The North American debut of Tuệ Sỹ—poet, monk, scholar, dissident, and one of the great cultural figures of modern Vietnam—and a new bilingual edition to the Seedbank series.
In addition to being a preeminent scholar of world philosophy and a Zen master, TuệSỹ is one of Vietnam's most celebrated poets. He is a survivor of sixteen years of imprisonment and an eloquent witness to the tumult, tragedy, and resilience of his country over the last sixty years—and a full-length translation of his work into English is long overdue.
Assembled and co-translated by Vietnamese poet and essayist Nguyen Ba Chung and acclaimed American poet Martha Collins, Dreaming the Mountain reflects a lifetime of creation, crisis, and commitment. With poems presented on facing pages in Vietnamese and English, this volume includes the early imagism of Tuệ Sỹ's Zen studies as a scholar and critic, midlife work that represents his attempted retreat from the devastation of war and subsequent years of imprisonment, and late, elliptical poems that give intensely lyrical expression to a lifetime of profound experience. From the "fleeting dream of red blood at dusk" to the quiet determination of one who sets out to "repaint the dawn," these poems reflect the journey of an artist who speaks for his country, who captures its darkness and its light.
At once personal and universal, coolly observant and deeply compassionate, the poems of Tuệ Sỹ bring singular attention to a fleeting, painfully beautiful world.
The North American debut of Tuệ Sỹ—poet, monk, scholar, dissident, and one of the great cultural figures of modern Vietnam—and a new bilingual edition to the Seedbank series.
In addition to being a preeminent scholar of world philosophy and a Zen master, TuệSỹ is one of Vietnam's most celebrated poets. He is a survivor of sixteen years of imprisonment and an eloquent witness to the tumult, tragedy, and resilience of his country over the last sixty years—and a full-length translation of his work into English is long overdue.
Assembled and co-translated by Vietnamese poet and essayist Nguyen Ba Chung and acclaimed American poet Martha Collins, Dreaming the Mountain reflects a lifetime of creation, crisis, and commitment. With poems presented on facing pages in Vietnamese and English, this volume includes the early imagism of Tuệ Sỹ's Zen studies as a scholar and critic, midlife work that represents his attempted retreat from the devastation of war and subsequent years of imprisonment, and late, elliptical poems that give intensely lyrical expression to a lifetime of profound experience. From the "fleeting dream of red blood at dusk" to the quiet determination of one who sets out to "repaint the dawn," these poems reflect the journey of an artist who speaks for his country, who captures its darkness and its light.
At once personal and universal, coolly observant and deeply compassionate, the poems of Tuệ Sỹ bring singular attention to a fleeting, painfully beautiful world.
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Overview
The North American debut of Tuệ Sỹ—poet, monk, scholar, dissident, and one of the great cultural figures of modern Vietnam—and a new bilingual edition to the Seedbank series.
In addition to being a preeminent scholar of world philosophy and a Zen master, TuệSỹ is one of Vietnam's most celebrated poets. He is a survivor of sixteen years of imprisonment and an eloquent witness to the tumult, tragedy, and resilience of his country over the last sixty years—and a full-length translation of his work into English is long overdue.
Assembled and co-translated by Vietnamese poet and essayist Nguyen Ba Chung and acclaimed American poet Martha Collins, Dreaming the Mountain reflects a lifetime of creation, crisis, and commitment. With poems presented on facing pages in Vietnamese and English, this volume includes the early imagism of Tuệ Sỹ's Zen studies as a scholar and critic, midlife work that represents his attempted retreat from the devastation of war and subsequent years of imprisonment, and late, elliptical poems that give intensely lyrical expression to a lifetime of profound experience. From the "fleeting dream of red blood at dusk" to the quiet determination of one who sets out to "repaint the dawn," these poems reflect the journey of an artist who speaks for his country, who captures its darkness and its light.
