Debate sistema de control previo o control reparador de la constitucionalidad

From the early 1930s, Xuân Di u, L u Tr ng L , Hàn M c T and many othersệ ư ọ ư ặ ử

used the idea of ‘correspondences’ between sound, colour and smell as a discovery of a new poetic land to talk about. Vietnamese poetry used to be ‘based on folk verse meters and on Chinese patterns’.256 _{However, in my view, it was not only a} dependence on poetry form but also a dependence on traditional ideology in poetry. For example, before ‘New Poetry Movement’, if a Vietnamese poet aimed to express nostalgia, he would use afternoon sky, cooking smoke and a country river as metaphors. Thus, things were written in poetry as equations or specific models. More importantly, what they wrote was supposed to be real. Therefore, it could be any river which represented nostalgia, however, it must be a real river that anyone could imagine and seem to know about. Thus, Vietnamese critics and readers were surprised and at first, found the images in Han’s poems unacceptable, such as ‘moon river’, ‘blood moon pond’ or ‘cloud drowning in a quiet river/ its body running into a boundless far away’.257 _{These images fraudulently changed common} understanding about objects, and they also failed to evoke any concrete portrait of the poet as a subject. They even made readers question what they could think of and how they might actually feel after reading such verses. To the surprise of the Vietnamese, dreams were first mentioned in Vietnamese poetry as poetic subjects, in which poets were struggling in their loneliness, in their traumas. The first time in Vietnamese poetry that a poet had dared to write about his own trauma was in a poetry collection named Hurt, which used to be called by the alternative name Crazy Poetry, by Han. However, for more than fifty years after 1930, Vietnamese critics tried to analyse this collection from a biographical view point. Accordingly, they pointed out that Han was a poet with leprosy. Thus, all ‘crazy images’ in his

255 _{David G. Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press,}

1981), p. 166.

256 _{Huynh Sanh Thong, An Anthology of Vietnamese poetry, p. 22.}

poems were reactions to the hurt, in an abnormal spiritual mind in a banished leprosarium nearby a forgotten beach. In that way, critics somehow admitted that Hàn M c T , a Vietnamese intellectual, was close to Baudelaire and Poe, while onặ ử

the other hand, his presentation of Symbolist poetry could not have been conscious but was passive due to his personal circumstances. That was why ‘hurt’ must refer to an actual ‘body pain’ and ‘crazy’ must be related to mental illness, rather than a manner of poetic expression. Thus, I think that Vietnamese critics tended to read new Symbolist poems in Vietnam as they were in reality, not as works of art. This attitude, I suppose, both prevented and unconsciously encouraged the new generation of Vietnamese poets to pursue Symbolism.

The above example case of Han helped me to explore Vietnamese ‘New Poetry’ from 1930 to 1945 with the perspective of a reader in 2017, not the historical point of view of critics in Vietnam, whose resistance to poetic debate made them consider each new poet a mental patient.

Among the new Vietnamese poets who appeared in the 1930s, Hoài Thanh regarded Xuân Di u as ‘the newest’.ệ 258 _{I regarded Xuân Di u as ‘the first’ poet ofệ} modernisation in Vietnamese poetry. After 1940 - ten years after he was first introduced in Vietnamese Poets, he was no longer new, and Hàn M c T and Chặ ử ế

Lan Viên with their move to Surrealism might have ‘usurped’ Xuan Dieu’s ‘throne’ in Vietnamese ‘New Poetry’. However, his pioneering achievements were undeniable. In my view, Xuan Dieu followed the idea of Baudelaire in confirming the supreme power of being a poet. Baudelaire wrote a statement for a new poet coming into existence:

When, by an edict of the powers supreme, The Poet in this bored world comes to be, (…)

Free as a bird, he plays with clouds and wind, Sings of the Passion with enraptured joy;259

In considering this declaration, Nicolae Babuts felt that ‘The dynamics of Baudelaire’s struggle to reach his identity as a human being is intimately

