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Poets in motion: Nguyen Phan Que Mai (left) and US poet Bruce Weigl work together to release the bilingual memoir After the Rain Stopped Pounding. — File Photo |
HA NOI — One evening, Bruce Weigl, the US war veteran cum poet, was wandering along Hue Street in Ha Noi when a group of pedicab riders offered to wheel him around the city. Preferring to stroll, he refused and gave them some money.
Later, he ran into the same group completely by chance at a small party. They invited him to join them and asked what he felt like doing. Weigl replied he wanted to hear some Vietnamese poems.
"That night we read poems for each other through a translator. I remember hearing the poems by Han Mac Tu(an early 20th century poet) and then I read my poems to them."
It was just one of countless memorable experiences that Weigl has had in the country he has come to call home.
Weigl is currently in Viet Nam on a 10-day trip. This latest visit is the last in a long line of trips which have gone some way to easing the spiritual and physical pain of war.
This time, however, the visit has a special resonance. On Thursday, he launched his memoir After the Rain Stopped Pounding at a bilingual poetry night at the University of Culture in Ha Noi. Also participating in the event were Vietnamese poets and writers from the Ha Noi International Writer's Collective.
Weigl's book is the result of the Vietnamese and US poets' hard work over six months. The memoir includes 36 poems and six articles which have been translated into Vietnamese by the poet Nguyen Phan Que Mai.
"I'm the author of 25 books but the translation of Circle of Hanh by my Vietnamese adoptive daughter Nguyen Thi Hanh Weigl and Mai's translation of After the Rain Stopped Pounding are my most important works," says Weigl.
"I hope that through my work, people will understand more about Viet Nam and that there are many Americans who love Viet Nam earnestly."
Mai also feels passionately about the memoir. "Although I hate the soldiers who invaded my country, tears came to my eyes when I read Weigl's poems," she says.
It is the figure of an older, sorrowful Weigl that moves Mai so much.
"I realised that this 61-year-old man had never once stopped regretting the terrible things his Government and armed forces did to our peace-loving country," she explains.
Weigl was born in 1949 in Lorain, Ohio. He served in the Viet Nam War from 1967 to 1968. His first full-length collection of poems A Romance, was published in 1979.
Weigl once served as the president of the Associated Writing Programmes. He was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for Song of Napalm and in 2006 he won the Lannan Literary Award in Poetry.
He was awarded the 2003 Poetry Panel Chair for the National Book Award. — VNS