Two interviews with Nguyen Quoc Chanh
A Conversation with Nguyen Quoc Chanh
With Linh Dinh (Translated by Cari An Coe)
Linh Dinh (LD): Please tell the readers a little
bit about your background.
Nguyen Quoc Chanh (NQC): I was born in Bac Lieu
in 1958, into a family of opposing customs, with a Southern
mother who chose action over words and a Northern father,
nearly the opposite, who chose words over action. I didn’t
fit in with Southerners because I had a little Northern blood,
and I also didn’t match with Northerners because I had a
bit of the Southern temperament. I was the distorted product
of that confused relationship. It influenced greatly my
way of thinking and my attitude. Currently I live in Saigon
and I’ve published two collections of poetry: Night of
the Rising Sun (Dem Mat Troi Moc, 1990), and Inanimate
Weather (Khi Hau Do Vat, 1997).
LD: I heard you were in the army?
NQC: I was called up in 1979 and spent two years
in the ranks who go in sandals and beards, wear a helmet
and shoot AK rounds, but luckily I did not see combat. I
think, if sent into battle, I would have been taken prisoner,
or I would have surrendered, or been the first person shot. I
didn’t go to battle, but still I am left with two scars:
one scar in my stomach from an ulcer caused by hunger and
eating improperly, and a scar on my psyche from repression
from the ever-inflating pressure of the collective. During
those two years, I came to recognize the nearly instinctive
martial spirit latent in the majority of the Vietnamese people
and it filled me with more terror than imagined gun battles
against Pol Pot. But it’s also lucky, because of the stomach
ulcer, I was released from the ranks early.
LD: When you were a student, which authors
did you read? How did they influence your thinking and
the way you write verse?
NQC: The Stranger, The Time of the Assassins,
and Thus Spoke Zarathustra not only left a deep impression,
but they served as a hammer that broke me free. I read The
Stranger, in Le Thanh Hoang Dan’s translation of Camus,
for the first time in 1974. It hit me like a firestorm,
burning and ravishing every illusion in my mind about human
existence, replacing it with an ever-slowly growing loneliness
in my emotional state. I read it when I was still a student
and now, I still read it again sometimes, and in the future
I believe that the thoughts of Camus in The Stranger will
be a foundation for the virtue that ends alienation among
people. Time of the Assassins, Pham Cong Thien translating
Henry Miller writing about Rimbaud, was to me at that time,
more than any psychological or aesthetic education, a mirror
into the primal need to remove the sentimental waste of tradition
from life and from literature. Those books formulated my
individual consciousness, and caused me to resist the half-civilized
environment of the collective power, and to always see in
the individual a threat to their provisional safety. Besides
that, utopian economics and political autocracy in Vietnam
after the war caused calamities, conflicts and harsh disorder
in my psyche, so that strange images, unexpected thoughts
in lines of poetry, such as: the revolver has white hair,
innards are of stone, air is a tree root, stone is the tree
for masses of clouds . . . immediately entered me like
a toxic windstorm, and the surrealist method of verse indifferently
turned into breath, flesh and blood, and grew into the most
important part of my artistic consciousness. During that
time, translated books from the Soviet Union monopolized
the bookstores, and almost all the books wore the uniform. But,
luckily, there was a line of verse that really went off-track: the
cloud masses that wear trousers, by Mayakovsky, rescued
me.
LD: Studying at a socialist university, how
did you pick up those depraved works?
NQC: I picked up all those things at the flea market. Before
there was the socialist university of Vietnam, there was
the university of capitalism in Saigon. Before 1975, Saigon
had nearly all the types of books for a beginning writer,
the fundamentals of philosophy, aesthetics and world literature. After
1975, those works were thrown out on the street and the hat
of ‘depravity’ was placed on their heads. While Gorki and
his comrades-in-arms dominated the price of books, at the
flea market, Faulkner, Beckett . . . lay stretched out on
the sidewalk. 98% of the students were sacks, they passively
held all the things that were crammed into them. I also
was a sack, but a sack with holes in it. I saw my studies
as a reason to remain within the law, but my soul had long
been having an affair with those depraved works from the
flea market. Because of that, I was able to accumulate a
little experience, so that I would never turn into a disciplined
member in the ranks of those sacks.
LD: Can you explain to the readers why surrealist
poets were able to publish in Vietnam, when their poetry
had nothing in common with socialist realism?
