accents are totally different as you will hear.
Southern Friend
Northern Friend
THE ORIGINAL POEM
THE TRANSLATION
Chữ Nôm, is the ancient “ideographic vernacular script” of the Vietnamese language. After Vietnamese independence from China in 939 CE, chữ Nôm, an ideographic script that represents Vietnamese speech, became the national script. For the next 1000 years—from the 10th century and into the 20th—much of Vietnamese literature, philosophy, history, law, medicine, religion, and government policy was written in Nôm script. During the 24 years of the Tây-Sơn emperors (1788-1802), all administrative documents were written in Chữ Nôm. In other words, approximately 1,000 years of Vietnamese cultural history is recorded in this unique system.
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