Dreaming the Mountain (Paperback or Softback)

INTRODUCTION

Tu? S?, born in 1943, joined a Zen order at the age of ten and later became an eminent Buddhist scholar, professor, poet, and translator. Ph?m Công Thi?n has called him “the most eminent, most intelligent, most erudite, most spotless Zen master in Vietnam today.” He has stood fast against the idea that Buddhism could serve as a tool for any ideology, and is well known in the United States and elsewhere for his dissidence, as well as in Vietnam, where he lives. Twice imprisoned, once for three years and again for fourteen, he was at one point sentenced to death. If this seems an unusual biography, Tu? S?’s poetry, much of it written in a country torn by war, is no less unusual.

FIELD OF DISTANT DREAMS: 1950–1974­

Tu? S?’s poems seldom make explicit reference to his life as a monk. But images of his early life, deepened by his study of Buddhism, permeate his poems. 

Following years of study at the Institute of Buddhism in Nha Trang, Tu? S? moved to Saigon, where he graduated from the College of Buddhism in 1964 and from Van Hanh Buddhist University in 1965. In 1970, he became a tenured professor at the university, based on his research and philosophical essays; he also became an editor of a journal that led to a revival of Buddhism in South Vietnam. A scholar of both Eastern and Western philosophy and a translator of Chinese and Pali Buddhist texts, he taught Chinese, Pali, and Sanskrit in the Saigon pagoda and studied French, English, and German as well.

He also wrote poems and short stories, many of which were published in literary magazines. The poems in the first section of this book are from that period. Living a contemplative life, mature beyond his years, Tu? S? sets the pattern for his later poetry as he presents the natural world in a series of shifting images that, in Zen tradition, are layered with significance:

         Worn stones reflect the setting sun

         Crying waters rise over life’s games

         A thousand years echo a great longing

         Winds bring words to a lonely, distant journey              (“Dream of a Long Life”)

During those years, Vietnam was undergoing one of the most brutal wars ever waged between a superior power and a small country. From a Buddhist perspective, the war, even if one side was right, contributed to the enormous sufferings of the country. “Bird Wing Sky” conveys, in his customarily indirect way, Tu? S?’s compassion for that suffering:

         A promise has been buried in mourning

         A bird disappears in the distant sky

         A sense of weariness, caught in an instant

         Autumn, ten thousand cries of discontent

         Late night, a cold mist, a raging whirlwind

         A deep breath out: dust rolls through a dream

DREAMING THE TRUONG SON: 1975–1977

In 1973, despite his many accomplishments, Tu? S? left Saigon to return to the solitude of a hill in Nha Trang, where the Institute of Buddhism was located. Two years later, Nha Trang fell into the hands of the revolutionary army. Knowing that Buddhism in the North had been seriously stifled, Tu? S? sensed that his freedom as a monk was threatened. The US embargo played a major role, but the new government made many mistakes. In 1975, Tu? S? wrote of seeing his country “only in its ruin,” its roads “still shadowed with sorrow’s smoke” (“The Years Away”).

As Tu? S? sat alone on the hill, his close friends and family members in Saigon, he began dreaming of a desolate peak in the Truong Son Mountain Range, pounded and battered by storms, which became for him a representation of Vietnam, uprooted from its long history. It was during this time that he wrote the following poem:

         I can still hear the cicadas’ song

         Can still love the night-fire’s flames

         Home is just a peak in the Truong Son

         Let’s proclaim our thousand-year indignation

                                             (“Reflection”)

The Truong Son dream has followed him ever since.

Many of the poems in the second section of this book were written in Nha Trang; others, including “Nightmares in the Forest,“ were written in the Van Gia Forest, about sixty kilometers from Nha Trang, where Tu? S? built his own hut in the summer of 1976, “wait[ing] f or the watch to change” (“By a Cold Fire”). Thích Phu?c An told of his visits to Tu? S?, following a road that was “zigzagging and tortuous, so it was a hard slog, especially during the rainy season. . . . There was nothing there . . . besides the flickering oil lamp in the straw hut and the massive darkness in the middle of an immense forest.”

Life in both Nha Trang and the forest was hard: Tu? S? was a small man, and the work of raking earth and pounding soil was difficult, as “Foot of the Hill” and other poems suggest. But the Truong Son dream remained with him, even when life became more difficult, as it soon would.

DREAMING THE TRUONG SON: 1978–1984

In 1978, after he came back to Saigon (by then Ho Chi Minh City), Tu? S?’s fears were realized: he was sent to reeducation camp for two years, in prisonlike conditions. A year later, he wrote the first section of “Sitting in the Graveyard” in what had been South Vietnam’s Police Directorate General’s prison, which to him was a deserted graveyard. It was one of his most austere poems.

