Tran Thu Ha "The experienced poet"

(Baonghean) - If sand painting artist Tran Thi Thu reminds me of a woman with many silver strands of hair, "witchy" hands with unpredictable, passionate, meticulous transformations on sand painting frames; painter Tran Hoang Trung reminds me of his pensive, thoughtful appearance next to paintings of the sea and a lonely boat, then their younger sister - poet Tran Thu Ha always makes me feel uneasy when reading her poems. But not only poetry, Tran Thu Ha also surprised me when I went to the house she called her "suburban shack", and found her sitting under the shade of a tree in front of the house with a zither, the sound of her hands made me fall silent...

Her fingers danced on the piano keys, the thin and soft sounds resonated. It was the song “Cau ho ben bo Hien Luong”. It felt like she was not playing a song, but she was pouring out her heart. There was something like a longing, something like a heaviness… And when she stopped, it seemed like all the sadness in her had disappeared. She welcomed me with a sparkling smile. It turned out that before being known as a poet “full of youthful energy and breakthrough”, Tran Thu Ha used to be a musician for the Nghe An Drama Troupe, then a music teacher.

Poet Tran Thu Ha.

Tran Thu Ha looks younger than her age of over sixty (she was born in 1950). She said that compared to her siblings, she has had more hardships and her own troubles. That is also fate. However, if she let herself be immersed in sadness, that would be a terrible thing. She considers herself lucky, because she chose another path, or rather, she has another path to choose, which is playing the piano, writing poetry. She entrusts her sadness, her hopes, her desires to the magic of sound, of the words that dance in her head...

Like many of her siblings, Tran Thu Ha has had a passion for art since childhood. Nghia Dan - the land where her family chose to live and make a living after moving from her father's hometown in Hue - is a land with many memories, nurturing the thoughts and dreams of her siblings throughout their childhood. Those were beautiful days, she talked and told stories about her bare feet on the red basalt dirt road, the space filled with the scent of coffee flowers, the sunny summer afternoons with the chirping laughter of her friends in Khe To... It always haunted her, even in her poetry, and remembering it was also the way she became young again.

From 1967 to 1969, Tran Thu Ha studied music at Nghe An School of Culture and Arts. At that time, there was still war, the school was evacuated to Thai Hoa, located in Boi village. Because of her long hands, she was advised to choose to study the zither (16-stringed zither). And indeed, when letting her hands glide over the keys, Tran Thu Ha felt indescribable emotions welling up inside her. Her hands seemed to have magic, they became supple and flexible, and from there, the clear, haunting sounds of the instrument with a strong Asian character rang out.

After finishing her studies, she returned to work in the Nghe An Drama Troupe and was busy with shock performances. “Back then, we all went by bicycle, attending all the key locations in the province,” she recalled. Then she told me an unforgettable memory about “a special performance”, which was around 1970. That time, the troupe performed at the Military Region IV Hospital in Thanh Cat, Thanh Chuong. Seeing the wounded soldiers with bandages and suffering pain, she was the first to cry, and then everyone else couldn’t hold back their tears. The final performance was not held because of the overwhelming tears, the actors and musicians were slightly reprimanded by their superiors, but from that day on, she and everyone in the troupe felt more connected to the life around them, to the fierce and bloody struggle for independence of the nation.

Having loved writing poetry since she was young, she often had the habit of recording her emotions into rhymes. One time around 1970, 1971, when she followed a troupe of artists to perform at an anti-aircraft artillery unit in Quynh Trang, she had just sung the first act when an American plane arrived. The plane was shot down, the American pilot parachuted to escape but was later captured by our army. The whole troupe, at that time, were still wearing their performance clothes, standing looking at the pilot and in return, he also stared at the group of people with makeup on their faces and colorful clothes that he must have found strange. After that day, Thu Ha wrote a poem that she still remembers to this day. The memories and poems became an important part of her memory, so that every time she remembers them, she always smiles as if she had lived her life to the fullest.

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

The performances, the bombings, the sound of the Southern zither playing the song “Lullaby” under the rain of bombs and bullets… now poet Thu Ha remembers all of them with an inconsolable emotion. The past journeys are marked in her mind through poems. Even now, when she has passed the age of sixty, poetry is the one who lifts her up after the sadness that sometimes seemed insurmountable. The broken happiness, the hopes that were sometimes hopeless. “But then it was music and poetry that lifted me up”, she said, “when I was sad, I sat down to write poetry, when I was even sadder, I played the zither”.

Around the 1965s, Thu Ha had her poems published in newspapers. In 1968, she was invited to attend the Nghe An Women Writers Congress. Since then, she has composed more, especially in the last decade, she has continuously published personal poetry collections: "Stairway Love" (2006), "Cross Section" (2007), "The Earth Turns by itself" (2009), "Platinum Fragments" (2014). She has won a number of awards in literature and art, including the C prize from the National Committee of the Vietnam Union of Literature and Art Associations in 2010 with the poetry collection "The Earth Turns by itself". There were times when she felt like a volcano, wanting to erupt the lava hidden deep in her heart, through poetry.

However, the path to poetry was not simple. Before 2005, she wrote poetry in the traditional style, with poems that had old themes, words, writing styles, and rhymes. Once, she showed them to poet Thach Quy, and he said frankly: “Why print these poems! Don’t think that just because they are published in this or that newspaper, they are good poems.” The frank comments of a veteran poet in the literary and artistic community in Nghe An made Thu Ha seriously reconsider her writing. “I know that from now on I need to “overturn”, I can’t write like before anymore,” Thu Ha said.

So just one or two years later, with a strange impulse, the volcano in Thu Ha was ready to burn. The poems were born, feminine but fierce, profound, gentle but new: “I came to take shelter/ Under the house of the storm/ Ragged, torn, thin shoulders weeping” (The Memory Tree). “I tiptoed/ The sunny hopping path/ Tiny golden leaves bloomed in the open/ I died in each compartment, falling in each compartment mourning for sadness - reaching out to cover and rest my feet on the window sill, shimmering with rain” (The Woman Practicing to Lull Her Slender Self). “Opening my hands/ Catching dew drops/ Quietly in the sedimentary land/ Desolate drops, thanks to the saving hand/ Sad drops, millions of autumn drops/ Burning to the end, breaking into a hundred thousand pieces” (Platinum Fragments)… Such verses surprised the poet Thach Quy himself. He said that reading these poems, it was difficult to imagine them from a poet of Thu Ha’s age.

Striving to innovate herself so that her poems are not boring, Thu Ha is now a powerful writer of Nghe An. Poet Nguyen Trong Tao once commented: “Do you think this is poetry for the 20s? Youthful poems with modern poetic language that young people today still like to enjoy. But it seems to have a magic, a certain madness of an experienced poet.”

The madness and magic of Thu Ha's poetry is also the way she chose to be able to live happily with life. The "volcano" in her needed to erupt to dispel the ice. Because "a fleeting, monotonous life amidst a giant orchestra, cymbals and beats, lonely vibrato/ We roll around amidst the bright rhythm, amidst the passionate singing voice, the enchanting, burning fire", she knew she needed to "carefreely accept/ Settle down within/ Purify herself". Music and poetry helped her do that. Every day, in the small house that she often jokingly called "a suburban hut" of Vinh City, the sound of the zither of a woman with many feelings still resounded. Every night she still diligently worked with her notebook and pen, so that her poems could reach out towards the light source "asking for a little bit of sun".

Article and photos:Quynh Lam