“I joined the army . . . traveling far from
      my village many years,
the old river with one back crumbling,
     one bank built up.
I found my love for my grandmother too late,
a grassy mound all that was left.”

—from “Do Len” by Nguyen Duy

“They smiled toward me, untied the gunnysack, and she appeared, arms and legs tied up in front of her chest with a cord, like a newborn baby. A Buddhist insignia was cut on her back with a knife. The slit skin was already dried and shrunken. As soon as they cut the cord, she tumbled down onto the earth. They arranged her head and pulled her arms and legs out straight. Now she lay face upward, looking at the sky and and the scattered wisps of fog. The younger brother had already scattered some roast barley and lit a pile of incense sticks. The thick smoke mixed quickly into the fog. Propped over another fire was a pot in which the younger brother melted butter. The elder brother added some dung to the three piles of burning incense and looked up at the peak. The lama was already sitting crosslegged on a sheepskin near the fire, his scriptures open, both hands telling his prayer beads.”

—from “Woman in Blue” by Ma Jian

“The Ifugao believe the sun god created the earth during the cosmic war between the sky world and the underworld . . . one arrow soared like a slim rocket past the sky people, so high that it struck the sun god. His shining skin opened around the arrow, and molten blood spewed out in aerial rivers. Thick red and gleaming orange ribbons floated away from this burning body. He yanked out the arrow and flung it into the night. It became the red star. He pulled the blood ribbons together and angrily shaped them into a barrier between the sky and underworld, to put a stop to the war.”

—from “The Gods of Luzon”
by Malcolm Champlin and Steven Goldsberry

“Dying now of the unknown
(though the doctors are still studying their slides)
in a foreign city, far from the clear
air of Peru, my little village,
Santiago de Chuco, my mother’s
soft white bread and her smoky fires,
I finish the last poem of my life.”

—from “His Hat (César Vallejo)” by Chris Taniguchi

“Stampari also tells us that, crouched at the poet’s knee, was a slave boy who could whistle to perfection the song of any bird that came to drink or bathe in the waters of the fountain on whose steps the poet sat every day, all day. The boy was otherwise mute, his tongue cut out by the pirates who sold him to the poet. Listening to the boy’s imitation of a song, Abu would promptly create from it a poetic bird more vivid, more alive, more whole than the original.”

—from “Paths of the Snow Bunting: Towards a
Poetics of Bird-watching” by Leonard Nathan

Patrick
Photograph by Muriel Fujii

About the guest editors: Nguyen Nguyet Cam was born in Ha Noi in 1970. She graduated in English from Ha Noi University and has translated numerous works from English to Vietnamese, including Charlotte's Web (Kim Dong Publishing House, forthcoming), and from Vietnamese to English. She is an assistant to the resident director of the Council on International Education Exchange in Ha Noi.

Kevin Bowen is director of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He served in the U.S. Army from 1968 to 1969 and has returned to Viet Nam many times since to initiate exchange and assistance programs. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Agni, Boston Review, Ohio Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and TriQuarterly, among other places. A collection of his poetry, Playing Basketball with the Viet Cong, was published by Curbstone Press in 1994. With Bruce Weigl, he is editing Writing Between the Lines, an anthology of work by U.S. and Vietnamese authors to be published by the University of Massachusetts Press.