The Defiant Muse: Vietnamese Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present
The Defiant Muse: Vietnamese Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present is the first bilingual anthology of poetry from ancient to modern times to come from Viet Nam itself. It is also the first book jointly produced from the outset by a Vietnamese and an American publisher. The Women’s Publishing House (Ha Noi, in business for over fifty years) printed the edition in Viet Nam. The Feminist Press at The City College of New York (in business for more than thirty-five years) printed the edition sold in the United States.
Native Vietnamese speakers and scholars carefully complied, translated, and edited the texts in this anthology to maintain the authenticity of each work. The editors have included groundbreaking new translations of several ancient poems and works by canonic Vietnamese poets, as well as poems by contemporary writers of the Diaspora. Whether describing the legendary uprising of the Trung sisters against Han Chinese rule or the quiet cultivation of silkworms, this volume distills women’s experiences throughout time.
This project took twelve years. The first step was building the first anthology in Vietnamese of Vietnamese women poets. Five Vietnamese scholars and poets undertook the huge task of choosing from a thousand years of writing. In the next step, the two Vietnamese editors for The Defiant Muse chose poems from the Vietnamese anthology and added newly emerging voices.
The Defiant Muse has three editors:
Nguyen Thi Minh Ha has degrees in Russian and in foreign languages and culture and is an editor at the Women’s Publishing House (Ha Noi), where she is responsible for foreign literature. Nguyen Thi Thanh Binh has a degree in Vietnamese and foreign literature and is an editor at the Women’s Publishing House (Ha Noi), where she is responsible for Vietnamese literature. A resident of Viet Nam for decades, Lady Borton is currently adjunct professor of Southeast Asian Studies at Ohio University. She is the author of several books about Viet Nam and has translated Vietnamese poetry, fiction, and memoir.
From the "Foreword" by Grace Paley and Robert Nichols:
"Whereas men’s actions in farming are solitary, as Lady Borton observes -- mending a hole in the dike or plowing with a water buffalo -- the women’s songs encourage each other. The women are ankle-deep in the rice paddy, planting shoots in a straight line, as the well-known Japanese haiku says, 'The rice-planting women. Everything about them / dirty except their song."
Excerpts from the "Introduction" by Lady Borton, with a few of the poems, which she translated with poet/songwriter/composer Do Xuan Oanh:
"Ca dao (Vietnamese oral folk poems) have been handed down since before 1000 C.E., the beginning of Viet Nam’s extant written literature (in contrast to occasional verses). The wet-rice cultivation that began several thousand years ago in Viet Nam’s northern red River Delta was impossible in colder China to the north. Except for building paddy dikes, traditional rice farming for men is solitary, whether they plow or drive oxcarts. In contrast, rows of women with many hands and many voices work together in the paddies. Thus, it is likely that many ca dao were composed by women to entertain each other while transplanting, weeding, and harvesting rice:
With the Second Month in sight,
Girls weed out grass, boys build the dike.
Girls speak lyrically and recite verses,
While boys delight in bawdy curses.”
***
"Confucian ethics banned women from preparing for and taking part in the mandarin exams, thereby preventing their educational advancement. Nevertheless, one woman did earn a doctorate. With her father’s permission and while still a child, Nguyen Thi Due (1574-1654) disguised herself as a boy and changed her name to Nguyen Van Du. ... This couplet by Nguyen Thi Due from a longer poem in six-word – eight-word meter asserts a place for women in academia:
This girl is taking the exam,
Like the best scholar, strength is at hand."
***
"Ho Xuan Huong (c. 1772-c. 1822) is often called the ‘Queen of Vietnamese Poetry.’ She portrayed life’s distress in sort, succinct poems and broke with tradition by expressing a thirst for love through powerful images of sexual desire. Ho Xuan Huong relied on Vietnamese ca dao as well as on Chinese T’ang dynasty poems to write poems in Nom (Vietnamese ideographic script) that seem deceptively simple yet use startling erotic metaphors. In ‘Honoring the Fan,’ the seventeen or eighteen bamboo slats needed to make a fan also reflect the years when a young woman comes of age:
Seventeen or eighteen, you should be
Cherished, never leaving his hands.
Stout or thin, you open to three corners,
Wide or narrow, you’re secured by one stud.”
***
"Anh Tho (1921-2006) grew up in a feudal Confucian family; her father allowed his daughters to study only through the fourth grade since they would soon marry and be responsible solely for the kitchen. Anh Tho read and wrote secretly. Her father found out. He burned her poems. Anh Tho persisted. Nearly seven decades later and two years after her death, Anh Tho became the only woman (compared with forty-five male writers, musicians, and artists) ever to receive Viet Nam’s highest cultural accolade. Her Buc tranh que (Rural Landscapes), a break-through book in Viet Nam’s New Poetry Movement of the 1930s, presented scenes crafted so that each poem is its own lyric painting, as in these lines from ‘Spring Afternoon’:
Rain like dust motes gentles the wharf
A lazy boat lounges on the river
A thatched stall stands silent in the deserted village
Floating purple flowers fall to the earth near the margose trees."
***
"While Anh Tho is probably the best known Vietnamese woman poet from the French War, the most famous woman poet in Viet Nam from the U.S.-Viet Nam War is Xuan Quynh (1942-1988). In 1988, a traffic accident took Xuan Quynh’s life and that of her second husband (Viet Nam’s most famous modern playwright) and their twelve year-old son (a child prodigy poet acclaimed in the former Soviet bloc countries). The crowd streaming after the funeral procession was the largest for artists in Viet Nam’s modern history. Before Xuan Quynh, probably no Vietnamese poet spoke of love with such pathos as in these lines from ‘The Boat and the Sea’:
The days they didn’t meet
The white-capped sea filled with longing;
The days they didn’t meet
The boat’s heart ached—and cracked.
If the boat should part without a farewell
The sea would have only wind and waves.”
***
"Although some modern poetry expresses anger never before found in Vietnamese verse, the tradition of the exquisite also continues, as seen in "Late Lotus" by Da Thao Phuong (1974--):
Silently
Having buried itself in the darkness of pond water
As the frogs’ croaking erupted all night long,
Tormenting the mosquito larvae, startling them into panic,
Only with summer already gone
Does the exquisitely pink lotus
Tenderly unfold its petals
Stunned
To remember that its origin was from fragrance
From light
From water"