Old Strange Books

Poems come our way in a variety of vehicles: journals, websites, and of course, books. Yet often enough, books come to us in poems, too—from Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer” to Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s “Supernatural Love,” which envisions a young girl watching her father “at the dictionary-stand.” In the November 2015 Poetry, Hai-Dang Phan’s “My Father’s ‘Norton Introduction to Literature,’ Third Edition (1981)” and Kathleen Ossip’s “Old Strange Book” continue that tradition—but in both poems, books stand for what can’t be read or even understood.

Like Schnackenberg, Phan imagines his father, an emigrant from Vietnam, making use of a dictionary:

Certain words give him trouble: cannibals, puzzles, sob,
bosom, martyr, deteriorate, shake, astonishes, vexed, ode ...
These he looks up and studiously annotates in Vietnamese.
Ravish means cướp đoạt; shits is like when you have to đi ỉa;
mourners are those whom we say are full of buồn rầu.
For “even the like precurse of feared events” think báo trước.

Phan italicizes both English and Vietnamese words, as if to suggest a similarity among them—that all are equally familiar, or equally strange, to any reader. And perhaps they are: words like “sob,” “martyr,” and “deteriorate” signify complicated realities that might well “puzzle” native English speakers, too.

The puzzle of translation, of what words and events mean as they change contexts, gives this poem its theme. Phan fills his lines with quotations—not only of English and Vietnamese vocabulary, but also of poems, his father’s annotations of those poems, and even Vietnamese propaganda: “In ‘reeducation camp’ he had to believe she was alive.” “Reeducation camp”—which denotes something far worse than its benign name—also provides a frightening counterpoint to the father’s education in poetry.

The speaker had a young sister, herself multiply translated:

Her name was Đông Xưa, Ancient Winter, but at home she’s Bebe.

“There was such speed in her little body, / And such lightness

in her footfall, / It is no wonder her brown study / Astonishes

us all.” In the photo of her that hangs in my parents’ house

she is always fourteen months old and staring into the future.

She goes by three different names—and she also goes by a quote from a poem and by a photo. Skidding from names to lines to image, Phan hints that all are necessary to express his sister, even as none will suffice: in the end, we learn basically nothing about her. Yet every work Phan quotes seems an attempted translation of his sister’s death, from Dickinson’s horses’ heads turned “toward Eternity” to Hemingway’s man and child “awaiting an apparition.” John Crowe Ransom’s “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter” may be most apt, for it, too, relies on translation—it describes a dead girl not as dead, but merely as “primly propped” and in a “brown study,” or mood of sad contemplation.

In “My Father’s ‘Norton’,” Phan performs an act of double-annotation: these stanzas constitute notes on his father’s notes about poems. Yet they also, of course, form a poem in their own right. And to make matters more complex still, that poem claims to be a book (see the title, which comes complete with publisher name, edition number, and publication date). What’s the implication of these overlaps? Can we consider every poem an annotation—and any annotation as rich as a book?

Related questions arise in Kathleen Ossip’s “Old Strange Book,” which adopts a similar strategy for its title, and which also revolves around a volume. “In the story of my life there is a book,” she writes:

The book told the story of two children,
Johnnie and Jill, I think.
They got lost in a deep forest,
drawn in thick dark ink.

The singsong poem reads like a nursery rhyme, an allusion both to the child the speaker was and to the book she loved. It’s as though, in writing the poem, Ossip is rewriting that book. Yet “I think” proves a crucial caveat, for while Ossip can’t forget this book, she can’t remember its details, which are “lost” just as Johnnie and Jill are, thick dark ink notwithstanding. As the poem progresses, Johnnie and Jill become “Julie and John,” and the speaker attests to transformations of her own: in the years since she read the book, “My hair was darker, / my body had opened to make a person, / my cheekbones were starker.” That second line has a fantastical ring, linking the speaker further to the fairy tale she misses, where “the goddess of spring / rescues the children in trouble.”

In her real-life tale, however, she is no longer a child and predicts no rescue; her own thick dark ink won’t prevent her disappearance:

Many books have I read, many people loved.
They mattered and mattered and mattered.
I tried but never found the book.
The field is where I’ll be scattered.

She is already “scattered,” so to speak, unable to remember the name of the book, whether it was an allegory, whether the goddess of spring was truly in that book or in another one. And she’s anticipating the time when she will become mere “matter” sprinkled in the field.

But what of the books she read, the people she knew? They “mattered and mattered and mattered”—and that rhythmic, repetitive sentence may get us as close to permanence as we can hope for.