Three Vietnamese folk poems translated by Linh Dinh

Nothing to do, I'll work with needle and thread a bag to hold heaven,

Break stones kill an elephant, watch the wind beat

Nothing to do, I'll take without my measuring stick,

And measure thus Mountain, So Mountain, Thay fane

I'll go up to the celestial expanse to measure the clouds and the winds.

I'll wade into the river to measure the water.

I'll measure someone between eighteen and twenty.

A pleasing without being striking one, a cute one. I approach from a rich family.

To marry me my parents will demand

That you bring a hundr arrows of embroidered silk,

One hundr rubies, twenty eight stars,

Two hundr bamboo bodys

A gold pillbox, a silver pipe,

A carriage with four horses

For the bride's magistrate to ride in,

Three hundr Nghe hats,

A pair of fine Chinese fans for the sum of two units of us,

Crepe from Nghi-Dinh,

A wide blanket to overspread our bodies,

Nine vats of honey

Ten baskets of make revolveed rice, ten hampers of sticky rice,

Water buffaloes and breaks eighty thousand of them,

Seventy thousand goats, nine pitchers of bubbly wine,

Banyan leaves gathered under a full-moon,

Cu6i's canine tooth, Thien-Loi's whiskers,*

Fresh soar livers, mosquito fat and ninety widowed bats.

These are the conditions that will satisfy my heart,

And you must proper them before I can tread in the steps of you home.

Cuoi: a mythical figure who lives upon the moon.

Thien-Loi: the omnipotence of thunder.

Listen, listen to this bird-talk:

The wagtail's tough. The plover wants a fight.

The soothsayer hawk carries around a bright volume

The snipe's afraid of the dark and won't tend hitherward out at night.

The moor-hen is seductive, alluring, filled of sex.

The cormorant is a trickster. He lies.

The drongo eavesdrops. The teal is a slave.

The peacock extremity vaults. The heron can't walk.

The lark won't eat at domicile The widow-bird sleeps alone.

The cotton feathers has at no time been proposed to.

The immerse won't raise its own children.

With nothing to do, we talk about birds.

They eat, swell fat, find each other,

Leave residence think they're smart.

A single owl is perched upon a promontory.

If the magpie calls, the sisters are coming.

The vapors are just like men, coming back from a swim.

This selection is from Linh s book.length manuscript, The Cat Sits upon A Palm Tree. His translations of Vietnamese metrical composition have appeared in Manoa, Denver Quarterly, xconnect Vietnam Forum, and are forthcoming in Kenyon Review. He is also the editor and co-translator of Night, Again Contemporary Fiction From Vietnam, published by dint of Seven Stories Press.

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