The State of Things; Ariel Dorfman/ John Balaban

or are are are are this is the state of things i'm frank station in the preface to his voices from beyond the dark our lord and writes fear and it's malignant twin violence are at the beginning of every voyage into courage and your dorfman seems to take that voyage each of his plays poems and novels is work explores the themes of identity freedom human rights and civil liberties his body of work is extensive including is well known play death and the maiden about the horrors of fascism and complications a person or retribution are elderkin has written a new book due out in january called desert memories it's a journal documenting his travel through chiles not the gun that the vast desert in the north of the country in it he writes that the desert had engendered contemporary chile everything that was good about it everything that was dreadful ariel dorfman is carly the distinguished professor of

literature and the american studies at duke university and he joins us now welcome thank you so much frank i'm so glad of your desert members as a as a kind of travel log into meditation it is is social history why did you write it but you know national geographic has taken a group of writers and told them go anywhere in the world you want and when i decided the one place i want to go to was the north of chile the fact that i passed through was as a young man one of zine tienen had not say that i'd gone towards much to be joined to look over the inca ruins and kill an awkward center and i really want to go there there were many reasons it was the place where chile had been engendered as as you suggested but it also was a place where might my wife's family i had come from responded by angelica my wife out what i was and in fact for a hundred years no member of her family had gone but backed we can't get where we had we had lived where she had lived which he had done they've been really created her own family so then there was there was a

friend of mine who had died many many years ago and the crew had been executed i want to find about his body but really was the desert i you know i'm i'm a person loves greenery i love if you can give me a stream and entries i'm happy and i thought that was a challenge there this very special place in the north of chile and utah which attack was at a chart it was really in fact that the origins of the modern world are there as well as the word origins of chile itself well and in fact you talk about stevia the journey doesn't really began in the desert all right david begins that there is at the market and then you you know you suddenly snap out of and say what am i doing here to tell us about that and tell us about the archaeological find there and how that relates to desert for your journey through the desert yes you know one of my problems is as a writer i know it's a virtue or to defect is that lines so ambitious that was always one everything and in

fact as a human being i was when everything is that you know i sought when i went down to chile was enough there was to go north i thought to myself there's something else in chile which i really want to visit and that somehow i didn't know why it was related to it but it was in the south of chili with three hundred miles to the south of santiago there is the oldest human settlement in the americas which is perhaps thirteen thousand five hundred years old that means that the people who settled there at place and there's a footprint there was a footprint left by a child in the sand there and in fact in the mud and it's been big chapter thirteen thousand five hundred years of those people had to walk america they had to walk from the north to the south to the south toward the northern zone from santiago to the north into the desert and i thought i should i should start for this so i should start from the first moment that we know of when somebody took their foot and slipped in the mud outside a campfire and left something there and i knew i didn't know why you know but i knew that the listening very important about that

footprint and so i go down to that place and i find the footprint and i finally ecological got what i find is that there's it's just a coffee you know if you have heel or settlement nuanced and in the world in the eid state some sort if you have you will be the oldest settlements in i'm in the americas in the united states with a new mexico or arizona or massachusetts you would have carloads of tourists you would have an art museum a mausoleum around right kiddos i was a cow field as you know there were cows and there were dogs in the new was that in the modern there was nobody there there was even guard unit are as difficult of latin american chilean general and i i use that as sort of a metaphor the idea of this foot step that is there that nobody cares about particularly an event at the end of the book i go to the last footstep in the desert which are that the footsteps of of the indigenous people and in this desert that but now you know as though habitation except for what came a much much later of course footstep itself is not in the pasture anymore it's it's more listen and in a

cardboard box and you describe them hobbits it's in a cardboard box in the dvr was somebody said that they'd taken this they put in plaster and they kept it there and i wasn't even proceed able to see the footsteps you know so i ice follow the route of that footstep going north northern words let's say war is the understanding that all so i wanted to go to a place that was full of life life in the sense that you know where there's water there's life and yet become a desert but the desert of of a chili is the driest place in the world of strife in the desert and in the middle east in stride in the gobi start driving a desert it then death valley there is more water in death valley and there is in the chilly north it is the driest place in the world i haven't mentioned an anecdote which is there are people that i met sixty seventy eighty years old and they had never in their lives had a drop of rainfall and there are other for one that said this is certainly a desolate place but it is a story in many ways this this journey through the desert the story about finding one's roots the beginnings and finding one's identity and i