NQC: Those were two misjudgments that had opposite
meanings. Surrealist poetry cannot but occur within
vague conceptions of utopian desires about the relationship
between a people and modernity. Socialist realism in Vietnam
has always regarded itself as a component of the advancement
of the people, and having advanced, why shouldn’t it know
the genius of the world? And so, surrealist poetry made
its way into Vietnam. However, it is necessary to reflect
upon both of these misjudgments. The misjudgment that socialist
realism brought was that it played a role in the mass murder
of talent by taking away consciousness and opportunity. But
the misjudgment of allowing surrealist poetry to enter Vietnam
was a lucky opportunity for those talents still latent. How
is it possible to modernize the plastic tail of the pig with
the head of a locomotive? While surrealist poetry
takes the policy that writing is carrying a revolver and
shooting randomly into a crowd . . . writing is taking the
power of the individual and illuminating it over the ignorance
of the collective . . . writing is calming down the whirling
within us, radiating light on dark, somber places and making
the darkness shift to other places. And writing is taking
revolt to revolutionize poetry, and through poetry, to break
through the borderline between life and death, between reality
and dreams, between things and objects, between this object
and that object - because surrealist poetry contrives to
place thought outside of its system of reference of idealist
and materialistic consciousness. However surrealist poetry
and socialist realism may exist together, just try to place
the poem “Free Union” by Breton next to “A May Morning” by
To Huu, or “In Search of the Shape of my Country” by Che
Lan Vien, with “New Tiles” by Xuan Dieu (from wartime), for
example, and you will see their ridiculous contradictions.
LD: I want to expand upon your observation
that one reason why surrealist poetry can be printed in
Vietnam is because almost all the surrealist poets support
socialism. Another author who has a large influence in
Vietnam is Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He is also pro-communist,
even though magic realism, a type of surrealism, has nothing
in common with socialist realism. What are your observations
regarding the influence of Marquez on Vietnamese literature?
NQC: I think they support communism in theory, according
to the canonical works of Marx. But the reality of communism
under Stalin, I cannot believe that they support that in
any way. The prisons in Siberia, the place where many writers
were maltreated, surely cannot be warm like the central office
of the Communist Party of France, where Aragon sat and drank
tea with his surrealist comrades-in-arms, discussing a future
classless society among all genders and races. I read a
piece written by Marquez about Castro, but Castro, in the
eyes of the magic realist Marquez, is not the colossal character
that pushed Cuba down a dead-end street. Castro emerges
as an old sorcerer in the admiring eyes of the people of
the village of Macondo. Because a writer, no matter where
he looks, will see the presence of illusory traits, Marquez
doesn’t view Castro from the perspective of participating
in the suffering of the people of Cuba, suffering caused
by Castro’s own policies. Marquez lifts Castro out of the
setting of Cuba like tossing a queer fish from the ocean
onto the deck of his newly-bought yacht, to drink and admire
it, and when he is drunk, the glorious yeast stimulates his
sympathies. And surely, it was in that manner that he came
to Vietnam after One Hundred Years of Solitude was
translated into Vietnamese. In my opinion, that was the
key that caused Vietnamese literature to jump out of its
skin after 1975. Except for Pham Thi Hoai, I think Nguyen
Huy Thiep, Tran Vu, Nguyen Quang Thieu . . . of course,
without Marquez, we would still have the writing of Thiep
and Vu and the poetry of Thieu, but without Marquez, I believe,
they couldn’t have been as good as they were. Because of
Vietnamese socialist realism, from the critical perspectives
of Nam Cao and Vu Trong Phung, true substance has become
impoverished. Meanwhile, according to the rosy perspectives
of Nguyen Khai, real substance was exchanged for something
better. But, from the perspective of illusion, real substance
has been inflated, creating extraordinary results that are
difficult to sense and which correspond with the nature of
a semi-civilization, and the stagnation of a society slowly
dying because of its closed-ness. With the approach of magic
realism, the remaining capital of Vietnamese literature orbits
around realism, and there are works which match well with
it.
LD: Is it hard for you to publish your poetry
in Vietnam?
NQC: It sure is. Before 1990, I had a few poems
that came out in the newspaper, but after I published The
Night of the Rising Sun, that all but stopped. By 1997,
the Youth Publishing House had allowed me to publish Inanimate
Weather. They say, necessity is the mother of invention. But
here, necessity leads to ‘cracks,’ and the evidence is that
two donkeys managed to sneak by.
LD: How do other poets and critics in Vietnam
assess your work?
