Life, Poetry, and Prison--Cuoc Song, Thi Van, va Tu Day; Nguyen Chi Thien's poetry in bilingual text (English and Vietnamese Edition)

Bilingual English and Vietnamese text of poems from the period of 1958 - 1979 when the author, was imprisoned in Communist Vietnam for the offense of writing poetry against the regime. The manuscript was brought to the British Embassy on July 16, 1979, during a brief period of release. Nguyen Chi Thien--denied asylum--was arrested outside the gate and spent the next twelve years in prison, eight of them in solitary darkness.

First published anonymously in the Vietnamese language press in the United States, translations began as early as 1982. These English translations appeared in 1984 in a Carlton Press book,The Will of a Vietnamese, by the editor Nguyen Thi, who was then a university student in Spain. Meeting the author in 2006, Nguyen Thi (now an educator at a Vietnamese language school in San Jose) and Nguyen Chi Thien collaborated on revising 35 of the poems into bilingual format.A final poem, written in 1996 after the author emigrated to the United States was translated for this edition. It is the only edition that it appears in translation. The poem, "The Beauty on Earth" tells of the love and longing of young men in prisons -- which were called "re-education camps" by Ho Chi Minh--for freedom and life represented by a photograph of a beautiful young girl. After the Communists invaded South Vietnam in 1975, many left the new country, now unified in the single name Vietnam. The poem tells of the beauty on earth -- the young South Vietnamese women -- who flew away and took root in "the American soil, the European sky."

All the poems depict prison life and the void of missing family. Starvation, a deliberate policy of the Communist gulag throughout Europe and Asia, is a recurrent theme.These poems are designed to be read aloud in both languages and assist in ESL learning as well as cultural grounding in Vietnamese history.