SPRING ESSENCE

The Poetry of Ho Yuan Huong

John Balaban

Copper Canyon Press

P.O. Box 271

Port Townsend, WA 98368

Paper, 134 pages, $15

ISBN 1-55659-148-9

By the time Ho Yuan Huong was born near the end of the 18^th century, 900 years had passed since the Vietnamese had driven out the Chinese, but even so the Confucian order had survived in Viet Nam until she came of age, at which point it was collapsing. Although some Vietnamese women had traditionally been able to achieve high positions, including the management of wealth, advising rulers, even sometimes leading armies, they still faced numerous social obstacles, and rarely were they tutored in literary studies. And while some women might obtain elevated positions, the Confucian system allowed a man to abandon a women for gossip, jealousy, lack of children, or an incurable disease. The bias against women was such that a pregnant, unwed, upperclass woman could be sentenced to death by an elephant trodding on her abdomen, killing both the mother and unborn child.

The strictures of morality made sex a forbidden literary topic, and even the nude was banned from art. In such a world was born Ho Yuan Huong, daughter of a concubine. As John Balaban says, it is surprising she wrote at all, much less that she became a master of the art of poetry, writing mockingly of corrupt Buddhist practices, the inequity of marriage for convenience, the ability to buy an official post, and double entendres in which a poem within the poem might reveal sexual meaning.

While Ho Yuan Huong s poetic attacks on male authority might seem normal for fin de si cle Americans and other Westerners, for her time it was shocking and personally risky.

Her name, which means the essence of spring, as in a form of perfume, belied her wit. According to legend, she was famous for her ability to immediately compose perfectly structured poems, and would often be challenged by young men studying for imperial exams. When one young scholar fainted from shock at the difficulty of her verse, then recovered to finish the poem, she remarked, Not bad, and married him. A believer in duyen (pronounced zwee-en ), meaning true love, she remained married a mere 27 months before her husband died, forcing her thereafter to marry for convenience as a second wife essentially a concubine like her mother. Her second husband she despised so much her elegy for his death is caustic. Yet her poetry in Balaban s translations seems far removed from such bitterness, as in Autumn Landscape:

Drop by drop rain slaps the banana leaves.

Praise whoever sketched this desolate scene:

the lush, dark canopies of the gnarled trees,

the long river, sliding smooth and white.

I lift my wine flask, drunk with rivers and hills.

My backpack, breathing moonlight, sags with poems.

Look, and love everyone.

Whoever sees this landscape is stunned.

Of course this is not merely a poem of a natural scene, for what was an image of nature was often, for Ho Yuan Huong, an image of something quite different. She knew what life had to offer, as in Spring Watching Pavilion:

Love s vast sea cannot be emptied.

And springs of grace flow easily everywhere.

Where is nirvana?

Nirvana is here, nine times out of ten.

Balaban s translations are exquisite, like jade in a clear pool. The work of this poetess, little known in the West, is a superb addition to the ever-increasing canon of translations finding a home in our contemporary literature.