‘But life itself is poetry; it is the most living poetry, and with us there are no clear limits between life and poetry.’ So says To Huu, the poet of modern Vietnam, in one of the interviews with which this slender volume of selections from his poetry are interspersed—interviews in which he speaks about his life, political struggles and poetic experiences in prose that is as lyrical and sensitive as his poetry. The poetry of To Huu is not just a reflection of life or merely ‘emotions recollected in tranquility’ in the traditional manner, but something that flows with an easy directness and immediacy from life itself, like the sap of a tree bursting into tender leaves or like blood blossoming into flowers of the flesh. This is indeed a rare collection of poems in English translation coming from that glorious, tortured land of Vietnam, and as the translators say contains that ‘blend of militancy and tenderness’ so typical of the Vietnamese.
Of Vietnam To Huu writers ‘No, our people have known a terrible grievous fate all through their long history. What will save them most of all is their love of mankind, their humanity. We have never known any long period of tranquility. No, there have always been invasions from the north, south, sometimes even the west. Ours is a tragic history. And then there have always been floods and typhoons. At every period this made the life of the people so hard; deaths, misfortunes, calamities of every kind … But it is necessary to live, survive, and for that you need a certain friendship, solidarity, comprehension, a mutual confidence; love of what is close, love of what is familiar.’ It is of this predicament of Vietnam that To Huu has written, not in tragic sorrowful tones or in rough proletarian rage, but with glowing divine indignation against tyranny and injustice and a melting love for the familiar things of life, for the mountains, rivers, rice-fields, potatoes, cassava, for a bird dead in the prison cage, a servant boy leaving a house with insults from his mistress raining all over him, for a nurse who has to leave her own baby uncared for in order to look after the master’s child, for mothers waiting for their sons gone underground to fight for the liberation of the land.[ih`c-hide-content ihc_mb_type=”block” ihc_mb_who=”unreg” ihc_mb_template=”1″ ]
To understand the poetry of To Huu it is necessary to know something of the life-story of the poet which has been bound up with Vietnam’s struggle for independence, freedom and revolution. This story is told in the book in the form of interviews with the poet, scattered in-between his poems, casting light on the background and meaning of the poems. To Huu is to-day not only a well-known poet but an Alternate Member of the Politbureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam. Born in 1920 he joined the Communist Party in 1938 at the age of eighteen. He was arrested in 1939 and until 1942, when he managed to escape, he spent his days in various prisons. In the jails of Vietnam he did not get the books, papers and pens which a Gandhi or Nehru got in British Indian jails. He composed poems in his mind most of which he forgot. He wrote poems on prison walls which disappeared through white-washing. The poems which survived from those early days were written on green leaves. To Huu was often put in special cells and was not allowed to go out to work like most of his other friends in jail. Some of these friends brought to him from outside banana and other leaves on which he scribbled poems with pins. They· were taken out by his comrades who went to work and from them they went to mass organizations in the· country. ‘Those were my first publications’, he says, ‘my first books; a bough, a whole bough, little but with lots of leaves’. One can truly say, as another Vietnamese poet—Xuan Dieu has said in the introduction to this book, that ‘To Huu’s poetry came to us by the way of the wind, carried to us by the breath of men’, from prisons and the underground, tearing apart· the meshes of legality.
These prison poems are marked by tender and almost sensuous love for his country, for life in general and for humanity. In the poem ‘The State of a Prisoner’s Soul’ he says: ‘I listen passionately to the noises of life—which is flowing outside with an immense happiness’. The twittering of birds, the swift rustling of night bats, the tinkle of bells of a horse, the clatter of passing clogs on the road. All these: ‘Suddenly for a brief moment make me forget how sad life is—There outside—how many imprisoned destinies are crushed in depths of fathomless despair’.
In my ‘My Bird’ To Huu sings of the little sparrow he kept in his cell, which he fed with grain, hoping that ‘it would sweeten my sad loneliness’ but which died one day in prison. With a pathos reminiscent of Wordsworth or Robert Burns he writes:
Why even for an instant
Break the song of a little bird?
Why not send him back to the wind
and cloud
To make himself drunk on sky and
light?
