As the first foreigner who translated Vietnamese folk verses into English, American professor John Balaban has established the Nom Script Preservation Association in the US. He plan to digitize around 1,000 books in Nom scripts to put online.

Balaban is a professor of literature at the North California University. Having a passion for poetry, he has collected many folk verses of the southern region of Vietnam. Vietnamese folk poems have brought him to poetry written by Nom script.

Nom script is an obsolete writing system of the Vietnamese language. It makes use of Chinese characters, and characters coined following the Chinese model. The earliest example of Nom scripts dates to the 13th century. It was used almost exclusively by the Vietnamese elites; mostly for recording Vietnamese literature, such as formal writings were, in most cases, not done in Vietnamese, but in classical Chinese. It has now been completely replaced by Quoc ngu, a script based on the Latin alphabet.

In the early 21^st century, Balaban was a phenomenon in the US literature circles when he translated Vietnamese poet Ho Xuan Huong’s poems, a famous poet in the late 18^th and early 19^th century. She wrote poetry using the Nom scripts. She is considered one of Vietnam’s greatest poets and is dubbed “the Queen of Nom poetry.”

In late 2000 during a Vietnamese government’s banquet in Hanoi, former US President Bill Clinton mentioned the Ho Xuan Huong poem collection translated by Balaban, seeing it as a bridge spanning the past and the present.

Since 2006, the American professor and the Nom Script Preservation Association have been working on a project to digitize books written in Nom scripts at the Vietnam National Library to help the library preserve their Nom script books and bring these books to readers in the world.

Under the instruction of Balaban, the association has digitized nearly 50,000 pages of Nom script books. This first project of its kind will be uploaded to the Internet in the near future.

Returning to Vietnam in December 2008 to attend the 10^th anniversary of the Nom Script Preservation Association, Balaban brought about modern equipment presented by the North California Library to the Vietnam National Library, which will be used at the training course of ancient document preservation.

On this occasion, the American professor received the “For the Cultural-Sports-Tourism Service” of the Vietnamese Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism.

Passion for Nom scripts

Professor Balaban was reading Kieu Tales.

Four years ago, during his European business trip, professor Balaban nearly died of appendicitis. “It was so lucky that I’m still alive to continue working on Kieu Tales. I will devote the remaining time of my life for translating Kieu Tales,” he said.

The American professor said he spent ten years for Ho Xuan Huong’s verse collection and he hopes the translation of the Kieu Tales will be faster because he has decoded many cultural issues of Vietnamese people.

Ho Xuan Huong and Kieu are the two women who helped Balaban partly understand the condition of Vietnamese women in the feudal society. He deeply sympathizes with Kieu’s capricious destiny and loves the sense of humor and mischievousness of Ho Xuan Huong. But in comparison, he prefers Ho Xuan Huong’s strong personality. Kieu seems to be fragile and could not struggle for herself.

“It is difficult to translate Vietnamese verses into English, it is more difficult to translate Ho Xuan Huong’s poem because Ho Xuan Huong often used slang,” said Balaban.

“Ho Xuan Huong’s poem not only makes a new surprise for Americans who read it, but also helps us find out a Vietnam with other cultural layers,” he said.

The professor said his association is researching Nom script teaching on computer and on the Internet. He said he worried that if Nom script is not quickly digitized, it may disappear.

To preserve Nom script, the first thing is digitizing it. His association has digitized more than 400 Nom script books and posted online at http://nomfoundation.org.

John Balaban is a four time winner of the Lamont Poetry Award of the Academy of American Poets. In 1971, he lived for one year in Vietnam to collect Vietnamese folk verse. He was the first who translated Vietnamese folk verse into English. In late 2000, he published a collection of 40 poems by Ho Xuan Huong. He is translating Kieu Tales into English.

John Balaban is a four time winner of the Lamont Poetry Award of the Academy of American Poets. In 1971, he lived for one year in Vietnam to collect Vietnamese folk verse. He was the first who translated Vietnamese folk verse into English. In late 2000, he published a collection of 40 poems by Ho Xuan Huong. He is translating Kieu Tales into English.

He set up the Nom Script Preservation Association in the US. The association held two national workshops on Nom script, published Nom script dictionary, presented scholarships to research Nom script to American scholars and Vietnamese students and performed many other works related to Nom script.

“The Vietnamese education must teach Nom script at schools. More scholars in the world want to research Nom script and preserve it,” professor Balaban said.

(Source: Tien Phong)