258 _{Hoai Thanh, Hoai Chan, p. 104.}

connected to the urgency of defining his mission as a poet’.260 _{Placing this analysis} in the context of the Vietnamese ‘New Poetry Movement’ in 1930, I recognised the connections between being a human and being a poet. Moreover, as Baudelaire wrote, a poet should be in ‘ecstasy’ with the joyfulness of being free in nature. I found that under the domination of the French in Vietnam, the only way people could write independently was about something that was far away from reality, however, by becoming a poet with unlimited ability within his own ‘fancy’ world, he could maintain his existence as a human being without being pressed by social disciplines. It also helped to understand the different places and positions that Vietnamese poets chose in order to avoid his freedom being censored (e.g. being drunk like Vũ Hoàng Chương and Nguy n Vỹ, or mad like Hàn M c T , Ch Lanễ ặ ử ế

Viên and Bích Khuê). In reaction to Baudelaire’s ‘Benediction’, Xuan Dieu wrote ‘C m xúc’ (Emotion):ả

Làm thi sĩ, nghĩa là ru v i gió, ớ

M theo trăng, và v v n cùng mây. ơ ơ ẩ

Đ linh h n ràng bu c b i muôn dây, ể ồ ộ ở

Hay chia s b i trăm tình yêu m n.ẻ ở ế

(Being a poet means singing lullaby with wind

Dreaming towards the moon and wondering with clouds Letting soul gathering with many strings

Or sharing by hundreds of love)261

If in the above first two lines, Xuân Di u interprets Baudelaire’s ideas of a poet’sệ

free life, in the remaining verses, he uses his own words in expressing correspondences between his poetic soul, the sensitive strings of the outside world and the love that he has achieved. Such strings, which cannot be counted, seen, heard or touched, become the desire running throughout Di u’s poetry career.ệ

With the enthusiasm of trying to understand the strings of life, he ‘throws’ himself into nature, but because these correspondences are so fragile that they might be torn away or disappear, he uses the sensitivity of a poet to keep them alive. This could explain a dilemma in Di u’s poetry: longing for spring, youth and love but atệ

the same time, refusing their coming to ensure that time can never pass and youth, love and spring can never be old.

260 _{Nicolae Babuts, ‘Baudelaire and the Identity of the Self’, Mosaic: a Journal for the}

Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 47(3) 2014, 159-173, p. 159.

Xuân Di u could be considered as a very typical Vietnamese Symbolist poet. Hisệ

first collection, Th th (Poetry poetry)ơ ơ (1938), was at the peak of the ‘New Poetry Movement’ and his second, Send Perfume to the Wind, published in 1945, closed a profound gate of Vietnamese poetry opened by Symbolism. Deriving from the influences of Symbolism’s marshals (e.g. Paul Verlaine, Stephane Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud), he followed Baudelaire in the concept of correspondences between perfumes, sounds and colours. I suppose him to be the first Vietnamese poet whose poetry had a consciousness of natural landscape alongside the traditional Eastern poetic ideology of the time. Moreover, his work had a clear aspect of being in sympathy with nature. He placed the poetic protagonist into a realm of ecstasy, which was very similar to real nature but was full of love and emotional connections that he named ‘strings’. He wrote ‘Long lanh ti ng s i vangế ỏ

vang h n’ (Glittering gravel voice echo echo anger) in ‘Nguy t c m’ (Moonậ ệ ầ

zither),262 _{in which he combined the ‘music in poetry’ of the East with Western} modern concepts. In this verse, he listened to the sound of a pebble falling into a water surface and making an echo. However, I think that he described sounds (gravel voice) throughout colours and sights (glittering) and listened to the echo with a contrasting emotions of quietness and anger. Thus, each symbol evoked other symbols without any connection. In my view, ‘Moon zither’ portrayed an imaginative realm in which Di u, through the concept of ecstasy, made all humanệ

senses correspond in only one verse.