NQC: In Vietnam, the poets and critics are nearly
all cadres. They get paid and work within the establishment
of the State. Whenever they speak or write about someone,
they have to look in front and behind. Literature for them
is a rice bowl, or the way to a promotion, or a fake blindness
to sit out the rain until retirement so that one can be buried
in the same cemetery as the leadership. They don’t have
a literary opinion other than standing their ground by passing
Party resolutions about literature. There are about ten
articles from the newspapers about my two collections of
poetry, especially about Night of the Rising Sun. They
criticize my poetry as being dark, obstructed, harmful .
. . They view my poetry as no different from garbage, insecticide,
coming from a group of scoundrels or spies. They cannot
distinguish between the attitude of a person in language
and the attitude of a poet in the language of poetry. And
for those people who are in good, the artfulness, the sneakiness
in the way they write, causes them to make every extreme
turn neuter. Ninety-nine per cent of them are literary eunuchs,
and they use the same knife that was used to castrate them
to sever the ovary or the penis of the literary work. They
write not for the reader or for the poetry, but because of
their relationship with the State, who they sleep with, but
have different dreams. Even if they dream of different things,
these cannot be. And if one of them is permitted to be different,
that one falls immediately for the pride of the profession,
because they aren’t experienced with freedom and learning. Just
recently, there was an article in the paper Tia Sang (Ray
of Light), which appeared to be wide-eyed, outward- and
inward-looking, but its vision was poor. Quoting two lines
of my poetry, the article said, “And it is because of this
that they write poetry in prose, trying to annul the rhyme
in the poem, writing without accents, leading in a dance
the lines of poetry with its abruptly ending and descending
lines, with truly new and strange representations and remembrances.” If
the writer of that article truly saw, in my poetry, extremely
new and strange symbols and memories, that strangeness could
not fallen from the fig tree in front of the village communal
house. Rather, it comes directly from that dance we are
led on in the lines of poetry. To say it violently, for
the sake of the strangeness of the poetry, even if I end
up burning the mountains and the fields, I would still burn
them down, much more than simply leading the poetic lines
on a merry dance.
LD: Only revolutionaries would dare burn down
the rivers and mountains to achieve their goal. It’s fortunate
that the poet can only bring forth revolution with his
words. What do you think of the place of poetry in Vietnamese
society now?
NQC: I am only joking, and then you turn around
and pull out the problem of the place of poetry. In Vietnam,
the place of the poem is always close to politics. It’s
correct, poets are revolutionaries because of some of their
objectives, they dare to burn down the rivers and mountains,
but with poets, there is only one objective, and that is
poetry, and they only have the power to burn one thing: words. To
burn words is to burn the person that was before, from To
Huu to Tran Dan. One person excels, and may be the vice-minister
at times; and one person sits in one place until their eyes
sink in, with surely very little to eat. The poems of To
Huu will never stand outside of the political establishment,
but the poems of Tran Dan, whether sitting or standing unstably
anywhere, they will always be poems. The inability of this
country to fully raise its head, is surely partly a result
of politicians who like to write poems, and so Vietnamese
poetry advances but little, because poets continue to worry
about being political. While the politicians ought to use
clear-sightedness to guide the nation, they instead bring
forth vagueness to placate the world. And for the group
of poets that follow behind flattering the powers-that-be
to wheedle a place for themselves in politics, they make
poetry trite and hollow with their sticky rhetoric called
a ‘return to the source.’ It is that which poetry makes
as its purpose, to push language into isolated vantage points,
its standing is still unclear in the present moment.
LD: I would like to share a long excerpt of
an email sent to me by a friend, which talks about your
poetry: “I continue to read Nguyen Quoc Chanh ever since
The Night of the Rising Sun, and I find that he has a tendency
towards fierce innovation, and his poetry naturally has
nothing in common with the persistent rhyme-spreading and
careful preparation, like the way those poets still prepare
for a feast, even if it is a feast of delicacies. But
let us not discuss that further. We don’t have to overstate
it, but NQC usually pieces words next to each other in
a very unpredictable fashion, and when a person who writes
prose, such as myself, reads it, they feel pleased. I
just have an observation that is very irritating, that
the internal rhythm of NQC seems to not exist, or is inconsistent,
or it misses, it seldom is truly persuasive. To speak
in the old manner, it has the air of not yet having been
brought together, so that there is a lot of substance but
it seems there is not yet much weight. To say that is
actually quite vague. To try to express it more intelligibly,
I just know to say that perhaps NQC mostly uses his head
to make poetry. Within our national poetry, among those
poets who pull out their own hearts, displaying their feelings
in pieces in their poetry, there are some who use their
heads [in the manner of NQC], but still play the prosody
very well. But to play this prosody in Vietnamese, no
matter whether it is modern Vietnamese, it is still Vietnamese,
a language which both succeeds and fails with abilities
to create fixed emotion . . . to ignore those abilities,
to ignore the special characteristics, the quintessential
emotions, which are expressed most perfectly in Vietnamese,
I call that foolishness.” What do you think of this observation?
