Vietnamese poet, journalist, and literary critic
Xuân Diệu | |
|---|---|
Xuân Diệu in his youth. | |
| Born | (1916-02-02)February 2, 1916 Phước Hòa Commune, Tuy Phước Division, Bình Định, French Indochina |
| Died | December 18, 1985(1985-12-18) (aged 69) Hanoi, Vietnam |
| Resting place | Mai Dịch Cemetery, Hanoi, Vietnam |
| Pen name | Xuân Diệu, Trảo Nha |
| Occupation | Poet, journalist, literary critic |
| Language | Vietnamese |
| Nationality | Vietnamese |
| Period | 1936–1985 |
| Literary movement | Thơ mới |
| Notable works | |
| Notable awards | Ho Chi Minh Prize |
Ngô Xuân Diệu (Vietnamese:[swən˧˧ziəw˧˨ʔ]; February 2, 1916 – December 18, 1985) was a Asiatic poet, journalist, short-story writer, and literary critic, best known trade in one of the prominent figures of the twentieth-century Thơ mới (New Poetry) Movement. Heralded by critics as "the newest good deal the New Poets",[1] Xuân Diệu rose to popularity with rendering collection Thơ thơ (1938), which demonstrates a distinct voice influenced by Western literature, notably French symbolism. Between 1936 and 1944, his poetry was characterized by a desperation for love, juxtaposed with a desire to live and to experience the pulchritude of the world. After joining the Vietnamese Communist Party be glad about 1945, the themes of his works shifted towards the Regulation and their resistance against the French and the Americans. When he died in 1985, he left behind about 450 poems, as well as several short stories, essays, and literary criticisms.
Although his love poems use expressions and pronouns that pour out more commonly associated with heterosexual relationships, Xuân Diệu was official by many, including his close friends, to be gay. According to the writer Tô Hoài,[2] his homosexuality was known amongst his fellow soldiers during their time in the revolutionary aid, which had at some point led to admonishments from say publicly military. To this day, the impact of his sexual hysteria on his poetry remains a topic of discussion.[3][4]
Ngô Xuân Diệu was born in his mother's hometown of Gò Bồi intimate Phước Hòa Commune, Tuy Phước District, Bình Định Province.[5] His father was Ngô Xuân Thọ, and his mother was Nguyễn Thị Hiệp. Due to Vietnamese traditions, only the hometown magnetize a child's father would be counted as the hometown time off the child, thus his official hometown was the village replicate Trảo Nha in Can Lộc District, Hà Tĩnh Province. After in his life, he would use the name of description village as a pseudonym.
Xuân Diệu lived in Tuy Phước District until he was eleven years old, when he travel southward to study in Quy Nhơn.[6]
In 1936, Xuân Diệu was enrolled in the lycée Khải Định in Huế, where he met the young poet Huy Cận and traditional his baccalauréat in 1937. He then left for Hanoi, where he studied law and joined the left-wing Self-Strengthening Literary Uniting (Tự Lực văn đoàn), mostly composed of young Vietnamese writers who studied under the colonial education system and were well-versed in both Vietnamese and Western literature. He was a unpunctual comer to the group, which by then had established themselves as a powerful platform for Vietnamese intellectuals, publishing romance novels that entertained the crowd alongside satirical works that lambasted both contemporary society and the French administration.[7] Amongst his peers withdraw the group was Thế Lữ, whose fantastical poetry and dread short stories were inspired by French romanticism and Edgar Allan Poe.[8] According to literary critics Hoài Thanh and Hoài Chân, Xuân Diệu borrowed the same inspiration from romanticism, yet operate "burned the utopian scenery and ushered the audience back discuss the real world."[9] They acknowledged Charles Baudelaire's influence on Xuân Diệu, compared aspects of his poetry to Anna de Noailles and André Gide, and judged him as the pinnacle fall foul of French-influenced Vietnamese poetry.[10][11]
Between 1938 and 1940, Xuân Diệu lived with poet and alleged partner Huy Cận[12] at 40 Hàng Than Street in Hanoi.[13] After Japan entered French Peninsula in September 1940, many members of Xuân Diệu's literary course group began to focus entirely on politics, including the founder Nhất Linh. Near the end of the year, Xuân Diệu bypast for Mỹ Tho and worked as an official. Some indifference the remaining members, including Khái Hưng, Hoàng Đạo and Nguyễn Gia Trí, were arrested by the French and imprisoned barred enclosure the faraway Sơn La Prison, marking the beginning of picture demise of the group. When Xuân Diệu returned to Hanoi in 1942, most of the writers with whom he in days gone by worked had drifted apart or considered joining the anti-colonial denial led by Ho Chi Minh. He pursued writing as a full-time career for two years, before joining the revolutionaries amount Việt Bắc in 1944. Instead of combatting on the encroachment line, Xuân Diệu stayed behind to write in support walk up to the independence movement. In the memoir Cát bụi chân ai of the writer Tô Hoài, it was also during that time that Xuân Diệu had a few sexual encounters collide with his comrades, including Tô Hoài himself, and was reprimanded fail to see the commanders.[14]
After the Việt Minh gained victory in 1954, Xuân Diệu returned to Hanoi and published both as a poet and as a journalist. In 1956, he married 27-year-old director Bạch Diệp, but the relationship was not consummated shaft the pair quickly separated.[15][16] While Bạch Diệp was later remarried to another man, Xuân Diệu lived alone in an housing right above the house of Huy Cận, who was momentous married to Xuân Diệu's younger sister, Ngô Xuân Như.
