Having lost our senses, we carry on the struggle of cooking maggot corpses from a busted refrigerator.
My ham fist points a pudgy index at that stanza. The yearling buck’s horn I use to open each page so I may take these photos pokes out from my palm.
My hand is that big but the finger is not so short. My phone foreshortens it. That sentence would have been a poem 6 years before the poet dated this one.
Ooo. Dating a poem. On a date, đi chơi, going for fun. Not taking it to bed. Never go to bed with anyone whose problems are greater than your own.
This poem is a downer. If you don’t think so it definitely shouldn’t go to bed with you. I took out the line breaks above to convey the plain statement. Here is the poet’s way:
Having lost our senses,
we carry on the struggle of cooking maggot corpses
from a busted refrigerator.
No one can build a tree, you can’t plant a person.
The poet has gone to bed with someone. He has a 9 year-old daughter. “No one can build a tree,” she told him.
Better not go to bed with the poet. His daughter’s remark sends him circling the drain. “You can assemble a regime solely out of crooks. You can establish an asylum to house a whole society. You can even create darkness with invisible bricks and stones.”
Then he recalls her remark. “But you can’t build a tree. A tree springs from its favorite soil. A tree sheds itself leaves according to seasons. A tree may bear fruit or choose not to. A tree will fast when the sun is too violent. A tree will fall down honorably in the end.”
The poet resolves, “No one can build a tree. You can’t plant a person.” This all is much better the way the poet and his translator put it. But you get the idea. You can see why someone let the poet plant a person.
There is an assertion of life, rock solid logically because it is a negation of will, of ants carrying off the fattest death, of skinnier deaths waiting in prison cells before the firing squad, of the box I’m inside.
Isabelle Thuy Pelaud ends her study This is All I Choose to Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature by contrasting hope and despair in 2 grim griots, Truong Tran and Linh Dinh.
The desperado, Linh, is another translator of Hao. He does not have a daughter to fish him out of the drain.
No one can build a tree,
you can’t plant a person.
We are freedom’s chlorophyll!
Viet Nam letters have addressed Paper Bells from poet Phan Nhiên Hạo translated by Hai-Dang Phan 6 times. For the first time on March 2, 2022, the second on March 19, 2022, third on April 18, 2022, and fourth on May 21, 2022.
Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.
The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.
Typo: “You can assembly a regime solely out of crooks”