John Balaban
(1995-1997)

In 1971-72, during the war, I returned to Vietnam to tape, transcribe, and translate the oral poetry known as ca dao, which Vietnamese had been singing for the several millenia of their cultural identity, but which few scholars, and certainly no Westerners, had ever bothered much about. Indeed, most of the 500 or so poems I collected and transcribed into Vietnamese had never been written down. That year a whole world of verbal music, of feeling and belief, opened up for me as I traveled the countryside talking to the singers of these tightly made lyric poems and, later, worked on the translations in my small room in Saigon. My days were filled with constant discovery. Despite the war, despite the risk of my trips into the countryside, I don't think I have ever been happier.

Translation is always a process of humane discovery of other peoples at their best. Translation makes the planet more habitable. No nation, great or small, can function without it. And for these reasons, I value my participation in ALTA and the work it does to foster discovery of other worlds.

John Balaban has published several books on Vietnam: Ca Dao Vietnam: A Bilingual Anthology of Vietnamese Folk Poetry, a collection of poems he taped, transcribed, and translated during the war; he wrote the text for Vietnam: The Land We Never Knew, a book of photographs; and his Vietnam experience is captured in the memoir Remembering Heaven's Face.

John Balaban's own works include nine books of poetry and prose. He is Professor of English and, since 1992, the Director of the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Miami, Coral Gables.