NQC: The ability of old Vietnamese to create emotion
in its ancient poetry, and romantic poetry, up through modern
poetry makes me sick and tired. Of course, I cannot exist
outside of this tradition, but I will never be its slave. Precisely
because of this, in the consciousness and action of the poem,
I always display an attitude of provocation and hostility,
in order to have many opportunities to banish it from my
game. Some others have also informed me of the violation
of the quintessential special characteristics of Vietnamese. Because
I made a choice, although it was a foolish choice, that foolishness
has given me many pleasant feelings. But if I were to re-adjust
myself and rely on the emotion-provoking special characteristics
of Vietnamese, naturally more people would identify with
my poetry. But that would betray my aesthetic tendencies. The
aesthetic tendencies of each person in each time period will
give Vietnamese a varied face. Because with language, its
substance is both the means of transporting thought as well
as the thought itself. Thought develops through the means
of language, while at the same time, it alters the nature
of the language itself that is used to think. Vietnamese
is both the concrete Vietnamese of each person, and abstract
and independent of everything. Each person who participates
in using it doesn’t muddy it or make it immobile. Besides
that, the aesthetic principle determines the structure of
the poem, which rules the structure of the poem will follow,
resulting in the rhythm of that structure. The aesthetics
of discontinuity, conjoining, lop-sidedness, heaping, bagging,
will not have a continuous structure connecting between the
principle/auxiliary, the center/periphery . . . and naturally,
its rhythm will not lead us to the emotions of the main points,
the concentrated center, stability and accumulation. It
will have the autonomous rhythm of the transitory, without
a center. The observation that my poetry has a fiercely
innovative tendency, that it has nothing in common with our
persistent measured verse and careful preparation, if we
display it according to the principles of yin and yang, I
fall under the tendencies of the aesthetic yang. Though
the rhythm of my biology, according to Eastern medicine,
usually occurs in the situation of discord between yin and
yang, in my poetry, I always choose, to let the yang points
fall, even the anodes. So, my poetry cannot reassemble and
deposit, it can only crush or move. It cannot be emotionally
moving or resound, it can only knock against and symbolize. Because
reassembly and depositing are yin, while crushing and moving
are yang, vagueness is yin, concreteness is yang . . . I
don’t choose the way of yin/yang to fit in to my poetry,
I like to push it to one side, like the anode. As a result,
the observations above are half-correct about my poetry,
and for the other half, because of the demand for yin in
the way that poetry is read, it cannot be used in my poems. Thank
you for your friend’s aggressive, inclusive, and good observations,
he is also our friend.
LD: Finding good books in Vietnam is not easy. What
must you do to always have sources of inspiration to create?
NQC: Reading a good book is to have the pleasure
of feeling like a person who is knocked out in the ring to
be replaced by one who is better than himself. It does not
directly impact the creative process, rather it acts to control
the self and widen the concept of aestheticism. I can’t
usually write from the emotion that comes from reading something
good, it’s only when something bad injures me and slights
me that I write more easily. And those things are profuse
in Vietnam, to the point that, at any place or time, it can
make us stop breathing.
Note on source text
The Vietnamese-language original of Linh Dinh’s interview
with Nguyen Quoc Chanh, “Noi chuyen voi Nguyen Quoc Chanh” first
appeared in the Australian journal Viet, number 8 (2000).
The interview is now available at the successor to Viet
on the Web, tienve: http://www.tienve.org/home/literature/
viewLiterature.do?action=viewArtwork&artworkId=37
The interview is also available at talawas, dated August
11, 2002:
http://www.talawas.org/talaDB/suche.php?res=935&rb=0101&von
Note on interviewer Linh Dinh and translator Cari An
Coe here.
 |
Nguyen Quoc Chanh, seated center, with bridegroom Linh
Dinh toasting. |
Poetry Is An Effort To Make The Shame
Stink
With Ly Doi (Translated by Pham Viem Phuong)
Ly Doi (LD): After three volumes: Night of the
Rising Sun (Dem Mat Troi Moc, 1990), Inanimate Weather (Khi
Hau Do Vat,1997) and Of Metaphorical Identity (Cua
Can Cuoc An Du, 2002), what do you have to say about your
creative work if forced?