wanna i'd only the footprint just yet because there's a story of a girl nadia piano and i have that right who tells him who who shows a slide of his footprint i want you to tell the story because i think it speaks to this whole notion of of finding her identity through these kind of travels yeah well i mean and what biden told me he was he was the other geologists who had been president when they found this way yeah this this footprint of this this child left thirty thousand five hundred years ago and he says he had been showing this to two are a group of school children you know and he was a man you know is an agnostic or perhaps even an atheist or doesn't believe in spirits or that raises a hard hardcore scientist and he says he said that all of a sudden you know our he was showing this footprint to these kids and he started to cry he felt was a presence there and then everybody started running the teachers and children they will start to cry and he felt that that was the presence of that little girl he thought a little girl you know

i was a little boy but who knows who it was wood left there which would slip on the mud as they were going out to get water to do to disputed or grandparent to the visit to a story to take a pee i don't know what you're doing now but what that child had left something there and i think that's very metaphoric about the fact that i was going to replace the desert but supposedly believes absolutely no trace of any human existence whatsoever what i discovered to my astonishment is that in the desert things are preserved very deeply and that they called to us it's for the voice of the desert there's a reason why i all of the great monotheistic religions were were born in the desert they were born in the solitude that were born in the place where art whereby ourselves in some sense we have to either invented god or god if he or she exists will speak to us because we are alone and this idea the solitude of the desert are the same time the solidarity the desert create because as though if you've got nobody if you if you can survive you need

somebody next to you and that creates great competitiveness and great solidarity the first next or the prison next year someone at once as a blizzard and fire more community and yet more competition in the desert and then another little else everything it's a very extreme place and a scene plays the sense of there's there there are no shadows in the desert to accept a shadow you give yourself in the trees so you wish i was a shadow of your own body or the shadow of somebody else protecting you or threatening it right but there is a very real economic brought to this particular desert and that was my trade says tell us tell us about that story well maybe you should read a little part of it in and then off of that double that will give a good idea virus is that ok sure sure it's it's it's this is monday on monday somewhere that the simple out by comets as a chapel cemeteries and to the moon i am stand in the middle of what used to be off the scene a minor and nitrate town were thousands of workers top of hammering each and pulverizing it and boil it until it released its treasure white gold i'm

standing where millions of tons were listed on the cards pulled by meals and onto trains and finally carried year after year over the port of bad battlefields of europe so the fields of eureka blue with sugar beet and grains and vegetables and then in front of a small monolith with the statue human finger on top representing the bumpy know our visit this desert as if it were a field of green nut crust of hard granite rock and sand a beloved or is it the side to side of office in a mine in the driest desert in the world and i turn around and i see nothing i see nothing and what what what happened was that the nitrate was discovered in the eighteen late eighteenth forties at fifty eight and sixties really and out nitrate was absolutely not the best fertilizer that was in the world meaning that there is no really great industrial revolution without being able to feed all the people who are you know but the people who are there there's a greater population increase it when then the solution kurds out and you need to feed them or need to feed it with more vitamins and going and more protein its innards are you know

and so what happens is that that that the other european powers party and safer basically that the british looked to this desert this place where nobody lived where they were like perhaps a hundred people on the coast right and they come in there with the biggest capital in the world thousands of money financial speculation the world and they populated with hundreds of thousands of workers and they've taken you know whether there had been basically on to to fishermen looking for climbs twenty years later there were hundreds of clipper ships enormous clipper ships that were taken this white gold to the fields of europe to feed the population of europe and of course it meant that they created out of the desert something like three four hundred towns towns out of nothing with it was just send out why sea towns i mean that there were theaters there and we saw there were there was so much money that they would have theaters where sarah bernard would come straight from paris true that the town itself so it creates a there they would go

