Comments on: Tran Da Tu

By: David Buuck

David Buuck — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 21:47:36 +0000

Linh
who is the poet Lorenzo Thomas is reading at the beginning of his 1978 reading on pennsound:
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Thomas.html
can’t make out the name, nor does LT mention a translator (himself, perhaps?)
great stuff-
DB

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 13:56:39 +0000

Dear Linh –
Thank you so much for the poetry and news of the poets.
There are so many ways in which exile functions in relation with writing.
Writing becomes the home where on hangs one’s hat so to speak–
as the home country bans one and he new country literally can’t read one–and even in translate is still seeing one as “far away”–
Out of the tensions many sounds arise and find themselves in poems–
of a surprising kind!
One can be an internal exile also, which more and more people are the world over.
I wonder if there will begin to be a mutual recognition among the refugees and exiles –as they find themselves in a land not a home land to any of them –(homelessness one may live in one’s own country–millions of internal refugees in usa–)–and yet the home they are making–
at any given moment–in any give poem–
this is opening of a piece on this question written for a Japanese journal that was reprinted in a British one for 9/11 anniversary couple years ago–
“Home is where I hang my hat”—since childhood this phrase haunts me with images and questions. The hat hanging in a forest, a field, aboard a ship, in a familiar room, a street, a faraway land . . . Trust in one’s ability & imagination to improvise a home in any situation. And—what happens if the hat is lost, stolen or damaged? Above all, in the 15th century French poet Francois Villon’s words:
En mon pais suis en terre longtaine In my own country I’m in a distant land
Je ris en pleur et attens sans espoir I laugh in tears and wait without hope
Confort reprens en triste desespoir I cheer up in sad despair
…the good black humor of the paradoxical ability to exist simultaneously at home and not at home.
Thank you for noting my blog–
actually besides news there is a great deal of art work there Visual Poetry and Mail Art and in April I am opening a new Visual Poetry/Mail Art Call to be displayed there as the pieces arrive–re Walls—-gated communtiies, Green Zones, Apartheid Walls, etc etc–”to cement divisions”–ethnic, religious, class, privataized, i a myriad ways to cut masses of people off and out–to in a sesne “disappear them” from view–and slowly from the mind completely–
a staggering amount of the us budget is poured everyday into these imense projects, bilions paid to the immense bloated corrupt contratcing firms–who in turn employ their own sub contratctors privatized security forces–and more and more work and destory and build very little for themost part outside any rule of law or oversight–
immense locusts feeding off the people lands and minerals and elements outside thw alls–
thanking you both very much–
david-bc

By: Linh Dinh

Linh Dinh — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 23:47:15 +0000

Hi Kent,
These poems are also in free verse in the originals.
Both Tran Da Tu ang his wife, Nha Ca, are still banned, as are most overseas Vietnamese writers. All of my Vietnamese poems are banned, for example, although I’ve just had my first collection released in Vietnam by an underground press. Call it a full-length samizdat, if you will. The wild and weird stuff you saw in Soft Target were written by poets in Vietnam but published in a Vietnamese webzine edited in Australia.
And yes, I know about David-Baptiste Chirot’s blog and have mentioned it on my own blog.
Cheers!

By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 21:04:42 +0000

One other thing. Linh Dinh asks how many “war poets” from the countries under U.S. occupation we know of here in U.S. Not exactly “verse,” in this case, but I encourage you to check out David-Baptiste Chirot’s blog http://www.davidbaptistechirot.blogspot.com/ far and away the best poetry-blog source for news from the Middle East, and with Philip Metres’s blog, the best anti-war poetry site going.
From Chirot’s latest post:
“The US army has banned the publication of four cartoons drawn by Sami al-Hajj, the Al Jazeera cameraman held in the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, according to his lawyer….
Al-Hajj was seized by the US military while he was covering the war in Afghanistan for Al Jazeera’s Arabic channel and has been held as an “enemy combatant” without trial or charge since 2001.”
Kent

By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 20:25:31 +0000

Thanks for these, Linh. Couple questions:
Has Tran Da Tu published in exile?
What’s the cultural situation now in Vietnam? That is, would he and Nha Ca, for example, still be “proscribed”? (Having seen some of the utterly wild and weird stuff you’ve translated from younger Vietnamese poets–in Soft Targets, for recent instance–I gather things are fairly open now?)
What’s the original prosody of these?
Kent