At once personal and universal, coolly observant and deeply compassionate, the poems of Tuệ Sỹ bring singular attention to a fleeting, painfully beautiful world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781639550197 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Milkweed Editions |
| Publication date: | 12/27/2024 |
| Series: | Seedbank |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 150 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Tuệ Sỹ is the author of Dreaming the Mountain. Born in 1943 in Pakse (Laos) as Phạm Văn Thương, he joined the Lâm Tế (Linji) Buddhist order in 1950. Educated in in Nha Trang and Saigon, he became a tenured professor at Van Hanh University in 1970, and served as editor in chief of the University's Tư Tưởng (Thoughts) journal from 1972 to 1974. The author of more than fifty works, he is recognized as one of the most important Buddhist scholars in Vietnam. His numerous works on Buddhism include General Outline of Zen, The Philosophy of Sunyata, and The Myth of Vimalakirti, and translated into Vietnamese Daisetz T. Suzuki's Essays in Zen Buddhism, translations of the Buddhist sutras, and other Chinese and Pali texts. Sỹ also authored studies on the life and work of poets Du Fu and Su Dongpo, on the work of Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Hölderlin, and was the first to introduce the works of Michel Foucault to a Vietnamese audience. Many of his early poems and short stories were published in Khởi Hành magazine (1969–1972) and Thời Tập (1973–1975). Imprisoned from 1978 to 1981 and again from 1984 to 1998, he has lived in Ho Chi Minh City since his release.
Read an Excerpt
INTRODUCTION
Tuệ Sỹ, born in 1943, joined a Zen order at the age of ten and later became an eminent Buddhist scholar, professor, poet, and translator. Phạm Công Thiện has called him “the most eminent, most intelligent, most erudite, most spotless Zen master in Vietnam today.” He has stood fast against the idea that Buddhism could serve as a tool for any ideology, and is well known in the United States and elsewhere for his dissidence, as well as in Vietnam, where he lives. Twice imprisoned, once for three years and again for fourteen, he was at one point sentenced to death. If this seems an unusual biography, Tuệ Sỹ’s poetry, much of it written in a country torn by war, is no less unusual.
FIELD OF DISTANT DREAMS: 1950–1974
Tuệ Sỹ’s poems seldom make explicit reference to his life as a monk. But images of his early life, deepened by his study of Buddhism, permeate his poems.
Following years of study at the Institute of Buddhism in Nha Trang, Tuệ Sỹ moved to Saigon, where he graduated from the College of Buddhism in 1964 and from Van Hanh Buddhist University in 1965. In 1970, he became a tenured professor at the university, based on his research and philosophical essays; he also became an editor of a journal that led to a revival of Buddhism in South Vietnam. A scholar of both Eastern and Western philosophy and a translator of Chinese and Pali Buddhist texts, he taught Chinese, Pali, and Sanskrit in the Saigon pagoda and studied French, English, and German as well.
He also wrote poems and short stories, many of which were published in literary magazines. The poems in the first section of this book are from that period. Living a contemplative life, mature beyond his years, Tuệ Sỹ sets the pattern for his later poetry as he presents the natural world in a series of shifting images that, in Zen tradition, are layered with significance:
Worn stones reflect the setting sun
Crying waters rise over life’s games
A thousand years echo a great longing
Winds bring words to a lonely, distant journey (“Dream of a Long Life”)
During those years, Vietnam was undergoing one of the most brutal wars ever waged between a superior power and a small country. From a Buddhist perspective, the war, even if one side was right, contributed to the enormous sufferings of the country. “Bird Wing Sky” conveys, in his customarily indirect way, Tuệ Sỹ’s compassion for that suffering:
A promise has been buried in mourning
A bird disappears in the distant sky
A sense of weariness, caught in an instant
Autumn, ten thousand cries of discontent
Late night, a cold mist, a raging whirlwind
A deep breath out: dust rolls through a dream
DREAMING THE TRUONG SON: 1975–1977
In 1973, despite his many accomplishments, Tuệ Sỹ left Saigon to return to the solitude of a hill in Nha Trang, where the Institute of Buddhism was located. Two years later, Nha Trang fell into the hands of the revolutionary army. Knowing that Buddhism in the North had been seriously stifled, Tuệ Sỹ sensed that his freedom as a monk was threatened. The US embargo played a major role, but the new government made many mistakes. In 1975, Tuệ Sỹ wrote of seeing his country “only in its ruin,” its roads “still shadowed with sorrow’s smoke” (“The Years Away”).
