Jerome Rothenberg
Inrasara: From ‘the purification festival in april,’
with translation from Cham/Vietnamese & note by Alec Schachner
jacket2.org, 10-5-2016

This collection represents a broad range of Inrasara’s poetic oeuvre to date, tracing his diverse journeys through storytelling, his forays into a varying array of narrative modes and transitions through lyric and narrative verse. Like all great storytellers, Inrasara pulls from a wide network of experience, weaving together the past and the present into a tapestry of the personal and collective, blending the real and the mythical. Wandering across history, literature, folklore, music, philosophy, Hinduism, Buddhism, pop culture, myth, war, peace, harvest, community, tradition, dream, language, ritual, epic and the everyday, Inrasara’s poems sing not only the song of the Cham people in modern Vietnam, but also of all human experience – of our imagining of self and of the myriad innermost emotional lives of globalization and modernity. Deeply rooted in his readings of the Cham epics, Inrasara’s verse somehow also resonates with the flowing lines of Whitman and Hughes, a montage of human experience and insight, capturing essences both singular and universal. Continue reading →

Trích đoạn:
Thanhnien News Daily, November 16, 2008

Literary critics say Vietnam’s lack of literary leadership is due to outmoded worldviews and historical problems.
As the Nobel Prize for Literature is set to be awarded to a French author next month, Vietnamese literary critics are speculating about why local writers have never received the honor. Continue reading →

Award-winning scholar and poet Inrasara devotes his life to poetry and Cham literature.
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I could not choose to be a child of the President of France
or a grandchild in direct line of the King of Brunei Continue reading →

Cham poet Inrasara will go to Thailand this October to receive the Southeast Asia Writing Award 2005. Continue reading →