Nhã ThuyênTranslated by Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng
‘He wanted to dream a man’Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Circular Ruins’
‘The grace of the poetry: the grace of the poet’
Today, I find myself attending the illusory moonplay-journey of a Vietnamese poet named Hàn Mặc Tử.
Good grief! My dear Trí! Look, the moon creature is stuck, right in those bamboo branches over there! See? It’s trying to free itself but can’t get out. What to do now… Oh Trí!” I laugh, “Well, we could dock our boat here, then climb the sand dunes, extend our arms, untangle the branches and voilà, we rescue the moon.”
From the poem ‘Midseason Moonplay’
The door of memory opens to a scene: My father sits there, with moon scattered on the porch, his wine dwindling away, his voice tilting and staggering,
Moon! Moon! Moon! It’s the Moon, Moon, Moon Moonbuyers, here I am, your seller of the moon.
Ever since my ten-year-old mind became tangled in the image of Hàn Mặc Tử and his shimmering mirage of a moon for sale, I have many times forlornly tried to track down the traces of the poetry and the footprints of the poet among ruins, among pieces of lovelorn music soaked in moons and stars, among imagined landscapes of Quy Nhơn, Đà Lạt, Huế, Phan Thiết… How can the reading experience evade the hold of the old myth: a heaven-banished immortal is doomed to live on earth, where he can taste all kinds of poetic delicacies, yet in return, must offer up the oblation of fresh blood and jeweled words? How should one read Hàn Mặc Tử? How should one read Hàn Mặc Tử in a way that feels fair and right? Must one necessarily strive to escape the endless dilemma: how not to feel sorrowful when facing the matrices of ‘sad life, mad poetry’ or ‘mad life, sad poetry’? Tragic fates spare none, from the East to the West, from the ancient to the modern. Since Hàn Mặc Tử already consoled himself with prayers and daydreams, why should we shed more tears of pity?
It was indeed a life of many pains: the death of his father, the death of his brother, his destitution, his grave illness, his unfinished dreams, his love sorrows, his lonesome distress. Various tales, movies, plays and songs have been inspired by the poignant story of his life. Among his pseudonyms, themselves whispers of heartache, such as Minh Duệ Thị, Phong Trần or Lệ Thanh, the question of whether it is Hàn Mạc Tử or Hàn Mặc Tử has generated multiple debates. Does his well-known pen name come with or without a moon? Does it mean Cold Curtain or Man with Brush and Ink? At 28, the poet left this world, his manuscripts scattered all over, some having gone missing. With a death that was tragic, pitiful, anticipated and still bewildering to many, Hàn Mặc Tử took on the life of a phoenix. It is not an exaggeration to claim that no other poet in Vietnam has inspired readers to so laboriously study and untangle even the tiniest thread of biography.
It was indeed a life of mad poetry, as the poet declared. Before entering a leper’s life of seclusion at Quy Hoà Hospital, Hàn Mặc Tử said to his poet friend Quách Tấn, to whom Hàn entrusted his manuscripts upon his death, ‘If God blessed me with health, I would surely burn the collection Mad Poetry… One should never let others see the secrets inside one’s heart.’ The title of the collection, Mad Poetry,is itself a relic of a writhing soul full of lust for life. It both brings about various psychoanalytical readings of the poems, and partially blocks off the path to Hàn Mặc Tử’s garden of poetry, a garden that ‘stretches boundlessly and shorelessly’, as he says in his poem ‘Poetry’ (‘Thơ’).
I want to copy down a decisive statement by the renowned poet Chế Lan Viên, a friend of Hàn Mặc Tử’s at the time: ‘I promise you that in the days to come, when all trivial and conventional words have flown away, the sole remains of this era will be the work of Hàn Mặc Tử.’ Mythology makes hazy all the meanings of a life’s details. Hàn Mặc Tử, therefore, despite various efforts to biographically interpret his strange poetic ideas, becomes a poet beyond biography. Attending his moonplay-journey this time, I must clear up some space within myself. I must overcome my bashful feeling in this encounter with a fiercely anguished poet-creature, hoping to briefly touch the chimera of this soul.