off a kind of a law that would go back a year and a new kind of culture in the new economy and i will talk more about this on the state of things talking with ariel dorfman his new book out in january called desert memory stay with us support for this data comes from the corporation for public broadcasting like you support well or do it really is the

le le le right here the new law this is the state of things i'm frank stay show we're talking this hour with mario dorfman his new book due out in january is called desert memories journeys through the chilean north and moral before the break we're talking about this this new find that suddenly this hard packed

clay seemingly useless desert floor kelly jake is now allow pot it makes it possible to fertilize the farmlands of europe and the changes the face of the idea of the desert north intentionally an unsettling towns spring up overnight and a new sounds are everywhere yeah and it's not in particularly in indigenous economy that this money doesn't really stay in chile a start moving up to her to europe is iran if israel will say that that the it ended up by be a curse on chile because it it for twenty or thirty or forty years to lance paid no taxes and with it this this economy in the northeast of the country was basically used up outside the country but it was also inside the country really the elite created all these mansions and they did not have to address the tremendous social and economic inequalities of their own country and at the same time in this place i mean what happened with the nitrate is very interesting because when you go there as i said there's nothing left what is there's nothing left because in the first world

war and the germans who could no longer get the nitrate from chile because of the blockade its arabic of the first world war i created our own are artificial synthetic nitrate and not in laboratories and that meant that after the first world war the economy that had been a boom went bust and all of a sudden there was no no need for the site training and all these towns are now ghost towns some of them are literally go sounds like you see in the western's right there's just no pieces of wood floated around there there's some there's an old saloon and things like that but mostly it's a spin what if it's been devoured by people who took all the wood saw that and there's nothing left so you have we used to have four hundred towns you have not nothing nothing you have your road leading from one town to the other there's a thing that you tell the story about those who were with a last lever there i found particularly interesting history that water regaled me who honors goes to the cemetery sister

julianne an honors the dead he plays the accordion he's it is that he is a professor who used to teach and he left you know the last of all the sunday that i was the last of them was a little tom corbett live on tv and in the north which i went to visit in fact yeah and this is just been abandoned perhaps ten to fifteen years ago because that they kept on their stilt one nitrate town which is producing contemporary town but all the rest are abandoned and what he does is and what what he did is he case stayed there even really predictive is light off it because you know is this water off etc he kept on their duty would do these one of the water up a plant a plant that he himself a book there in that little desert plays and what he does is he he goes around you know all these as easy retired i was as us professor and he goes and he takes a sandwich at his accordion and he plays music all by himself for the dead because they're really at cemeteries right and is honoring them the whole book really is about trying to to see if the dead can speak to a still a special a place like the desert rats

and it's an obsession of mine all my life you know my novels all of my plays i'm always looking for those or the extreme marginalize people was more marginalized and the dead who would listen to them speak for them and i i allow them to speak or i i i give them sort of a channel for them to speak because of all the characters that i find were very picturesque a very special well originally says of those who are in who are buried in these cemeteries these are the people who made you a rich these are the people right then and there there's no statue to them there's no monument to them nobody knows about this in fact you know hardly anybody remembers them effect in and in another section of this i explain how very difficult it is to even make a museum of the last ones that are left our it's it's it's been plundered the land was plundered when it was up but the nitrate was there and now it's being plundered again by forgetfulness it reminds me of something you wrote about the a book would put out by the association of relatives of the disappeared in chile it contains the names and photos of the disappeared

under aggressive energy a bud you come in on those who donated their photos and in some ways it's the same thing the people are very resonant our present through their absence in some way by how to other chileans feel you write eloquently about this dude dude chileans have the same sense of do they understand what this place meant to them in their history and what it means to them today i think most of them really don't you know they they they live very much on the consumer side of the day they have no idea of the enormous richness of the story that have been told which is their own origins you know very often what moderates it does to us is it it stops us from connecting with who we used to be and to our ancestors were no and that's what modernization means it means the cars the destruction of the past you know what by building new things the new revenue the new and i think shelley as like people all over the world really so we have no resources to keep that passed even alive has a museum show insert

