Poetry
Tiếng thông reo
Not translated into English
Bàng Bá Lân · 1934
Synopsis
The verses of a twenty-two-year-old boy on the countryside of the North: the rice fields and the buffaloes, the village markets, the dyke, the kite whistling in the wind, a grandmother and her grandson asleep in a hammock, an earthen house where the dust falls on the altar. Two lines of the collection, addressed to the girl who draws water at the side of the road and pours out the golden moon, have passed into the language to the point that they are often taken for a popular song.
Context
The book appeared with Lê Cường, in Hanoi, two years after the manifesto that opened the new poetry: its author belongs to the movement's first batch, and is the only one to turn its language towards the rice fields rather than towards love or melancholy. Critics in 1941 already counted it among the books that make the decade, and Hoài Thanh and Hoài Chân gave it its place in their 1942 anthology, selecting two pieces taken not from this book but from a manuscript that never appeared.
Who it is for
Short, in Vietnamese, in a simple and concrete language. Poems of the countryside to be taken one by one; no prior knowledge is needed.
Prizes and reception
The book through which its author entered the new poetry, cited as early as 1941 among those that matter, and the source of the most recited verses of his work.