Reality is overwhelming but literature lacks great works.

Chairman of the Vietnam Writers Association Nguyen Quang Thieu said European and American writers crave the changing and emotional Vietnamese reality of the past 50 years to create, but we have it but cannot produce works worthy of the times.

Some Vietnamese literary works since 1975, both by domestic authors and Vietnamese living abroad - Photo: T.DIEU

In the workshop "Vietnamese Literature after 1975 - Achievements, Problems and Prospects", organized by the Vietnam Writers Association on October 6 in Hanoi , poet Nguyen Quang Thieu - Chairman of the Vietnam Writers Association - asked what is preventing Vietnamese literature from developing as expected in recent years, only a fragmented portrait.

Reality is overwhelming, where are the writers?

Mr. Thieu said European and American writers craved the changing and emotional Vietnamese reality of the past 50 years to create, but we have it but cannot produce works worthy of the times.

Professor Phong Le also had a similar assessment. He said, historically, the past 50 years have been a rare or unprecedented change. From war to peace , from a divided country to a unified country, from narrow to wide exchanges...

Such movements must be said to be very large, but Vietnamese literature has not yet had movements corresponding to those great changes in society.

Looking at the past 30 years, since 1990, literary life has still had a steady appearance and the more new names appear, the more it gets. But it seems that they have not all gathered into a team, in a journey that is not mixed together.

Poet Do Thi Tac is saddened by the fact that Vietnamese literature is bustling with "fighting" stories rather than literary achievements.

Vietnamese writers rarely read each other.

Critic Le Hoai Nam sighed at the reality that "anti-American literature used to be so humane, why does it now write about such evil people?"

But he believes that the literature of the past 50 years has had many achievements and good works, not that there has been nothing like many people complain. According to him, those complaints come from the reality that Vietnamese writers are lazy to read each other.

Critic Nguyen Dang Diep also highly appreciated the achievements of Vietnamese literature over the past 50 years.

He said if in the past we had Nam Cao as a peak, then in the past few decades we also had Nguyen Huy Thiep.

Before we had Vu Trong Phung as a dense urban writer, now we have Nguyen Viet Ha who is also very excellent.

Affirming that Vietnamese literature over the past 50 years has had some outstanding works, Mr. Diep also admitted that our literature lacks philosophical and aesthetic depth, only having "a few valuable sentences, a few stylistic, a few clever, a few witty".

Writer Nguyen Binh Phuong - Vice President of the Vietnam Writers Association - said that the seminars in Ho Chi Minh City and Da Nang also received two opposing opinions in evaluating the achievements of Vietnamese literature over the past 50 years.

At the conference, critic Nguyen Hoai Nam gave his opinion on Vietnamese literature abroad.

According to him, along with the mainstream of domestic literature, the literature of Vietnamese people and people of Vietnamese origin abroad not only delves deeply into issues of the past and Vietnamese traditions, but also opens up widely to issues of all nations and peoples in the era of integration and globalization.

That body of literature deserves further recognition and study.

BIRD OF PARADISE

Source: https://tuoitre.vn/hien-thuc-ngon-ngon-ma-van-chuong-thieu-tac-pham-lon-202510070917224.htm