Poetry
Gái quê
Not translated into English
Hàn Mặc Tử · 1936
Synopsis
Clear, sensual verses about village girls, the moon, the gardens and the quays of Quy Nhơn. The poems are short, regular, and have the quality of a tableau: a girl bathing, an orchard under the moon, a shoreline. It is the only book the poet saw printed, and it comes shortly before the illness that withdrew him from the world and changed his manner entirely, towards pain and delirium.
Context
The book appeared in Saigon in 1936, the year the poet met the woman he sang of most and the year his illness declared itself. He would see no other published: the later collections, completed between 1937 and 1940, were printed by his friends after his death, and the strongest of them has no established date of publication at all. His legend was built on the last four years, those of the illness and the poems of pain, more than on this clear beginning.
Who it is for
About sixty pages, in Vietnamese. This is the readable side of the poet: whoever comes looking for the delirium he has heard about will find it elsewhere.
Prizes and reception
The only book printed in the lifetime of one of the three or four great names of the poetic renewal of the thirties.