into to forget what happened there and there are people in and i focus on them who are desperately trying to keep their past alive and i look at their efforts i look at how what they're trying to do another trying to to keep those boys that you could say the key bridges for with their past alive you write about the writer aaron and rivera a lick it and how he gathered the stories and wrote stories and novels that world very touching apparently very meaningful to be at least two chileans but they very much saw in that that certainly he helps you know literature helps because i can imagine what is god oh i found particularly it is in an inn and my my a religion with a ninety minute he told me to go and take a look at a place where he had he had secured one of his novels and so on our way out of love about the virus to where we had dinner with him we go to this place and it used to be the bravo of the north in the sense that it was one of those towns which do not

produce nitrate leaching it's ever produced pleasure sex and gambling with that right there's a wild town and he told us a story which we found wonderful which was that this town was such a hell hole that out even the bishop than one percent a priest that right there was an even on the maps because the people didn't want to recognize that existed so one day the president back then you die news was gonna come by on his way from bolivia on a train and it'll prepare themselves for this this boy scouts everybody about the book the prostitutes as i said everybody the fire but everybody was there from all over the place they come there and they waited for the train to come in to train chugged into the station they were waiting there and had petitioned for the president which was please put us on the map so that we can have a municipality and what happened was i'll tell you i mean i should tell you because that way you read the book i think what happened was that that the key item it got its its water the president didn't even look out and that the train showed the way

and they were left with air bag with their speeches with their petition to look at each other in the solitude of the desert right now there's nothing there where you know where it where people used to are pro rouse into the into the night and spend very little very little money they had in this wild gambling than this but the denizens of hell were left by themselves the president himself that one look at the fallen exists the other amazing thing about this is the way anna maria tatar gets his stories i mean he is and tell us about that because he's hiding under the table he's listening to these old men and that also gets we can talk a little bit about how he hears the stories and journalism but also he points to the role of women in these in these areas and the important role they played and one that i think is going on record to tell us a little bit about his says historian gathering and down and the fact that women played an important role here little one understand that that at ninety day that is somebody who lived these experiences as a child that was he was himself that but the child a very poor nitrate workers sew so he would his mother

and despise the role of women will always keep things going so we will keep things going everywhere not only that but especially in the desert his mother would have like a canteen where she wouldn't have love people come in and they would eat good food no other migrant workers so of men would sit underneath the table and listen to their stories and these are the stories these later telling rightly so in some sense it's a little kid hidden underneath there was got that and afterwards you know it it's very much related the fact that it's always a woman who saved him in some way and the fact that that this is one of the ways that they could make a living to his two is to provide these meals for some the old men who had no place else to go right it was a supplement let's say two to the food if you have an ad man sisters would do that and then of course it turns out that he himself goes to our town when he yes to live and make a living in the heat he leaves his own family and he goes on to a town he says tell me something where is the best place for

it made enormous a bad place or mostly goes that plays he he sits down and as he has is lunches you reheat realizes that peep but that he's been given the biggest piece of chicken and he looks at the girl and that's not his wife you know you like them so he got more chicken than the other guy and an easily get hurt you know on some sites but this is what the desert is full of you know these these these very extremely colorful situations of people in dire need and yet i've really found people who are or more are more full of the humor and guts and strength because this is also a place of enormous massacres you know they're there were their massacres three thousand people were killed in a unit in a schoolyard any key kid it's called the mud than the senate subcommittee at key good and dime we went there once again that it's a little plaque there you know it's a little a little harley monolith to remember all of people who died because they were they were standing up in fact for workers' rights for the fact that you should be paid with tokens for the fact that you have saturday and sunday offer the fact you shouldn't have

