Poetry’s pervasiveness in Vietnamese culture is much deeper than that of the United States. Since 1999, an N.C. State professor has been documenting these Eastern poems, which revolve around rhymes, syntax and tones.
John Balaban, poet-in-residence and professor of the English, shed light on some of those poems to a small group of students and faculty members on Tuesday. His presentation came after years of research in the Southeast Asian country, dating all the way back to 1967, when Balaban left his studies at Harvard University to travel to Vietnam and teach English.
“[Then Secretary of Defense] Robert McNamara came and spoke to our class about the [Vietnam] War, and I thought he was so arrogant and evasive, I decided to go see for myself,” Balaban said.
While in Vietnam, Balaban developed an interest in Vietnamese poetry, most of which has never been written down.
“When I went to Vietnam, I entered a culture in which everyone knows poetry,” Balaban said.
Length of the poem or social status wasn’t a factor: Balaban said many peasants could recite a poem that was more than 3,000 lines long. Balaban spent many nights in Vietnam asking citizens to sing their favorite poem. Because Vietnamese is a tonal language, it’s nearly impossible to recite a poem without adding some sort of melody, Balaban said.
Attendees to Balaban’s lecture heard recordings of Vietnamese people reciting the poems and listened to them have Balaban read several English translations. Sounds of gunshots and mortars rang out in the background of one of the recordings.
“No one ever stopped singing because of the war noises,” Balaban said. “It was like crickets to them. It went on all the time.”
After Balaban left Vietnam, he put aside his interest in poetry until 1999, when he started the Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation. Today, this foundation works to document more than 1,000 years of the poems.
“I was still interested in the poetry and the translating process,” Balaban said. “That’s why I went back. Now I go back once a year.”
VNPF employees first worked to digitize ancient Vietnamese poems. Now, the organization has branched out to digitize nearly everything in the country, including writing on the side of Buddhist temples.
“If we could digitize libraries, we decided we could digitize whole cultural places,” Balaban said.
In addition to hearing about Balaban’s work, attendees also learned about the characteristics of Vietnamese poems. Despite having a melody, poems are not sung to music. Melodic incantations are specific to the person reciting the poem.
“I asked a group of schoolchildren to sing a poem to me, and I could tell they learned it in school,” Balaban said. “They just recited it.”
Today, Vietnamese poetry is still flourishing, but television, radio and American pop music are threatening its future, Balban said.
In addition to running the VNPF, Balaban has written 12 books of poetry and prose, including four volumes, that, together, have won The Academy of American Poets’ Lamont prize. Agnes Bolonyai, an associate professor of English, said it was “impossible to do justice to his fascinating life” in the minutes she spent introducing him.
