"The road to battle this season is very beautiful!"
When mentioning the name of poet Pham Tien Duat (1941 -2007), many poetry lovers in our country remember his collection of poems that won first prize in the poetry contest of Van Nghe Newspaper (1969 -1970), including the poem "Truong Son Dong - Truong Son Tay". The poem resonated even more because it was set to music by musician Hoang Hiep...
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Later, writer Do Chu in his essay Tham tham bong nguoi (2008), the part about Pham Tien Duat, remembered and recorded the following excited and touching atmosphere: "One day, comrade Pham Van Dong came to talk to the collective of teachers and students of Hanoi Pedagogical University, when about to leave, he asked, who here volunteered to go to war? Thousands of arms of boys and girls immediately raised up, the roof of the large hall shook with the shouts of Let's go! Let's go! The gray-haired Prime Minister looked down from the podium at the bustling crowd, his mouth smiling but his eyes were filled with tears. Then he clenched his hands and raised them high...".
Of course, among the thousands of boys’ hands raised that day, there was the young student Pham Tien Duat. He, along with hundreds of other brothers, became soldiers in the meaningful first departure of the capital’s students. They were fourth-year students of the Faculty of Literature, who had just returned from teaching experiments!
Blending his fate with the fate of the people and the country in a new environment, the army, and then entering Truong Son, full of sacrifice, hardship but also very heroic, poet Pham Tien Duat created many passionate, mischievous, youthful, and deeply sentimental poems of soldiers, including the poem "Truong Son Dong - Truong Son Tay". The poem consists of 7 stanzas, 28 lines, written around 1969, 1970 - the 3rd line of the first stanza: "The road to the battle this season is very beautiful" spoke for many young people eagerly going to the battle in those years...
After the day our country achieved peace (1975), there was a time when a person who also wrote during the anti-American war criticized the verse "The road to the battlefield this season is very beautiful", and thought that it should be "the other way around"?! Indeed, that person viewed our war in a one-sided, tragic way. They did not understand that poet Pham Tien Duat had spent 14 years in the army, including 8 years with the 559th Truong Son Army Group - a very accurate reflection of the reality of our country, and of himself as well, at a historical moment!
Kim Hung
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