children working when they were five years old although conquests the social conquest which we take for granted you know are they were forty four just like in this country to reform for all by people in the meat industry and people all over the arid settlement for four in chile as well but especially their that's with a social laws of the most progressive social legislation came out of the north of chile in the eighty nine these nineteen hundred small and is also the birthplace of your friend or freddie to garner who was an activist like you and like who who was killed and you were in some ways looking for the remains of afraid of them what was that he was a discipline it's evil and let me just read what are the chapter called finding freddie begins and this is perhaps ten days after by my experience with with the nitrate towns as a saturday i'm standing for in this is a site where i am standing for the cell were freed though that amount spent his last night on this earth i'm here in the still a piece i were my friends freddie was informed by its military commander of the next day had dawned a

firing squad was to execute him i remember him for it in the scale that has so many years after his death and convert into beside was only hotel motel build on the premises of the old jail hotel are hundreds of political prisoners were incarcerated after the nineteen seventy three coup the hotel in jordan i slept last night so basically i slept in the hotel i slept five steps away from where my friend had spent his last night it's the beginning of anything it's the fact you know that you you go to a place and you think you're gonna have some sort of a out of body experience and you don't have anything you just have the fact that he was there when i go to the cemetery where he was he was accepted and that's what i was going ask you a sense there's very little hope of heaven in fact finding remains maybe even not even hearing within the last what the story was it was less to see and what do you learn what do you come away from with an artist like that of what in relation to freddie

concretely i came away with his story so if they killed him i'm not allowed to kill the story if they disappeared him i'm gonna do everything possible for people like him another people to lease be hurt in some sense to give you the space for their voices but you know and in the case of the whole desert it's a bit more what when i come away from i think i came away with wit with a sense that this had this was teeming with life but where i thought there was only death and only desolation i found enormous wells of dignity in a sense and i think that i came away from the desert with what i say it gratitude i think is a place of thankfulness is a place where they're the oldest mummies in the world are there you know and and i saw those mummies and those monies were buried all of them together the group had ed had taken the both of the whole the whole group itself and buried them every time that somebody died they would take to a person and modify them and that put them back in special ways a special ships to them this is the

place where the indians would paint or depict graphs on the big canyons of the walls and you see that walking using digital larry got god's there you know so it's a place of of all these different emotions that i say i thought this enormous gratefulness of the of the of the fact that in spite of the desert itself or perhaps because the desert itself something did remain some voices were able to speak to me and i i brought those voices back i brought the animal voices back above the indigenous voices back i brought back the story of a lot of a whole indigenous village which is not under tons and tons of salmon i brought the story to become either the bravest copper mine in the world where the very place where i was having lunch was going to be filled with rubble one year later because they got does the college of place could stand any more of this this county right next to mine so it's all about nature and its its enormous ecological questions how questions people out i brought that i think i brought back the desert it's people that

are older and as my guest his book due out in january desert memories journeys through the chilly north and you know the few minutes we have left i would like to talk with you about a few other things i know that you've been an advocate for academic freedom member of human rights watch academic freedom committee and i wonder how you think it's going to these days for academics and for intellectual freedom in the united states particularly in the post nine eleven environment what we need to understand that that they're there are threats to academic freedom because this is a society that is full of fear and his side which is a crisis and therefore when that happens very often when somebody's dissents when somebody renters us in securing our minder and our values when they questioned us like question reality question what are the status quo or what what what what we might fairly conventional ideas or wisdom of society that society tends to react against that say there's too much freedom you have to you know there's a war going on but you know there is a war going on but you can't have a war against terrorism

unit war against terrorists as such and for that we have to understand where they come from why they act the way they act and how the best way to confront them is to be as democratic as possible so there are several ways in which academic freedom as being under threat and i would say of course is that it's not like it is that door like it used to be and then saddam hussein's a rack right i mean we we we certainly don't have people being disappeared or tortured because they disagree with with one another but you know i've been the situation in chile where we had the most autonomy the most freedom but anybody could imagine we could say we want some weeks we thought this can't happen here those charity can happen here dictatorship can happen here i will tell you something if people are scared enough they will accept anything done in their name in the name of security so that they will not be killed they will not be hurt so their children will be what they call safe they will do anything will accept anything we have to be very careful about that academic freedom is one of the ways in which unites

