Why aren't you back to Vy Hamlet
To watch the sun rising over the areca trees?
Whose garden is so lush in jade-like green
And bamboo leaves cover whose firm square face?

The wind and cloud each follows its own way;
The stream is cheerless, the corn flowers sway.
And that boat moored in yond moonlight river
Can it lug its load of moon back tonight?

I dream of one so far away, oh far away;
Your dress is so pure white it's hard to recognize;
Here fog and smoke obscure so much of the landscape.
How could one tell who is the passionate lover?

 

 

by Han Mac Tu (*)

Source: allpoetry.com

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(*) Han Mac Tu [September 22, 1912 - November 11, 1940]

Hàn Mặc Tử was a Vietnamese poet. He was born Nguyễn Trọng Trí, at Lệ Mỹ Village, Đồng Hới District, Quảng Bình Province.^[1] His pen names included: Minh Duệ, Phong Trần, Lệ Thanh, and finally Hàn Mặc Tử,^[2] by which name is known today. He grew up in a poor family, his father having died when he was young. He showed poetic talent at a young age. When he met Phan Bội Châu, he received encouragement and praise that made him well-known.^[2] He contracted leprosy in 1937, and was finally hospitalized at Quy Hòa Hospital in September 1940, where he died two months later.

 

His many poems addressed to real or fictive women - in the manner of Giacomo Leopardi in the West, for example - remain popular, and he is known as a love poet in Vietnam. His poems on folk subjects are also well-known.

 

Poetry

 

Hàn Mặc Tử's early poems - praised by Phan Bội Châu - are famous for their purity of diction and form, and show him to be a fluent Classicist with a strong interest in realistic subjects. Subsequently, his poetry showed the influence of French Symbolism, and after he fell sick, became increasingly violent and despondent. Personal despair combined with the search for poetic novelty led him to found the short-lived "Disordered" (Loạn) or "Mad" (Ðiên) school of poetry. More than a love poet, Hàn Mặc Tử was a Modernist, who sought to fuse, in a new poetic language, disparate traditions and experiences. Beginning with poems that refreshed the Classical tradition, he went on to absorb the French influence, which he directed toward the turbulence of his own painful history. His language, increasingly tortured, remained both Classical and innovative throughout; and though a Catholic, he made frequent use of Buddhist ideas and imagery.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Source: en.wikipedia.org

Notes:

1. Cung Giu Nguyên (1955). "Contemporary Vietnamese Writing". Books Abroad (University of Oklahoma) 29 (1): 19–25. doi:10.2307/40093803. JSTOR 40093803.
2. ^{a b} "Vietnamese Literature". Retrieved 31 March 2011>.