Nguyen Quoc Chanh (NQC): Creating is a way to link
myself with life. I don't know what the situation in foreign
countries is like, but here, in this dark and miserable corner
of the world, to live means being resigned to sinking the
shame. And writing poems is to rake up everything to make
the shame stink. The more you rake, the stranger the smell.
I love the smell of marrow so I drive my drill to the bone.
Let's have a look, dogs love gnawing at bones, and creative
work is somehow like that. We are like dogs that gnaw at
a lot of bones to find some marrow.
LD: Is each volume of poems an achievement,
or simply some stupidity you didn't know where to throw away?
Many people have thought so, how about you?
LD: I think each volume of poems is a consequence
of some holes you have dug, and from each hole a chance comes
out to help you to escape, even for only a second, from this
obscure, mean and tattered condition. In an obscure and tattered
society such as this, art provides nothing but introspection
and an act of staring. But keeping on staring will eventually
lead to disillusion.
As stated above, gnawing at a bone is not wise. But gnawing
(with a sense of disillusion) and at the same time getting
ready to apply for the membership of the Association of Writers
is irremediably stupid. If the first volume of poems helps
you get into the provincial Association of Writers, and the
second into the central Association, and the third one gets
you the Prize A of the Vietnamese Poetry Committee, it may
be seen as an achievement. An achievement also means getting
money grown on trees or applying for a license to print money.
Such a license is a bitter dream for most of the junk poets
here and now. Excuse me, but I regard them as flies hovering
over a corpse until it has nothing to stink, but the flies
keep hovering. It's a strange symptom of the passion to belong
to a herd.
Imagine you are living in a confined place, and your creative
work is a means to dig a hole through it. If your creative
work doesn't dig such a hole, it is but a fake paint put
on the wall of darkness and deception. A hole as such is
both a gap for you to breath and a plot to upset the fake
order, just for fun, with a view to confusing those who look
into it and suddenly see your deformed face. Confusing everybody
is a decent and kind occupation of so-called art in this
lifeless and lethargic time.
LD: How did you develop your ideas and working
manner in each volume of poems? Did your techniques and
contents change over time?
NQC: My first volume was a plot to
cause confusion by using epigrammatic language, such as:
The bank bill stinks of gunpowder
and salary is the corpse of the war
I have to hold the past in my hand every month
all my blood rushes from head to toes
and the second one was the same plot but with fantastic
language:
tick-tock tick-tock
the horny bill taps on the night drum
the two eyes reveal the secrets
sliding on the fat layer of time
the walls show death niches made by generations of prisoners
only the tick-tock keeps counting rolling aspirins
and the third one did it with humorous and brazen language
and started the technique of assembling things according
to the post-socialist cloning dogmatism (called socialist-oriented
market economy in Vietnam now):
Looking out from a blind alley, the world is covered
with glue, my friend says: taking a fake pill, I gave birth
to a hare-lipped boy on the nineteenth of May. A long-tail
silhouette glides on the wall in an act of masturbation,
and ends with a fall on its face . . .
or:
One day suspended from the ground
Drumbeat still sounds urgent in messy memory, and the temples
of a menopausal woman jerk. Blood pours out. Why so quick
Is that Kotex White
Comfortable
Dry
Brisk
Always Kotex White
OK?
As mentioned above, each volume of poems is a series of
holes, but they are not bored at random but done according
to an overall effort to cause confusion. Because our concepts
of poetry could give birth to new ideas in a poem, and vice
versa, these ideas could lead to new concepts of poetry.
Interaction between these ideas and concepts results in the
artistic content of the poetry that mostly depends on changes
in techniques.
LD: Why didn't you send your Of Metaphorical
Identity to publishers for a permit as you had done with
your two previous volumes? Are you afraid of them now?
NQC: Anyway you should be afraid of
them. You can't do anything about it, because to them, the
word toc (hair on your head) is OK but long (hair
on other parts of you body) begins to be problematic; mat (eye)
is extremely ethical, but cac (penis) surely corrupt; can
cu (hard working) sounds patriotic while dan ngu cu
den (people at the bottom rung) certainly reactionary.
