Martha Collins

Poet, Translator, Editor

Dreaming the Mountain

By Tuệ Sỹ

Dreaming the Mountain
$18
  • Publisher: Milkweed Editions
  • Available in: Paperback
  • ISBN: 978-1-63955-018-0
  • Published: June 13, 2023
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More Poems from this Book

“Street at Noon” at AGNI

“A Slender Moon” at Waxwing

“Descending the Mountain” at Waxwing

Sitting in the Graveyard” at Tupelo Quarterly

 

More about this Book

See this Translators’ Note in Waxwing

Translated by Nguyen Ba Chung and Martha Collins

Finalist, PEN America Poetry in Translation Award

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.

Dreaming the Mountain is a moving depiction of a mind seeking freedom in a chaotic world: the doubts and certainties, the careful, profound observations, and, ultimately, the dedication to liberation. It belongs with the greats of wartime poetry and Buddhist literature, but it’s also a generous companion for any of us seeking to understand this human life. —Rachel Abrams, Tricycle Magazine 

[Tuệ] Sỹ is a master of blending the body and its surroundings, making the metaphysical tangible.  –Sylee Gore, Poetry Foundation

If there’s loneliness in these poems it’s the loneliness of a soul aware of his small place among a mysterious immensity, and immensity that includes the butterfly wing, the bending grass, the wet eyes of a love. And it’s the loneliness that somehow, powerfully, makes one feel less along.  —Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe

Dreaming the Mountain “embodies the Zen view that everything we experience is simultaneously present and evanescent. . . . The best way to describe anything, physical, emotional, or spiritual is to shine light on it from more than one direction. Which is what Tuệ Sỹ does luminously.”—Lola Haskins, On the Seawall

Dreaming the Mountain is a feat of translation and modern poetics. It spans a large swath of history that can be felt in the tonal and thematic shifts over the course of the book: urbanization and desolation are in constant conversation with the natural scenes and hopeful images, the former becoming stronger as Tuệ Sỹ ages and reconciles with his experiences in prison. With powerful images that have been maintained in the English versions, the collection venerates Vietnam, from its beautiful Trường Sơn mountain range to the souls that populate its soil. –Melina Kritikopoulos, DVAN

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

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