Objeto de la cuestión

102 _{Pound, Collected shorter poems, p. 122.} 103 _{Pound, ibid, p. 124.}

104 _{Pound, ibid, p. 104.}

From my knowledge of modern Vietnamese poetry, I recognise that Vietnamese poets might have picked up Imagist methodologies, not particularly from Pound’s poems but from listening to other Americans reading their work from 1954 onwards in South Vietnam. Thus, modern Vietnamese poets learnt about Imagist poetry, which might have been seen as a ‘modern Haiku type’, before they had actually read and followed traditional Japanese Haiku, which was only translated and first published for Vietnamese readers in 1994.106 _{Thus, the possible} understanding of Imagist poems like Pound’s came to Vietnam before Vietnamese poets had actually read Pound’s poetry.

In Vietnam, the early innovation of modern poetry was awoken by Western theories, among which I suppose that Imagist poetry was one of the most important poetic schools for Vietnamese poets to follow. Haiku poetry, from 1994 with the poetry collection of Lê Đ t, was found to be an innovative technical way toạ

express the imaginative characteristics in Vietnamese poems. In Paul de Man’s words, this could be understood due to the fact that:

The appeal of modernity haunts all literature. It is revealed in numberless images and emblems that appear at all periods (…). No true account of literature can bypass this persistent temptation of literature to fulfil itself in a single moment.107

In addition, Pound had experienced translation work from Chinese to English poetry with Cathay108_{, in which translation was considered to be:}

…a similar form of acquisition of stories and histories, again with an inevitable effect of mutilation. On the positive side, however, it connects distant texts (either removed in time or place, i.e. culture and language) and the present in which these texts gain a new, albeit transformed life. 109

In the case of Vietnamese poetry, the lack of awareness about Japanese Haiku did not prevent Vietnamese poets from borrowing this kind of poetry as a new trend of modernisation. The similar conditions of some Asian countries under feudalism in medieval times, and the interactions of religious ideologies including

106 _{Nh t Chiêu, ậ Basho và Th Haiku (Basho and Haiku poetry)ơ (Hanoi: Nhà xu t b n văn h c, 1994). ấ ả ọ} 107 _{Rainer Emig, Modernism in poetry: motivations, structures and limits (London: Longman, 1995), p.}

5.

108 _{Pound, Cathay, ibid.} 109 _{Emig, p. 104.}

Confucianism, Buddhism and Zen, had made Japanese Haiku in particular and other traditional poetic styles in general lack attraction to Vietnamese poets. Along with the open attitude of Western civilisation, the development of technology and the popularity of language based on Latin words, Vietnamese society welcomed Western theories and lifestyles as a way to close the dolorous past of a thousand years dependent on Chinese feudalism. Therefore, by rejecting the familiar poetry and strongly refusing obedience to the King’s concepts, Vietnamese poets gradually created the ‘ego’, which meant that for the first time, the ‘self’ could raise his own voice in literature. The demand for escape from basic rules and the desire to explore free forms of poetry led to them skipping the Haiku poetry which tried to strictly fix poems in certain amounts of words and ideas. Therefore, after being infatuated with Romanticism, and then with Symbolism and Surrealism at the beginning of the twentieth century, poets in Vietnam caught up with the opposite poetic school, which concreted poems into images like the Imagists did. This became a real trend in Vietnam after 1975. Its incipience had even appeared immediately after 1945, though it was suppressed by wars with the French and Americans. During the half century following 1945, Vietnamese poets continuously created and renewed images.

However, the concept of images in Vietnam related not only to images of objects or nature that should be transferred from real life to poems; as Flint pointed out, it included ‘Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective’.110 _As Pound mentioned in a letter to Harriet Monroe, ‘Language is made out of concrete things’,111 _{and to Vietnamese poets, each image was considered a word, so the way} they made images was also the way they created new words: they contributed Vietnamese language. This helped in making the ‘revolution in poetic Language’112 and from this, the image was raised to a higher level in poems. Poets, therefore, tried to turn the image in many directions until they found it was far from the limitations of normal imaginative association and thus difficult to relate to its original meaning. Defamiliarisation was the common approach used to create images.