You can even be seen as the biggest reactionary when you
fail to capitalize bac Ho (uncle Ho). State publishers
are a black market that professionally sells printing permits
to private printers, but it always sells them carefully because
it is afraid of getting involved with some depraved or reactionary
books. Its selling is well oriented. It is the socialist
orientation. In Of Metaphorical Identity, there is
no toc but a lot of long, no can cu but
full of dan ngu cu den. In other words, it has no
damn orientation and it is even unruly. How can it get a
printing permit? I don't give a damn about the printing permit
because my manuscript would be distorted, it would "lose
its roots", after it was handed to them. Just because
I don't want it to "lose its roots", I don't dare
go to the publishers.
LD: What are your overall interests and ideas
in your three volumes of poems?
NQC: What is present in all of them
is a sense of confusion. Although each volume represents
a type of confusion, all of them aim at causing confusion,
because the most important objective for the Ideology Board
of the Vietnamese Communist Party is to struggle against
confusion. It's the need to fight against confusion by this
Board in a very confused society that forces arts, including
poetry, to do everything in reverse. To reverse what the
Ideology Board has introduced is suitable to human nature.
Because human beings will make change when they are confused,
and changing the way of thinking is the only way to fumble
along the path to freedom. If you can't change your thinking,
that is, you keep clinging to the old political viewpoint,
you will eventually become conservative and reactionary in
terms of thinking. Because reaction means going against something,
and those who go against progress are reactionary. I think
the Ideology Board usually accuses people of reaction while
they are the biggest reactionaries, because their foremost
political task is to control the freedom of (confused) thought
by others.
LD: What do you think about the fact that young
and innovative poets today like to disseminate their works
by photocopy instead of having it published officially
and legally?
NQC: Private persons can have rights
to have dog meat, and even traffic in women and children,
but they have no right to publish their works. Publishing
is monopolized by the government. And a monopoly never supports
innovations. And photocopying one’s work is a natural form
of struggle for the freedom of speech that is suppressed
now. You can’t ask for this right, but you must rub against
it to make it "erect". The slogan “there is
nothing more precious than independence and freedom” should
be interpreted as independence and freedom for everybody,
and should not only exist in the air or the slogan. Young
and innovative poets should photocopy as many works as possible.
Up till now, only Bui Chat photocopied his Xao Chon Chong
Ngay [wordplay on Disturbances Today] while others,
such as Phan Ba Tho, Nguyen Huu Hong Minh, Lynh Bacardi and
Ly Doi, failed to rub their independence and freedom to
make them "erect". Oh, no, I’m wrong. They have
actually done a lot of things, making such websites as Tienve, Talawas and eVan hotter.
LD: Somebody said Nguyen Quoc Chanh was the
last hand that put an end to Vietnamese free-verse poetry
in the 20th century. What do you think about
this remark? What poetry you are making now? Your methods
of imagery association?
NQC: Such a remark originates from
Khe Yem’s New Formalism. His followers think that their new-formalist
poetry has replaced free-verse poetry. It’s worth noting
that free verse is not a pattern and it has a lot of variations.
It has no form in its internal structure. It is the only
poetry that is free while new-formalist poetry exists in
a fixed pattern.
If you rewrite a new-formalist poem as a piece of prose
you usually find it bad. The same thing happens when you
rewrite it as free verse but it isn’t so bad due to its uneven
rhythm. I think free verse has no end, only the free verse
of each poet has its beginning and end. Failing to realize
this leads to the opinion that free verse had reached its
peak with works by Mr. A or Mrs. B, so others could make
no free verse because they couldn’t surpass A or B.
And now I write something like the following:
I’m a dying stuff on the chopping board
Fuck you who keep sharpening the knife.
LD: Facing such new trends as New Formalism
and post-modernism in the Vietnamese poetry, where do you
place your writing? What do you think about present Vietnamese
poetry?
NQC: New-formalist poetry is a form
of free verse that is better developed due to its narrative,
and worsened by the use of enjambment. The New Formalism
is a dilemma of one of free-verse forms.
As for post-modernism, I saw its symptoms in works by Nguyen
Dan Thuong, Do Kh., Nguyen Hoang Nam, Le Nghia Quang Tan,
Phan Nhien Hao, Nguyen Hoang Tranh, Than Nhien (overseas
Vietnamese), Phan Ba To, Nguyen Huu Hong Minh, Lynh Bacardi,
Bui Chat, Ly Doi, Tran Tien Dung (Saigon), and Phan Huyen
Thu (Ha Noi).