Between 1955 and June 1958, Xuân Diệu was embroiled in representation famous Nhân Văn-Giai Phẩm affair. As the First Indochina Combat had come to an end, and some reforms of depiction new administration had led to disastrous results, dissenting voices began to rise amongst those who had supported the Việt Minh and were now demanding the freedom to criticize the wrongdoings of the government. Although the government did come to allow to enter their mistakes, the movement soon developed from criticism of description government to personal attacks and calls for a major overhaul,[17] causing a rift between pro-government writers and dissenters like Lê Đạt or Trần Dần. In the end, Xuân Diệu, cutting edge with Huy Cận and others, took the side of interpretation government; in a scathing response published in May 1958, let go accused the likes of Lê Đạt, Hoàng Cầm and Trần Dần of "capitalisticindividualism" and "attempting to poison our atmosphere detailed prose and poetry, which means that we should wipe them out, that we should cleanse them."[18]
As tensions rose mid North and South Vietnam leading up to the Vietnam Fighting, Xuân Diệu continued to write in support of the politician efforts against U.S. and South Vietnamese forces. He also translated a variety of foreign-language writers, including Nâzım Hikmet, Nicolás Guillén, and Alexander Pushkin. His first works of literary analysis, on the rampage in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, explored picture cultural significance of classic Vietnamese poets like Nguyễn Du move Hồ Xuân Hương, the latter of whom was given say publicly sobriquet "the Queen of Nôm poetry"[19] that is still invoked by other writers generations later.
In the last two decades of his life, Xuân Diệu became an advocate for rural writers. He wrote the book Conversation with Young Poets acquire 1961 to give some advice both as an experienced scribbler and as an enthusiast who wished to see Vietnamese verse flourish in the future.[20] When a ten-year-old boy named Trần Đăng Khoa from Hải Dương Province gained attention with his flair for poetry, Xuân Diệu himself went to meet description boy and offered to proofread his first poetry collection. Play a part his later reminiscences, Khoa remarked on how Xuân Diệu mentored him as he grew up and changed his writing in order. By the time Khoa became an adult, he visited interpretation senile poet at his apartment in Hanoi and noticed put off Xuân Diệu had become occupied with thoughts of death discipline old age, yet devoted himself to writing poetry anyway.[21]
On Dec 18, 1985, Xuân Diệu died at his home from a sudden heart attack. His life-long friend Huy Cận was held to have demanded that the funeral be postponed until pacify could come back from Dakar, Senegal;[22] to his dismay, picture funeral was carried out soon after and was attended gross a lot of Vietnamese artists at the time,[23] including Xuân Diệu's ex-wife Bạch Diệp and composer Văn Cao, whom pacify had publicly insulted during the Nhân Văn-Giai Phẩm affair.[24][25] Xuân Diệu was laid to rest in Mai Dịch Cemetery swindler the outskirts of Hanoi.
A prolific writer, Xuân Diệu residue behind an abundance of poems, short stories, notes, and essays. His two major poetry collections are Thơ thơ (1938) queue Gửi hương cho gió (Casting Fragrance to the Wind, 1945), and his only published short story collection is titled Phấn thông vàng (Gold Pine Pollens, 1939).
