Tran Thu Ha, "A poet with life experience"

(Baonghean) - If sand painting artist Tran Thi Thu reminds me of a woman with many gray hairs, "magical" hands with unpredictable and passionate transformations on sand canvases; and painter Tran Hoang Trung reminds me of his pensive, thoughtful demeanor beside paintings of the sea and a solitary boat, then their younger sister - poet Tran Thu Ha - always leaves me with a lingering sense of unease when I read her poems. But it's not just poetry; Tran Thu Ha also surprised me when I visited her house, which she calls her "suburban hut," and found her sitting under a tree in front of her house with a zither, the sounds emanating from her hands leaving me speechless…

Her fingers danced across the piano keys, producing delicate, soft notes. It was the melody of "A Song by the Hien Luong River." It felt less like she was playing a piece and more like she was pouring out her heart. There was a deep longing, a heavy burden… And when she stopped, it seemed all her sadness vanished. She greeted me with a radiant smile. It turned out that before becoming known as a poet with "youthful energy and breakthrough potential," Tran Thu Ha had been a musician in the Nghe An Drama Troupe, and later a music teacher.

Poet Tran Thu Ha.

Tran Thu Ha looks younger than her age (born in 1950), which is in her sixties. She says that compared to her siblings, she has had a harder life and her own personal struggles. Perhaps that's fate. However, she believes that dwelling in sadness would be detrimental. She considers herself fortunate to have chosen a different path, or rather, to have a different path to choose: playing the piano and writing poetry. She entrusts her sadness, her hopes, and her aspirations to the magic of sound and the words that dance in her mind…

Like many of her siblings, Tran Thu Ha showed a passion for art from a young age. Nghia Dan, the place where her family chose to live and work after moving from her father's hometown in Hue, holds many memories, nurturing the thoughts and dreams of her and her siblings throughout their childhood. Those were beautiful days, she recounts, describing her barefoot steps on the red basalt dirt roads, the fragrant coffee blossoms, the golden summer afternoons filled with the cheerful laughter of her friends in Khe To… It haunts her, even in her poetry, and remembering it is a way for her to feel young again.

From 1967 to 1969, Tran Thu Ha studied music at the Nghe An School of Culture and Arts. During the war, the school was evacuated to Thai Hoa, located in Boi village. Because she had long hands, she was advised to study the zither (a type of Vietnamese stringed instrument). And indeed, as her hands glided across the keys, Tran Thu Ha felt an indescribable surge of emotion. Her hands seemed to possess a magical quality; they became graceful and agile, then gave rise to the clear, haunting sounds of this instrument deeply rooted in East Asian culture.

After graduating, she worked for the Nghe An Drama Troupe and was busy with mobile performance tours. “Back then, we always traveled by bicycle, visiting all the key locations in the province,” she recalled. Then she told me about an unforgettable memory of “a special performance,” around 1970. That time, the troupe performed at the Military Hospital of the 4th Military Region in Thanh Cat, Thanh Chuong. Seeing the wounded soldiers with their bandages and suffering, she was the first to cry, and then everyone else couldn't hold back their tears. The final performance was canceled because it was filled with tears, and the actors and musicians received some reprimands from their superiors. But from that moment on, she and everyone in the troupe felt more connected to the life around them, to the arduous and bloody struggle for independence of the nation.

Having loved poetry since childhood, she often wrote down her feelings in verse. Once, around 1970 or 1971, while performing with a performing arts troupe at an anti-aircraft artillery unit in Quỳnh Trang, a US plane arrived just as they were beginning their first act. The plane was shot down, and the American pilot parachuted to escape, but was later captured by our troops. The entire troupe, still in their performance costumes, stared at the pilot, and he, in turn, stared intently at the group of people with their heavily made-up faces and brightly colored clothes—surely he found it strange. After that day, Thu Hà wrote a poem that she still remembers to this day. These memories and poems have become an important part of her recollections, and every time she recalls them, she smiles as if she has lived life to the fullest.

