I am very grateful to have another opportunity to share the work of two Vietnamese poets whom I have been privileged to help translate for the last eight years. I knew very little about Vietnamese poetry when I met Nguyen Quang Thieu at the William Joiner Center Writers Workshop in 1993; but even in his rough translations, his poems impressed me immediately as both extraordinary literature and work that provided a deep and important window into Vietnamese culture. We began working together immediately, and continued for three years. Thieu provided rough English versions, and met with me on two trips to Boston; I began studying Vietnamese, and in 1994 traveled to Viet Nam on a Witter Bynner grant to work on the poems. Our translations were published in a 1997 bilingual collection entitled The Women Carry River Water, which received a finalist award from the American Literary Translators Association in 1998; the poems that follow are from that collection.

It was while I was in Viet Nam that I met Lam Thi My Da. I had seen a few of her poems in translation, and told her that I hoped to be able to help translate others. Our interpreter in Hue was To Dieu Linh, who had known the poet for many years. When Linh came to Boston several years later, she became (as Linh To) my first co-translator for the poems, and was able to bring me both personally and culturally to the poet's doorstep. We worked together until last summer, when I met Thuy Dinh at the Joiner Center Workshop. Lam Thi My Da herself was also in residence, and the three of us met several times. Thuy and I have been working by e-mail ever since, and are almost halfway through a book-length collection of translations. My Vietnamese is still limited, so her linguistic skills are essential; but she has also helped to bring not only My Da's poems but also the rich literary culture of Viet Nam more deeply into my consciousness.

Although the two poets presented here are both very grounded in that culture, their work differs in a number of ways. Thieu was still in school when the "American" war ended, and he identifies himself as one of the "new generation" of Vietnamese writers who write more experimentally; he works almost exclusively in free verse. Born eight years earlier, My Da reflects her own experience of the war in her early poems (Garden Fragrance is an example); and while she writes increasingly in free verse, many of her earlier poems, especially, continue to reflect the formal traditions of Vietnamese poetry.

I have tried to retain some sense of that formality in translating her poems, just as I have tried to capture the strength of Thieu's free verse and (as in Motion) lyrical prose. That no translation is equal to the original goes without saying; but I hope that these translations help the reader, as they have helped me, to experience something of a literature that has been greatly (and indeed tragically) under-represented in our country.

                                                            Martha Collins