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My Recommendations
Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho
Xuan Huong, translated from the
Nom by John Balaban.
Ho Xuan Huong’s poems are
remarkable for many reasons:
she wrote in Nom, an ideographic
(and now nearly lost) version
of the Vietnamese language at
a time when only men wrote in
Vietnam, and nearly all of them
wrote in Chinese; almost all of the
poems contain double entendres;
many of her poems can be read
vertically as well as horizontally, or
by beginning at any spoke of the
ones shaped like wheels and going
in either direction. Such incredible
sophistication and cleverness, of
course, makes them practically
impossible to translate. Unless,
of course, you happen to be John
Balaban.
Notes from Underground by
Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated
from the Russian by Constance
Garnett.
Garnett has been criticized by
many for her translations of
Russian literature, and I am not
a reader of Russian, but I will
say that reading her version of
Notes from Underground thrilled
me. She has captured a version
of the underground man who is
repulsive, intensely strange, and
charming all at the same time.
The Art of Peace by Morihei
Ueshiba, translated from the
Japanese by John Stevens.
Like the Tao Te Ching, the lessons
in The Art of Peace read like poems,
and John Stevens has rendered
them in a simple, perfect diction
that keeps all their compact power
intact.
years later from victims most
Americans had never even
thought of once.
I wasn’t the first to notice
this lack of consideration for
the Vietnamese. Many books
have explored the countless
ways Americans made the
Vietnamese invisible as we
pondered the war—rendering
them as absent, agentless
gunfire in the movies for
example—and collectively
constructed the ego-soothing
idea that we had somehow
defeated ourselves. I realized
what Americans needed most
was to hear stories of how the
Vietnamese suffered because of
the war.
Americans needed to
feel the ache and the loss of
these ruined lives, needed
to understand that the war
didn’t just mean bullets tearing
flesh, but also the daily agony
of painful birth defects and
the terror of being pregnant
after having been exposed to
one of the most teratogenic
compounds on earth. Even
though just about everyone I
knew at home had some uncle
or cousin or father or neighbor
who’d served, and most of that
group knew someone who’d
been damaged by exposure
to Agent Orange, no one I
knew had reasoned that if our
veterans had been exposed,
the Vietnamese exposure must
have been hundreds of times
worse. No one I knew had any
inkling of how that kind of
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National Endowment for the Arts