Echoes from the South: The Voice of a Life Lover

Teacher, researcher, and literary and art critic, Professor Huynh Nhu Phuong, has just released a collection of critical essays that he said is "probably his last work" called Echoes from the South (Da Nang Publishing House).

The book is quite full with nearly 270 pages, including 2 parts : The Residence of Love and In You There Is Me, a collection of 36 articles that have been published in newspapers, magazines, book introductions... about literary works, writers, poets at home and abroad, both "old" and "new".

Echoes from the South “retell” literary stories with the depth of both a reader and a critic. As in the article chosen as the title of the book, the author shares his feelings with the short story collection of Tran Truong Khanh, a Taiwanese writer, with sympathy for the situation of “compatriots in the same country having to divide themselves on two sides of the battle line”.

Leaving his hometown of Quang Ngai to live and study in Saigon in the 1960s, Huynh Nhu Phuong had a full experience of war, the desire for peace, and unification, and had many compositions while still in school published in leftist publications.

So the author's response to this collection of stories is also a profound sharing: "Tran Truong Khanh's works show that literature in a locality can reach beyond the walls to find sympathy from readers through communion with humanism... For me, this collection of stories not only opens the door to awareness of a country with many ups and downs like my homeland, but also brings aesthetic experience about the appeal of the art of language...".

Professor Huynh Nhu Phuong introduces the collection of critical essays Echoes from the South

The book opens with the poem Poetry - the abode of love, introducing the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973). Without being too heavy on biography, Neruda in the work has emerged the portrait of an anti-fascist revolutionary, strongly promoting the communist movement that not only had influence in the country but also spread to many countries around the world. Thanks to this book, readers also know that Neruda had close connections with Vietnam, not only traveling to Indochina and Vietnam by bus since 1928 but also continuously encouraging the resistance war against the US to save the country of our people, especially through the poetry collection The Urge to Destroy Nixon and the Song of Praise for the Chilean Revolution...

Among the “old” writers, Xuan Tam (1916-2012), a poet of the New Poetry movement and present in Vietnamese Poets since 1940, was “renewed” by Huynh Nhu Phuong with new stories and new poetic ideas, so that readers not only reminisce about the famous poem Summer Vacation…

Or a new assessment of Nguyen Vy (1912-1971), Huynh Nhu Phuong noted and also reminded many other writers: "His fate is the fate of an intellectual who acts, struggles with life, brings his knowledge and intelligence to serve society, to serve culture".

As for Ngo Kha (1935-1973), a famous revolutionary poet of Hue, the author noted: “Ngo Kha, like the young people who wrote protest poetry in the South during the war, shouldered a very dangerous mission in an extreme situation of history, when poetry not only led to action but was also action itself”. We would like to emphasize the italicized paragraph above as a sharing about the role and mission of writers in general, and poets in particular, in life, to constantly create works of action for society.

Echoes from the South also has many interesting suggestions for readers about writer Vo Hong (1923-2013), who is considered to "understand and grasp the changes of life"; about poet and translator Diem Chau (1937-2006), who is associated with leftist magazines before 1975 such as Dat Nuoc, Trinh Bay, Doi Dien, Dong Dao, Dung Day, Lam Dan; about Tuong Linh (1930-2021), a neoclassical poet, who, although going "towards the setting sun", still "left his life's poetry towards the dawn"; about the "contemporary" writer and journalist Tu Nguyen Thach, who, despite his retirement, has continued to write, and whose work "The Village Teacher" (under the pen name Quang An) won the highest prize in the 2nd "Beloved Teacher" contest (2023) with Huynh Nhu Phuong as a judge without even knowing that it was one of his characters...

Throughout the book Echoes from the South are truly the heartfelt voices of a teacher, a writer, a researcher who looks at life every day, every hour, with a detailed, specific, and very human, very humane, simple yet profound gaze, of a person who truly loves life.

NGUYEN MINH HAI

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