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Friday, 6 March 2015

Vietnamese literature abroad

http://tuoitrenews.vn/lifestyle/26460/bringing-vietnamese-literature-to-the-world-a-long-way-to-go
http://english.vietnamnet.vn/fms/art-entertainment/124672/int-l-experience-in-promoting-vietnamese-literature.html
http://news.asiaone.com/news/asia/vietnamese-literature-needs-global-exposure







[Funnily enough, the Lưu Quang Vũ poem in the 1st link is a revolutionary poem, a proper poem according to the communist party's standards. If you don't have a clue what I mean by that, Nabokov's essay "Russian Writers, Censors and Readers" may help. Pretty much the same. 
I hope, when talking about exporting Vietnamese literature, they're thinking of something broader than those red poets and writers of the North like Tố Hữu, Phạm Tiến Duật, Chính Hữu, Hoàng Trung Thông, Chế Lan Viên, Phạm Tuyên, Viễn Phương, Nguyễn Đình Thi, Thép Mới, Anh Đức, Nguyễn Thi, etc. Nobody reads that kind of thing now in Vietnam, except at schools.
It's ironic- heaps of books, by Southern authors as well as by foreign ones, were destroyed after 1975, then decades later they're republished and still enjoyed, whereas all the books and poems created for propaganda and indoctrination and honoured by the communist party are now all dead, as they have little value and no longer have any relevance, and hardly anybody cares about them now.
Well, on 2nd thought, there is no irony about that...] 

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