states it is enormous creativity and its bounty bountiful no intellectual glory thinks about itself and it's about the world and there's a great great parliament and the great fear and i see too much happening in the sense of to many threats against the autonomy of of universal what danger signs would take a coup d'etat in a state like united states for those changes to be to take place her or couldn't be more subtle than happened right under noses and i think it's happening right under our noses you know and then the sense of i'm not saying that there is a coup but obviously you know if you just put a view of what's happening in united states today if the president can buy himself under his own authority put away anybody really wants and not give them a lawyer and i can tell the people but the relatives that this person's been taken and never accuse that person under any circumstance forever but presumably forever what if it's one person or if it's on a thousand persons or it's a million persons is the

same act of totalitarian secrecy and because we we happened to be at at at a very special moment where secrecy and lack of transparency seem to be about the but the major problems and where it is you know in iraq was attacked supposedly because there was intelligence regarding what was a mass destruction it turns out the people who are more intelligent or those and that there were no rebels of mass destruction on intelligence matters and you know intelligent the sense of we must nurture our intelligence alone and there are many many signs in different ways but it's nothing like it does as much damage areas but beware of what begins because what started a very small way and then blow forth into horrible dreadful forms very briefly in the minute or so we have left a given what you've written about the nine eleven seventy three inch to lay out how to respond all the american posture right now in its capture of saddam hussein ofer so i'm just very very glad that saddam hussein is in custody are i think he should be given a fair trial i wish i wish that every

dictator to be should be brought to trial in fact i i don't know why we didn't bring him to trial when the united states was supporting him when we were sent many millions of dollars to hold him up against iran you've been brought to trial then because most of the human rights violations which he's used to be tried for are the very ones which is in that way which we she did when he was about the protege and the favorite love of dick cheney and i'll run so very long i appreciate it thank you very much i wish we had more time writer and distinguished professor of literature and latin american studies at duke university his latest book desert memories journeys through the chilly north is due out in january this is the state of things i'm frank stay show in nineteen sixty seven a young man

named john bell of them volunteer to go to vietnam not as a soldier in fact he was a conscientious objector his alternative service was to bring more injured children back to the united states for treatment and then escort them home through the din of mortar fire machine gun bursts john bell band managed to hear something quite soothing and beautiful he noticed people singing to themselves the day we didn't make much of it at the time but after he returned home he heard the songs playing back in his memory over know eventually went back to vietnam where he learned about how yao an ancient poetic tradition john bell banners poet in residence and professor of english at north carolina state university is also the author of several books and poetry and prose his new book is cai ya'll vietnam seventies folk poetry and he joins me in the studio welcome thank you tell us a little bit of ohio it's old goes back at least a thousand

years and probably another thousand beyond that it's probably is always that the enemies think of themselves as the vietnamese it's passed on by word of mouth always in fact by song people haven't seen these palms in the countryside for as long as there's been a vietnamese countryside can you call them folk songs you can but then that makes you think of bob dylan and johnny cash in pete seeger and let me just read a lot of them have to do with a single individual by themselves recording how they feel about themselves and the world summer song in groups but that rarely cheesy just a single pretty to the jewels and who would compose the cell the first time i heard them was when i was traveling in the countryside and sometimes i'd be waiting behind a house where he had me his parents to be deciding whether not send their child to the united states for medical care and and so one would be singing a song way out in the

garden is only for known but themselves later when i came to collect those poems on paper was that anybody can sing them children know the mom brothers and sisters singing to each other a lot of what i recorded were low point and a lot of my record from buddhist monks are there any rules about what makes the old rules are so complex as to defy our imagination about a farmer who cannot rewrite hanging on to these rules friends and most of the bombs are in a fix form of six syllables linked eight syllables by word pitch total picture and syllables and awesome bahraini and of those rules are followed fairly carefully and carried by certain melody which various region the region let's hear one now that this was called a red cloth rabbi erin

