[In the following essay. Ying depicts the poetry of Ho Chi Minh as representative of a heroic struggle against United States imperialism in Southeast Asia.]

Deep is the friendship between Viet Nam and China;
We are comrades as well as brothers.

This concise description of the close relationship between the Vietnamese and Chinese peoples was written by President Ho Chi Minh of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam. And this deep friendship between two peoples who have long been comrades-in-arms is vividly reflected in all fields of life, including art and literature.

The literary ties between China and Viet Nam go back to the thirteenth century or earlier. Many classical Vietnamese writers had a good knowledge of Chinese literature and sometimes even wrote in Chinese. Similar customs and social conditions as well as related languages facilitated learning from each other and cultural interchange, which reached unprecedented proportions after the Chinese people's liberation. There are now more contacts than ever before between Chinese and Vietnamese writers, and many Vietnamese works have been made available in translation to the Chinese reading public. I want, briefly, to give my impressions of some Vietnamese writing in Chinese translation I have recently read.

At the end of the eighteenth century Nguyen Du wrote a poem of more than 3,200 lines entitled Kim Van Kieu which was adapted from a Chinese novel. As soon as this was published in Chinese in 1959 by the People's Literature Publishing House, Peking, it aroused great interest among Chinese readers, who find its content and historical background familiar since it gives a picture of sixteenth-century China. It tells of a beautiful and talented girl named Thuy Kieu, who was kidnapped and sold to a brothel, but through all her sufferings and hardships her heart remained as innocent as a white lotus flower unstained by mud. Nguyen Du ruthlessly exposed the feudal rulers and voiced the people's longing for freedom and justice. This poem conveys his sympathy for the people and his admiration for virtue and pure love.

This long poem is still so popular in Viet Nam that when I visited the country with the Chinese Writers' Delegation in October 1956 I heard an old village woman and a young woman worker in town reciting some of the most moving stanzas. The poem is widely read in China too. To me it represents the union of Chinese and Vietnamese literature and is a monument to the close literary ties between our countries.

But the most popular Vietnamese poems in China are those written in Chinese by President Ho Chi Minh. I saw the original manuscripts in the Central Library in Hanoi in 1956, and they were published here in 1960 to celebrate the president's 70th birthday. Our Chinese Writers' Delegation was privileged to hear from Ho Chi Minh himself how these poems came to be written. Holding his hands together as if he were handcuffed, he told us that after his arrest by the Kuomintang reactionaries in the province of Kwangsi in 1942, he was imprisoned for a whole year, and during that time he put all his joy, anger and grief into the hundred short poems which make up this collection. At the beginning of the book he wrote:

My body is in prison
But my spirit roams free outside;
To achieve a great task
In spirit we must range wide.

These lines indicate the lofty tone of the whole book. Reading it, one forgets that these poems were written in prison but seems to hear a great revolutionary talking to his comrades. Here are three examples:

Dawn
Every morning the sun rises over the wall
To shine on our locked cells;
The cells are still dark,
But ahead of us is light.
Cock-crow
You are simply an ordinary cock
Yet how loudly you crow each day to announce the dawn;
And it is no little thing
To arouse men from their dreams.
Evening
Roses bloom, roses fade,
Bloom and fade relentlessly;
But their fragrance seeps into our cells
Conveying their sympathy for the men inside.

There is not a hint of gloom or sorrow in these poems which express high ideals and infinite faith in freedom, using homely yet poetic images to voice the confidence and optimism of a revolutionary.

President Ho Chi Minh was writing in dark days for the Vietnamese people under the rule of the French colonialists, but at the same time a resolute underground struggle was being waged under his leadership and that of the Communist Party. After the revolution of August 1945, the Vietnamese fought for another eight years for national liberation. The stirring happenings of this period and the many heroes who fought and gave their lives for the cause of liberation supplied Vietnamese writers with inexhaustible material.

In 1956 in Hanoi the talented young Vietnamese author Nguyen Ngoc told me about his first novel The Village That Wouldn't Die, which was later published in Chinese and has aroused wide interest. After the 1945 Revolution in Viet Nam the French colonialists with their superior military strength seized the cities and main lines of communication in Viet Nam and started to attack the mountain areas. Nguyen Ngoc, then living with the Ba-na people in the mountainous region of central Viet Nam, joined in their resistance to the colonialist forces. When French troops surrounded the villages and cut off their salt supply, the people used the ashes of burned straw as a substitute. When the enemy set fire to their houses and crops, a whole village would often move away to keep the colonialists from getting grain and conscript labour. The village in Nguyen Ngoc's novel evacuated thirteen times, moving from a valley to a mountain peak.

