Hoa dia-nguc/The Flowers of Hell.

Nguyen, Dinh-Hoa

The Flowers of Hell is the bilingual edition of a collection of poignant poems by the Vietnamese dissident Nguyen Chi Thien (see WLT 59:3, p. 490), who was finally allowed to leave his country and settle in the United States early in 1995. The book consists of a preface, the poems (presented in three parts), an epilogue, a biographical note, a list of poem titles in Vietnamese and in English, and expressions of international acclaim by writers, critics, and human-rights activists from all over the world. Between part 1, "The Swamps" ("Dong lay"), and part 2, "The Flowers of Hell" ("Hoa dia-nguc"), there are several photographs of the author's appearances before refugee audiences around the U.S., and preceding part 3, "Scribblings" ("Nhung ghi-chep vun-vat"), are several sketches and musical settings of some of the poems.

The impact of Nguyen Chi Thien's poetry has now reached the outside world through translations into English, French, Japanese, Chinese, German, and Czech, and international readings of his poetry have been held in such distant locales as Barcelona (1993) and Prague (1994). Fourteen of his poems have even been set to music by an Austrian composer, and those new songs were presented at the Academy of Music in Klagenfurt in October 1995. Readers are therefore grateful to the editor-translator Nguyen Ngoc Bich for this rich bilingual collection. An earlier collection of translations (by Huynh Sanh Thong) introduced only eighty-seven of the 191 longer poems and seventy of the 188 short ones; the volume under review makes available up to 90 percent of the 396 original compositions in Vietnamese, with exquisite English renditions by Nguyen Ngoc Bich.

The poet's moving verse, as he himself says, "is somewhat weak in imagination / being true like jail, hunger, and suffering." But actually, the true plight of political prisoners languishing in communist jails is revealed through the clever use of various genres of Vietnamese poetry, including the traditional six-eight (luc-bat) meter and the so-called "new poetry" first experimented with in the 1930s by well-known writers of the generation preceding Nguyen Chi Thien's. Twenty-seven years in jail have helped this frail man of letters express boundless compassion for his compatriots in particular and his fellow men in general. Every line exudes the poet's infinite optimism regarding a society in which reign human dignity and freedom - through the triumph of altruistic love. The poet and his gifted interpreter, working together outside Vietnam, will carry that message farther and farther, thanks particularly to well-conceived collections such as this one.

Dinh-Hoa Nguyen Southern Illinois University, Carbondale