NCSU Libraries Focus Online
Volume 24 number 2 - Winter 2004
Friends of the Library News: John Balaban's Journey in Poems
By Mary Kate Keith, Friends of the Library
John Balaban, NC State University's poet-in-residence and professor of English,
presented "Poetry Passports" to guests at the Friends of the Library's
annual Fall Luncheon on November 12, 2003. Balaban read several of his poems
as well as his translations of other poems that reflected his unique observations
of people and circumstances. He conveyed the idea that poetry has the ability
to cross borders to speak to all cultures about universal themes common to
all people.
In his latest book, Ca Dao Viet Nam: Vietnamese Folk Poetry, Balaban
translates poetry in the ca dao (pronounced ka zow) tradition. Ca dao, which
means songs and ballads, were sung without musical accompaniment in the Vietnamese
countryside for generations and served as a means to preserve the nation's
heritage. Balaban played a ballad he recorded while in Vietnam in the 1970s.
Balaban's first book of Vietnamese poems was Spring Essence: The Poetry
of Ho Xuan Huong, published in 2000. Balaban translated poems written
in Nom, an ancient form of writing that the Vietnamese used for 1,000 years
before switching to a Western Roman alphabet.
Balaban is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose, including four
volumes that together have won The Academy of American Poets' Lamont Prize,
a National Poetry Series Selection, and two nominations for the National Book
Award. His Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems won the 1998
William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. He was named
the 2001-04 National Artist for the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society. In 2003 he
received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.
During the Fall Luncheon, Susan K. Nutter, vice provost and director of Libraries,
presented the fifteenth annual NCSU Libraries Faculty Award to Karl F. Bowman
from the NC State College of Veterinary Medicine.
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