The poet does not lead us down the infernal road like Dante. Nor does he open our eyes to scenes of the underworld like Nguyễn Du. Nor does he lie still in the deep grave, listening to motions of the outside, like Đinh Hùng, an ill-fated contemporary of Hàn’s. He dreams of flying up to the Tusita Heaven, the Out-of-this-World, the Upper Pure Air, a place where the vision of eternity is both intimately present and immensely misty.
The enchantment has begun.
The door to the cave opens. May I have the pleasurable honor to join the likes of Lưu Nguyễn and enter into the magic cave of ‘Midseason Moonplay’?
‘Each image: a flood. Each mirage: a floating’
Midseason Moonplay
The moon is the light? With the mid-autumn moonrise, the light becomes all the more magical and fragrant, a perfumed floating. If the poetic human listens with gentle care, they can hear shards of music slowly falling. Wherever the shards fall, whatever they touch, resonant echoes of this giddy windtorn music will spring from that very place, that very thing, though nobody can see the force of these vibrations. What I mean is, isn’t the mid-autumn full moon a metaphysical event of the immeasurable night, a symbol of the wishing season, made of pearl-tears, made of farewells, and yet forever an incarnate spring of lavish delights? Don’t you agree, up there in your heavenly river, Mister Oxherd and Miss Weaver?
The river? The river is a stream of white silk—no, it is a moonflow draped by gold mats, flanked by sand dunes and green forests, lined with wildness and serenity. With our little paddle, my sister and I are softly stirring the yellow streaks that float across the water.
My sister releases her coquettish laugh, a string of laughter as clear as glass, so oddly pure. She is, as always, showering me with her incessant riddles. ‘Little brother, how about this one: Does the moon rise under the water or high in the sky? And are we boating sky-high or underwater?’ I look up at the sky, I look down into the water, then I smile in response: ‘Both and both, dear sister.’ Oh my, how lovely! The two of us keep bursting into delirious laughter every once in a while, causing a commotion in the vital pure air of nature’s immensity.
The Oxherd and the Weavergirl, gods of the mid-autumn night, have not merely besieged us with the incandescent and the miraculous. They have commanded the autumn breeze to bring us an aroma, intense as the scent of mothballs. Wafting in this perfume—who knows—might be the moans and cries of some ancient, hidden longing… Our boat is moving so easefully it feels as if we are traveling across a pool of reverie. Giddy and ecstatic in the light, the two of us slip into a state like hypnosis, so bewitchingly heady we can hardly tell if we are truly here, or who we even are. The enchantment has begun. Minute by minute, degree by degree, the higher the moon, the more harmonious the climate. Like vapors, everything is gently rising: intelligence, and dream, and poetry, and water, and the boat. Up in the highest regions of the air, the virginal river known as the Milky Way is being engulfed by stars that have lost their way. Suddenly my sister cries out, ‘The Milky River! We’re almost there! Paddle quick, little one! Let’s dock the boat by the Hàn riverbank.’
Journeying on water, we feel the exhilaration of steering a boat of astral haloes, a boat of precious gemstones, for it constantly looks as though brilliant starbursts are endlessly falling onto our laps.
Up there, yes, way up there, the sky looks imprinted with the silhouette of a stellar fairy waiting for a boat to carry her across the river.
All of a sudden, our dream zone darkens a little. My sister, pointing at the ferry dock by the Mo Temple village, says to me, ‘Good grief! My dear Trí! Look, the moon creature is stuck, right in those bamboo branches over there! See? It’s trying to free itself but can’t get out. What to do now… Oh Trí!’ I laugh, ‘Well, we could dock our boat here, then climb the sand dunes, extend our arms, untangle the branches and voilà, we rescue the moon.’ And so we hide our boat behind a grove of reeds, its flowers fluttering in vivid gold. Soon we find ourselves lost along a strange path, the sand cooling the soles of our feet like a slab of silk. Running through the white-rock cave is a flow of springwater, clear and precious as jade. But when the water pounces upon the surrounding undergrowth, it can turn into such a fearsome creature, identical to the most violent silver cobra.
