Oct 13th 2012
THE poems were under his shirt, 400 of them. The date was July 16th 1979, just two days—he noted it—after the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. Freedom day. He ran through the gate of the British embassy in Hanoi, past the guard, demanding to see the ambassador. The guard couldn’t stop him. In the reception area, a few Vietnamese were sitting at a table. He fought them off, and crashed the table over. In a cloakroom nearby, an English girl was doing her hair; she dropped her comb in terror. The noise brought three Englishmen out, and he thrust his sheaf of poems at one of them. Then, calm again, he let himself be arrested.
Thus Nguyen Chi Thien sent his poems out of Communist Vietnam. They were published as “Flowers of Hell”, translated into half a dozen languages, and won the International Poetry Award in 1985. He heard of this, vaguely, in his various jails. In Hoa Lo, the “Hanoi Hilton”, one of his captors furiously waved a book in his face. To his delight, he saw it was his own.
He was not strong physically. He contracted TB as a boy; his parents had to sell their house to pay for his antibiotics. Then since 1960, on various pretexts—contesting the regime’s view of history, writing “irreverent” poetry—he had done several long spells in prison and labour camp. Hard rice and salt water had made him scrawny and thin-haired by his 40s. Internally, though, he was like steel: mind, heart, soul. Sheer determination had forced him through the British embassy that day. In fact, the more the regime hurt him, the more he thrived:
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