wagg is running certain fish bones with game which is the frame the closer and amir and part one company for minor is famous the idea the red cloth being the bombing the goes round the mirrors indian these altars in every home which begins upon talking about a memory of her childhood in a country where mothers don't have pavel omar gerber's food to buy they chew the food and the massacres as picture of a woman who's our members about seventy eight years old and she sang this poem a sad i know i think of my dead mother her mouth chewing rice her tongue removing fish farms the red cloth grapes the mirror frame men of one country should love one another and no one thought of putting those

two couples together before but they make a very intimate compassionate sense of the kind of tenderness one must remember from being fed from her own mother's mouth and the kind of tenderness when michael with people of your own country especially in a pop song in the midst of more frightening know that at the very air in john bell then as my guest he's written a book called a cardiology at the knees folk poetry john you went back to vietnam after year of your first stay when you're doing alternative service how did you find i would talk about the song certainly recalling them but you didn't realize at the time during your alternative service that this was a form of traditional poetry's like most americans were there and then the clue about where i was or what was happening around me i was working for grouper treated more injured shoulder and my job was to help evacuate and soft

data talk to their families not to flee to the countryside and some as i'd be a river crossing in to see a blind singer playing one of these six string steel guitars and singing these old poems about prince's in kings and lost love affairs and ross lost thrones won the beauties of this poetry is it's powerful imagery in the imagery is the imagery the countryside of edwards' fishing boats going through cat tales of elephants getting into farmers' gardens and snapping sugarcane and running off into the jungle escape the farmers are chasing them people going to marketplace is the really very subtle and sophisticated than the way they're structured their office office for scale of the structures are very are strong structures tied to melody every syllable the enemies has a a linguistic word pitch and if you decide in speech like where we're talking now they fall randomly so friends you can say a law which means a shot is a line which is the verb to be aired live of a high rise in tone that's

the word from beef if you decide in poetry that you're in a play certain kinds of pitches at certain feet in the metra line then you're already underway to creating the lines themselves that's not happening that said not all of the unique id all our song let's hear an example of that of a spoken crying dr knew your mom in fact that we're all one month and at the little human being at that point well this isn't song because the person reciting it is a collector like myself and i'd met him it's a nighttime camera he must have been in his eighties at the time when he had been a forum mandarin in the last imperial court and we were and whey any taken into two men a man that rode boats of undone the perfume river avenue great make eye it also knew took me to a man he was very old and who had been a pow and greenberg in the last imperial

court violinist a sedan chair yellen actually had carried wish to come around when he was a young man and so tom was a collector had notebooks full of kai out what he thought were powerfully important about culture and he's reciting one of these oh palos with male and female teachings are your face is so pretty with makeup how many big fellow's can hear bo take on and this woman who is riverboat person says this boat has long sighted deep bottomed previously and freighted your daddy's coffin you can a federal courtroom in vietnam you can even gamble and poetry he can win a political argument with actually quoted palm and slipped into the tradition hoping that they'll become a kind of propaganda factory and then that did it and he's been doing this for hundreds of years you've also you recorded several of these there's one in particular that that i find

striking one that you recorded back in seventy one called saigon river in shellman ga on day yeah a very close to they'll always accidental they're the ratio together fragrance the fragrance of my country home are calling my mother home staring people the politics are in the steam coming off the rice bowl of it amaze know they're native rivers no other smell and they know the smile of rice cooked in water of their home rivers and so for instance when in saigon on the first louisiana long grain rice had to be imported when people smell the strange

sense the real food riots restaurateur riots in the restaurants and the police had to be called and so this is a political pawn sense of something as delicate that be as being disturbed the person who sang the song had a beautiful voice had been fact the viet cong soldier who defected and when i met him he had become a buddhist monk and his life was in danger because of his defection you talk about the politics and how you know these things can be skillfully put into put into poetry but there are times you have an example of one that's less skillful yet how this one probably was a deliberate attempt to insert the political sentiment in two the traditional i don't i never record again and when i played it this of this palm and also the one that we just heard for some time now singers up and waiting and i asked them what they thought mackay with a full after eating hatred frizzy americans will last thousand years seven years