Articles on post-modernism have been disseminated in Poetry (Tho)
and then Viet (Viet) magazines, and most impressively
in Calvino's lecture "Multiplicity" [translated
into Vietnamese by Hoang Ngoc-Tuan as "Tinh cach boi
truong trong van chuong tuong lai", in Viet no.
6, 2000]. In my opinion, such articles are the most important
contributions by those magazines and by Hoang Ngoc-Tuan and
Nguyen Hung Quoc to the re-awakening of the new consciousness
or rather, the post-new consciousness, after what Pham Cong
Thien did some 30 years ago in his New Consciousness in
Arts and Philosophy (Y Thuc Moi trong Vang Nghe va Triet
Hoc) in a number of poets in Saigon, including Phan Ba Tho,
Nguyen Huu Hong Minh, Lynh Bacardi, Bui Chat and Ly Doi,
who are the most active writers to respond to the post-modern
spirit.
I have grasped with excitement the essence of post-modern
consciousness, particularly the following awesome statement
by Calvino: "Overambitious projects may be objectionable
in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains
alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond
all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves
tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue
to have a function." (English translation of Vietnamese
translation by Hoang Ngoc-Tuan), and I had the inspiration
to write a series of poems in my Of Metaphorical Identity in
2001. I had read The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot before,
therefore, when I read Calvino's "Multiplicity",
I immediately recognized that The Waste Land was a
very fine example of multiplicity, and I had every reason
to experiment with the concept of multiplicity in my poetry.
My first new poem was “Revolving Stage” (San khau quay).
After having completed it, I happily sent it to Linh Dinh
who felt so excited that he translated it to English. Luckily,
at that time, the post-modernist poet Linh Dinh was staying
in Saigon, and with Phan Ba Tho and some others we met almost
every week, had some Lang Van rice liquor with dog meat and
discussed all things on earth. What’s wonderful was the fact
that these small talks absorbed me into post-modernism without
my knowing.
In an interview, Linh Dinh said, half jokingly and half
seriously, that in the term “New Formalism” only New was
OK, and that in the long run the term “post-modernism” may
leave behind only the word post. You want to know
where I put my writings, don’t you? Maybe somewhere between new and post.
I followed the New-Post school. Between New and Post, there
must have been some aperture, and I am trying to turn it
into an air hole. Doing creative work is to bore a hole through
which I could come out and draw in playing with the stuffy
block around me, not to illustrate any trends or theories
as many people thought.
Vietnamese poetry of today is not different from that under
the Ly and Tran dynasties. It always makes the new by adopting
the old from foreign countries. So Vietnamese poets can feel
free to buy, steal, or rob the world poetic heritage. All
trends, from futurism, dadaism, surrealism to new formalism
and post-modernism, are necessary, because the Vietnamese
poetry is like the Vietnamese economy in that it will be
in the doldrums if there is no foreign investment.
LD: What about playing fields for writers,
from Literature and the Arts (Van Nghe) magazine
to the Association of Vietnamese Writers and other addresses,
where do you belong?
NQC: Literature and the Arts magazine
and the Association of Vietnamese Writers are no place for
me. They are places built by the Vietnamese Communist Party
to control the army of lackey writers. While the Party still
has the extraordinary power to rule the country unreasonably,
these lackey writers will keep shining. When the Party becomes
old and weak, or loses its extraordinary power, they will
get bewildered and turn into dust. What I say is based on
experience presented by Nguyen Dinh Thi, the leading lackey
writer who had ruled his fellows on behalf of the Party for
life. What he wrote will turn into dust like anything else
on earth, but I think the statement he made from the bottom
of his heart as a professional lackey (“We writers are only
specks of dust, but they are shining ones belonging to the
Party”) and reported by Bui Minh Quoc, will shine forever
although some day his glorious party may cease to exist.
In Nguyen Dinh Thi’s slavish imagination, the Party is not
merely a political organization but something omnipotent.
In other words, Nguyen Dinh Thi made his Party a God and
he even didn’t know what his rank was among disciples of
the Party.
My family has been atheist for three generations, so we
have no place in a country where everything could become
gods, from a beggar to a terrorist. Two places I like to
frequent are Tienve and Talawas.
LD: Anybody who knows you see that you are
interested in the concept of Freedom. What is freedom,
in your opinion, in its ordinary sense and what is freedom
in the arts?
NQC: Freedom is the most beautiful
concept among spiritual ones. This concept needs to be nurtured
specially, and if it survives and grows up, other rubbish
concepts will have no place in our mind. In my opinion, such
concepts as "The Socialist Republic of Vietnam", "The
Liberation of the South Vietnam", "The Ideological
Front", "The Central Culture" . . . must
be eliminated before the concepts of "democracy", "development" .
