Nguyen chi thien biography of michael
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It was only upon reading his obituary this month that I first learned of Nguyen Chi Thien. He was a courageous Vietnamese dissident who had spent nearly 30 years in prison for his opposition to communist repression, cruelty, and lies. Much of Nguyen’s opposition was expressed in poetry, most famously “Flowers from Hell,” a collection of poems he memorized behind bars, and only put down on paper after being released from prison in 1977.
The poems were published after he audaciously handed off the manuscript to British diplomats at their embassy in Hanoi, the AP obituary recalled. As he walked out of the embassy, “security agents were awaiting him, and he was promptly sent back to prison.” He spent the next 12 years in Hoa Lo, the notorious Hanoi Hilton. While he was in captivity, “Flowers from Hell” was published; it earned the International Poetry Award in 1985. By the time he emigrated to the United States in 1995, his poems had achieved wide renown. His stanzas “became as familiar as songs,” wrote Anh Do in The Los Angeles Times, and “continue to move the Vietnamese immigrant generation — and their sons and daughters.”
By coincidence, the same newspaper page that carried Nguyen’s obituary also ran a much longer story about Eric Hobsbawm, the famous British historian who
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Nguyen Chi Thien was a dissident poet imprisoned in 1961 at age twenty-two by the Communist regime in North Vietnam. 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 - edited, revised and stored entirely in his head. Released following the fall of Saigon, Thien delivered a manuscript of these poems to the British Embassy in Hanoi.
He was arrested at the embassy 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 Ðia-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. At the same time, his manuscript was making its way around the world, passed from hand to hand in Britain and the United States.
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