As Tuệ Sỹ sat alone on the hill, his close friends and family members in Saigon, he began dreaming of a desolate peak in the Truong Son Mountain Range, pounded and battered by storms, which became for him a representation of Vietnam, uprooted from its long history. It was during this time that he wrote the following poem:
I can still hear the cicadas’ song
Can still love the night-fire’s flames
Home is just a peak in the Truong Son
Let’s proclaim our thousand-year indignation
(“Reflection”)
The Truong Son dream has followed him ever since.
Many of the poems in the second section of this book were written in Nha Trang; others, including “Nightmares in the Forest,“ were written in the Van Gia Forest, about sixty kilometers from Nha Trang, where Tuệ Sỹ built his own hut in the summer of 1976, “wait[ing] f or the watch to change” (“By a Cold Fire”). Thích Phước An told of his visits to Tuệ Sỹ, following a road that was “zigzagging and tortuous, so it was a hard slog, especially during the rainy season. . . . There was nothing there . . . besides the flickering oil lamp in the straw hut and the massive darkness in the middle of an immense forest.”
Life in both Nha Trang and the forest was hard: Tuệ Sỹ was a small man, and the work of raking earth and pounding soil was difficult, as “Foot of the Hill” and other poems suggest. But the Truong Son dream remained with him, even when life became more difficult, as it soon would.
DREAMING THE TRUONG SON: 1978–1984
In 1978, after he came back to Saigon (by then Ho Chi Minh City), Tuệ Sỹ’s fears were realized: he was sent to reeducation camp for two years, in prisonlike conditions. A year later, he wrote the first section of “Sitting in the Graveyard” in what had been South Vietnam’s Police Directorate General’s prison, which to him was a deserted graveyard. It was one of his most austere poems.
For a long time I’ve been sitting in a graveyard
Like white silk, cold moonlight covers the forest—
As chill night winds blow in, demons tremble
Quivering, kissing heaps of thin bones
They cry, ask why their bodies haven’t crumbled
So their spirits can disappear in wisps of flame—
When the mind has not yet turned to dead wood
The black earth still shines with bright blue blood
In the later sections of “Sitting in the Graveyard,” Tuệ Sỹ moves from desolation to memory; in the last section, memory is further transformed:
A life: a short stretch of rough road
I listen, all night long, to a waterfall
I step quickly over a long-lost river
Waiting for rain to drizzle on butterfly wings—
One morning, my eyes flood with the past
The dark road connects to my former lives
I stand forever in an endless forest stream
A fleeting dream of red blood at dusk
The three quatrains that follow in this book, also written in reeducation camps, convey a similar spirit. “Dedication,” a famous poem, speaks not only of Tuệ Sỹ’s practice as a monk but also of his compassion for the suffering of his people:
Two hands lift the prison bowl of rice
To dedicate it to the Lord of All
World overflowing with blood and strife
Bowl raised as wordless tears fall
The last five poems in this section were written following Tuệ Sỹ’s release from reeducation camp. In “Descending the Mountain” (1983), he may have been imagining what awaited him as he returned to the city. “Daydream” and “Dawn” were also written around then and reflect the mood of someone anticipating a return to prison.
This happened the following year, when Tuệ Sỹ was arrested and sent to prison for what turned out to be fourteen years. In 1988, he was given a death sentence, which was reduced to twenty years at hard labor because of international pressure. No poems were written during this period of imprisonment.
In 1998, the government intended to free Tuệ Sỹ and asked him to sign a letter requesting leniency. He refused, saying: “No one has the right to judge me; no one has the right to pardon me.” When the government threatened to withhold his release, he went on a ten-day fast. He was then released.
In this refusal, as in his actions and words throughout the war, Tuệ Sỹ exemplified advice he gave to young monks and nuns in 2003: “Do not…flatter kings and mandarins, pleased for the favor of the world, canvassing for a social position.” Instead, he wrote elsewhere, one should strive for bodhicitta, “the burning aspirations of a sentient being who finds himself living under grim circumstances and hellish persecution. He wants to locate a bright road not only to free himself from threats and oppression but also to liberate those in the same plight. . . . Shrouded by darkness, why not search for a torch?”
