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Poems from the period of 1958 - 1979 when Nguyen Chi Thien, the author, was imprisoned in Communist Vietnam for fifteen years for the offense of writing poetry against the regime. The manuscript was brought to the British Embassy on July 16, 1979, during a brief period of release. The author--denied asylum--was arrested outside the gate and spent the next twelve years in prison, eight of them in solitary darkness. First published anonymously in the Vietnamese language press in the United States, translations began as early as 1982. These English translations appeared in 1984 in a self-published book, The Will of a Vietnamese, by Nguyen Thi, who was then a university student. Meeting the author in 2006, Nguyen Thi (now an educator at a Vietnamese language school in San Jose) and Nguyen Chi Thien collaborated on revising 35 of the poems into bilingual format. A final poem, written in 1996 after the author emigrated to the United States was translated for this edition. It is the only edition that it appears in translation. The poem, "The Beauty on Earth" tells of the love and longing of young men in prisons -- which were called "re-education camps" by Ho Chi Minh--for freedom represented by a photograph of a beautiful young girl. After the Communists invaded South Vietnam in 1975, many left the new country, now unified in the single name Vietnam. The poem tells of the beauty on earth -- the young South Vietnamese women -- who flew away and took root in "the American soil, the European sky." Due to international pressure led by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the poet Nguyen Chi Thien, nearly dead, was released in 1991. He emigrated to the United States and met the young girl who had been in the photograph of her father that he had seen in prison. When the girl, now a woman, asked the poet to write something for her father, his prison companion, he wrote of the vision of her that kept the young men alive with the hope that someday they might find the beauty on earth that she personified. All the poems depict prison life and the void of missing family. Starvation, a deliberate policy of the Communist gulag throughout Europe and Asia, is a recurrent theme. These poems are designed to be read aloud in both languages and assist in ESL learning as well as cultural grounding in Vietnamese.
About the Author
Nguyen Chi Thien (born 1939 in Hanoi) was the youngest of four children of a tribunal official (clerk). He showed his gift for poetry at an early age when he wrote love poems for older friends who then claimed them and were able to achieve matrimony. In 1961 he was arrested for telling a high school history class that their textbook was incorrect about World War II. The book HISTORY OF THE AUGUST REVOLUTION (referring to the Communist revolution of Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam in 1945) stated that the Japanese surrendered to the Russians. When Nguyen Chi Thien told the students it was actually the atom bombs dropped by the United States which caused the surrender of the Japanese, he was tried for anti-propaganda and sentenced to two years. This sentence became indeterminate and he continued to be imprisoned most of his life -- twenty-seven years out of thirty between 1961 and 1991 -- because he refused to kowtow to the Communists and renounce his belief in human freedom and traditional Vietnamese culture. Denied pen and paper in prison (as everyone in Vietnam's Communist prisons, even today) he cultivated the use of his memory to compose more than 700 poems. The manuscript for this book was written down in secrecy in the space of three days and brought to the British Embassy in 1979 with the request to publish in your free country. Arrested outside the gate, he was brought to the Hanoi Central Prison (known as the Hanoi Hilton) and imprisoned again for twelve years there and at brutal numbered camps of high security location. He did not expect to survive and the creation of his written manuscript of the first 400 poems is testament of his will to be read. In 1985 he received the Rotterdam International Poetry Prize while still in prison, and it was not known if he were alive or dead. Adopted as a Prisoner of Conscience by Amnesty International, he was released in November 1991 and placed under close watch, virtual house arrest, with his sister in Hanoi. Not daring to write down the poems he created in his memory in prison between 1979 and 1991, he waited until emigrating to the United States in 1995 to write them down, again in a mass writing that took six days nonstop. He was the only citizen of North Vietnam to be approved to emigrate to the U.S. who had never been a part of the South Vietnamese government or military. His older brother had been a colonel in the South Vietnamese army, and a translator for U.S. troops and the Paris Peace accords. In 1998 Nguyen Chi Thien (in Vietnamese names, the family name is first and given name last) was awarded a fellowship from the International Parliament of Writers. He wrote seven prose stories of life in the Hanoi Central Prison, called HOA LO (the furnace) by Vietnamese. They were published in America in 2001. In 2005 he submitted English translation of these stories to the Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, who had published his original manuscript of poems in bilingual translation in 1984. It was that volume that won the Rotterdam Poetry Prize in 1985. In 2007 Yale published the English prose stories as Hoa Lo/Hanoi Hilton Stories.
