The Beginning of Water
Vietnamese poet Tran Le Khanh shows us how to reimagine time
The poetry of Vietnamese author Tran Le Khanh has appeared in English for the first time in this volume, which won the Cliff Becker Prize in 2020. Translated from the Vietnamese by the author and Bruce Weigl, these poems introduce us to a temporality at many removes from the fast pace of everyday life.
They are inspired by Buddhist teachings and mostly consist of just four lines. They point to a poet who, as Weigl notes in his preface, has found in his verse “a way to offer true expression of the Dharma.”
The poem “process,” which can be read as a poetic manifesto, asks the reader to observe the passage of time:
spring drops itself several times onto a single bud
For Tran Le Khanh, every moment is sacred and demands our attention. Such a poetics is well-suited for rendering the fleetingness of our worldly existence, as in the poem “fragile”:
time is a cool breeze through our souls in the apocalypse leaving only the print of a kiss
While most of the poems offer little by way of explication and instead ask the reader to do the work of interpretation, some are accompanied by titles that serve as metacommentary. In other cases, the poem seems to function as a gloss for an otherwise cryptic title. One such is the poem titled “already across the river he carries the boat on his shoulders.” It reads in full:
clouds in the season of birth-giving build a nest together for a million single drops of rain
While the title presents the scene as if in medias res, without any context, the poem itself offers what might be an abstract distillation of the anonymous man’s perspective or inner world.
Through such delicate miniatures, this collection breathes new life into quotidian minutiae — rain, sun, wind, leaves on trees — we might otherwise take for granted.
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