Bloggaz With Attitude

In 1971 John Balaban went to Vietnam to record ca dao, lyric poems passed down orally through generations. Guided by a sympathetic monk, he traversed the war-torn southern countryside, capturing some five hundred ca dao on tape. Most of these poems had never been written down, not even in Vietnamese. In Ca Dao Vietnam: Vietnamese Folk Poetry Balaban presents forty-nine of these stunning, crystalline lyrics in English translation.

The introductory essay suggests that the unassuming, mostly anonymous ca dao are quintessential expressions of Vietnamese culture. “Agrarian dynasties with a cultural continuity of millennia have left few monuments more enduring than the oral poetry and song known today as ca dao.” Linguistic and formal analyses show ca dao to be both ancient (perhaps many thousands of years old) and endemic to Vietnam. In this, they differ from Vietnamese literary poetry, which borrows heavily from Chinese tradition.

As Balaban states in the introduction, “Ca dao are always lyrical, sung to melodies without instrumental accompaniment by an individual singing in the first person…The range of ca dao includes children’s game songs, love songs, lullabies, riddles, work songs, and reveries about spiritual and social orders.” They are informed by a keen, rural sensibility which sometimes appears in brilliant nuggets of folk wisdom.

I am a Mo Village girl. I wander about selling beer, chance to meet you. Good jars don’t mean good brew. Clothes well-mended are better than ill-sewn. Bad beer soon sends you home. A torn shirt, when mended, will look like new.

Many of the poems take love as their subject, but patience and duty generally overrule passion. Buddhist notions of karmic destiny foster a romantic quietism and the necessary social coordination of village life makes the fulfillment of individual desire something less than a priority.

HE: In the long river, fish swim off without a trace. Fated in love, we can wait a thousand years.

SHE: Who tends the paddy, repairs its dike. Whoever has true love shall meet. But when?

A concubine’s bitter lament, a drifter’s carefree song, a jungle soldier’s stoic verse: they are wonderfully varied in tone as well as subject, but all share a vivid sense of metaphor born of the intimate observation of nature. Ca dao are miracles of evocative concision. Simplicity and understatement are the rule.

A tiny bird with red feathers, a tiny bird with black beak drinks up the lotus pond day by day. Perhaps I must leave you.

I wonder how the ca dao tradition has fared these past thirty-odd years. Balaban writes that already in 1971, the people of Saigon thought the tradition was dead. It was only when he took to the road and talked with country folk that he discovered ca dao to be alive and well. Hopefully they are thriving still, despite Vietnam’s increasing economic growth. It would be a shame to lose these verbal treasures, honed over generations, washed smooth in the river of time.

P.S. In a moment of pure, internet magic, Google discovered some of Balaban�s recordings here. Enjoy them there, or go to his own page for a track list, info on his other books and links.

The young poet Eumenes complained one day to Theocritus: �I have been writing for two years now and I have done only one idyll. It is my only finished work. Alas, it is steep, I see it, the stairway of Poetry is so steep; and from the first step where now I stand, poor me, I shall never ascend.� �These words,� Theocritus said, �are unbecoming and blasphemous. And if you are on the first step, you ought to be proud and pleased. Coming as far as this is not little; what you have achieved is great glory. For even this first step is far distant from the common herd. To set your foot upon this step you must rightfully be a citizen of the city of ideas. And in that city it is hard and rare to be naturalized. In her market place you find Lawmakers whom no adventurer can dupe. Coming as far as this is not little; what you have achieved is great glory.�

Oh, to reach that first step! Oh, to make it in the city of ideas!

I like this guy, and not just because he�s named Gyorgy. (Can a 29 year old get away with patronizing a nonagenarian? Not likely, but where’s the harm in trying?) I like him because he�s a true blue bibliophile. He�s obviously read everything you can imagine reading and quite a lot more that you can�t even imagine. And I like him because he�s a duece of a raconteur. You know he�s told this story about a thousand times. It�s got a kind of nacreous perfection to it:

… in March 1938, I offered some of my poetry translations to the publishers Uj Idok. They offered me a contract to translate the 1000 most beautiful poems in world literature. When the publisher�s head, Miss Andrassy, who looked rather like a woman from an Italian renaissance painting, asked me when I�d have it ready, I asked for four years. �I have a lot of reading to do: I�ll submit the manuscript after the World War,� I said. She replied: �After the World War? It�s already been.� She couldn�t believe there�d be another. In the end, we agreed on a deadline of 1942. I finally completed the first version of the anthology in spring 1988. It�s now being reissued, with another 500 poems. I don�t regret chasing down great poems all my life. I learned something that few people know: that Japanese, Chinese, Persian and Arab poetry has just as much value as European poetry.

That�s what I want to learn! But does he actually read all of those languages? Amazing. Meanwhile my Spanish, rarely used even in its heyday, quietly gathers dust in some climate-controlled storage of the mind. And that�s not all the sad news. Faludy points out the grim fact that my generation is sinking into an age of darkness�as if I didn�t know it already.

In the US, people read 35 to 40 per cent fewer books now than 20 years ago. And the numbers continue to fall. Of courses, we�ve seen this before. Around 350AD, people stopped reading. At the time of Marcus Aurelius, there were 88 libraries in Rome. Under Constantine the Great there was only one. I think we stand before a great crisis, which is consuming literature.

Oh! when will I be able to recount the sociological trends of the ancient world with such assurance? There�s only one thing for it: I�ve got to hit the books. And it�s true what they say, nature helps the one who helps one�s self. Call it a minor miracle if you wish, but the local library actually has one of Faludy�s books in circulation. It�s a biography of Erasmus, with the pithy title of… Erasmus. Which is perfect because I know next to nothing about Erasmus. That�s one of the few benefits of ignorance, pretty much everywhere you turn there�s something to be learned. So the too-be-read list gets a little bit longer. [Link is from The Literary Saloon]

DIARY

Grown up? Never—never—! Like existence itself which never matures staying always green from splendid day to splendid day— I can only stay true to the stupendous monotony of the mystery. That’s why I’ve never abandoned myself To happiness, That’s why In the anxiety of my sins I’ve never been touched By real remorse. Equal, always equal, To the inexpressible At the very source Of what I am.

~trans. L. Ferlinghetti & F. Valente

In high school, I made a similar promise to myself�never to grow up. All the kids around me were stressing about getting into the best colleges on route to the best careers. �If that�s what being an adult is about, count me out,� I thought. I was into playing cards and basketball, making and looking at art, hanging out with my girlfriend�not test scores, and certainly not career paths. Maybe I was naive; maybe I was wise beyond my years; maybe I was a spoiled brat who didn�t need to stress about a career. In any case, the moment I made that vow (I remember it vividly) was an important one for me. I�ve never yet had reason to regret it. (I wonder if my high school buddies who went into insurance, or retail apartment development can say the same about their choices.) I was determined to always be mindful of �the inexpressible/ at the very source/ of what I am� as opposed to pinning my future to, as Pasolini puts it in another poem, the �flimsy crust of our world/ over the naked universe.� The detachment expressed in �Diary,� the steering a middle course between happiness and despair, is another idea with which I sympathize. Happiness is conditional�dependent on certain factors outside of our control (Buddhist theory). So paradoxically, even happiness causes suffering when we abandon ourselves to it. By which I mean forgetting its transient nature. If, in a moment of happiness, we recall that �this too will pass,� we won�t despair when the conditions for that happiness disappear. It�s good, I think�as Pasolini suggests�to be similarly detached in our moments of guilt or grief. This too will pass… That�s just about the best thing I ever learned.