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Spring Essence: The Poetry of Hô Xuân Huong
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About Spring Essence: The Poetry Of Hô Xuân Huong
Product Description Featured on NPR's "Fresh Air" "Sometimes books really do change the world... This one will set in motion a project that may transform Vietnamese culture."Utne Reader Ho Xuan Huongwhose name translates as "Spring Essence"is one of the most important and popular poets in Vietnam. A concubine, she became renowned for her poetic skills, writing subtly risque poems which used double entendre and sexual innuendo as a vehicle for social, religious, and political commentary. The publication of Spring Essence is a major historical and cultural event. It features a "tri-graphic" presentation of English translations alongside both the modern Vietnamese alphabet and the nearly extinct calligraphic Nom writing system, the hand-drawn calligraphy in which Ho Xuan Huong originally wrote her poems. It represents the first time that this calligraphythe carrier of Vietnamese culture for over a thousand yearswill be printed using moveable type. From the technology demonstrated in this book scholars worldwide can begin to recover an important part of Vietnam’s literary history. Meanwhile, readers of all interests will be fascinated by the poetry of Ho Xuan Huong, and the scholarship of John Balaban. "It's not every day that a poet gets to save a language, although some might argue that is precisely the point of poetry." Publishers Weekly "Move over, Sappho and Emily Dickinson." Providence Sunday Journal "In the simple landscape of daily objectsjackfruit, river snails, a loom, a chess set, and perhaps most famously a paper fanHo found metaphors for sex, which turned into trenchant indictments of the plight of women and the arrogance, hypocrisy and corruption of men... Balaban's deft translations are a beautiful and significant contribution to the West's growing awareness of Vietnam's splendid literary heritage."The New York Times Book Review The translator, John Balaban, was twice a National Book Award finalist for his own poetry and is one of the preeminent American authorities on Vietnamese literature. During the war Balaban served as a conscientious objector, working to bring war-injured children better medical care. He later returned to Vietnam to record folk poetry. Like Alan Lomax’s pioneering work in American music, Balaban was to first to record Vietnam’s oral tradition. This important work led him to the poetry of Hô Xuân Huong. Ngo Than Nhan, a computational linguist from NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematics, has digitized the ancient Nom calligraphy. From Publishers Weekly It's the backstory more than the actual English renderings of these poems that has been generating pre-pub attention for this title, including a feature in APRAbut it's a pretty good backstory. A poet and conscientious objector during Vietnam, Balaban (Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems) nevertheless went in country during the war, advocating for better care for wounded children. He eventually became smitten with the poems in this book and perhaps with the mysterious poet behind them. Ho, who was born in the late 18th century and died in the early 19th, may or may not have been a concubine to a local official, but the speaker in the poems that have come to us in her name often wrote as oneAemploying strictly forbidden sexual themes via wry double entendres. The difficulty in translation, as Balaban's straightforward introduction notes, is compounded by the fact that Ho wrote in N?m, a now nearly extinct writing system that maps characters onto the vernacular rather than the Mandarin of more formal writing. Her "sonnetlike lu-shih style" was a particular challenge, but the form and meanings come through clearly in poems like "Three-Mountain Pass": "A cliff face. Another. And still a third./ Who was so skilled to carve this craggy scene:// the cavern's red door, the ridge's narrow cleft,/ the black knoll bearded with little mosses?" Such contrivances can make for entertaining reading, but unless one can read the
