Demetria Martinez events

The Power of the Word in the World
by Demetria Martinez

When Vietnamese-American scholar Nguyen Ba Chung handed me a sheaf of poems in Vietnamese and asked me to translate them for a reading the next week, what could I say but yes?
      This was, after all, the 19th annual writers’ workshop at the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences. Based at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and named for a man who died of causes related to Agent Orange, the center is devoted to reconciling former enemies and studying war’s fall out—with an eye to one day studying war no more.
      The workshop, where I have taught for 12 years, takes place during the last two weeks of June and offers classes in all genres, forums on the writer’s obligations in times of war, talks by writer/activists such as Grace Paley and Sam Hamill, and visits by writers from Vietnam and other war-scarred countries.
       Chung provided me with a “trot,” his literal translation, and I was to polish the work for the acclaimed visiting writer of fiction and poetry, Phan Thi Vang Anh. She would read from her work and I would read the translations at one of the six evening readings that are a highlight of the workshop.
      Martha Collins, who teaches the annual translation class, every year asks the question that has long haunted her: Would the United States have bombed Vietnam if the people and politicians here had read the poetry of the so-called enemy?
      I thought of that question as I took the poems to my apartment and, somewhat panic stricken, began to read the trots. Fragments, at times nonsensical to my ear (imagine how our expression, “break a leg” would sound to a Vietnamese), nonetheless began to bring to light a world of flowers, birds and fruit trees in the early morning hours, a grandmother’s lullabies, and the sweetly scented healing herbs sold at market.
     This was not the Vietnam I watched on television when I was a child.
    As I read I began to enter the life of a woman in so many ways like myself, who has known profound homesickness, loneliness, determination to grow as a writer, and delight at rising early in the morning in order to go far in life. There was humor, too, and stinging insight in her poem, The Coldest Day in Hanoi: “What are women’s minds made of, that they think only of love?/They lean together, in serious discussion, as if to plot: but over one little man.”
     I made notes. Thankfully I room each year with Lady Borton, an American who has worked in Vietnam for over 35 years, doing everything from working with refugees to translating books. The author of a memoir, After Sorrow, Borton is fluent in the language.
     During our two weeks together she was up at 5 a.m., up to her elbows in dictionaries. She and her Vietnamese colleagues are putting together a bilingual anthology of Vietnamese women poets from antiquity to modern times, to be published by The Feminist Press at The City University of New York.
     A true scholar, she darted from dictionary definitions to lived experience—a motorbike can double as a taxi in Vietnam; how to translate this into English? Long discussions of this and other conundrums ensued. (Vietnamese has as many as 60 pronouns, yet these poems often used no pronouns.)
     Above all, I had the great luck to work with Vang Anh herself. Shy and self-effacing, she has much more English than she gives herself credit for. We plunged in. In “The Coldest Day in Hanoi,” the rain doesn’t fall, it’s a hard and slanting rain; the cell phone is not just a cell phone but serves as a light as a woman climbs a stairwell, yearning to be back in Saigon. I made the corrections.
       The reading went off without a hitch. The readers were introduced by poet Kevin Bowen, the director of the Joiner Center, and founder of the writers’ workshop. Born to parents who were active in the Catholic Worker movement, he has been deeply involved for years in translating the work of men and women he would have killed thirty years ago.
    Bowen and his staff were taking delegations of vets to Vietnam long before the U.S. normalized relations. He has helped build extensive archives that include documents of captured Vietnamese (including their poems). Now, he is starting to find ways to work with returning Iraqi vets. (For information about the Center, including its extensive Hispanic outreach work, check out its website http://www.joinercenter.umb.edu/ .
      Earlier in the week Bowen noted the historical miracle taking place as he stood beside the writer Le Van Thao, and read translations of his work. “We were fighting on opposite sides in the very same area,” he noted.
     I too wonder if we’d rain bombs down on people whose culture we knew intimately, for they would become human to us. Go out and find books by our “enemies.” There is everything to be gained in translation, and, in this time of still more war, way too much to lose if we don’t cross borders into the art and soul of those we are told to hate.
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