Nguyễn Bình at Literary Hub:
By 1964, Vietnam had been bisected for a decade. Fierce fights between the US-backed South and the communist North had marred the country, and with US forces officially entering the war that August, it seemed things were only getting worse. From the West Lake in Hanoi, the poet Chế Lan Viên wrote to decry American war crimes and made sure to specify their perpetrators:
No! It is not Edgar Poe who herded us into strategic fences,
Not Lincoln who dropped thousand-kilogram bombs on the faces of men,
Not Whitman who fired three thousand nights of cannons.
At first glance, the mention of Poe sticks out like a sore thumb. It would make sense to name Lincoln and Whitman, who embody the ideals of America and contrast with its brutal crimes in Vietnam, but why Poe? The answer lies in his surprisingly major role in the early twentieth century, right at the dawn of Vietnam’s modern literature. For a period in Vietnamese history, Poe was “America’s literary giant,” inspiring a generation of authors who would go on to take up arms and raise their voices in support of the struggle against imperialism.
More here.
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