         For a long time I’ve been sitting in a graveyard

         Like white silk, cold moonlight covers the forest—

         As chill night winds blow in, demons tremble

         Quivering, kissing heaps of thin bones

         They cry, ask why their bodies haven’t crumbled

         So their spirits can disappear in wisps of flame—

         When the mind has not yet turned to dead wood

         The black earth still shines with bright blue blood

In the later sections of “Sitting in the Graveyard,” Tu? S? moves from desolation to memory; in the last section, memory is further transformed:

         A life: a short stretch of rough road

         I listen, all night long, to a waterfall

         I step quickly over a long-lost river

         Waiting for rain to drizzle on butterfly wings—

         One morning, my eyes flood with the past

         The dark road connects to my former lives

         I stand forever in an endless forest stream

         A fleeting dream of red blood at dusk

The three quatrains that follow in this book, also written in reeducation camps, convey a similar spirit. “Dedication,” a famous poem, speaks not only of Tu? S?’s practice as a monk but also of his compassion for the suffering of his people:

         Two hands lift the prison bowl of rice

         To dedicate it to the Lord of All

         World overflowing with blood and strife

         Bowl raised as wordless tears fall

The last five poems in this section were written following Tu? S?’s release from reeducation camp. In “Descending the Mountain” (1983), he may have been imagining what awaited him as he returned to the city. “Daydream” and “Dawn” were also written around then and reflect the mood of someone anticipating a return to prison.

This happened the following year, when Tu? S? was arrested and sent to prison for what turned out to be fourteen years. In 1988, he was given a death sentence, which was reduced to twenty years at hard labor because of international pressure. No poems were written during this period of imprisonment.

In 1998, the government intended to free Tu? S? and asked him to sign a letter requesting leniency. He refused, saying: “No one has the right to judge me; no one has the right to pardon me.” When the government threatened to withhold his release, he went on a ten-day fast. He was then released. 

In this refusal, as in his actions and words throughout the war, Tu? S? exemplified advice he gave to young monks and nuns in 2003: “Do not…flatter kings and mandarins, pleased for the favor of the world, canvassing for a social position.” Instead, he wrote elsewhere, one should strive for bodhicitta, “the burning aspirations of a sentient being who finds himself living under grim circumstances and hellish persecution. He wants to locate a bright road not only to free himself from threats and oppression but also to liberate those in the same plight. . . .  Shrouded by darkness, why not search for a torch?”

LATER POEMS

The last two poems in this volume, or sequences of short poems, were written after Tu? S? returned to Ho Chi Minh City, where he now lives. These poems are more fragmented than the earlier ones and also more richly diverse in their imagery and references, juxtaposing an urban world with the remembered world of forests and streams and at the same time evoking Buddhist thought more explicitly. Still infused with sadness, they are also more hopeful. “I’m journeying to reform my country,” he writes in the first section of “Meditation Room” (2000–2001); and later in the poem:

         Deep regret, like a star dreaming in sleep

         In the vast night, people have lost their way

         Streetlights still stare blankly at the windows

         Tomorrow I’ll set out to repaint the dawn

All of Tu? S?’s poems are filtered through a Buddhist perspective. For a Zen master, there are two ways to look at the world. One is to look at it as real, or at least temporarily real. The other is to understand its basic unreal nature; as Tu? S? says in “Fleeting Dream,” “the world is a moment’s dream.” In “Meditation Room,” he moves easily between the two ways of seeing:

         Leaving behind the cows, their amorous eyes

         I rise to the sky, become Lord of Nothingness

         I look down at the earth, the cigarette smoke

         Humanity’s sad sunlight dries in the wind

In the last sequence in this book, “Refrains for Piano” (2006), Tu? S?’s movement is even more seamless. Explicit references to piano music create a musical thread through the poem (Tu? S? himself plays the piano), not as something to leave behind, as in the earlier poem “Piano Keys,” but as a means of embracing a range of emotional and spiritual experience:      

         Since then, I’ve returned to the numinous sphere

         Blue spreads out, obscuring endless space                             

         The night star stretches deep into the distance          

         Real or unreal, the afternoon’s wet with grief

         In an afternoon like that, low notes hum

         The notes go on, burning my fingertips

         Embracing a rest, the music suddenly stops

         Where are you, friend? Smoke fills the veranda

Infusing the music is “the restless call of nothingness,” in which “time falls like rain”—rain which, in the last section of the poem, “falls on ancient tombs,” evoking the history of the country and its thousand years of Zen poetry. While Tu? S?’s poems reflect one of the most turbulent periods in Vietnamese history, they also raise one of the most important issues facing a people in transition: Where can a country go without a foundation in its spiritual tradition?

