Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed

for you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

I'm Michael Silverblatt, and today my guest is the poet John Balaban.

I first became aware of John Balaband's translations from the Vietnamese folk poetry

when a small section of John Barth's novel sabbatical was

published 18 years ago. Since then, I've read his memoirs of his service as a conscientious

objector in Vietnam in his memoir, remembering Heaven's Face. His book, Locus at the edge of summer, came out a couple years ago.

It's his own new and selected poems. And now what we have from Copper Canyon Press is a collection

called Spring Essence. It's the poetry of Hotswong. Huang.

Thank you.

These are rather amazing poems by a Vietnamese woman poet who lived at approximately the same time Jane Austen lived.

That's right.

And they are, in a way, a companion volume to the work that my guest, John Ballaban, did on the folk poetry, Kayow.

Chayau.

Of Vietnam. Now, tell us first a little bit about Hull.

Well, she was remarkable.

She lived around 1800.

No one knows quite what her birth date was or really when she died, but we know who her family was.

...