In traditional Vietnamese poetry, instant understanding of words created the meaning of verse. The rhythm of a poem was formed by being chosen and arranged into available poetic lyrics.263 _{Therefore, meaning and music were always separate.} Moreover, because words were used with a conventional understanding, the content of the poem became trivial because the sound of words were mixed into available lyrics so the music seemed to be empty. In contrast, in the ‘New Poetry Movement’, the fluctuation between sound and meaning became an important principle of creating. By reading the verse in Vietnamese, the sound chains made by words helped to express something in the poet's own soul. After that, both music and words in Xuan Dieu’s poems were part of the subtle rhythm of the

262 _{Hoài Thanh, Hoài Chân, p. 119.}

poetry rather than a feature of poetic form. Helen Abbott pointed out the following with regard to music in Baudelaire’s poetry:

Music, after all, has voices which interact and converse in strange and mysterious ways – and this is inherent to the aesthetic ideal for poetic composition that Baudelaire and Mallarmé seem to yearn for. 264

In my view, Baudelaire and other Symbolists consciously operated this kind of musical approach to create the poetic environment. With regard to the aspect of feelings, it should be pointed out that Romanticism displayed sympathy with the universe and nature mainly through direct perception and specific descriptions of emotion. Xuan Dieu’s work belonged to this type of expression and he combined it with Symbolism to create correspondence through non-specific symbols. Bathed in a particular environment and mood, words contained new connotations and evoked surprise meanings. In my view, music or melody itself in ‘New Poetry’ contrasted with the vast mediocrity and emptiness of traditional poetry. ‘New Poetry’ could not attain the correspondences of Baudelaire, but it could use symbols for synaesthesia, as Baudelaire focused poets on paying attention to mysterious relationships which created a deep and murky unity of the universe and went beyond superficial senses.

Responses of Vietnamese critics and readers to the poems of Xuân Di u, in myệ

view, reflected the Vietnamese history of modern poetry. After the debate surrounding Poetry Poetry’s response to medieval Vietnamese poetry in 1938, Xuân Di u became ‘the king of love poems’ in Vietnam. His poems were consideredệ

as a dictionary of love, where readers could discover themselves or a part of their young life inside. For the first time in Vietnam, love was mentioned in poetry without any restrictions and readers were allowed to talk about love poems without fear of their personality being re-evaluated or even being charged. However, this ‘love period’ lasted for little more than a decade. After 1945, love poems and Di u’s Symbolist and Romantic poems were banned in Vietnam. Thus,ệ

Vietnamese poets came back to traditional poetry forms, and love was again marginalised in both poetry and real life.

264 _{Helen Abbott, Between Baudelaire and Mallarmé: Voice, Conversation and Music (London and}

In the case of Ch Lan Viên, the influences of Baudelaire could be recognised inế

poetry titles in which he chose to make evil poetic. In the preface of his first collection, he wrote:

Thi sĩ không ph i là Ngả ười. Nó là Người M , Ngơ ười Say, Người Điên. Nó là Tiên, là Ma, là Qu , là Tinh, là Yêu. Nó thoát Hi n T i. Nó x i tr n Dĩ Vãng. Nóỷ ệ ạ ố ộ

ôm trùm Tương Lai. Người ta không hi u để ược nó vì nó nói nh ng cái vôữ

nghĩa, tuy r ng nh ng cái vô nghĩa h p lý.ằ ữ ợ

(Poet is not human. He is dreamer, drunker, madman. He is fairy, ghost, evil and demon. He escaped from present. He disordered the past. He covered the future. They can not understand him because he wrote nonsense, although it is reasonable nonsense).265

Ch Lan Viên saw the ‘New Poetry Movement’ as a new era for Vietnameseế

poets; he stated that: ‘It [Vietnamese poetry] renewed itself and gave new content and significance to life, to death, to the face of a loved one or a rose’.266 _{He, as well} as the ‘Crazy poet group’ that he organised, regarded poetry as a realm of mystery without any marks of reality, in which, there were only four poetic elements: moon, flower, music and perfume. In the above analysis of Xuân Di u’s verse inệ

Moon zither, there was a glimpse of ‘the other world’, which was quiet enough to listen to the sound of a pebble, dark enough to see glittering and cold enough to feel inner anger. In Ch Lan Viên’s poems, however, ‘the other world’ was reversedế

to become a realm immersed in terror and death.

