Flowers and grass: poet Bui Giang

Bùi Giáng was a prolific Vietnamese poet, scholar, critic, and translator, born in Quảng Nam in 1926. He first became known locally for herding goats while reading French books, later served in the war against France, and moved to Saigon after his wife died in 1956. Working independently, he translated Western writers including Heidegger and Camus; his major poetry collection Mưa nguồn appeared in 1962. After a fire destroyed many manuscripts, he entered a period he called “brilliant madness,” wandering southern Vietnam before returning to Saigon. He died in 1998. His poetry is existentialist, impressionistic, nonlinear, and deliberately difficult, drawing on evocative language, archaic expressions, and multiple possible meanings.

The discussion centers on translating his eight-line poem “Nomadic Soul of Flowers and Grass,” which evokes mountain water, falling sounds, shadows, time, tears, and a spirit leaving familiar fields to roam. Its Vietnamese has no punctuation and uses lục bát, a six-eight-syllable form governed by intricate rhyme and tonal rules. Several phrases resist direct translation: nguyên khê suggests a spring emerging from a mountain, while xanh can mean green, blue, fresh, or young. The translator also connects bóng cành to an image in the classic Truyện Kiều and reads the river and wharf as symbols of painful departure. Rather than force English into the original’s meter and rhyme, the translation favors sense and atmosphere, using “karst fenster” to suggest water appearing and vanishing among rocks.