Poet Chinh Huu next to Uncle Ho's bamboo gate

Visiting Uncle Ho's house in Kim Lien to understand more about Uncle Ho, understanding Uncle Ho is also to understand yourself again. This idea is not new anymore, considering the thousands of poems inspired by each time the authors stopped and admired a simple, peaceful countryside of Nghe An. What is new is perhaps the concentration of emotions, the choice of details, life images and the way of forming ideas, the language of expression of each person...

In the opening paragraph of the poem "Nghe An bamboo gate in Uncle Ho's house" written in 1984, poet Chinh Huu (1928-2007) leads us into a friendly, simple story, with very simple and warm associations of his life:

I walked along the fence of bright red hibiscus flowers

Meet the very familiar bamboo gate of Nghe An

Suddenly like meeting old childhood

Warm afternoons far away

Tet holiday, drizzle, go back to my maternal home

And hear the sound of fish splashing under the bridge.

Chinh Huu continued to push his feelings to a climax, but no longer in the direction of listing old memories:

I feel like I met my own soul again.

There is nothing at Uncle Ho's house.

just the normal things i see

In my hometown, since I was born

And left by my grandparents.

Four verses of different lengths, with line breaks, but still connected together, relying on each other, exude a state of natural astonishment: Are these all the things in the house of a world-class leader? Those things have long since become "my own soul", but I still doubt it. Expressing the same state of mind, poet Che Lan Vien has a pretty good verse:

"You are great but you surprise no one."

With an average writing skill, ending a poem there is acceptable. In this poem, Chinh Huu does not do that:

Throughout the days of wandering far away

Perhaps the simple, rustic bamboo gate

Of Nghe An hometown

Is a poem that still haunts me

poet Uncle Ho's heart

The word "perhaps" in this stanza is just a way of speaking, the poet's guess is completely well-founded. From the simple bamboo gate of his hometown, Chinh Huu reaches "the heart of poet Uncle Ho" in the years when he was wandering the world, that is a surprising and profound idea. I think, only Chinh Huu of "The lamp standing guard", "Letter from home", "Paragraph", "Price of every inch of land"... can find and express it in such a unique way!

The poem has two last lines to become too complete:

There is nothing in Uncle Ho's house - no red tower, no purple attic.

You are just the Country!

Smart readers can guess this ending, so in my opinion, the two verses just mentioned are not necessary to write, especially for Chinh Huu, a poet who is always highly conscious of saving words.

In an article about Chinh Huu's poetry, literary researcher Mai Quoc Lien evaluated the poem "The bamboo gate of Nghe An in Uncle Ho's house" as a worthy poem, cutting into people's hearts and having many verses that will remain... And poet Huy Can, in 1997, wrote a few really good verses that really fit the "literary portrait" of poet Chinh Huu:

The voice of the heart in the dew drops,

The battlefield flower branches reflect the heart.

Let the poetry in your heart,

Moon or gun, still the image of the poet.

Chinh Huu - Ho Chi Minh Prize for Literature and Arts in 2000 - born in 1926, his mother's hometown is Nghe An and his father's hometown is Can Loc district, Ha Tinh province. Is it because of the strong Central Vietnamese temperament that in his memoirs, he describes himself as a quiet person, who likes to live with his own inner thoughts, is shy, and sometimes talks to himself endlessly?

At the age of 72, poetry lover Chinh Huu is delighted to have the opportunity to read his Poetry Collection. A lifetime of holding a gun and then holding a pen, working as a cultural and artistic manager in the Army, struggling through two fierce wars against the French and the Americans to save the country, now he has the opportunity to review his entire poetry career, with only 54 poems, along with 5 translated poems by two French poets, Victor Hugo and G.Apolline. That is enough to know how strict he is with his spiritual children and himself! And, the poem "The bamboo gate of Nghe An in Uncle Ho's house" is the only work in the Chinh Huu Collection, written about Ho Chi Minh!

Kim Hung