CA DAO VIỆT NAM

Vietnamese Folk Poetry

 

by

 

John Balaban

 

Copper Canyon Press

P.O. Box 271

Port Townsend, WA 98368

 

Paper, 73 pages, $15

ISBN 1-55659-186-1

 

 

Imagine in 1971, a veteran of Viet Nam, not a soldier who fought in the war but one who had completed alternative service by treating children wounded in the war, returning to rural Viet Nam where the war still raged, and, as a young American, turning on his tape recorder to record the folk poems of peasants unafraid to sing their songs. Who would have the courage to do that in Iraq? That s what John Balaban did in Viet Nam, speaking to farmers, housewives, boat builders, fisherman, seamstresses, herbalists, and older sisters minding their siblings. Often he taped at night, after the work day was done, a kerosene lamp lit, and mixed with the singer s voice would be a background of mortar and rifle fire. Most of what he recorded had never been written down. All of them are ca dao (pronounced ka zow or ka yow ), and he recorded over 500 of them, translating just 49 in this slim, fine volume. As one village proverb says, Go out one day, come back with a basket of knowledge.

There is both knowledge and beauty here. Most of these ca dao are brief, often only one couplet of 14 syllables, and while passed down through an oral tradition, they are sung, not spoken. Like stones worn smooth over generations of use, many of these poems, perfected and polished through the ages, now seem jewel-like. Like this one:

Oh, girl, bailing water by the roadside,

why pour off the moon s golden light?

 

For the Vietnamese, who hold poetry in high esteem, a poem should not be too obvious, but should contain an undercurrent with a deeper meaning. So what may appear to be a simple expression through a clear image may mean something quite different. Consider this, titled by Balaban as Linked Verses:

The wind plays with the moon; the moon with the wind.

The moon sets. Who can the wind play with?

 

The wind plays, plays with the moonflower.

The bud is yours, but the blossom is mine.

 

The wind plays through watercress and chives.

A pity that you have a mother, but no father.

 

The wind plays. How can one please a friend s heart?

The Milky Way is shallow in places, in some places, deep.

 

To mistake the beauty of this poem as nothing more than a description of a natural scene would be a mistake of ignorance and lack of imagination. In contrast, take the complaint in The Body Is Pain by a guard assigned for three years to a lonely outpost: In the well, one fish swims alone and free. Or, in A Tiny Bird, the lament of a lover about to leave:

A tiny bird with red feathers,

a tiny bird with black beak

drinks up the lotus pond day by day.

Perhaps I must leave you.

 

To think we dropped napalm on a nation whose peasants sing poetry as beautiful and allusive as this. But these poems, and this collection in particular, do not dwell on the war. Their words are timeless and often show us the innate hope of the human spirit, as in The Painting:

The stream runs clear to its stones.

The fish swim in sharp outline.

Girl, turn your face so that I may draw it.

Tomorrow, if we should drift apart,

I will find you by this picture.

 

#