How could this night be this exquisite, like a vibrant painting in motion? I want to ask my sister if she can feel a sweetness spreading in the throat, a sensation like sipping water so cold it delightfully numbs the teeth and the tongue. While my sister keeps quiet, leaves of moonlight are falling, one by one, onto her soft blouse like slants of yellow music. The dune is made of sand that appears superfluously white, whiter than the flesh of a fairy, whiter than silver silk, whiter than chastity even—an excess of white that makes me long to roll in it, tremble like crazy, surrender my lips in a kiss or press my cheeks against it to relish the tender coolness of the sand.
My sister and I have to lean on each other to keep walking further and higher. Sometimes when our knees give out, the two of us just drop to the ground—another occasion for my sister’s laughter to bloom, its crisp song hatching in the air. Once it reaches the top, her music starts to softly wither away. Still we remain lifted by this deluge of light. Are we looking at the traces of the Nhược waters and Bồng mountains, those ancient grotto-heavens where immortals used to live? We look down at the sand, trying to search for the footprints of the Goddess of the Peach Blossom Spring, but the sand remains flatly serene like stretched silk, virginal and pure.
To know what this place even is, one goesto the Peach Blossom Spring; one asks the Master there.
We are now in the middle of moon season, and even with eyes wide open, we cannot tell the nine directions of the heavens from the ten directions of the Buddha. The whole space flickers with colors so iridescent our pupils turn hazy in their blinding bright glare. The moon and the light have entered every possible place on earth. And this entire womb of the world that carries us, while it buoyantly floats to the shore of another planet, is now wholly flooded with moon.
Light overflowing, light overspilling. Light urging my sister and me to unfold our lapels to embrace the brightness as if collecting our precious gemstones. Looking over at my sister, I am suddenly struck by her overwhelming elegance. She seems as pristine, as lush and as noble as a sculpture of the Blessed Virgin Mary, our messenger of the divine will. I long to eagerly bow and ardently supplicate her for clemency. Good heavens, how can my sister look so splendid tonight? Her pale complexion, adorned by the ample folds of her white garments, looks peerless in her perfection.
Frantically, I shake my sister’s hand and ask her a laughably absurd question: ‘You are you, aren’t you?’ I shiver a little as I ponder a fleeting thought: ‘Perhaps my sister is a Fairy Maiden, a ghost, or even a goblin.’ Then I think again, and with a chuckle, hurriedly cry: ‘Aha! I know, sister Lễ, you are the moon, and your young brother here is also the moon!’
Looking the way we do, my sister and I surely can be moonly indeed. My sister, jubilant as spring, skips wildly about like a young girl letting all of her fifteen-year-old innocence flower and flourish. Meanwhile, I behold her, feeling an infinite gladness in my heart. I have many times been arrogantly protective of her graceful beauty, and yet it is only tonight, under the autumn sky, that I am finally learning how to relish her brilliance. Moments as lustrous as these hours have illuminated my soul, releasing the ‘self’ of myself from the fetters of the flesh. Suddenly I howl like a madman, holding out my palms to catch a falling star. Hearing my cry from afar, my sister runs to me, saying, ‘Your scream is so loud I worry its echoes might stir the heavenly air, and the moonlight would dissolve into foam…’
‘Ah, my dear sister, don’t you worry! Soon the light of this night will indeed melt away; that is inescapable. We will mourn it, we will miss it. As for me, all I long to do is fly straight to the sky and search for the light of the eternal…’
The breath of dream has covered the entire realm. Each letter, each syllable, each period, each comma, is billowing into sculptural form and blowing up into ethereal sound. The light, the fragrance, the music, the brother, the sister: all are whirling into the deluge of the moon river. An atmosphere of enchantment, wildness and absolute purity. A monstrous kind of magic enfolds the poetic realm of Hàn Mặc Tử.
One must turn into Air. Only then would one be able to fly: to cease from falling into the realm of decadence, to stop fainting from the pain of chronic torment. If in the realm of the collection Mad Poetry (also known as Torment), it is ‘blood’ that bursts out of terror, then here, it is ‘air’ that loosens, scented with the perfume of ocean winds, with the vapor of held breath, with the fog of moon that stirs the mantle of white silk. Air is the magic spell that soothes the agony of the body.
I grope around in the dictionary: things that share neither form nor substance but a synchronisation of feeling are called things of same 氣 | Air. The ideogram Air, consisting of the radical Rice (米) and the simplified Air (气), carries traces of Eastern wet-rice civilisation, where vapors are distilled into wine, the invisible condensed into the visible.
