"They destroy while we want to live"
Chế Lan Viên was a Vietnamese poet. He was born Phan Ngọc Hoan, in Đông Hà, in Central Vietnam. He grew up in Quy Nhơn further south, and started writing poetry at an early age. His first collection, published when he was seventeen, gained him notice as a poet of original, if morose, sensibilities. He participated in the events of the August Revolution of 1945, in the Quy Nhơn area. Afterwards, he
"Little sister, do you know why humanity passes down ancient tales, from hand to hand, from generation to generation? It is so that each generation can add something that was not there yesterday. ...The miracle of today is in the hands of those who go unshod, their hearts bare."
"Pale, cold torchlight. Slender shadows from a row of tall bamboo Flicker dimly on the coffin of a child Carried through the chilling dew. A sobbing old woman lays bare her heart. I stare at the countless stars in silence, asking myself: Since when has my soul been destroyed? And might that dark coffin of a child Not contain my corpse as well? Vaguely, from the immensity of space, I heard a star cast a soft reply."
"...[E]ach moment of joy but prompts the more That madness buried at the base of dreamy souls, That sadness in the dark citadel of the heart, And in sorrowful eyes, images of innocence from the past. All the Past is but an endless string of days, All the Future is but a series of graves not yet fulfilled... In the summer sun, fresh leaves begin to change in hue, Weaving the autumn whose arrival is imminent—as in our lives The green days follow in fading succession, Weaving the shroud that covers our souls."
"Men, be vigilant! Those are killers. They dont care about introspection, still-lifes, structuralism, colours and sounds: They kill. They dont care about Chuang-tzu, Kafka, the unconscious and the subconscious, Breton and surrealism, Hamlet and "to be or not to be," they just dont care; They kill. They sweep on us as the twitter of birds greets the coming of dawn Or during starlit and love-laden nights Or when the sky is at its bluest When gardens are fragrant with the scent of flowers And the fruit sweet like human lips."
"One translucent day I leave the city to visit my home, the land of Champa.Here are stupas gaunt with yearning, ancient temples ruined by time, streams that creep alone through the dark past peeling statues that moan of Champa.Here are dense and drooping forests where long processions, lost souls of Champa, march; and evening spills through thick, fragrant leaves, mingling with the cries of moorhens.Here is the field where two great armies were reduced to a horde of clamoring souls. Champa blood still cascades in streams of hatred to grinding oceans filled with Champa bones.Here too are placid images: hamlets at rest in evening sun, Champa girls gliding homeward, their light chatter floating with the pink and saffron of their dresses.Here are magnificent sunbaked palaces, temples that blaze in cerulean skies. Here battleships dream on the glossy river, while the thunder of sacred elephants shakes the walls.Here, in opaque light sinking through lapis lazuli, the Champa king and his men are lost in a maze of flesh as dancers weave, wreathe, entranced, their bodies harmonizing with the flutes.All this I saw on my way home years ago and still I am obsessed, my mind stunned, sagged with sorrow for the race of Champa."
"[A] bright star on the literary scene in the late 1930s was a young man from central Vietnam who wrote under the pen name Che Lan Vien. His reputation was based primarily on one slender volume of poems, entitled In Ruins, published in 1937 when he was only seventeen years old. Although he was Vietnamese, his poems are mostly about Champa and written from a Cham rather than Vietnamese point of view. It seems, however, that behind his preoccupation with the long-crumpled glories of Champa, deemed worthy of countless centuries of lamentation and regret, lay a view of Vietnam in the 1930s as a decadent and dying society whose true glory was "in ruins."