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"Totalitariansm creates hell on earth. In
Nguyen Chi Thien, that hell has found its Dante. Hoa Lo/Hanoi Hilton
Stories is a tribute to the power of the human spirit over tyranny
and of art over oblivion.
-Michael Lind, Senior
Whitehead Fellow, the New American Foundation,
Washington
DC
"The austerity, menace, and extremity of long
imprisonment under conditions that are calculated to defeat the spirit
and body have the capacity to produce great literature....a magical
blend of...close observation of one's constrained surroundings and of
one's interior life together with the lyricism that hopeless situations
can, paradoxically, produce."
-James C. Scott, Sterling
Professor of Political Science and Anthropology,
Yale University
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Hoa
Lo/Hanoi Hilton Stories
by Nguyen Chi Thien |
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During the roughly fifteen years spent as a political
prisoner in Vietnamese labor camps from 1960 to 1977, Nguyen Chi Thien
composed hundreds of poems. Released following the fall of Saigon,
Thien delivered a manuscript of these poems to the British Embassy
in Hanoi. He was arrested at the gate and taken to Hoa Lo - the well
known "Hanoi Hilton" Prison, where he spent six of an additional
twelve years of imprisonment, often in solitary confinement. During
this time, his collection of vivid poems, known as Hoa Dia-Nguc
began to circulate in two Vietnamese editions, and eventually
overseas. Some of the poems were set to music and popularized by Vietnamese
folksinger, Pham Duy. In 1984, a bilingual edition of the poems, translated
into English by Vietnamese literature scholar Huynh Sanh Thong, was
published under the title Flowers
from Hell by the Council on Southeast Asia Studies at Yale
University. In 1985, while it was still unknown if he were alive or
dead, Thien was awarded the International Poetry Prize in Rotterdam
on the basis of this book. He was released from prison in 1991 and
lived in Hanoi until 1995 when he emigrated to the United States.
He became a U.S. citizen in 2004.
In 2007, the Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies undertook publication
of a collection of Nguyen Chi Thien's prose - stories written about
his years in Hoa Lo. Poetic testaments to the human spirit, this collection
is further legacy of a great literary talent. (See Nguyen
Chi Thien obituary, New York Times October 2012). |
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Yale Southeast Asia Studies Monograph #57
Hoa Lo/Hanoi Hilton Stories,
by Nguyen Chi Thien
Foreward by James C. Scott
; Preface by Jean Libby
Translators: Nguyen Ngoc
Bich, Tran Van Dien, Vann Saroyan Phan, Nguyen Kiem Phong
$25.00 - Paperback ISBN: 978-0-938692-89-8
$37.00 - Clothbound ISBN: 978-0-938692-88-1*
*Cloth is Library serial binding: no jacket or cover photo; blank
with foil stamp on spine.
Paperback includes cover photos/design and text - cover design
by Metaglyfix
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| top left:
Nguyen Chi Thien, age 39 (Hanoi, 1978); top right: Hallway
in cell block of Hanoi Central prison, © 2007 Christopher McCooey;
center left: Nguyen Chi Thien at Berkeley College Master's
Tea, Yale University 2005; lower left: Door detail of cell
#2 in Hanoi Central Prison, © 2007 Christopher McCooey |
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