In 1974, Thu Ha returned to Nghia Dan to teach elementary school, then worked at the District Education Department for a while before returning to teach music at the Teacher Training School until her retirement in 1991.

The performances, the bombing raids, the sound of the Southern Vietnamese lullaby "Lullaby" sung on the zither amidst the rain of bombs and bullets… now, poet Thu Ha recalls it all with overwhelming emotion. The journeys she has taken are etched in her mind through her poems. Even now, having passed the age of sixty, poetry is what lifts her up after sorrows that at times seemed insurmountable. Broken happiness, hopes that at times turned into despair. "But then music and poetry lifted me up," she says, "when I'm sad, I write poetry; when I'm even sadder, I play the zither."

Around the 1960s, Thu Ha had her poems published in newspapers. In 1968, she was invited to attend the Congress of Female Writers of Nghe An. From then on, she wrote more frequently, especially in the last decade, continuously publishing personal poetry collections: "Staircase Love" (2006), "Cross-section" (2007), "The Earth Rotates" (2009), and "Platinum Fragments" (2014). She has won several literary and artistic awards, including the C Prize from the National Committee of the Vietnam Union of Literary and Artistic Associations in 2010 for her poetry collection "The Earth Rotates". There are times when she feels like a volcano, wanting to erupt with the lava hidden deep within her heart, through poetry.

However, the path to poetry was not easy. Before 2005, she wrote poetry in a traditional style, with poems that had outdated themes, language, writing style, and rhyme schemes. Once, she showed her poems to the poet Thach Quy, who bluntly remarked: "Why print these poems! Don't think that just because they're published in this or that newspaper, they're good poems." These frank comments from a veteran poet in the Nghe An literary circle prompted Thu Ha to seriously re-evaluate her own work. "I knew from now on I needed to 'turn things upside down,' I couldn't write the same way anymore," Thu Ha said.

So, just one or two years later, with a strange impulse, the volcano within Thu Ha was ready to erupt. Poems were born, feminine yet fierce, profound, gentle yet fresh: “I come to take shelter / Under the house of the storm / Torn apart, tattered, my thin shoulders weeping” (The Tree of Memory). “I tiptoe / The path where storks leap in the deep sunlight / Tiny golden strands bloom in the vast realm / I die in sections, falling in sections, mourning for sadness - reaching out to cover and resting my feet on the window glistening with rain” (The Woman Learning to Soothe Herself). “Spreading my hands / Catching the dewdrops / Silently in the sedimentary land / Drops of desolation, thanks to saving hands / Drops of sadness, millions of drops of autumn / Burning to the very end, shattering into a hundred thousand fragments” (Platinum Fragments)… Such verses surprised even the poet Thach Quy. He said that reading these poems, it was difficult to imagine them to be by a poet of Thu Ha's age.

Through her efforts to reinvent herself and prevent her poems from becoming monotonous, Thu Ha is now a powerful writer from Nghe An. Poet Nguyen Trong Tao once remarked: "Do you think this is poetry for someone in their twenties? The poems are youthful, with modern poetic language that young people today still enjoy. But there seems to be a certain magic, a kind of madness, of a poet who has experienced much."

The frenzy and magic of Thu Ha's poetry is also the way she has chosen to live happily. The "volcano" within her needs to erupt to melt the ice. Because "a fleeting, monotonous life amidst a giant orchestra, cymbals, and lonely melodies / I toss and turn amidst the bright rhythm, amidst the hoarse, passionate voice, the enchanting, burning fire," she knows she needs to "carelessly accept / To quiet herself / To purify herself." Music and poetry have helped her achieve this. Every day, in the small house she jokingly calls her "suburban hut" in Vinh City, the sound of the zither of this woman with many emotions still resonates. Night after night, she still diligently works with her notebook and pen, her poems reaching towards the light, "asking for a little sunshine."

Text and photos:Quynh Lam