Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong

It's the backstory more than the actual English renderings of these poems that has been generating pre-pub attention for this title, including a feature in APR--but it's a pretty good backstory. A poet and conscientious objector during Vietnam, Balaban (Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems) nevertheless went in country during the war, advocating for better care for wounded children. He eventually became smitten with the poems in this book and perhaps with the mysterious poet behind them. Ho, who was born in the late 18th century and died in the early 19th, may or may not have been a concubine to a local official, but the speaker in the poems that have come to us in her name often wrote as one--employing strictly forbidden sexual themes via wry double entendres. The difficulty in translation, as Balaban's straightforward introduction notes, is compounded by the fact that Ho wrote in N m, a now nearly extinct writing system that maps characters onto the vernacular rather than the Mandarin of more formal writing. Her ""sonnetlike lu-shih style"" was a particular challenge, but the form and meanings come through clearly in poems like ""Three-Mountain Pass"": ""A cliff face. Another. And still a third./ Who was so skilled to carve this craggy scene:// the cavern's red door, the ridge's narrow cleft,/ the black knoll bearded with little mosses?"" Such contrivances can make for entertaining reading, but unless one can read the included transliterations and N m script (this book is one of the first successes of the N m Preservation Foundation), the translations, as tightly wound as they are, won't bear repeated perusals. (Still less so the book's cover, with its lame, bare-breasted attempt at titillation.) For all but the most jaded, however, the book's provenance and racy themes will hold interest enough. (Oct.)