In “Don’t Hide the Madness”, Vietnamese poet Nhã Thuyên takes seriously the question of how to keep speaking, how to endure in language when it has been and continues to be drained of meaning. Here the language of madness, like the language of dream, offers a possibility of going on.
Don’t Hide the Madness
Nhã Thuyên
Translated by Kaitlin Rees
May 2025
About the Author
Nhã Thuyên secludedly anchors herself to Hà Nội, Việt Nam and totters between languages as a writer, translator, and editor. She has authored several books in Vietnamese and/or in English translations, including viết (writing), rìa vực (edge of the abyss), từ thở, những người lạ (words breathe, creatures of elsewhere), moon fevers (2019), bất\ \tuẫn: những hiện diện [tự-] vắng trong thơ Việt (un\ \martyred: [self-]vanishing presences in Vietnamese poetry). Her poetry and writing appear in numerous venues, including Asymptote, Cordite Poetry Review, The Margins, Words Without Borders, Jacket 2, Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review, and other places. Among her accolades are the Rotterdam Poetry International and the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin fellowship. She has been unearthing her notebooks and rubbing her words, learning to quietly speak up with care. Her next book of poetry vị nước (taste of water) is lying there waiting to see the moon.
Praise
Nhã Thuyên refuses to let herself or her work be a symbol or token for anybody. Her work refuses all easy interpellations. It is a wall of words. It speaks through and against this wall. It faces this wall. It seeks to destroy this wall and to preserve it. Its language is wound round so tightly that one would think it would explode. Yet, precisely from this point, it expands, unfolds, unrolls into a breathtakingly expansive, excessive plenitude. It’s some of the most beautifully rigorous poetry in existence today and I am grateful beyond measure for its existence.
David Grundy
Praise for Previous Work
Nhã Thuyên, poet, essayist, editor, micro-press publisher—but foremost an intrepid explorer of the Vietnamese language ... In Nhã Thuyên’s poetic universe, Vietnamese can be as visceral as a bout of moon fever, maddening as a narrow door, or explosive as the beatings of one’s heart. While the mutable resilience of Vietnamese syntax anchors Nhã Thuyên to her birth soil, her translated works—metaphorical ships likened to pot-bellied pigs to illustrate wish fulfillment—sail calmly toward the far horizon.
Đinh Từ Bích Thúy
When reading Nhã Thuyên, one gets the sense that she is a private person whose beliefs about poetry have, step by step, brought her reluctantly into a public position that has been simultaneously condemned and championed by both 'sides' of the Vietnamese literary community (the very idea of 'sides' being something she pushes against). She is prickly like James Baldwin was prickly, in that she refuses group membership and instead maintains his idea of being 'a witness to whence I came, where I am. Witness to what I’ve seen and the possibilities that I think I see.' Her loyalty is to the Vietnamese language, not to cultural and ideological imperatives.
Kelly Morse, for Asymptote
About the Translator
Kaitlin Rees is a translator, editor, and public school teacher based in New York City. She translates from the Vietnamese of Nhã Thuyên, with whom she co-founded AJAR, the small bilingual journal-press that organizes the occasional poetry festival. Her translations include moon fevers (Tilted Axis, 2019), words breathe, creatures of elsewhere (Vagabond Press, 2016), and the forthcoming book of poetry taste of water.
Links
Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-946604-27-9
Chapbook
Hand-bound. 48 pp, 6.5 x 8.75 in
Publication Date: May 01 2025