         We ask the ant: Where is the Pure Land—

         Beyond emptiness, there, in the tracks of birds

         Away from the call of the black, bitter earth

         Where the light of thought takes over from the sun?

                                             (“Daydream”)

Perhaps there. Perhaps in these poems.

ON THE TRANSLATIONS

Tu? S?’s poems are a particular challenge and a particular delight for the translator. Infused with the poet’s Buddhism, they can seem, superficially, like nature poems or love poems. But when you delve a little more deeply—as translation forces you to do—you find both an unexpectedly spiritual experience and a fierce translation challenge.

Tu? S? often uses multiple images in a quatrain or even a single line, usually without transition. Many of the images are of the natural world, but the shifts keep the poems from being merely descriptive and force the reader to make connections. The result resembles what Robert Bly called “leaping poetry,” which he saw as a means of bridging the gap between conscious and unconscious thought. In Tu? S?’s poems, the shifts create a layering that encompasses both spiritual and historical significance. Sometimes this is explicit, as in: “I still wait through black, windless nights / The pure shimmering black of ancients’ eyes” (“I Still Wait”). Elsewhere, it isn’t, and the challenge for the translator is to make the lines or parts of lines syntactically and musically harmonious without adding too much connective tissue.

Vietnamese syntax is itself fluid, indeterminate in subject, object, and predicate. It can use verbs without indicating tense and sometimes omits the subject altogether; it doesn’t distinguish between “a” and “the.” These features are especially poignant in the poems of Tu? S?, whose sometimes ambiguous sense of time is made more striking by the lack of verb tenses, and who can all but disappear from a poem (is he the speaker?) when no subject is specified. A line can often be read in many ways, giving the poem different shades of meaning, some of which can be contradictory. This gives the poem a multivalent ambience, generally prized in Eastern culture. That a poem may contain contradictory meanings is treasured as a philosophical attitude: truth never finds itself fixed in one pole of a dichotomy but always reaches deeper and beyond. 

The layering of meaning is especially apparent in a number of poems that could be read as love poems. The boundary between an ordinary love poem and a spiritual one is very thin in Tu? S?’s work. Some striking examples (there are others) are “Nightmares in the Forest,” “Dried Tree,” “The Road Scented with Your Lips,” and “Rooster Crow at Noon.” Of “Nightmares in the Forest,” in which the speaker “glimpse[s] your slim shoulder, your thin dress,” Tu? S? himself has said that love in the poem invokes the idea of safety, of protection. In reference to the quatrain “Fleeting Dream,” which opens with images of “emerald eyes” and a smile and closes with “I love because the world is a moment’s dream,” Ph?m Công Thi?n has written: “Love is only truly love, human relation is only truly human relation, if it’s seen as nothing more than a dream moment. When one realizes that one is nothing more than a dream moment, a complete awakening blazes forth.”

In Vietnamese, “Fleeting Dream” may seem less like a love poem than some others because of the pronoun it uses. Vietnamese has many words for “you,” most of them based on kinship terms. Em is one of the most distinctive of these; literally meaning “younger sister/brother,” it is used, among other things, by male speakers in reference to wives and sweethearts and is usually an indication that a poem is a love poem.

“Fleeting Dream” is different. One of the most flexible Vietnamese pronouns is nguo?i, which can be singular or plural, referring to a person or to people—or somewhat impersonal, as in the impersonal English “you,” which can be replaced by “one” or suggest the speaker, as it does in “Rainy Season in the Highlands.” In “Fleeting Dream,” we’ve simply not translated nguo?i in order to distinguish the poem from (and at the same time make a connection with) the previous poem, “Nightmares in the Forest,” which uses em.

Nguo?i is used much more frequently in the 2000–2001 “Meditation Room,” where context often seems to indicate “people,” usually seen historically. Another “you” pronoun, anh (literally, “older brother”), appears in both “Meditation Room” and “Refrains for Piano,” where we have used “friend” to distinguish it from both em and nguo?i.

Inseparable from the imagistic richness and layering in Tu? S?’s poems are sonic effects; together they give a particular beauty and coherence to each line, creating a quality that is, of course, impossible to translate. That lines tend to be imagistically self-contained helps; but prosody plays a major role and presents a major challenge.