The air of autumn can penetrate the soul way before the arrival of autumn’s footsteps:
Autumn is still to come. Yet my soul has already soaked up the colors of gloom. The autumn moon of my heart has already gone misty and cold.
(‘Autumn to Come’)
And when the human being turns into the moon, they can exhale the moon’s breath, clean and sweet:
The lighter the vapor of smoke, the clearer the vapor of moon, the more fragrant the vapor of my breath, just like perfume!
(‘Dreaming with Reality’)
One ought to quietly read and re-read aloud the following two sentences, over and over again; just watch the vapor of Vietnamese poetry float up and condense into a teardrop, pure and clear, before it spreads out:
Tôi từ trong chiêm bao đi ra, đi về thuyền ở bên trăng cổ độ. Nước mắt khóc vì người lạ không biết tuổi trân châu.
(‘Khao khát’)
I exit the dream. I walk to the boat by the ancient moonshore. Tears are falling. Pearl-tears whose age cannot be known by a stranger.
(‘Desire’)
In the first sentence, twelve out of the fifteen Vietnamese words, strung together using level tones, stroll in a buoyant dream; the last two words, bearing oblique tones, softly set foot on the bank of an old river. In the second sentence, six oblique tones are interlaced with five level ones; the tears gather into drops, then blur into a floating immensity. How to gulp down all that pleasurable air and taste of Vietnamese poetry, if one overlooks this ringing oblique-levelness, so melodiously and arbitrarily planted throughout the lines.
Except for the prayer ‘La Pureté de l’âme’, which the poet wrote in French right before his passing, the entirety of the collection Midseason Moonplay manifests a breed of Vietnamese that remains intactly gorgeous. In the atmosphere of dream, the Vietnamese language does not express but transmit feeling, like an electric current sent straight to the heart and the brain, like a flow of shedding soul, like a rising of water that floods the mind, like a fabled zone that swells upon touch as it resounds and rattles into breaking tones. A breed of Vietnamese that produces ‘verses that reel with rapture’ as Hàn Mặc Tử himself wrote in ‘The Concept of Poetry’. One must greedily gulp down the sound of each letter, the sound flying ahead of meaning, further than meaning.
I am afraid to play a melancholy reader, who nostalgically believes that the Vietnamese language reached its haloed summit over a century ago, and that it has not since finished its self-decaying cycle and entered into rebirth. It is possible that the poetic itinerary Hàn Mặc Tử drew up for himself is also the dream journey of the Vietnamese language:
One goes from realities to mirages, from mirages to miracles, from miracles to dreams. Fog has enshrouded every entity in the realm of the real, which the light of dreams has entirely and relentlessly besieged.
(‘Dreaming with reality’)
Hàn Mặc Tử at his core was an Eastern poet, who fell into the poetic world during an era of East-West collision. Having undergone years of writing and reading poetry in Classical Chinese, in French and in Vietnamese, having drunk from French sources, perhaps Baudelaire or Mallarmé, from Tang poetry sources, perhaps Meng Haoran and Li Bai, and from Vietnamese sources, such as the inevitable current of folk songs and enigmatic legends, Hàn Mặc Tử spent his life roaming a variety of modern and ancient paths. Yet he never stopped clinging to an eternal mirage of the moon like a classic Eastern poet:
Feeling swells onto the white sheet of paper: my intention suddenly rings and coagulates on the page like a moon coagulating under a bridge.
(‘Feeling’)
Both real and illusory is the ‘moon coagulating under a bridge’: a chimerical liquid moon, a teardrop of immense nature. A moon human, an emerald human, as the poet might put it, is the virgin sky, the pristine soil, the freshly fallen star, the strangeness that fills grasses and flowers with doubt, the blood and tears spilled in the parturition of heaven and earth. The birth of a poetic human: a sacred pain.
‘The teardrops of banished immortals’
What is poetry, how to write poetry, how to live the life of a poet—for someone who cannot escape the destiny of a ‘tragic poet’?
Say your prayers: for the Evil stars have showered disasters upon the world, so that humans can better hear the cries of pain; for happiness lies hidden within anguish.