Poems from the period of 1958 - 1979 when Nguyen Chi Thien, the author, was imprisoned in Communist Vietnam for fifteen years for the offense of writing poetry against the regime. The manuscript was brought to the British Embassy on July 16, 1979, during a brief period of release. The author--denied asylum--was arrested outside the gate and spent the next twelve years in prison, eight of them in solitary darkness. First published anonymously in the Vietnamese language press in the United States, translations began as early as 1982. These English translations appeared in 1984 in a self-published book, The Will of a Vietnamese, by Nguyen Thi, who was then a university student. Meeting the author in 2006, Nguyen Thi (now an educator at a Vietnamese language school in San Jose) and Nguyen Chi Thien collaborated on revising 35 of the poems into bilingual format. A final poem, written in 1996 after the author emigrated to the United States was translated for this edition. It is the only edition that it appears in translation. The poem, "The Beauty on Earth" tells of the love and longing of young men in prisons -- which were called "re-education camps" by Ho Chi Minh--for freedom represented by a photograph of a beautiful young girl. After the Communists invaded South Vietnam in 1975, many left the new country, now unified in the single name Vietnam. The poem tells of the beauty on earth -- the young South Vietnamese women -- who flew away and took root in "the American soil, the European sky." Due to international pressure led by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the poet Nguyen Chi Thien, nearly dead, was released in 1991. He emigrated to the United States and met the young girl who had been in the photograph of her father that he had seen in prison. When the girl, now a woman, asked the poet to write something for her father, his prison companion, he wrote of the vision of her that kept the young men alive with the hope that someday they might find the beauty on earth that she personified. All the poems depict prison life and the void of missing family. Starvation, a deliberate policy of the Communist gulag throughout Europe and Asia, is a recurrent theme. These poems are designed to be read aloud in both languages and assist in ESL learning as well as cultural grounding in Vietnamese.
About the Author
Nguyen Chi Thien (born 1939 in Hanoi) was the youngest of four children of a tribunal official (clerk). He showed his gift for poetry at an early age when he wrote love poems for older friends who then claimed them and were able to achieve matrimony. In 1961 he was arrested for telling a high school history class that their textbook was incorrect about World War II. The book HISTORY OF THE AUGUST REVOLUTION (referring to the Communist revolution of Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam in 1945) stated that the Japanese surrendered to the Russians. When Nguyen Chi Thien told the students it was actually the atom bombs dropped by the United States which caused the surrender of the Japanese, he was tried for anti-propaganda and sentenced to two years. This sentence became indeterminate and he continued to be imprisoned most of his life -- twenty-seven years out of thirty between 1961 and 1991 -- because he refused to kowtow to the Communists and renounce his belief in human freedom and traditional Vietnamese culture. Denied pen and paper in prison (as everyone in Vietnam's Communist prisons, even today) he cultivated the use of his memory to compose more than 700 poems. The manuscript for this book was written down in secrecy in the space of three days and brought to the British Embassy in 1979 with the request to publish in your free country. Arrested outside the gate, he was brought to the Hanoi Central Prison (known as the Hanoi Hilton) and imprisoned again for twelve years there and at brutal numbered camps of high security location. He did not expect to survive and the creation of his written manuscript of the first 400 poems is testament of his will to be read. In 1985 he received the Rotterdam International Poetry Prize while still in prison, and it was not known if he were alive or dead. Adopted as a Prisoner of Conscience by Amnesty International, he was released in November 1991 and placed under close watch, virtual house arrest, with his sister in Hanoi. Not daring to write down the poems he created in his memory in prison between 1979 and 1991, he waited until emigrating to the United States in 1995 to write them down, again in a mass writing that took six days nonstop. He was the only citizen of North Vietnam to be approved to emigrate to the U.S. who had never been a part of the South Vietnamese government or military. His older brother had been a colonel in the South Vietnamese army, and a translator for U.S. troops and the Paris Peace accords. In 1998 Nguyen Chi Thien (in Vietnamese names, the family name is first and given name last) was awarded a fellowship from the International Parliament of Writers. He wrote seven prose stories of life in the Hanoi Central Prison, called HOA LO (the furnace) by Vietnamese. They were published in America in 2001. In 2005 he submitted English translation of these stories to the Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, who had published his original manuscript of poems in bilingual translation in 1984. It was that volume that won the Rotterdam Poetry Prize in 1985. In 2007 Yale published the English prose stories as Hoa Lo/Hanoi Hilton Stories.
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