Han mac tu biography of rory

Han Mac Tu was born into a Catholic family in Growing up in Quang Binh province, he expressed great interest in literature from an early age and started playing with rhymes and stanzas at He befriended many academics at the time who shared his love for poetry and writing, including Phan Boi Chau, a prolific writer. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

At 21, Tu decided to pack up his life and move to Saigon in hopes of pursuing his dream career in writing. Little did he know that this job would lead him to Mong Cam, his first and most talked-about love. Throughout his life, Tu was linked with many women but his romance with Mong Cam is the most well-known. Also a lover of literature, she used to submit short poems for his poetry column.

Collections [ edit ]. Poetry in English [ edit ]. See also [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. Books Abroad. University of Oklahoma : 19— JSTOR Retrieved September 3, VietNamNet News. Retrieved April 5, Yale University Press. Still we remain lifted by this deluge of light. We look down at the sand, trying to search for the footprints of the Goddess of the Peach Blossom Spring, but the sand remains flatly serene like stretched silk, virginal and pure.

To know what this place even is, one goes to the Peach Blossom Spring; one asks the Master there. We are now in the middle of moon season, and even with eyes wide open, we cannot tell the nine directions of the heavens from the ten directions of the Buddha. The whole space flickers with colors so iridescent our pupils turn hazy in their blinding bright glare.

The moon and the light have entered every possible place on earth. And this entire womb of the world that carries us, while it buoyantly floats to the shore of another planet, is now wholly flooded with moon. Light overflowing, light overspilling. Light urging my sister and me to unfold our lapels to embrace the brightness as if collecting our precious gemstones.

Looking over at my sister, I am suddenly struck by her overwhelming elegance. She seems as pristine, as lush and as noble as a sculpture of the Blessed Virgin Mary, our messenger of the divine will.

Han mac tu biography of rory

I long to eagerly bow and ardently supplicate her for clemency. Good heavens, how can my sister look so splendid tonight? Her pale complexion, adorned by the ample folds of her white garments, looks peerless in her perfection. Looking the way we do, my sister and I surely can be moonly indeed. My sister, jubilant as spring, skips wildly about like a young girl letting all of her fifteen-year-old innocence flower and flourish.

Meanwhile, I behold her, feeling an infinite gladness in my heart. I have many times been arrogantly protective of her graceful beauty, and yet it is only tonight, under the autumn sky, that I am finally learning how to relish her brilliance. Suddenly I howl like a madman, holding out my palms to catch a falling star. Soon the light of this night will indeed melt away; that is inescapable.

We will mourn it, we will miss it. The breath of dream has covered the entire realm. Each letter, each syllable, each period, each comma, is billowing into sculptural form and blowing up into ethereal sound. The light, the fragrance, the music, the brother, the sister: all are whirling into the deluge of the moon river. An atmosphere of enchantment, wildness and absolute purity.

One must turn into Air. Only then would one be able to fly: to cease from falling into the realm of decadence, to stop fainting from the pain of chronic torment. Air is the magic spell that soothes the agony of the body. Autumn is still to come. Yet my soul has already soaked up the colors of gloom. The autumn moon of my heart has already gone misty and cold.

The lighter the vapor of smoke, the clearer the vapor of moon, the more fragrant the vapor of my breath, just like perfume! One ought to quietly read and re-read aloud the following two sentences, over and over again; just watch the vapor of Vietnamese poetry float up and condense into a teardrop, pure and clear, before it spreads out:. I exit the dream.

I walk to the boat by the ancient moonshore. Tears are falling. Pearl-tears whose age cannot be known by a stranger. In the first sentence, twelve out of the fifteen Vietnamese words, strung together using level tones, stroll in a buoyant dream; the last two words, bearing oblique tones, softly set foot on the bank of an old river.

In the second sentence, six oblique tones are interlaced with five level ones; the tears gather into drops, then blur into a floating immensity. How to gulp down all that pleasurable air and taste of Vietnamese poetry, if one overlooks this ringing oblique-levelness, so melodiously and arbitrarily planted throughout the lines. In the atmosphere of dream, the Vietnamese language does not express but transmit feeling, like an electric current sent straight to the heart and the brain, like a flow of shedding soul, like a rising of water that floods the mind, like a fabled zone that swells upon touch as it resounds and rattles into breaking tones.

One must greedily gulp down the sound of each letter, the sound flying ahead of meaning, further than meaning. I am afraid to play a melancholy reader, who nostalgically believes that the Vietnamese language reached its haloed summit over a century ago, and that it has not since finished its self-decaying cycle and entered into rebirth. One goes from realities to mirages, from mirages to miracles, from miracles to dreams.

Fog has enshrouded every entity in the realm of the real, which the light of dreams has entirely and relentlessly besieged. Yet he never stopped clinging to an eternal mirage of the moon like a classic Eastern poet:. Feeling swells onto the white sheet of paper: my intention suddenly rings and coagulates on the page like a moon coagulating under a bridge.