Don’t Hide the Madness
Don’t Hide the Madness
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About the Book
In Don’t Hide the Madness, Vietnamese poet Nhã Thuyên takes seriously the question of how to keep speaking—of 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. Kaitlyn Rees’ skillful translation carries Thuyên’s language of lunacy into English in this bilingual edition.
Author
Nhã Thuyên
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.
Translator
Kaitlin Rees
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.
Praise
Praise for Previous Work
Excerpt
my daytime language is articulate and lifeless, i mutter some drowsy words on a drowsy subject, diligently crush the eggs of spasmodic fish, the surviving words cripple, their scars fester, their scars reincarnate scars, to live another life as a cruel scar, how does a scar cry, my nighttime language is pitch-black and brutal, stars no longer roam, no longer play peekaboo, all stops, but we have seen the mirror of each other and all of you stirs me, the wind stirs the sea, the salt stings, the tongues of briny waves bite against sedimentary rock holding silent in the story that does not need an ending, no one returns to continue the unfinished conversation, i pack the abandoned days and months to preserve the memory from that moment, when the rain came and the child called out, you complaining about me keeping all the books you love and me continuing to ask for the pen you insist on having already given back, the book’s traces pale from page to page, the sounds of a night, the sounds of a day, how does a sound cry