Ch Lan Viên raised the level of the senses higher with horrible images (e.g.ế

grave, tomb, the human skull, the dried-up bone):

A skull, a human creature owned you once! Beneath all that thin crust of bone on top, What do you still remember in the dark? What hopes or wishes do you entertain?

‘The human skull.’267

In my view, the correspondences in Ch Lan Viên’s poetry were the next step upế

from those in Xuân Di u’s poems. Whereas Di u’s sensory images were stillệ ệ

265 _{Hoài Thanh, Hoài Chân, p. 13.}

266 _{Neil L. Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 277.} 267 _{Huynh, p. 341.}

familiar and human in terms of sound (from a human voice), colour (from reflection of a human image) and perfume (from memories about women, e.g. wife or virgin), Ch Lan Viên kept his senses away from humanity. I think that Xuânế

Di u was close to Baudelaire in the concept of correspondences, but Ch Lan Viênệ ế

was the Vietnamese poet who could touch the mysteriousness in Baudelaire’s ideologies. Ch Lan Viên not only wrote about the face of death but also the soundế

of death, the shape of death and the fragrance of death. He, in my imagination, definitely belonged to the world of the Symbolists.

To analyse Ch Lan Viên’s attitude, which used to be thought of as craziness, Iế

read his ‘Manifesto-poem’:

Give me a planet full of frost and ice,

A star that shines alone where ends the blue. There, living out my days and months, I’ll hide From all the pain and anguish I have known

‘Silk threads of memory.’ 268

While on the one hand, he wishes to hide in a solid and chilly place, on the other, he praises the position of loneliness, of being himself. Thus, among the blue sky, the shining star, the frosty planet and the hurt of sadness, he emerges as human. The pronoun ‘I’ rarely appeared in Vietnamese poetry before the 1930s, but now was being repeated continuously in Che’s and Xuan Dieu’s poems. The ‘Silk threads’ in Che’s poem are also similar to the ‘strings’ in Xuan Dieu’s; both are used as slight, sensitive links to connect themselves to the world. Thus, in my view, despite the fact that they could write about love or anger, life or death, angel or devil, they looked towards the ‘self’, which set up a foundation for modern Vietnamese poets to rebel against a thousand years of poetic conventions.

Another ‘crazy’ Vietnamese poet in the ‘New Poetry Movement’ was Bích Khê. Readers had enjoyed the notion of the ‘dream’ from other poems, too, but if Di u’sệ

poems were a dictionary of Vietnamese love, Bích Khê’s poetry was a phrasebook of the ‘dream’. In terms of the subject feature, he was fairy, human and genius dream. For the object feature, he dreamed a visual, homesick dream. Even more

interesting was the way he combined different features that did not belong to dream. For example:

Dream? Genius?

In the mixture of nude.269

In the 1960s, Tr n D n for the first time dared to write about nudity, sexualầ ầ

organs and sexuality in terms of what was actually known about them but could not be spoken about. Nearly thirty years before that, Bích Khê had first placed the word ‘nude’ in Vietnamese poetry.

Bích Khê’s dreams presented various conditions of imagination. As such, among the more than seventy times Bích Khê mentioned dreams, at no time could a dream be just a dream. This evoked Baudelaire’s idea of correspondence, whereby the poet could sink into a world of mixed ideas. In Bích Khê’s poems, he sank into a mixture of nudity-dream in which he himself could feel shape, see colour, taste and smell, but it was impossible to consider it as normal dream. In my view, it was a way of importing senses to the subject. Thus, feelings, memories, vague symbols, subconscious images and illusions were the products of dream.

While Xuân Di u and Ch Lan Viên were drunks in mysteriousness, Bích Khêệ ế

was consciousness in dreams. This paradox turned Bích Khê, in my view, into a dream-inventor with unlimited dream-combinations e.g. ‘wavy silk space night’, ‘drunk chasing dream muse’ and ‘lines of pearls’. In his abnormal sense of the