The Lament of the Soldier's Wife:
Variations on the Ching Phu Ngam
1.
War always. War by policy.
A bad time for women. The death of children.
Braying horns. Martial drumming.
The valleys full of moving armies.
The naked face of heaven looks down
on the signal fires along the frontier
& though the moonlight may seem to tremble
Heaven does not answer.
After three-hundred years of peace,
the throne hands down orders
naming generals & deploying battalions,
setting the order of battle.
Advisors & experts gather to advise
the government; towns & villages echo dryly
with the sounds of marching armies
& the grief of families torn apart.
2.
Husband, twenty generations press you
to put aside your books & papers
& take up arms in the service of your country.
You understand the risks.
You know you may die in a far place
& be buried in the hide of your horse.
You understand you may never see your wife again.
Your child again.
I do not understand.
I only hear the crack of your whip carried
on the West wind as you urge your horse
over the Wei bridge.
Green water runs cold under the bridge
carrying away my hopes.
Husband I am with you even now
as surely as the moonlight falls on us both.
The Chinh Phu Ngam is an 18th century Vietnamese poem originally written in Classical (Han) Chinese by Dang Tran Con and almost immediately translated into Vietnamese by several hands in several versions. The version that comes down to us has traditionally been attributed to Doan Thi Diem, but some scholars now believe it was probably done by Phan Huy Ich. In any case, all of the early translations into Vietnamese used the chu nom writing system, in which Chinese characters were adapted to write Vietnamese. The Chinh Phu Ngam was known and admired by literary intellectuals in the 18th and 19th Centuries in Vietnam and many of its lines filtered into the general culture and literary imagination of the country, but it was only in the 20th Century that the poem was brought into the Romanized script used in modern Vietnam, quoc ngu. It is in this form that the poem has achieved its widest popularity; it is well-known in Vietnam and easily available in inexpensive editions. There are two widely available translations of the Chinh Phu Ngam into English, each admirable in its own way. The earliest is by Rewi Alley and a latter one by Huyen Sanh Thong. In working on the version presented here, I have worked from both these English translations by scholars far more fluent in Vietnamese than I (Rewi Alley was also completely at home in the poem's original Chinese) as well as from the quoc ngu version of the Vietnamese. This is not a line-by-line translation, but a version that attempts to find a contemporary English idiom for the poem while remaining true to its spirit. The lines presented here are a work in progress and comprise only the opening passages of the poem, which runs more than eight hundred lines in Vietnamese.
Ekleksographia:
Wave Two
October, 2009
Poems
Joseph Duemer
Joseph Duemer is Professor of Humanities at Clarkson University. His poems have appeared widely in literary journals and he has held grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2001 he was a Fulbright Research Fellow in Vietnam. His most recent book of poems is Magical Thinking (Ohio State University Press. 2001).