LATER POEMS
The last two poems in this volume, or sequences of short poems, were written after Tuệ Sỹ returned to Ho Chi Minh City, where he now lives. These poems are more fragmented than the earlier ones and also more richly diverse in their imagery and references, juxtaposing an urban world with the remembered world of forests and streams and at the same time evoking Buddhist thought more explicitly. Still infused with sadness, they are also more hopeful. “I’m journeying to reform my country,” he writes in the first section of “Meditation Room” (2000–2001); and later in the poem:
Deep regret, like a star dreaming in sleep
In the vast night, people have lost their way
Streetlights still stare blankly at the windows
Tomorrow I’ll set out to repaint the dawn
All of Tuệ Sỹ’s poems are filtered through a Buddhist perspective. For a Zen master, there are two ways to look at the world. One is to look at it as real, or at least temporarily real. The other is to understand its basic unreal nature; as Tuệ Sỹ says in “Fleeting Dream,” “the world is a moment’s dream.” In “Meditation Room,” he moves easily between the two ways of seeing:
Leaving behind the cows, their amorous eyes
I rise to the sky, become Lord of Nothingness
I look down at the earth, the cigarette smoke
Humanity’s sad sunlight dries in the wind
In the last sequence in this book, “Refrains for Piano” (2006), Tuệ Sỹ’s movement is even more seamless. Explicit references to piano music create a musical thread through the poem (Tuệ Sỹ himself plays the piano), not as something to leave behind, as in the earlier poem “Piano Keys,” but as a means of embracing a range of emotional and spiritual experience:
Since then, I’ve returned to the numinous sphere
Blue spreads out, obscuring endless space
The night star stretches deep into the distance
Real or unreal, the afternoon’s wet with grief
In an afternoon like that, low notes hum
The notes go on, burning my fingertips
Embracing a rest, the music suddenly stops
Where are you, friend? Smoke fills the veranda
Infusing the music is “the restless call of nothingness,” in which “time falls like rain”—rain which, in the last section of the poem, “falls on ancient tombs,” evoking the history of the country and its thousand years of Zen poetry. While Tuệ Sỹ’s poems reflect one of the most turbulent periods in Vietnamese history, they also raise one of the most important issues facing a people in transition: Where can a country go without a foundation in its spiritual tradition?
We ask the ant: Where is the Pure Land—
Beyond emptiness, there, in the tracks of birds
Away from the call of the black, bitter earth
Where the light of thought takes over from the sun?
(“Daydream”)
Perhaps there. Perhaps in these poems.
ON THE TRANSLATIONS
Tuệ Sỹ’s poems are a particular challenge and a particular delight for the translator. Infused with the poet’s Buddhism, they can seem, superficially, like nature poems or love poems. But when you delve a little more deeply—as translation forces you to do—you find both an unexpectedly spiritual experience and a fierce translation challenge.
Tuệ Sỹ often uses multiple images in a quatrain or even a single line, usually without transition. Many of the images are of the natural world, but the shifts keep the poems from being merely descriptive and force the reader to make connections. The result resembles what Robert Bly called “leaping poetry,” which he saw as a means of bridging the gap between conscious and unconscious thought. In Tuệ Sỹ’s poems, the shifts create a layering that encompasses both spiritual and historical significance. Sometimes this is explicit, as in: “I still wait through black, windless nights / The pure shimmering black of ancients’ eyes” (“I Still Wait”). Elsewhere, it isn’t, and the challenge for the translator is to make the lines or parts of lines syntactically and musically harmonious without adding too much connective tissue.
Vietnamese syntax is itself fluid, indeterminate in subject, object, and predicate. It can use verbs without indicating tense and sometimes omits the subject altogether; it doesn’t distinguish between “a” and “the.” These features are especially poignant in the poems of Tuệ Sỹ, whose sometimes ambiguous sense of time is made more striking by the lack of verb tenses, and who can all but disappear from a poem (is he the speaker?) when no subject is specified. A line can often be read in many ways, giving the poem different shades of meaning, some of which can be contradictory. This gives the poem a multivalent ambience, generally prized in Eastern culture. That a poem may contain contradictory meanings is treasured as a philosophical attitude: truth never finds itself fixed in one pole of a dichotomy but always reaches deeper and beyond.