. . can be realized. And the concept of freedom must be embodied
in the broom and the foxhound during this task of elimination.
Ordinary freedom means braking and slowing down when seeing
the orange light on a road while freedom in the arts means
speeding up before all red lights.
LD: What traditions does your poetry belong
to, Oriental or Occidental?
NQC: My poetry may belong to the tradition
of garbage, because Vietnam is a trashcan for both the East
and the West. After some 1,000 years of struggle and coexistence
with Chinese, French, Japanese, American and Russian imperialists,
Vietnam developed a strangely tragic culture that is both
virtuous and wanton, something like Thuy Kieu’s life. Why
are the Vietnamese people madly in love with the Tale
of Kieu [Nguyen Du’s classic verse narrative]? I think
the Vietnamese people, in their unconsciousness, feel similarities
between the tragic fate of Kieu and Vietnamese history. It
is a cultural complex, a defense. And it’s this complex that
unceasingly turns Vietnam into a trashcan for both the East
and the West. Disputes between the old and the new, and traditions
and innovations, are nothing but conflicts between two pieces
of rubbish from the East and the West. In such an environment
full of nonsensical conflicts my solution is to use and discard
as quickly as possible all pieces of rubbish from both the
East and the West.
LD: What do you think of luc-bat poems [poems
written in lines of alternately six and eight syllables]?
NQC: A luc-bat poem comprising only
a couplet is good. If it comprises two couplets, it begins
to become bad. And it is unbearable when comprising thousands
of couplets.
LD: What are the shortcomings of Vietnamese
poetry?
NQC: Its instinct is abundant, and
its consciousness is insufficient. Or both its instinct and
consciousness only go halfway with the consequence that everybody
is content with only a slight touch of innovation for fear
that if one goes too far, one’s name maybe removed from the
genealogical account.
LD: In your opinion, what are a poem, a free-verse
poem, and a good poem?
NQC: Jean-Paul Sartre regards a novelist
as a man who could tell a big victory from a small one while
poets could see some failure in all victories. Sartre's intelligence
helps him say the right thing although he doesn’t like poetry.
Novelists can only see flame and smoke in wood while poets
think of ash. That is why what a poet writes will be a poem
in general; while a free-verse poem is written by an ordinary
poet who is well aware of his freedom. A good poem is the
one that causes an esthetic confusion, either slowly or quickly,
forcing readers to review their thoughts.
LD: This is my last question: What are you
doing? And who are you?
NQC: I do some affairs to make a living,
but as I have no big capital I can easily go bankrupt. What
I do with, and without, my poetry is something that only
God knows. In an environment where walls have ears, I had
better keep it secret, as Ho Chi Minh pointed out, because
of the following reasons:
I was born in a dull place (Bac Lieu), into a dull family
(half Northerner and half Southerner), went to dull schools
(not worth mentioning) with dull teachers (not worth mentioning),
and now although I live in a brilliant and chaotic city (Saigon)
I have no alternative but to become a dull person (called
Nguyen Quoc Chanh) and I have to take anti-stress pills (magne-B6)
every day.
References
Note on the source text
In Ly Doi’s interview, “Tho la (tho o) khoet cho cai nhuc
(nha, duc, vong) boc mui”, the poet Nguyen Quoc Chanh plays
on words in ways that are not translatable. The Vietnamese
original is available at talawas, dated July 26, 2004:
http://www.talawas.org/talaDB/
showFile.php?res=2479&rb=0101&von=20
Note on the interviewer
Interviewer Ly Doi is a poet and writer, born in 1978, living
in Saigon. For more on him in English, please see “Vietnam’s
rude poetry delights intelligentsia”, by Nga Pham of the
BBC Vietnamese service, August 31, 2004, at:
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/3614760.stm
For an article in Vietnamese including a photo, please see “Hien
tuong tho photo o Saigon” (The Phenomenon of Photocopied
Poetry in Saigon), by Chinh Vi, BBC Vietnamese service, August
12, 2004, at: bbc.co.uk/vietnamese/entertainment/story/
2004/08/040811_undergroundpoetry.shtml
For Ly Doi’s own poetry in Vietnamese
and another photo, please see his index page at tienve:
tienve.org/home/authors/viewAuthors.
do?action=show&authorId=161
Note on translator Pham Viem
Phuong.