110 _{Jones, p. 129.} 111 _{Jones, p. 142.}

112 _{Julia Kristeva, ed. by Leon S. Roudiez, Revolution in Poetic Language (Guildford: Columbia Univ.}

Undeniably, the requirements of an Imagist poem, as stated by Pound and Flint and shown in the practical experiments of other Imagists, were followed strictly by Vietnamese poets, from the concrete words to the retained rhythm. It could be claimed that these characteristics belonged to Imagist poetry itself and were not borrowed from previous poetic styles, even Haiku poetry. Furthermore, the images in Imagist poetry could be considered as the relationship between ‘persona’ and ‘myth’:

Link draws the connection between persona and myth quite clearly in his discussion of the metamorphic tree-poems ‘The Tree’, ‘La Fraisne’, and ‘A Girl’. In all these cases, he sees a mythological subtext as the point of reference of the poems.113

On the other hand, the Imagists admitted that they had ‘the greatest admiration for the past, and humility towards it’;114 _{they ‘showed him his own thought already} splendidly expressed in some classic’115 _{. Thus, in my view, from ‘classic’, Pound} himself had a special enthusiasm for Chinese and Japanese poetry. Thus, Haiku poetry was one of the indisputable sources that Pound looked to renew. However, perhaps the aim of creating relationships or nonvisual links between images in Imagism, while preventing them from disrupting the initial title of poem, tended to be a limitation:

It remains analogous, i.e. the poetic construction strives towards some kind of mimetic correlative, for instance in its use of the term ‘bough’ for platform, ‘petals’ for faces in ‘In a Station of the Metro’. The image does not alter the role of the creative subject, despite its attempt at impersonality. Nor does it overcome its attachment to history. 116

I think that this approach was a way of using hidden comparisons and metaphors. This had happened in Haiku, when the appearances of images which seemed to be incidental and discrete were connected to each other by the web of ‘Zen’ to inspire a philosophy. In a similar way, in many of Pound’s poems, after faithfully recording initially separate images, Pound led all of them towards one subject or title systematically, for example the girl, the tree, the fan, the station and so on.

113 _{Emig, p. 94.} 114 _{Jones, p. 138.} 115 _{Jones, p. 130.} 116 _{Emig, p. 109.}

This was quite different to what Vietnamese poets had been doing with Imagist poetry. With the appearance of various Western theories at nearly the same time, and with a desire to rapidly change the stagnant and conservative conditions of Vietnamese poetry, most schools were following a mixture of theories. Imagist poetry was an apt example. To make a sketch of Imagist poetry in Vietnam, it had a small number of words like traditional Eastern poetic forms, images built in the spirit of Imagism, and the structure-without-structure of Dadaism. Thus, the images were not created to bring new sense; they aimed to destroy the existent meaning and understanding. Therefore, images in Vietnamese poems rebelled and tried to hide or erase any communication between others in the same poem as far as possible. Besides the experience of renewing images, this could be regarded as ‘playing’ with words like the Dadaists did. This poem by Lê Đ t expresses it clearly:ạ

Bước đ mệ đ a tìnhư xanh khúc phố N t chân xuânố đàn cò lạ phím lùa Ch p ch ng dậ ữ ương c mầ bè l cạ ngã tương tư117 (Accompanied padding steps Bring love

Greens streets Spring foot notes Strange stork flock

Sliding key Toddling piano Lost vocal

Lovesick corner)

This seems to be the clutter of a musical sheet (with ‘accompanied’, ‘piano’, ‘notes’, ‘vocal’ and ‘key’) and a remix of normal life (with ‘street’, ‘corner’, ‘love’ and ‘foot’). Each image contains no additional descriptive words, but is defamiliarised from its original meaning by being combined with the others. For example, ‘steps’, ‘love’ and ‘street’ may be easily referred to a specific definition, but when they are put in one sentence: ‘Night steps brings love greens street’, they are perhaps not

themselves anymore. Individual images walk silently, step-by-step through the poem, the links between them existing but only slightly appearing. In my view, only the sound and vague vibrations of piano accompaniment might strengthen its appearance. Making poems as ‘play’ like this became a very attractive trend in Vietnam after 1975.

However, like the rapid disappearance of Dadaism, mostly because of its meaningless and nothingness, the collage structure in Vietnamese poetry gradually lost support. It could be assumed that Vietnamese poets, after trying to destroy the past through strong Western techniques and spirit, decided to reconstruct poetry on a more sustainable path. Thus Imagism, with its main ideology of creating images, became the long-term, stable choice for Vietnamese poetry. The demand for innovation in poetic language has always been the leading direction for poets in modern times. As a consequence, from short poems like those in Haiku style, there were also many long poems, epic poems and prose poems in Vietnam. By that time, form and novelty were no longer the main attentions in poems. What Vietnamese poets tended to do was to dig deeply in the word field to create images. This was the most durable influence of Western theories on Vietnamese poetry.

Chapter 3