Poet of the Month 083: NGUYEN PHAN QUE MAI

 

NGUYEN PHAN QUE MAI

2018

Image © 2018 Vu Thi Van Anh/Saigoneer 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MOVING

 

 

 

A tree in bloom
I uproot myself
from my relatives, my friends, my language
Alone I shred my leaves mid-air

 

 

I sail across an ocean
So deep, the waves called fear
They lap against each other, they want to sink me
They lap against each other, they want to erase me

 

 

I plant myself amongst strangers
A new garden pushes me up
My roots start to bleed
I am lonely among birds’ voices
I am barren among vast green

 

 

I break away from laziness
I shed leaves from old things
I shake away all my habits

 

 

I open each cell of my tree
I drink each voice of the birds
I eat each breeze that comes to me
I learn to grow new buds

 

 

I shudder to bloom
I grow my fruit from my bleeding roots

 

 

I am a tree that uproots itself.

 

 

 

 

 

c 2018

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Translated by

 

BRUCE WEIGL

  

and  

 

NGUYEN PHAN QUE MAI

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poet and novelist Dr Nguyen Phan Que Mai was born in the northern Ninh Binh province of Vietnam in 1973.  Six years later her father, a poor farmer who was married to a teacher, relocated his family south to the Bac Lieu province in Vietnam's fertile Mekong Delta region where he believed it would be easier to earn a living from the land while providing his children with improved educational opportunities. 

 

 

Que Mai, who as a child rose at 4am each day so she could catch and sell shrimp in her local market, was looked down on in her new home for being a northerner but soon learned to speak the southern dialect that allowed her to more easily assimilate.  An excellent student, she was eventually awarded a scholarship to study business in Australia, subsequently returning to Hanoi where she worked for an internationally-based company and also in Vietnam's burgeoning real estate market.  Hanoi was also where she met her husband, a German diplomat, with whom she traveled to Bangladesh, the Philippines, Belgium and Indonesia, building new careers for herself in each country while pursuing what was still her hobby of writing, translating and publishing her own award winning volumes of poetry. 

 

In 2012 Que Mai became a full-time writer and began studying for a Master's Degree in Creative Writing as a distance learning student at Lancaster University in the UK.  She was awarded a scholarship for her studies and went on to write her PhD on the subject of what Vietnamese people refer to as 'the American War.' 

 

 

Since then, Que Mai has published eight books of poetry, fiction and nonfiction in Vietnamese, nine books of translations from Vietnamese into English and vice versa along with widely read columns in several Vietnamese newspapers.  Her debut novel The Mountains Sing, written in English, was published by the US-based Algonquin Books in 2020.  Her second English language novel Dust Child is due to be published in 2023.

 

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to visit the website of Vietnamese poet, translator and writer DR NGUYEN PHAN QUE MAI:

 

 

 

https://nguyenphanquemai.com/about.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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