now laying waste the southern land so i my shoulder a gun and had for the fighting your fate is a girl's house garden and fields the message is pretty pretty pretty plain and though when i played both reserve cut our foreign singers up and away i said and i'm like this one are so will wise because of politics mr donnelly group he said it's just that they're so crudely express and they saw no no beauty in it and if no beauty the new utility and now it's like to follow the other traditional probably not being sounded on not been good there's not any sense that now about how this tradition is holding up since the end of the war and the enemies could turn to their usual occupations in their usual preferences there've been dozens and dozens of kano books when i went to do this they're really not an unknown had gone out with a tape recorder but since the end of the war a lot of people have done this and so there are collections of chi our how to do it

one province and its tryout their chi out adjust our children's time now there are carry out other for like joke books like i l s and a great time if i am or an oyster will be talking to each other things like that or there's a huge turnout for dummies they have their cars for jammers be awfully difficult to translate these songs and when you think about the cultural differences though the language and an and the sheer difficulty of translating anybody's poetry and engine of the language it is a riot the very first home or translated i try to translate doesn't look like a poem tomorrow western trained i was about the right size of the lyric poem i was fearful what i had gotten myself into the palm or the first twenty lines or so each line is eight syllables long the last syllable of each line rhymes with the fourth syllable of the next line that last eight syllable always

being the name of a bird and the fourth syllable to which is linked always being some kind of human trait for so i learned what the birds vietnam war but then i had to have i wanted to do anything like that in english i had to replicate the ryman keep the bird's name accurate as well as the human traits of those birds represented and i try to do that as well and how did you listen listen hear all about birds and bees to sexy in a war and that's a little more than minor offense that's nasty corner and slaves like an end yes the traveling pew straining to overhear drone goes snooping trees shaky in its knees the skinny brown i grabbed stays at home is that each night its cowardly skype really i mean you've got one as i read through these i had to keep reminding myself that these were really good news because they read like homes and their other quite beautiful effect is john bel than

his new book is a collection of poetry that he translated called chi e r vietnam vietnamese pho poetry by the way in english kiowa spelled c a b a o the app or at children's letters to santa are charming staple of the holiday season probably fair to say that many contain long wish lists for toys and sports equipment in the occasional pet or this year france's president's daughter made an unusual request in her letter one that caused france's to look at senator with renewed respect my six year old daughter wants santa claus to bring her eternal life never digest heads rosie's christmas list which he carefully composed last summer during one of her frequent bouts of distress over the concept of death her additional requests for a china doll in a popsicle maker were clearly afterthoughts know what rosie wants is to get enough never die dust to make sure our whole

family is together for ever to be included but santa just delivers toys i said as i watched her painstakingly sound out each word in her letter he can't make you live forever you'll just be disappointed rosie ignored me until she had placed her sealed on full opened the mailbox and raised the red flag she turned to me red eyed but noticeably calmer and defiantly dismissive well you just don't know mommy you just don't know she had me i'm jewish and admittedly not the family expert on santa claus when i was six i thought it worked for my father dad was a manager in a grand old department store and seemed to have a friendly relationship with santa throughout the holiday season santa was just their dad said to hand out free candy canes and sell toys on our first holiday together my atheist husband confessed his deep desire for a tree to go along with our hanukkah menorahs i caved

and by the time our first child was four i had to accept santa as a part of the holiday package soon susie had independently concluded the only hanukkah presents came from mommy and daddy any presents under the tree came from santa i persist in reminding my daughters that many good children get by happily without his annual visits their cousins and devout muslim friends among them still their belief has been easy to indulge i admit to being charmed by the sweetness of their letters to santa the concentration as they prepare snacks for him on christmas eve there very real concern that he might not be able to find them if we spent the holidays with my in laws in florida but until now i've seen center is just a sweetly benign figure rosie's firm belief in his omnipotence has forced me to reconsider the power of his relationship in the eyes of true believers santa won't respond to her letter should get her porcelain dahlen her popsicle maker but she won't find what she so desperately wants under the tree

i now understand santa significance goes far beyond toys his relationship with children who believe is as deep and complex as any around with the capacity to disappoint as well as delight france's president lives in durham north carolina things