Huu Viet
PROMETEO
Revista Latinoamericana de Poesía
Número 81-82. Julio de 2008.
A SHORT ANTHOLOGY
OF VIETNAMESE POETRY
Huu Viet
1962
A Candle Poem
Is it true that candles tend to cry in the night?
Missing the nameless evenings
Ha Noi’s New-Year’s-Eve streets
The old year is dawdling
but New Year is always in haste
Gardens rushing cherry blossoms
forever calling the spring
All are done so it seems
Candles have fallen asleep
Dreams have ceased to come back knocking on the door
In solitary flowers uselessly bloom red
Suppose again you’re indifferent
For me the spring is there but not there too.
Translated by Y Nhi.
Hữu Việt (born 1963), holds the B.Sc of Economics of the University of Kharcov (the Former Soviet Union). He is a Fellow of the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa USA, which he attended from August 2001 to November 2001). His main field of literature creative activity is poetry. He has received a number of poetry prizes from various newspapers and magazines in Vietnam. In 2007, he received the Annual Award of Vietnam Writers Association for his book, Tieng Hat Trai Tim a translation from English into Vietnamese of Heartsongs by Mattie Stepanek, a young American poet. He currently works as a journalist, and is editor of Tien Phong newspaper in Hanoi.