Trần Dạ Từ - Thơ

The first volume including collected poems from his sixty years of work. About the author: Tr¿n D¿ T¿ was born in H¿i D¿¿ng, northern Vietnam. In 1954, during the partition of the country, he went to Saigon, where he became a journalist and prominent poet. During 1963, he was jailed by the Ngô ¿ình Di¿m government for his dissident views, then imprisoned for 12 years by the Communists from 1976-1988, after the collapse of South Vietnam. His wife, the famous novelist and poet Nhã Ca, the only South Vietnamese female writer among 10 black-listed as "cultural guerrillas" by the Communist regime, was also imprisoned from 1976-1977. In 1989, a year after Tr¿n D¿ T¿ was released from prison, the couple and their children received political asylum from the Swedish government, but later moved to the US and now live in Southern California. His poetry-most notably the 4,000-line "The Stone that Generates Fire" ("Hòn ¿á Làm Ra L¿a"), was translated by Cuong Nguyen and featured in Writers and Artists in Vietnamese Gulag, eds. Nguy¿n Ng¿c Bích and Ruth Talovich (Century Publishing House: 1990). The seminal poem "T¿ng V¿t T¿ Tình" has been translated variously into English as "Gifts as Tokens of Love" (Hünh Sanh Thông), "Love Tokens" (Linh Dinh), and "A Gift of Barbed Wire" (unknown translator, but used as title of a book by Robert S. McKelvey about America's abandoned allies in South Vietnam, published by University of Washington Press in 2002). "Gifts as Tokens of Love", "Drinking Song" ("Bài Hát M¿i R¿¿u"), and "The New Lullaby" ("L¿i Ru M¿i")--all from Declaration of Love in the Night--were translated by Hünh Sanh Thông and appeared in An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems, ed. Hünh Sanh Thông (Yale University Press: 1996); and From Both Sides Now, the Poetry of the Vietnam War and its Aftermath, ed. Philip Mahony (Scribner: 1998).