Dreaming the Mountain

Dreaming the Mountain compiles and translates poems written over a period of almost forty years by Vietnamese Buddhist poet and scholar Tuệ Sỹ, who was imprisoned in Vietnam for fourteen years and at one point condemned to death. Translated by poet-translators Nguyen Ba Chung and Martha Collins, the poems trace Tuệ Sỹ’s journey from his student and professor years in Saigon, through a time of solitude following the 1975 end of war, and into the years of his first imprisonment and temporary release. The book concludes with two poetic sequences written between 2000 and 2006.

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THE YEARS AWAY

The wind gave you ten long years of wandering
Seeing your country only in its ruin
The Eastern Sea still whispers to white sand
Tales of compassion, breath of the Truong Son

Ten more years you were silent in the city
Love for the forest brought you close to tears
Arms reached for the sky, the birds’ late chirping
Life adrift, small wings closing up by the road

Ten years later you crossed streams and forests
Saw your country as bloody abandoned fields
Evening smoke fades like wounded souls
Each river, each stream of blood and tears overflows

For ten years you forgot your reed-thin weakness
On slender shoulders a new country rose
You bent your head to hear mountain and forest
Chanting the endless love song of the East

The day you came back to the ancient city
The roads were still shadowed with sorrow’s smoke
Eyes still glint with timeless indignation
As fresh as rain in the borderlands, as true