The artist’s mind is always infinitely insane. Their talent, on the other hand, is often limited. If they dare to have their minor talent agitate the divine waters and clouds—then they shall be knocked down by the heavens. Alas! Talent can be such catastrophe!
As they say, ‘One day of separation aches like three dire autumns in the heart.’ If I could kneel and surrender to her all of my joyous days, both to come and gone by, in exchange for one minute of encounter… obediently I would..
But never will I give up my days of utmost agony for some nights of rapture in a pleasure palace full of charming flowergirls.(‘Autumn to Come’)
Each time the sunlight awakes, my heart is ablaze. This is the sign of the season of ripened poetry. Harvest quick, for the higher the poetic tip, the madder the poetic human. O Maiden, why don’t you borrow a sickle from the young moon to harvest—please don’t tread on the banks of my heart.
Quick, quick, grab the moon, seize the stars, lest everything should one day drop into a sea of nothingness.
Well. Gone is the light. The music shall never collide with the moonsilk and this perfume shall never draw near to that perfume, as happens when someone’s heart is calling out to someone else’s heart.(‘Calling’)
The poetic human is a strange traveler walking in the spring of primeval clarity.
The human pauses to pick the exquisite leaves. The human falls silent to listen to the echo of the moon ringing, which resounds like the rattle of jewels exploding. Ah, so the human is hurriedly gathering the falling gold light, naively wrapping it in the lapel of their coat.
I make poetry?
—Meaning I pluck a melody, press on a silk thread, stir a veil of light.
I have lived fully and vigorously—have lived with heart, with lungs, with blood, with tears, with soul. I have nourished all possible sensations of love. I have been so glad, sad, angry and bitter that my life has almost snapped in two.(‘Poetry’)
And the human species, don’t forget to give thanks to the Poet who has exhausted many a spring of blood and tears, who has drunk bitter bile while the lips still show a bright, earnest smile.(‘Born II’)
And so, beside the two esteemed species, namely angels and humans, God has had to birth a third species into being: that of poets. This species is made up of extremely rare and incredibly fine flowers, born with a sanctified mission, le but de la poésie: to delight in the bejeweled creations of God, to praise His powers, to pour into the human soul the wellsprings of spellbinding rapture that remain ever fragrant, ever pure. It is God’s wish that the poet species fulfill its duty in this world, that is to birth marvelous works and to leave eternal legacies, which cost the poets their blood—this is the brutal destiny that haunts them endlessly.
And so, poetry is the desolate cry of a wretched soul longing to return to the heavens, where they once lived a thousand lives in boundless bliss, without beginning, without end. (‘The Concept of Poetry’)
There is a strange fusion that unfolds in these poems, which inspires me to borrow a line from Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought to further this little ramble: ‘Thinging, the thing stays the united four, earth and sky, divinities and mortals, in the simple onefold of their self-unified four-fold’. The poem is born like the moon, a fusion of sky, earth, mortals and divinities.
(((())))
Now, I am once again in a daze, bewildered like Lưu Nguyễn in the legend. The door to the heavenly cave is closed, and the earthly world is strange.
A silk slab of talent that summons One thousand years of ardent pity
I sit by the edge of water, with the Vietnamese poetry collection by Hàn Mặc Tử on one side, and on the other, the English translation by Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng. Between the two languages is a river, a stream of white silk, endlessly suspended between earth and sky, between ‘me’ (tôi) and ‘perhaps me, perhaps us’ (ta) and ‘perhaps you, perhaps they, perhaps he, perhaps she, perhaps one’ (người).
How to translate the breath of dream?
To transport the breath of dream is to travel between yes and no. It is also to demystify the mythologized obsession with the untranslatable. Graced with the blue eyes of many talents and an ecstatic rhythm of language, Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng reveals a writerly-translational presence. Yet, much like a dream, the translation itself remains distant from the disclosures and conveyances of a message. The translator has devoted (perhaps, in vain?) much arduous work to the carving of stone, in search of precious gems, only to gently drop them back into the cold creek running in the deep valley. Perhaps, at best, a couple of vagrant passers-by will exclaim their oh’s and ah’s of surprise and delight upon noticing the jarring beauty that glows in the spotless verses of ‘Midseason Moonplay’, of ‘Autumn to Come’, of ‘Feeling’. How should one read Hàn Mặc Tử in translation? How should one read the translations in a way that feels right and fair? No amount of commentaries and justifications for these coexistences seems adequate.
