Commencement Address, Department of English, NC State, Spring, 2009
John Balaban, Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence
As Professor Harrison just mentioned, my interest in the poetry of Vietnam takes me there from time to time, currently in a project to help restore the ancient texts at the National Library of Vietnam in Hanoi.
Besides its modern national library where I work, Hanoi is also home to a Temple of Literature, dedicated to Confucius, and constructed in 1070, not long after the Vietnamese won their independence from China. Today, it is restored after centuries of warfare and neglect.
You enter the Temple grounds through a large stone gate topped with recoiling dragons and then proceed past gardens and ponds through another large gateway under a sheltered balcony where graduates declaimed their poetry.
Perhaps the most striking thing one then sees are rows of 6-foot stone blocks standing on the backs of huge stone turtles. On the blocks are carved the names of those who, over the hundreds of years, graduated from the Temple and entered Vietnam's ancient civil service.
In several ways, the Temple is reflective our gathering today. First, and most obviously, a respect for those who studied hard at the Temple, passed their many exams, and brought distinction to themselves and to their families, with their names carved on stone memorials that still stand after a thousand years.
(You all, I'm afraid will have to settle for paper diplomas.)
Even today, hundreds of years later, one can see their descendants lighting incense sticks and placing them before those stone blocks in veneration.
Further on, in a room inside the Temple itself, there is a large square stone carved in Chinese characters and next to it a translation of its text in modern Vietnamese and in English.
This is what it says:
Virtuous and talented men are state sustaining elements. The strength and prosperity of a state depend on it[s] stable vitality and it becomes weaker as such vitality fails. That is why all the saint emperors and clear-sighted kings didn't fail in seeing to the formation of men of talent and the employment of literati to develop this vitality. -- Examination Stele, Dai Bao Dynasty, Third Year (1442).
How on earth, we Americans might ask, can men and women trained in literary skills be "state-sustaining elements"? It seems a little far-fetched. The answer is both ancient and contemporary.
A 1000 years still earlier, the Chinese philosopher to whom the Vietnamese Temple is dedicated (after recently driving out the Chinese) was asked the perennial philosophic question of the 4th century B.C.E.--as it was in the same period in the West for Socrates in Plato's The Republic--"what would you first do if allowed to rule a kingdom?"
Confucius' reply, as recorded in his Analects, was "to correct language." Because, he continued, if language is not precise, "then what is meant cannot be effected. If what is meant cannot be effected, society falls apart."
Here is the exchange in Book XIII of the Analects from around 400 BC.
Tzu-lu said, "If the prince of Wei were waiting for you to come and administer his country for him, what would be your first measure?"
The Master said, "It would certainly be to correct language."
Tzu-Lu said, "Did I hear you right? Surely what you say has nothing to do with the matter. Why should language be corrected?"
The Master said, "Lu! How simple you are! A gentleman, when things he does not understand are mentioned, should maintain an attitude of reserve. If language is incorrect, then what is said does not concord with what was meant; and if what is said does not concord with what was meant, what is to be done cannot be effected. If what is to be done cannot be effected, then society falls apart."
A training in the skills of precise language is what our Department of English has offered these graduates. Whatever our particular academic disciplines--rhetoricians, literary and film scholars, creative writers, technical writers, journalists, or linguists--all of us endeavor in the precision of language.
Such precision in the use of words is of course a pleasure in itself, but it has immense practical value as well. Without such precision in the way we communicate with ourselves as a society and with the world beyond the U.S., our affairs falter.
Whatever these students pursue after graduation, they do it now with considerable essential skills. Precision in the use of words is the talent which lends all other professions their usefulness.
It is, to go back to the Vietnamese stone tablet, "a state-sustaining endeavor." Indeed, as stone tablet suggests, "the strength and prosperity of the state depend on its stable vitality." This is as true in 21st century America as it was in 15th century Vietnam.
Please join the faculty in congratulating the graduates of 2009.
