Poetry
Điêu tàn
Not translated into English
Chế Lan Viên · 1937
Synopsis
Thirty-six poems in which the speaker calls himself a Cham and mourns a destroyed kingdom. He wanders among the crumbling towers of Bình Định, questions the bones and skulls, calls on the ghosts and the severed heads, declares himself a stranger to the present world and refuses to live in it. The subject matter is deliberately funereal and keeps returning on itself; the poet, who was not Cham, borrows the voice of a vanished people to speak of his own exile.
Context
Thirty-six pieces, published by Mai Lĩnh. The preface, dated to a moonlit night at the Đồ Bàn tower, holds that writing is something out of the ordinary and that the poet is not a man but a dreamer, a drunkard, a madman; it is regarded as the first manifesto of a group of young poets from Bình Định. The pseudonym is itself a declaration: it presents itself as an orchid from the garden of the Cham kings. The book at once marked him out as a new voice, though a funereal one.
Who it is for
Short, in Vietnamese. The subject matter is funereal and repetitive by design, and it is best to know that Champa was a kingdom destroyed by the Vietnamese themselves.
Prizes and reception
The book that made a provincial boy a known name overnight, and which Hàn Mặc Tử welcomed by calling its author the poet of the kingdom of Champa.