At one place To Huu says: ‘I am in love with my country, and I talk to it as a lover talks to a woman.’ In ‘Nostalgia for the Countryside’ he expresses his love for the countryside of Vietnam with a mixture of joy and sadness, a lyricism that is romantic touched with the simple down-to-earth realism of the revolutionary—
Where is the wind from the dunes
bearing the thousand savours of
earth?
Where are the cool groves of bamboos
breathing their tranquil joy?
Where is the fresh young rice with
its emerald shoots?
Where are the fields of sweet potatoes
and cassava? …
Where are the backs bent over the
furrows?
Delirious savour of the hope-filled
ooze!
Where are the hands
On those early mornings flinging the grain to the wind?
In another poem, ‘Fish with Shoots of Taro’, the poet describes his struggle against the temptation, during a hunger strike in jail, to eat a bowl of delicious smelling soup which was placed on the floor of his cell. The savoury scent of the soup cries out to him:- ‘Just take a bite, go on—What is the good of suffering and dying so?’. Who is going to know it? Your honour will be safe!’ To Huu finally rejects the temptation ‘and I smile with victory’, he concludes the poem. About this experience in jail To Huu remarks with delicate understanding in the interview that ‘from struggle to surrender there is one millimetre’. It is this ‘millimetre’ of courage, a courage with infinite humility and not any sort of grandiose heroism or conceit in victory that marks out the life of To Huu and indeed the whole saga of Vietnam.
To Huu’s poetry, beginning with his prison poems, pulsates with another strain, a warm and poignant love for humanity. From the cold solitude of his wintry cell he sang: – ‘Immense the longing for friends—I send the warmth of my affection to the four winds.’ An earlier poem composed in 1938 before he was arrested and after he joined the Communist Party, lays bare the humanism of To Huu, not a crackling of dry thorns under the pot of proletarian internationalism though the poet is undoubtedly a proletarian internationalist, but a humanism that is spontaneous, all embracing and full of poetic pathos reminiscent of some of the Negro spirituals. Some lines of this poem are worth quoting:
I bind my heart to the hearts of all
men,
Letting my love flow to the furthest
horizons.
And my soul be one with the souls of
all who suffer ….
Now I am the child of a thousand
families,
Younger brother of a thousand
humiliated lives,
Elder brother of so many millions of
little ones,
Without clothes or rice, wandering
without hearth or home.
To Huu’s poetry is not all lyricism of the romantic and the critical-realistic current prevalent in much of contemporary Vietnamese poetry. It is also militant revolutionary poetry following Ho Chi Minh’s instruction in one of his poems that while the ancients sang of moon, flowers, snow and wind, hills and streams, ‘ … in our days poetry must have steel verses: The poets should form assault teams,’ To Huu’s poetry does not seem to be as hard as ‘steel verses’, and ‘assault teams’, though his life has seen enough of steel and assaults. The nearest we come in this collection to poetry of this harsh type is in “Hue, August’ 45’ , in which hailing the August Revolution, he cries out, ‘Wind, 0 Wind, become a tempest, become typhoon—Unroll and raise the flag, red—so much blood, so much youth! The poem ‘The Fighter of Dien Bien Phu’ and several poems in homage to Ho Chi Minh and on the struggle in the South may be said to contain some steel. However, one feels that To Huu even in his most revolutionary poems reveals more lyrical passion and poetic hatred than cold steel. For he is essentially a lyric poet. Somebody once defined lyric poetry as a poem ‘short, simple and sensuous.’ To Huu has narrated how the man who influenced him in literature during his young days, one Hai Trieu, who kept a small bookshop in Hue (incidentally another man who kept a small bookshop in that city and influenced him in politics at the same time, was Le Duan, now Secretary of the Vietnamese Communist Party) had advised him that there were three things in literature, ‘the life of the people, not to be too difficult, and not too long’: To Huu has in fact followed this precept and his poetry is short, simple, passionate and revolutionary. Short, simple, passionate and revolutionary like the political motto handed down by Ho Chi Minh to his indomitable people, which has inspired To Huu in his poetry viz., ‘Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom’. Commenting on this historic motto To Huu says, ‘It’s concise, clear and understood by all … Independence, freedom—this is the whole of life’.
K.R. Narayanan is former Indian Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China.
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