The layering of meaning is especially apparent in a number of poems that could be read as love poems. The boundary between an ordinary love poem and a spiritual one is very thin in Tuệ Sỹ’s work. Some striking examples (there are others) are “Nightmares in the Forest,” “Dried Tree,” “The Road Scented with Your Lips,” and “Rooster Crow at Noon.” Of “Nightmares in the Forest,” in which the speaker “glimpse[s] your slim shoulder, your thin dress,” Tuệ Sỹ himself has said that love in the poem invokes the idea of safety, of protection. In reference to the quatrain “Fleeting Dream,” which opens with images of “emerald eyes” and a smile and closes with “I love because the world is a moment’s dream,” Phạm Công Thiện has written: “Love is only truly love, human relation is only truly human relation, if it’s seen as nothing more than a dream moment. When one realizes that one is nothing more than a dream moment, a complete awakening blazes forth.”
In Vietnamese, “Fleeting Dream” may seem less like a love poem than some others because of the pronoun it uses. Vietnamese has many words for “you,” most of them based on kinship terms. Em is one of the most distinctive of these; literally meaning “younger sister/brother,” it is used, among other things, by male speakers in reference to wives and sweethearts and is usually an indication that a poem is a love poem.
“Fleeting Dream” is different. One of the most flexible Vietnamese pronouns is người, which can be singular or plural, referring to a person or to people—or somewhat impersonal, as in the impersonal English “you,” which can be replaced by “one” or suggest the speaker, as it does in “Rainy Season in the Highlands.” In “Fleeting Dream,” we’ve simply not translated người in order to distinguish the poem from (and at the same time make a connection with) the previous poem, “Nightmares in the Forest,” which uses em.
Người is used much more frequently in the 2000–2001 “Meditation Room,” where context often seems to indicate “people,” usually seen historically. Another “you” pronoun, anh (literally, “older brother”), appears in both “Meditation Room” and “Refrains for Piano,” where we have used “friend” to distinguish it from both em and người.
Inseparable from the imagistic richness and layering in Tuệ Sỹ’s poems are sonic effects; together they give a particular beauty and coherence to each line, creating a quality that is, of course, impossible to translate. That lines tend to be imagistically self-contained helps; but prosody plays a major role and presents a major challenge.
All of Tuệ Sỹ’s poems are formal, though the form loosens somewhat in the two later sequences. The primary unit of Vietnamese prosody is the syllable. Most common are poems comprised of seven, eight, or five syllables, or of alternating lines of six and eight syllables (the lục bát, or 6-8). Tuệ Sỹ uses all of them. Because Vietnamese is a monosyllabic language, a line could rarely be rendered by a similar number of syllables in English. And because stress is heard more easily than syllable in English poetry, a loose pentameter line (five stresses, sometimes four) has been a useful way of creating a consistent music in English for most of these poems, while the five-syllable lines tend to fall more easily into four- or three-stress lines (as in “Foot of the Hill”). In Vietnamese, rhyme is complicated by tonal patterns (Vietnamese has six tones, divided into sharp and flat for prosodic purposes) that we of course can’t render; but most of these translations (especially of the lục bát poems) use some rhyme or slant rhyme, usually within quatrains.
Much of Vietnamese prosody is based on the quatrain, which seems to exert itself structurally in Tuệ Sỹ’s poems even when the poems are written as a single strophe. In some cases, especially the lục bát poems (usually written as a single strophe in Vietnamese), we have broken the poem into quatrains; in the third section of “Sitting in the Graveyard,” we use dashes to create pauses.
In “Meditation Room” and “Refrains for Piano,” the sections range from strict quatrains to completely free verse; frequently, what might have been seven- or eight-syllable lines are broken into units of three and four (or three and five) syllables, and rhyme is also freer, or nonexistent. In response, we have loosened the form in these sequences, trying only occasionally for rhyme.
These “translations” of form are of course arbitrary, and bear little resemblance to the music of Tuệ Sỹ’s Vietnamese, which is, even in the context of Vietnamese poetry, extraordinary. All translation, especially of formal poetry, involves a negotiation between form and content, and, as the first translators of most of these poems, we wanted to be especially careful to find equivalents for the imagery, diction, and nuances of the originals.
Our translation work has involved a similar negotiation. Chung has insured that a translation reflects, though not necessarily duplicates, the sense and power of the piece in the original language; Martha has tried to make sure that it bears some resemblance, musical and otherwise, to a poem written in English.
