Paul Hoover
ENTRY UNDER CONSTRUCTION. MAY CONTAIN LARGE MISTAKES.
Paul Hoover (1946) is a poet and professor of poetry at San Francisco State University who works with Nguyen Do to present Vietnamese poetry in English.
He has collaborated with Do on the Chinese-language work of fifteenth-century Nguyễn Trãi but the focus of their work is on their contemporaries. In considering their anthology Black Dog, Black Night bear in mind that Hoover, a younger admirer since the 1970s of the urbane and innovative New York School of the 1950s and 60s, edited the Norton anthology Postmodern American Poetry.
Hoover reaches out to actual Vietnamese literature from a solid grounding in the American fantasies of that country. His Saigon, Illinois, a novel of conscientious objection to American involvement in the Vietnamese war, won praise from the enlisted combat veteran novelist and fellow Chicago man, Larry Heinemann.
Hoover is himself a birthright pacifist, son of a preacher in the Church of the Brethren, one of the anti-modern sects whose work with the government of the United States in World War II, based on resistance to past conscriptions, established conscientious objection to military service here.
Dan Duffy started this entry.
Paul Hoover's books with Nguyen Do on Vietnamese poetry
- With Nguyen Do, he selected and translated into English Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry (Milkweed Editions, 2008)
- Về Côn Sơn: Tuyển tập thơ chữ Hán [Returning to Con Son: a Collection of Poems in Han], by Nguyễn Trãi, selected and translated into Vietnamese and English by Nguyễn Đỗ with Phạm Văn Ánh, Nguyễn Duy and Paul Hoover (NXB Văn Hóa Sài Gòn, 2009).
Paul Hoover with Nguyen Do online
Nguyen Do and Paul Hoover have worked with Cerise Press to present the poet's work online bilingually:
- Con chó / A Dog
- Về phía Bắc / Going to the North
- Cuối đông con về / In Late Winter, I Returned to Visit You
- Không phải từ ngươi, từ ai, từ ánh nắng kia / It’s not Coming from You, but Whom, that Sunlight
- Ru lá nho / Lullaby for a Vine
- Bên bờ biển nhà tôi / On my Home Beach
- Vân tay chiều thu / Palms on an Autumn Evening
- Chiều hạ ven đường / Summer on a Sidewalk
