Dreaming the Mountain

Vietnamese author Tuệ Sỹ became a Zen monk in the 1950s when he was just a boy. Dreaming the Mountain collects the renowned poet’s work, from his early days as an academic, his mid-career years through war and imprisonment, and his later life.

Sỹ is a master of blending the body and its surroundings, making the metaphysical tangible. When he writes, “I found my eyes submerged by the sea,” and, elsewhere, “my shadow blurs the stream,” or “streaming hair sweetened the song,” he smudges the division between self and (often aqueous) natural world. The poet personifies the abstract in such lines as “Late sunlight fills with shame.” In one poem, “the city [is] missing the deep forest”; in another, the “deep forest still dreams of city streets.” Further synaesthetic morsels like “melody flows into my eyes” and a “love song is heard in the vanishing dew” layer the senses to deeply evocative effect.

In their illuminating and perceptive translators’ introduction, Nguyen Ba Chung and Martha Collins discuss how Sỹ overlays images to create new meaning: “the shifts keep the poems from being merely descriptive and force the reader to make connections.” Liberal use of parataxis heightens this effect, as when single lines stack to form a fresh compound meaning:

A pair of courting white storks is still unseasoned
Why does the sun scorn her graceful hair?
I seek my strange sorrow on the mountain
Why doesn’t youth weep at the break of dawn?

In this stanza and throughout the collection, rhetorical questions conjure an idea without simplifying it. “Why do people die, but love doesn’t die?” another poem asks, and then: “Turn around several times     the lips still dry.” Balance is struck amid instability, despite the absence of firm ground.