Đây Thôn Vĩ Dạ by Hàn Mặc Tử
Sao anh không về chơi thôn Vĩ?
Nhìn nắng hàng cau nắng mới lên.
Vườn ai mướt quá, xanh như ngọc
Lá trúc che ngang mặt chữ điền.
Gió theo lối gió, mây đường mây,
Dòng nước buồn thiu, hoa bắp lay...
Thuyền ai đậu bến sông trăng đó,
Có chở trăng về kịp tối nay?
Mơ khách đường xa, khách đường xa,
Áo em trắng quá nhìn không ra...
Ở đây sương khói mờ nhân ảnh,
Ai biết tình ai có đậm đà?
---
Won’t you return to Vĩ hamlet?
Where the sun rises through rows of palms.
Whose satin gardens, green as jade
And bamboo leaves shield your brow.
Clouds part where wind trails wind,
Deep fields of water where the cornflowers sway …
Whose boat docked on a moonlit river?
Will you return the moon in time tonight?
Dreaming of faraway places, faraway traces
Your stark white clothes make you hard to see,
As the fog thickens it blurs my sight,
Who knows if your love still runs deep?
‘Đây Thôn Vĩ Dạ’ (1938) is considered a masterwork of Hàn Mặc Tử, a key Vietnamese modernist poet.[i] The poem, like many of his works are often said to be about his multiple love affairs and romantic dalliances. Unlike the other works in his groundbreaking published collection of Thơ Điên ~ ‘Madness Poems’, this work is undeniably romantic and sentimental. The poet’s treatment of time – compressed and sped up like a montage, jump cutting from sunrise to moonlight and from verdant greens to overexposed whites – perhaps reveals Hàn Mặc Tử’s interest in modernist cinema.
The work represents an artistic tradition in Vietnamese poetry and film that combines the sentiments of lovers, friendships and family into the surreal reality of loss and fragmentation which accompany waves of colonisation and war.
Hàn Mặc Tử’s poem is perhaps not that different from the documentary film ‘Chuyện Tử Tế’ (1985) by Trần Văn Thủy which unashamedly explores the filmmaker’s deeply sentimental search for kindness and decency in the aftermath of war and the passing of his friend, cinematographer Đồng Xuân Thuyết.[ii] The sentimentality and romance of searching for what has been irrevocably lost , what can be said and left unsaid becomes a serious artistic preoccupation.
By the time he wrote ‘Đây Thôn Vĩ Dạ’, Hàn Mặc Tử had been diagnosed with leprosy and was going through a period of unbearable physical and psychological pain. Within three years, Hàn Mặc Tử died at the Quy Hòa Hospital in the Quy Nhơn Leper Colony.[iii] Perhaps the poem was not about a lost lover, but about a pre-illness world and life that he no longer had access to.
On a pilgrimage to visit Hàn Mặc Tử’s grave, I learned that the reason my mum’s sister Soeur Hương had joined a Catholic Order to serve at the same Quy Hoà Leper Colony might have been driven by her own impossible search for her own grandfather.
In 1933, a few years before Hàn Mặc Tử had published his Thơ Điên ~ ‘Madness Poems’, Nguyễn Văn Đính, my great-grandfather was taken by the French colonial authorities to treat a persistent and undiagnosed skin condition behind his knees. He too never returned home.
To this day, my mum’s side of the family still believes that he had probably been misdiagnosed and shipped off to the Leper Colony at Quy Nhơn without a trace.
[i] Hàn Mặc Tử , ‘Here in vĩ Dạ Hamlet’ (1938) translated by N.T. Anh, Modern Poetry in Translation (website, accessed August 2024) https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/poem/here-in-vi-da-hamlet/.
[ii] ‘Chuyện Tử Tế – Phim Của Đạo Diễn Trần Văn Thủy’ (2016) Chungta (website, accessed August 2024) https://www.chungta.com/nd/tu-lieu-tra-cuu/chuyen_tu_te.html.
[iii]Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng, ‘Poet Statement’ (1944) The Poetry Foundation (website, accessed August 2024) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/157065/poet-statement.
Supported by Creative Victoria, City of Melbourne and City of Yarra. Edited by Sofia Sid Akhmed.
