There is nothing beautiful about my poetry (i)
from poet Nguyen Chi Thien at Viet Nam Literature Project
There is nothing beautiful about my poetry
Well then it isn’t poetry. Poetry is beautiful. A poet makes beautiful things. I have seen this poet laboring over a verse in his head counting syllables and tones on the phalanges of his fingers to engage with poets’ standards of beauty in verse.
That is prosody. He had composed his entire oeuvre in his head and carried it there through long days and years of boredom and fear and hunger and illness and work, something prosody helps to do.
The English prosody of translator Nguyen Ngoc Bich in the translation shown is a matter of register and tone. Bich studied at Princeton in the 1950s when such departments of English taught the clean, crisp, direct address of modernist prose.
He followed a career as a journalist as such moderns as Ernest Hemingway had done. But all of the many translators who brought Thien into print when British diplomats carried the prison poems out and refugee presses printed them in Vietnamese around the world
translated Thien’s words into the same English mood, including Huynh Sanh Thong who often used a more fey, tinkly diction while translating other poems and poets. So I take it that Thien here chose blunt and forceful phrases to say,
There is nothing beautiful about my poetry. So, if it isn’t poetry, and scansion has vanished with the original Vietnamese, leaving only the lingua franca of modernism, why not just write it as prose,
There is nothing beautiful about my poetry. It’s like highway robbery, oppression, TB blood cough. There is nothing noble about my poetry. It’s like death, perspiration, and rifle butts.
what curators in a museum write as a chat box, the blob of prose on the wall next to a work of art; in a book, a caption below the representation itself. Why not? Because prosody includes rhetoric as well.
Note the repetition that makes these four lines two stanzas of verse rather than one paragraph of prose. Note of course the irony, saying one thing and getting across another.
Is it an arch irony, hipster, sarcastic? A cheap effect? I think it is rather dramatic irony, where the speaker means what he says. There is nothing beautiful about my poetry.
He was a beautiful man who only wanted to write beautiful poetry. Did prison make you a poet, I asked him. No, he said, no. He was born a poet. It was all he ever wanted to do.
Prison made him write ugly poetry. That is what he meant, up there on stage. The audience of the globe has disagreed. Dramatic irony. Poetry. Tragedy, the noble form.
There is nothing noble about my poetry
It’s like death, perspiration, and rifle butts.
Not even like getting shot. Getting butt-stroked as when without a weapon, a captive, a prisoner, sweating death.
My poetry is made of horrible images
My poetry is somewhat weak in imagination
My poetry is simply for common folks
This was the first Viet Nam letter of 3 so far addressing a translation from the work of our good friend the late poet Nguyen Chi Thien. The second, My verses are in fact no verses, went out July 13, 2022 and the third, I will visit your home, went out on July 27, 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.