All of Tu? S?’s poems are formal, though the form loosens somewhat in the two later sequences. The primary unit of Vietnamese prosody is the syllable. Most common are poems comprised of seven, eight, or five syllables, or of alternating lines of six and eight syllables (the l?c bát, or 6-8). Tu? S? uses all of them. Because Vietnamese is a monosyllabic language, a line could rarely be rendered by a similar number of syllables in English. And because stress is heard more easily than syllable in English poetry, a loose pentameter line (five stresses, sometimes four) has been a useful way of creating a consistent music in English for most of these poems, while the five-syllable lines tend to fall more easily into four- or three-stress lines (as in “Foot of the Hill”). In Vietnamese, rhyme is complicated by tonal patterns (Vietnamese has six tones, divided into sharp and flat for prosodic purposes) that we of course can’t render; but most of these translations (especially of the l?c bát poems) use some rhyme or slant rhyme, usually within quatrains.  

Much of Vietnamese prosody is based on the quatrain, which seems to exert itself structurally in Tu? S?’s poems even when the poems are written as a single strophe. In some cases, especially the l?c bát poems (usually written as a single strophe in Vietnamese), we have broken the poem into quatrains; in the third section of “Sitting in the Graveyard,” we use dashes to create pauses.

In “Meditation Room” and “Refrains for Piano,” the sections range from strict quatrains to completely free verse; frequently, what might have been seven- or eight-syllable lines are broken into units of three and four (or three and five) syllables, and rhyme is also freer, or nonexistent. In response, we have loosened the form in these sequences, trying only occasionally for rhyme.     

These “translations” of form are of course arbitrary, and bear little resemblance to the music of Tu? S?’s Vietnamese, which is, even in the context of Vietnamese poetry, extraordinary. All translation, especially of formal poetry, involves a negotiation between form and content, and, as the first translators of most of these poems, we wanted to be especially careful to find equivalents for the imagery, diction, and nuances of the originals.

Our translation work has involved a similar negotiation. Chung has insured that a translation reflects, though not necessarily duplicates, the sense and power of the piece in the original language; Martha has tried to make sure that it bears some resemblance, musical and otherwise, to a poem written in English.

Others would, of course, create very different versions of individual poems, and a few already have, including B?ch Xuân Ph?, who published a number of translations in his book about Tu? S? as teacher and monk. We appreciate their work, and we welcome the work of those to come. Our effort is merely the first of what we hope will be many attempts to bring the inspiring poetry of Tu? S? to a wide audience of English-speaking readers.

***

RAINY SEASON IN THE HIGHLANDS

A swallow, a hazardous stretch of road

A tall waterfall, heard through a long night

Stepping quickly across a vanished river

Waiting for rain in the flutter of butterflies

A ghost calls your name each morning

Day by day, sound by pointless sound 

Rain greens black hair, heavy with dew       

In dreams, leaves drift far away from shore   

For a long time you stand in the sunlit river

Telling tales of what far places and times?

A small butterfly travels on fragile wings    

But where can a leaf go, away from its season?    

Months and years are like smiles in dreams  

You keep going on, as water runs from its source  

Strange shores tell their secrets to the shadows

Stray clouds, a thousand years ago, old hair

***

A SLENDER MOON

Resting, I embrace a slender moon

Disgrace bows shoulders, rancor shakes fading dreams

Many deep forests run through the Truong Son

Many red clouds, from tides of the Eastern Sea

On an ill-fated journey, tears well, spill over

Can one who journeys keep a simple heart?

His blood mingles, red, with the flag’s color

The sky cuts his remarkable dream in half

An army march tramples the setting sun

Lips are mortified by the traveler’s song

Love, when true, takes no revenge on others

One can seclude oneself in a wandering life

***

STREET AT NOON

Street at noon: red sunlight, crimson flag

Life does not confide in the lover of dust

Sorrow in a century of dissolution

Dream of desert island solitude

Hatred seethes in late-afternoon light

Flooding river, avalanche, tidal wave

Blinding smoke covers the Eastern sky

Oh heaven, white hair, have pity on Father’s village

I went away at the crowing of the cock

The Milky Way looks bleaker, night after night

If there is no loyal dust in life

Where, for the lover of dust, is his native land?

***

DRIED TREE

You let down your hair and the dried tree dreams

The dried tree and the spring cry for each other

I bow down, a full smile on my lips

And dream, like the city missing the deep forest

***

I STILL WAIT

I still wait through long restless nights

Pale green cries sound from the forest edge

In hatred’s darkness, there is still love

A star brims like tears beside my lips

I still wait through black windless nights

The pure shimmering black of ancients’ eyes

I look deep to lengthen history’s path

A river of blood and tears over the land

I still wait, to forget the beating waves

The Pacific Ocean, people back and forth

Those who stayed ache in the tyrant’s hands

Slender reeds weighed down by the sun at dusk

Then, with a frail body, I face prison

Fingers tapping time on a mossy wall

Then, my eyes closed, I go to the dream-place

Like early dew, like lightning, like evening clouds