By Lê Hương & Hồng Vân

Coming to Việt Nam during the American war as a voluntary teacher of English at Cần Thơ University, a 24-year-old American man did not know he would find the inspiration for his life’s work.

Over the past half century, over dozens of visits to Việt Nam, John Balaban’s warm smile, friendly manner, sincerity and especially his profound knowledge of Vietnamese folk songs and literature has made him a close friend to many Vietnamese scholars.

Balaban is the author of 12 books of poetry and prose, including four volumes which together have won The Academy of American Poets’ Lamont prize, a National Poetry Series Selection and two nominations for the National Book Award (one for After Our War, published in 1974, and the other for Locusts at the Edge of Summer, published in 1998).

He has also been known as a researcher of Vietnamese literature and the founder of the Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation, which helps popularise the ancient ideographic vernacular script of the Vietnamese language over the internet.

He first came to Việt Nam with the International Volunteer Services in 1967, where he taught at what was then called Cần Thơ University until it was bombed during the Tết Offensive in 1968.

He was wounded in the shoulder by shrapnel and evacuated; after his recovery, he worked for the Committee of Responsibility to Save War-burned and War-injured Children.

“Sometimes I travelled along the rivers, along the Mekong, I could hear people singing folk songs (ca dao in Vietnamese), and I didn’t know what it was,” he told Việt Nam News. “I visited families, I would hear people singing all the time, everywhere, in the orchards, behind the house. I got curious and I decided to collect them on tapes.”

He returned to the US in 1969 but again found himself in war-torn Việt Nam in 1971, to wander around the countryside with a recorder over nine months to record folk songs.

“The singing tradition is almost thousands of years old—everybody can sing, from little children to men and women.”

“The war was going on when I collected ca dao.  You can hear rifle and mortar fire in the background on some of them.  And so it wasn’t safe for me to go everywhere I wanted, deep into the countryside where ca dao lives.  Otherwise, I had nothing but help from the Vietnamese I met, recorded, and spoke to,” he said. 

To him, the beauty of the singing and the content of the songs reflect a cosmology that is itself old and powerfully informative.

In 1973-74, he joined Prof Trần Văn Khê and film maker David Grubin to produce a short film titled Ca Dao: The Folk Poetry of Vietnam, which was then screened at many universities in the US.

His first book of translation, Vietnamese Ca Dao, was published in 1980 by the Unicorn Press. The Copper Canyon Press reprinted it with the Vietnamese originals and more authorative introduction. In 1984, the Pennsylvania State University re-distributed his short film Ca dao: The Folk Poetry of Vietnam.

“My one contribution to knowledge about ca dao may be my research into its music; my other contribution -- besides collecting hundreds of the songs on tape -- was in finding a way to date the tradition through lexico-statistics dating,” he commented.