Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong

Translated and edited by John Balaban
A copper Canyon book, Fall/Winter, 2000*

Ho Xuan Huong-her given name means "Spring Essence"-was born around 1780 at the end of the second L Dynasty, a period of calamity and social disintegration. Her fame in Vietnam as a poet and cultural figure continues to this day. A concubine, although a high-ranking one, she followed Chinese classical styles in her poetry, but preferred to write in nom, i.e. in Vietnamese. And while her prosody followed traditional forms, her poems were anything but conventional: Whether mountain landscapes, or longings after love, or apparently about such common things as a fan, weaving, some fruit, or even a river snail, almost all her poems were double entendres with hidden sexual meaning. In a Confucian tradition that banished the nude from art, writing about sex was unheard of. And, if this were not enough to incur disfavor in a time when impropriety was punished by the sword, she wrote poems which ridiculed the authority of the decaying Buddhist church, the feudal state, and confucian society. Yet, because of her stunning poetic cleverness, she and her poems survived. Young scholar-poets came to match wits with her. Her poems were copied by hand for almost 100 years before they finally saw a woodblock printing in 1909.

Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong is the first printing of her collected poetry in any Western language. Indeed, it is the first time that her poems have been actually printed in the nom she wrote in, rather than passed on by hand or copied in limited woodblock editions. 1000 years of nom writing-in literature, law, religion, government, medicine, and philosophy-are currently unreachable to all but a handful of Vietnamese scholars who can still read this calligraphic writing system that began its slow surrender to Western-style, roman script towards the end of the 17th century. Spring Essence is a first step, through computer analysis, towards recovering this long literary tradition.

John Balaban's own poetry has received two nominations for the National Book Award, while winning the Lamont prize, a National Poetry Series Selection, and, most recently, the 1998 William Carlos Williams Award for his Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems. He is one of a few Americans who translate Vietnamese poetry, beginning with his wartime taping and translating of folk poetry for his Ca Dao Vietnam. In 1999, he traveled to Vietnam to consult with literary scholars, to trace details of Ho Xuan Hong's life, and to track her footsteps through the countryside. He teaches at the University of Miami.