Poetry
Lửa thiêng
Not translated into English
Huy Cận · 1940
Synopsis
Verses in which someone stands before rivers too wide and empty evenings, and feels tiny. The sorrow has no nameable cause: neither mourning nor lost love, it comes from the vastness itself, from the sky, the flowing water and the falling evening, and the poet does not try to be rid of it. The language is simple, the verse flows without a jolt, and this objectless sorrow takes on the air of something old and already known.
Context
Several pieces originally bore a dedication to Nhất Linh, to Khái Hưng or to Hoàng Đạo, the three men of the group that had published it; these dedications disappeared from later printings, when the group was banned. The prosody remains regular, seven or eight syllables, where others broke the metre: it is through feeling and not through form that this book belongs to the new poetry. The house that published it brought out between 1935 and 1945 the bulk of the collections of this movement.
Who it is for
Short, in Vietnamese, and in simple language. The sadness in it is constant and without object; it is best approached poem by poem rather than in one go, and selections of the author's work exist in French.
Prizes and reception
Regarded by critics as a high point of Vietnamese poetry before 1945, and the book by which its author remains known, despite sixty years of later writing.