My words go around in circles: Hàn Mặc Tử does not need our tears of pity. Hàn Mặc Tử’s poetry does not need the excuse of torment for a chance to live. The poetic work of Hàn Mặc Tử has dreamed a Poetry. The poetic work of this translation has dreamed a Poetry. In the dream of spotless perfection, drunk on music, drunk on perfume, poetry’s image-illusion remains protected and indestructible. To depart with a line from Nguyễn Du’s The Tale of Kiều: ‘What departs? The body and shadow. What remains? The ravishing soul.’
(Allow me to leave a small parenthetical aside here: certainly, upon returning to Hàn Mặc Tử’s pages of life and pages of poetry, I remain entangled in many involute questions regarding the New Poetry movement of the early twentieth century, regarding the new and the old in poetry, regarding the relation between the movements of New Poetry and New Music, so on and so forth. These seem to be matters belonging, and dedicated solely, to Vietnamese readers, in the long history of the self-perishing journeys and persistent resistances of the Vietnamese language, among the ashes of decay and dream-fire of rebirth. But why am I always entangled in these circles?)
To read Hàn Mặc Tử is to read a poet who has gone far, who is also a contemporary, both of our time and ultimately, outside of time. This breed of reading, to imitate Borges, must continue to dream again another dream.
______
Translator’s Notes:
All translations of Hàn Mặc Tử’s poetry and other Vietnamese references in this essay are subjectively my own.
‘The grace of the poetry: the grace of the poet’: ‘Người thơ phong vận như thơ ấy’, from Hàn Mặc Tử’s poem ‘Xuân Đầu Tiên’.
‘Moon! Moon! Moon! It’s the Moon, Moon, Moon
Moonbuyers, here I am: your seller of the moon’: ‘Trăng! Trăng! Trăng! Là Trăng, Trăng Trăng / Ai mua trăng tôi bán trăng cho,’ from the poem ‘Trăng Vàng Trăng Ngọc’.
On the question of the poet’s pen name, whether it is Hàn Mạc Tử or Hàn Mặc Tử: If there is no diacritic mark above the letter a in ‘Mạc’, then the name means a young man standing behind a cold curtain. If there is a little breve in the shape of a crescent moon suspended above his middle name, then ‘Hàn Mặc Tử’ means a young man with his inkpot and brush.
‘I promise you that in the days to come, when all trivial and conventional words have flown away, the sole remains of this era will be the work of Hàn Mặc Tử.’: from Chế Lan Viên’s ‘Kỷ Niệm về Hàn Mặc Tử,’ Người Mới, Issue 5, 1940.
‘The enchantment has begun’: ‘Huyền ảo khởi sự,’ from the poem ‘Chơi Giữa Mùa Trăng’.
‘Each image: a flood. Each mirage: a floating’: ‘Mỗi ảnh, mỗi hình thêm phiếu diễu’, from the poem ‘Huyền Ảo’.
‘The teardrops of banished immortals’: ‘Những hạt lệ của trích tiên đày đọa’, from the poem ‘Siêu Thoát’; this line is also referenced in ‘Quan Niệm Thơ.’
‘A silk slab of talent that summons
One thousand years of ardent pity’: ‘Nhất phiến tài tình thiên cổ lụy’, a line by Phạm Quý Thích, dedicated to Nguyễn Du.
‘What departs? The body and shadow. What remains? The ravishing soul’: ‘Thác là thể phách, còn là tinh anh’, from Nguyễn Du’s The Tale of Kiều.
- Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng
QUYÊN NGUYỄN-HOÀNG is Modern Poetry in Translation‘s Writer in Residence for 2023. She is a poet and translator born in Việt Nam.
Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Margins, Jacket2, and other venues. She is studying at Stanford University.
NHÃ THUYÊN’s most recent books are bất tuẫn: những hiện diện [tự-] vắng trong thơ Việt (English edition: un martyred: [self-]vanishing presences in Vietnamese poetry (Roofbook) and moon fevers (Tilted Axis). Her next book of poetry vị nước (taste of water) has been waiting to see the moon. She’s a 2023 DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Fellow.