Hoang Cam, poet of the soul of the countryside - the soul of the Vietnamese people

In modern Vietnamese poetry, Hoang Cam is a unique and talented figure with a distinct and unmistakable style. He is considered a poet of the Kinh Bac countryside - a sacred space that bears both historical traces and the soul of folk culture.

In Hoang Cam's poetry, homeland is not simply a place name, a geographical space, but a deep memory, a cultural and spiritual symbol, a place containing national identity and historical pain.

Poet Hoang Cam

Photo: Document

That is clearly shown in the poem On the Other Side of the Duong River (1948), a typical poem during the resistance war against the French. The poem is the call, the echo, the cry of a son far from home witnessing his Kinh Bac homeland being occupied by the enemy, being plowed and destroyed by war: My dear! Why are you sad?/I will take you back to the Duong River/In the old days, the sand was flat and white/The Duong River flows away/A sparkling stream/Lying sideways in the long resistance war/On the other side of the Duong River/Our homeland has fragrant sticky rice/Dong Ho paintings of chickens and pigs with fresh and clear lines/The national color shines brightly on the paper… My dear! The enemy burned my village/So many hamlets and camps are desolate/The roads are bare with bamboo clumps

Duong River flows red water…”.

It was a homeland torn apart by bombs and bullets, but in the poet's memory, it was still full of poetry, dreams, and folk colors. That flashback created a phantom and painful countryside, both a cultural regret and a desire to preserve the national soul in the midst of war. This is what made Hoang Cam different in a period of poetry that tended toward epics and political language.

After the war, when the country was in the process of rebuilding, Hoang Cam continued his poetic journey with the masterpiece Ve Kinh Bac . The collection of poems was written in the years 1959 - 1960, but it was not published until the 1990s due to special historical circumstances. The collection of poems is a long poem of the mind, where the homeland Kinh Bac appears as a mysterious fairy tale world , bearing the imprint of folk culture, customs, festivals, beliefs, and the obsession with war and separation. In that space, Hoang Cam's poetry does not tell stories in a linear way, but lures readers into pieces of time and unreal space, where memories, dreams, reality and national culture blend together like overlapping waves of poetry.

One of Hoang Cam's outstanding contributions to modern poetry is in the aspect of artistic poetics. He is a rare Vietnamese poet who knows how to "nationalize" modern poetic forms, renewing folk materials without falling into the rut of illustration.

A LOOK AT POETRY INNOVATION

A few months before Hoang Cam passed away, I was fortunate to meet him and have the following exchange about poetry.

How do you evaluate the first group of innovative poets of your generation such as Tran Dan, Le Dat, Hoang Cam, Dang Dinh Hung, and Duong Tuong?

The five of us were not only a group of like-minded poets, but also a very close friendship. We read all our newly written poems to each other, without hiding anything from each other, all for the sake of poetry. Because we were close friends, we understood what each other wanted to say in our poems, things that others sometimes could not understand or feel.

How do you evaluate the poetic innovations of poets Tran Dan, Le Dat and yourself?

Tran Dan was as looming as Mount Thai Son in terms of poetry innovation and had many contributions to modern poetry. Tran Dan intended to innovate poetry and researched and considered each word. Tran Dan quietly and persistently innovated poetry so that each poem would be different from the previous one in a different way. Tran Dan innovated right from the resistance war when he wrote the long poem Viet Bac . Mr. Tran Dan decided to bury "New Pre-War Poetry". Actually, "New Pre-War Poetry" also made a great contribution to Vietnamese poetry, but if we keep repeating it over and over again, it will become boring. Therefore, Tran Dan had to innovate.

It can be said that Le Dat is a "brave" poet. If he can bring something new into his poetry, he will disregard public opinion and that is one of Le Dat's strengths.

I write poetry by instinct and I don't intend to do anything. I never like to theorize about poetry, I just write poetry. The Kinh Bac poetry collection has been praised by many people and I feel embarrassed.

According to you, how is the innovative poetry of today's young generation?

There are two problems: One is that some young poets try to appear innovative but their poems are not memorable and cannot be read. Two is that some have found a new way of expression, and the words used are also new. But innovative poetry does not mean writing arbitrarily and haphazardly. In my opinion, there are only good and bad poems. Poetry always comes from emotions rather than reason and there is no other way. Young poets today must avoid "pretending" in innovating poetry. Because poetry itself already carries within it the spirit of innovation and that is a natural law, it must innovate itself. (to be continued)

Poet Hoang Cam, whose birth name is Bui Tang Viet, was born in 1922, from Thuan Thanh, Bac Ninh. He joined the Viet Minh in 1944 and was awarded the State Prize for Literature and Arts in 2007. He died in 2010 in Hanoi . He published nearly 20 works, including short stories, novels, poems, plays, translated poems, and narrative poems. Among them are famous poetry collections: Ben kia song duong, Ve kinh bac, Tieng hat quan ho, la dieu bong, mua Thuan Thanh, Men da vang, 99 tinh khuc...

Source: https://thanhnien.vn/hoang-cam-nha-tho-cua-hon-que-hon-nguoi-viet-185250820201856814.htm