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A review by brice_mo
36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem by Nam Le
5.0
Thanks to NetGalley & Knopf for the ARC!
Nam Le’s 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem reckons with the irreconcilability of the self and language, and if the collection could be essentialized to a thesis, it’s a line found early in the book: “Translation is a violence.”
Within these poems, the instability of language is recognized as volatility. In the shadow of war and memory and Western attempts to own history, what else could it be? Readers get the sense that the poem’s narrator is gymnastically squirming through the language forced upon him by interrogating it at every turn. The book resists interpretation or “translation” by situating itself in multiplicity—semantic duality and syntactic slippage sustain the work, and readers cannot simplify its meaning.
Reality is built and destroyed through language, so the poet refuses to let language stay still.
I don’t think poets have an obligation to make their work accessible, but I appreciate how Nam Le strikes a balance of writing approachably while still asking readers to be persistent. By explicitly condemning the reader’s impulse to interpret, the book opens up. We encounter the poem purely on Nam Le’s terms, and we are both implicated and invited in.
In "[7. Violence: Paedo-affective],” the narrator alternates between patronizing, sexually charged baby-talk and elevated language to discuss how Asians are infantilized through language. Both forms are violent. In this dissection of exoticization, one line sticks out:
“with / waists two hands could circumscribe”
The image of a writing implement conjured by the word “circumscribe” is apt. It’s a jarring and effective way to evoke the way Asian bodies are written and rewritten through language so that they can be restricted.
Elsewhere, in “[19. Oral-metaphorical],” Le’s interrogation of language imagines a tongue oscillating between a caged animal, a plough, and a machine. Language is a complicated apparatus, and there’s a kind of latent destruction in every speech act, as if building something in language means destroying something else.
There are many other breathtaking lines and themes that I would love to share here, but 36 Ways is so precise in its intention and execution that to do so would feel like a betrayal akin to sharing spoilers. Reading the book feels like an act of discovery, and despite the weight of its subject matter, it is startlingly exciting—one might even say “fun”—to read. With each iteration of the titular poem, I found myself eagerly awaiting the unpredictable leaps across different forms and registers. If you have even a passing interest in language and its politics, this book is a must-read.
This isn’t just one of my favorite collections of the year—it’s one of my favorite collections ever.
Nam Le’s 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem reckons with the irreconcilability of the self and language, and if the collection could be essentialized to a thesis, it’s a line found early in the book: “Translation is a violence.”
Within these poems, the instability of language is recognized as volatility. In the shadow of war and memory and Western attempts to own history, what else could it be? Readers get the sense that the poem’s narrator is gymnastically squirming through the language forced upon him by interrogating it at every turn. The book resists interpretation or “translation” by situating itself in multiplicity—semantic duality and syntactic slippage sustain the work, and readers cannot simplify its meaning.
Reality is built and destroyed through language, so the poet refuses to let language stay still.
I don’t think poets have an obligation to make their work accessible, but I appreciate how Nam Le strikes a balance of writing approachably while still asking readers to be persistent. By explicitly condemning the reader’s impulse to interpret, the book opens up. We encounter the poem purely on Nam Le’s terms, and we are both implicated and invited in.
In "[7. Violence: Paedo-affective],” the narrator alternates between patronizing, sexually charged baby-talk and elevated language to discuss how Asians are infantilized through language. Both forms are violent. In this dissection of exoticization, one line sticks out:
“with / waists two hands could circumscribe”
The image of a writing implement conjured by the word “circumscribe” is apt. It’s a jarring and effective way to evoke the way Asian bodies are written and rewritten through language so that they can be restricted.
Elsewhere, in “[19. Oral-metaphorical],” Le’s interrogation of language imagines a tongue oscillating between a caged animal, a plough, and a machine. Language is a complicated apparatus, and there’s a kind of latent destruction in every speech act, as if building something in language means destroying something else.
There are many other breathtaking lines and themes that I would love to share here, but 36 Ways is so precise in its intention and execution that to do so would feel like a betrayal akin to sharing spoilers. Reading the book feels like an act of discovery, and despite the weight of its subject matter, it is startlingly exciting—one might even say “fun”—to read. With each iteration of the titular poem, I found myself eagerly awaiting the unpredictable leaps across different forms and registers. If you have even a passing interest in language and its politics, this book is a must-read.
This isn’t just one of my favorite collections of the year—it’s one of my favorite collections ever.