Dear friends, I have the honor to announce
the publication of the new edition of complete poetry of Nguyen Chi Thien from
the East Coast USA Vietnamese Publishers Consortium and the publisher Nguyen
Ngoc Bich. Publishers address: 2607 Military Road, Arlington, Virginia, 22207. Telephone: 703-525-4538 Fax: 703-719-5764.
Mr. Bich contributed to one of the first
publications of the poetry of Nguyen Chi Thien, which was smuggled through the
British Embassy in Hanoi in 1979 at the cost of twelve more years of
imprisonment in the Gulag of the communist prisons of Vietnam, during which
time the poet nearly died of starvation and the cruelties of solitary
confinement for eight of the twelve years.
This early publication of the work of
Nguyen Chi Thien was twenty of the poems set to music by Pham
Duy in the trilingual edition of Nguc Ca, Chants
de Prison, Prison Songs, which was published by Que Me in
1982. It includes English versions for singing of the Prison
Songs by Nguyen Ngoc Bich, the current publisher of Hoa
Dia Nguc --over 700 poems composed by the author during his
imprisonments between 1957 and 1991 in
Mr. Bich, who is the author of A
Thousand Years of Vietnamese Poetry (Knopf, 1975) began his detective work on
the imprisoned poet, whose name was not known at that time. Even among
the later publications about Nguyen Chi Thien his July 30, 1982 "A Voice
From the Hanoi Underground" in AsiaWeek was the most correct
for year of birth (1939), the years of the deaths of his parents (1970 and
1976), his loss of a lover who appears so sweetly in his early work and then
becomes part of the bitterness of the cement floor and chains that become
poetry through memorization -- he was denied pen and paper in the
prison.
Nguyen Ngoc Bich continued to translate the
poems into English -- even though they had been translated by Huynh Sanh Thong
and Hang T. Nguyen and published in the 1980s (as well as French,
Dutch, Korean, Chinese, and German translations). In 1995 and 1996,
when Nguyen Chi Thien gained asylum to the United States in the H.O.
Program (the only North Vietnamese citizen who had never been affiliated with
South Vietnam or the USA to be admitted) the energetic Mr. Bich published three
bilingual editions of the poetry, Hoa Dia Nguc II, then a combined Hoa
Dia Nguc I and II, and the Nguc Ca, Prison Songs, with Pham Duy.
There is a recent photograph of the
publisher Nguyen Ngoc Bich and author Nguyen Chi Thien with Frederick Brown,
director of the International Studies program at
On June 18, 2006 there will be an inaugural book
signing with the publisher and author at the George Mason University Metro
Campus,
There will be a signing of the new edition of Hoa
Dia Nguc
(which is entirely in the original Vietnamese) in
Congratulations to the author and publisher of
Hoa Dia Nguc, Messrs. Nguyen Chi Thien and Nguyen Ngoc Bich. I am honored
to be the photographer of the cover image, which you can see in the
attached flyer and posted on the blogsite. This image is also
the portrait chosen for the entry on Nguyen Chi Thien's poetry
and autobiography on the site of the Viet Nam Literature Project, www.vietnamlit.org.
It has recently been featured in the Epoch Times in an article by Nataly
Teplinsky. http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/6-5-2/41077.html
Part Two continues the week following May 2, 2006.
Even as the photographer who deliberately
planned the location of Rodin's "Gates of Hell" for the poet Nguyen
Chi Thien in 2004, I missed the signficance of the image until Nguyen Ngoc Bich
told me in an telephone conversation yesterday:
Nguyen Chi Thien is turning his back on the
wall, the Gates of Hell, and starting a new life as a Vietnamese American
rescued from the Communists. He had taken the oath of citizenship
only ten days before the photo was taken.
This is a most profound and philosophical
observation and interpretation which will now stay with the image.
Jean Libby, editor
Viet-Am Review
http://vietamreview.blogharbor.com