Others would, of course, create very different versions of individual poems, and a few already have, including Bạch Xuân Phẻ, who published a number of translations in his book about Tuệ Sỹ as teacher and monk. We appreciate their work, and we welcome the work of those to come. Our effort is merely the first of what we hope will be many attempts to bring the inspiring poetry of Tuệ Sỹ to a wide audience of English-speaking readers.
***
RAINY SEASON IN THE HIGHLANDS
A swallow, a hazardous stretch of road
A tall waterfall, heard through a long night
Stepping quickly across a vanished river
Waiting for rain in the flutter of butterflies
A ghost calls your name each morning
Day by day, sound by pointless sound
Rain greens black hair, heavy with dew
In dreams, leaves drift far away from shore
For a long time you stand in the sunlit river
Telling tales of what far places and times?
A small butterfly travels on fragile wings
But where can a leaf go, away from its season?
Months and years are like smiles in dreams
You keep going on, as water runs from its source
Strange shores tell their secrets to the shadows
Stray clouds, a thousand years ago, old hair
***
A SLENDER MOON
Resting, I embrace a slender moon
Disgrace bows shoulders, rancor shakes fading dreams
Many deep forests run through the Truong Son
Many red clouds, from tides of the Eastern Sea
On an ill-fated journey, tears well, spill over
Can one who journeys keep a simple heart?
His blood mingles, red, with the flag’s color
The sky cuts his remarkable dream in half
An army march tramples the setting sun
Lips are mortified by the traveler’s song
Love, when true, takes no revenge on others
One can seclude oneself in a wandering life
***
STREET AT NOON
Street at noon: red sunlight, crimson flag
Life does not confide in the lover of dust
Sorrow in a century of dissolution
Dream of desert island solitude
Hatred seethes in late-afternoon light
Flooding river, avalanche, tidal wave
Blinding smoke covers the Eastern sky
Oh heaven, white hair, have pity on Father’s village
I went away at the crowing of the cock
The Milky Way looks bleaker, night after night
If there is no loyal dust in life
Where, for the lover of dust, is his native land?
***
DRIED TREE
You let down your hair and the dried tree dreams
The dried tree and the spring cry for each other
I bow down, a full smile on my lips
And dream, like the city missing the deep forest
***
I STILL WAIT
I still wait through long restless nights
Pale green cries sound from the forest edge
In hatred’s darkness, there is still love
A star brims like tears beside my lips
I still wait through black windless nights
The pure shimmering black of ancients’ eyes
I look deep to lengthen history’s path
A river of blood and tears over the land
I still wait, to forget the beating waves
The Pacific Ocean, people back and forth
Those who stayed ache in the tyrant’s hands
Slender reeds weighed down by the sun at dusk
Then, with a frail body, I face prison
Fingers tapping time on a mossy wall
Then, my eyes closed, I go to the dream-place
Like early dew, like lightning, like evening clouds
Table of Contents
Introduction xi
On the Translations xix
Khung Trời Cũ 2
A Piece of Old Sky 3
Cánh Chim Trời 4
Bird Wing Sky 5
Hương Ngày Cũ 6
Scent of Past Days 7
Mưa Cao Nguyên 8
Rainy Season in the Highlands 9
Tóc Huyền 10
Black Hair 11
HoàiNiệm 12
ARecollection 13
Hận Thu Cao 14
NobleAutumnRancor 15
Mộng Trường Sinh 16
Dream of a Long Life 17
Kết Từ 18
Last Words 19
Những Năm Anh Đi 22
The Years Away 23
Một Bóng Trăng Gầy 24
ASlenderMoon 25
Phố Trưa 26
Street at Noon 27
Tự Tình 28
Reflection 29
Chân Đồi 30
Nightmares in the Forest 35
Một Thoáng Chiêm Bao 36
Fleeting Dream 37
Những Bước Đường Cùng 38
End of the Road 39
Bóng Cha Già 40
My Father’s Shadow 41
Ước Hẹn 42
Promise 43
Cây Khô 44
Dried Tree 45
Những Phím Dương Cầm 46
Piano Keys 47
Bên Bếp Lạnh 48
By a Cold Fire 49
Tống Biệt Hành 50
Leave-Taking 51