Narrative
Đôi mắt
Not translated into English
Nam Cao · 1948
Opening lines
Anh thanh niên làng chỉ một cái cổng gạch nhỏ, quay lại bảo tôi: - Ngõ này đây, ông Hoàng ở đây.
The young man from the village pointed to a small brick gate and turned round to tell me: “This is the lane. Mr Hoàng lives here.”
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from vi.wikisource.org
Synopsis
A writer who has come from the maquis visits a fellow writer who has withdrawn to the countryside, who lives apart, surrounded by his books and his dog, and speaks of the peasants with disgust while admiring from afar the great men of the moment. The conversation lasts an evening and a night; the two men have known each other forever, still hold each other in esteem, and no longer see anything the same way. Nothing happens, everything is played out in what they say and in what the visitor leaves unsaid.
Context
The text appeared in a collection entitled Journal en forêt, in the very year its author wrote it, at the start of the war against France. Tô Hoài saw in it the statement of intent of a whole generation of writers from before 1945 who were going over to the revolution without knowing how to look at the people in whose name they now wrote. The question is not posed in theory: it lies in the way two men speak of the same villagers. Its author was killed three years later, and his work ends there.
Who it is for
Very short, in Vietnamese. Almost everything is dialogue, and the narrator's irony is never signalled; the reader has to pick it up unaided.
Prizes and reception
His author's most commented text after the revolution, and a set text in secondary-school curricula.