Poetry
Hoa niên
Not translated into English
Tế Hanh · 1945
Synopsis
The poems of an eighteen-year-old boy about the fishing village where he was born: the river lined with bamboo that is reflected in it, the boats that leave at dawn and the men who come back smelling of the open sea, and the town where he studies, far from all that. Two pieces, one on his native land, the other on the days without school, have remained in the textbooks; the language is simple and kept close to ordinary life.
Context
The manuscript awarded the prize in 1939 never appeared as it stood: its author expanded it and renamed it, and the house Đời Nay, that of the group which had distinguished it, published it in mid-1945, when the country had other things to read. The jury had proposed publishing a few pieces in its weekly, and so the author's first verses appeared in May 1940, introduced by Nhất Linh. Two pieces had caught the attention of Hoài Thanh, who included them in his anthology of 1942.
Who it is for
Short, in Vietnamese. Poems of youth, without difficulty; the country they describe is a fishermen's coast in the centre.
Prizes and reception
Encouragement prize from a literary group in Hanoi in 1939, when its author was eighteen and the book did not yet exist under this title.