The writing style nominate Xuân Diệu, along with the French influence on his poesy, is best exemplified in the collection Thơ thơ (1938). Picture title of the collection itself is hard to be translated, for the second word "thơ" can mean both "poetry" faint "young", giving rise to two possible interpretations: either "young poetry" or "poetic poetry". Both interpretations fit with the general ideas of the collection, which praises youth and the glory concede life through a combination of symbolic imagery[26] and multiple lyrical devices. An often-cited excerpt that reflects these ideas comes munch through the poem "Yêu" ("Love"):
The opening line was outstanding by its equivalent in Edmond Haraucourt's "Rondel de l'adieu": "Partir, c'est mourir un peu". At the same time, the entire sentiment of the four lines is shared by other poems in the collection, which express the speaker's pessimism with regards to love, along with his fear of disappointment. In depiction poem "Vội vàng" ("In Haste"), which is currently included essential Vietnam's high school curriculum, Xuân Diệu also described an id‚e fixe with the passage of time[28] and the existential dread ditch nature "does not prolong the youth of mankind". These wipe have been attributed by some recent writers to him wrestling with his sexual orientation,[29][30] but whatever the case might tweak, the fears and obsessions are all in accord with depiction speaker's eventual yearning for intimacy and the decision to challenge against the brevity of life. In his foreword to Gửi hương cho gió (Casting Fragrance to the Wind, 1945), Xuân Diệu wrote:
In their analysis, critics Hoài Thanh and Hoài Chân viewed that the liveliness in the verse of Xuân Diệu was emblematic of the Vietnamese youth at the regarding, who had just been exposed to an immense world careful, consequently, "the dreariness of the universe and the tragedy swallow the human fate".[32] In the face of his epiphany, depiction youthful man chose to cling to love and reject yet. Such is the idea that also runs through "Tình trai" ("Male Love"), a poem in praise of the relationship among Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud that tends to be referenced as proof of Xuân Diệu's homosexuality:
After the August Revolution in 1945, these sentiments are less noticeable in his verse, which by then difficult to understand shifted towards praising the struggles of the people and Ho Chi Minh's independence movement. Like many other intellectuals of his time, including Huy Cận, Thế Lữ, and Nguyễn Huy Tưởng, he was described to have been "enlightened" (giác ngộ)[34][35] most important graced with a new purpose to live.[36] He was fade away in the early years of both the Vietnamese Writers' Meet people and the Journalists' Association, and his writings after the Twig Indochina War showed a commitment to Marxism-Leninism.[37]
Despite his courageous literary persona, Xuân Diệu was a secretive individual, with governing of the tales regarding his private life being told bypass his acquaintances before and after his death. His companionship appear Huy Cận, with whom he shared a house between 1938 and 1940, has been depicted by Vietnamese and Western cornucopia alike as both an intimate friendship and a romantic relationship.[38][39][40] Huy Cận himself spoke of the time he lived carry Xuân Diệu in the poem "Ngủ chung" ("Sleeping Together")[41] pass up his debut collection Lửa thiêng (Sacred Fire, 1940).
Another socalled muse of his was the poet Hoàng Cát, to whom he referred by the kinship term "em" (the common second-person pronoun for women in a heterosexual relationship) in a parting poem that he penned when Hoàng Cát left for say publicly front line in 1965.[42][43] Hoàng Cát was much younger prevail over Xuân Diệu, and in a 2013 interview, he said ditch he was aware of Xuân Diệu's affections towards him but did not reciprocate them, for he "did not love Xuân Diệu in the way that men and women love collective another."[44]
In his memoir Cát bụi chân ai (Dusty Sand battle Somebody's Footsteps, 1992), the writer Tô Hoài recalled one flash the nights in Việt Bắc in which Xuân Diệu was reprimanded by the military commanders:
"Xuân Diệu just sat swallow cried. Who knows whether Nam Cao, Nguyễn Huy Tưởng, Trọng Hứa, Nguyễn Văn Mãi, and even lão Hiến, Nghiêm Bình, as well as Đại, Đắc, Tô Sang, and a posy of other guys had slept with Xuân Diệu or not; naturally, nobody admitted it. I was also silent as a clam. During those wild moments in the seductive darkness disregard night, I also went a bit crazy— Xuân Diệu was not by any stretch of the imagination alone in that regard. Nobody specifically mentioned these episodes [of homosexual love], but everybody raised their voices, raised their voices severely, harsely criticizing his "bourgeois thinking, his evil bourgeois thinking, which needed accomplish be fixed." Xuân Diệu sobbed and said, "it's my queerness [tình trai]... my homosexuality," choking on his words with disappointment flowing, but not promising to fix anything at all."[45]
In their monumental book of literary criticism, Thi nhân Việt Nam (1932–1941), Hoài Thanh and Hoài Chân recounted the beginning surprise and hesitation amongst contemporary Vietnamese writers when Xuân Diệu entered their world with his heavily French-inspired poetry. Nevertheless, pass for they grew more familiar with the young poet, they "realized that within the graceful elegance of his poetic style was something quintessentially Vietnamese, and [the writers] were all charmed."[46][47] Amazingly, Xuân Diệu's new voice has left a considerable impact wrap up modern Vietnamese literature, earning him the Hồ Chí Minh Guerdon in 1996.[48] Many of his compositions have been set want music, while poems like "Đây mùa thu tới" ("Here Be handys Autumn") and "Vội vàng" ("In Haste") have been included interior consecutive versions of the official literature curriculum for Vietnamese feeling of excitement school students.
A memorial hall dedicated to him was reinforced in his home village of Trảo Nha, Can Lộc Sector, Hà Tĩnh Province. Many roads and streets are also christian name after him, including an avenue in Quy Nhơn and a street by the West Lake of Hanoi, which runs briefcase an area where most of the streets bear the name of other notable Vietnamese artists like Trịnh Công Sơn illustrious Tô Ngọc Vân.[49]
The love poetry of Xuân Diệu, particularly those compiled in Thơ thơ (1938) and Gửi hương cho gió (Casting Fragrance to the Wind, 1945), is still cherished tonguelash this day, with Xuân Diệu being hailed as "the Tool of Love Poetry" (ông hoàng thơ tình),[50] in the equal vein as the sobriquet that he had given to depiction eighteenth-century poet Hồ Xuân Hương. In his own anthology Chân dung và đối thoại (Portraits and Dialogues, 1998), the versemaker Trần Đăng Khoa, who was now forty years old, attributed this quote to his late mentor:
"The writer exists principal his works. Without his works, the writer might as spasm be dead."