“Our people had a hard time,” Nguyen Ngoc told me. “They had to use their bare hands to fell trees, open up waste land and dig up the wild cassava roots deep in the earth. We were reduced to eating buffalo hide. The French colonialists were vicious brutes. They set fire to the villages and seized all the choppers, axes, bows and spears, knowing how scarce iron was there, and thinking that without iron tools the Ba-na people must starve. …” His book provides colourful descriptions of the superb scenery of south Viet Nam and shows the terror of the French when they entered those beautiful mountains, which bristled with bamboo spikes and traps. Death threatened them from underfoot, from the trees, and even from the air. Nguyen Ngoc gives a vivid picture of the heroism of the people of the south in their grim struggle against the colonialists. The hero of his novel Nup develops from a simple, brave village lad into a leader of the partisans and a seasoned, resourceful revolutionary.

If we compare Kim Van Kieu to a gentle and moving song and The Village That Wouldn't Die to a symphony, the collection of poems South Viet Nam Fights On can be likened to a clarion call or the thunder of battle drums. Published in Peking in 1964, this collection of 51 poems by 31 poets from both north and south Viet Nam deals with the struggle of the Vietnamese people today. Whether writing in Hanoi or the jungles of the south, all the poets issue the same powerful call to the whole of Viet Nam: Liberate the south and unite the motherland!

To Huu begins his famous poem The South with these lines:

If a friend should ask me:
Of all the sounds on earth
Which is the sound that goes straight to our hearts?
My answer would be: The south!
If my love should ask me:
Of all the names on earth
Which is the name that stands for unchanging love?
My answer would be: The south!

To Huu's work has the evocative musical qualities of classical Vietnamese poetry, but its heroic revolutionary passion is distinctively his own, and his style reminds me of a limpid spring from a high mountain flowing through a flowering plain. His love for the southern part of his motherland and the people of the south is matched by his strong hatred for U.S. imperialism and its henchmen who are trampling over the south and obstructing the unification of the country. His poetry seems as clear and bland as wine, and like wine it warms your heart and fires your blood. This poem voices the deep love of the 17 million people of north Viet Nam for their brothers in the south.

Because of obstruction and sabotage by the U.S. imperialists, for ten years the Hien Luong River on the temporary military demarcation line at the 17th parallel has cut the beautiful land of Viet Nam into two, dividing brothers from each other. That is why this river figures in so many Vietnamese poems, symbolizing boundless longing and ardent love. In South Viet Nam Fights On different poets view the same river from different angles. Luu Trong Lu writes in The Waves of Cua Tung:

No boat in the world but puts in to the shore,
No shore in the world but serves as a mooring-place;
Why is it, with only one stream between,
No boat of ours may moor at the southern shore
And none of our people may visit loved ones there?
With only one stream between,
Why can I only wave my hand and strain my eyes towards the south?

In Mist Mantles the Far Shore of the Ben Hai¹ Hoang Trung Thong writes:

One river rent in two by tears,
One bridge like teeth tightly clenched;
Cold mist mantles the south,
But behind that cold dank mist
The flames of war
Are burning ever brighter.

The ardent desire of all the people of Viet Nam is to pull out this sword which has been plunged through their heart and to smash the hell on earth created by the U.S. imperialists and their puppets in south Viet Nam. The poets have put into words the longing of all their compatriots. Their songs of golden paddy and green bamboo glades, little streams and broad highways, the tears of mothers, the longing of young brides, and the pledges of fighters, all have the same theme—the motherland must be re-united, the criminal imperialists and the reactionary regime must be destroyed. The struggle of the people in the south is gaining in strength; they have full confidence in their victory. This is expressed by Thanh Hai of south Viet Nam at the end of his poem We Stand in the Forefront of the Battle Against U.S. Imperialism:

The people of the south
Are fighting in the forefront of the battle against U.S. imperialism;
The flames of liberation blaze high in the raging wind,
Our hearts are full of hope and brightness.

The same revolutionary confidence is evident in other works recently translated such as Letters from the South, the short stories in Stories in the South, and the two collections of reportage Stories of the War in South Viet Nam and The Fighting Youth of South Viet Nam. Most of these are not the work of professional writers but of soldiers, housewives, students or old people who have taken part in the just struggle against U.S. imperialist aggression. They describe their own experiences or those of their friends, their own aspirations, joys and sorrows, and their unity as they work for one common cause. Fresh, optimistic and revolutionary, these simple accounts show us the heroic sons and daughters of Viet Nam loyally upholding their national dignity and refusing to submit to force. It is only natural that the heroes they present have been taken to the hearts of the Chinese people.

Notes

1. Ben Hai is another name for the Hien Luong River.