Disabled poet Hoang Cat: Poems that live forever
One day I sat in a cafe with poet Hoang Cat on Cua Lo beach, he said: “Poetry must be written with the heart and soul, with unending pain. That heart and soul pain is aroused by emotions, emotions reaching their peak can be used to write verses, poems”...
One day I sat in a cafe with poet Hoang Cat on Cua Lo beach, he said:“Poetry must be written with the heart and soul, with unending pain. That heart and soul pain is aroused by emotions, emotions reaching their peak can be used to write verses and poems.”...
Along with the famous poem “Three incense sticks”, the poem “My heart is a grave” printed in the first poetry collection “Long Lasting January” (Culture Publishing House, 1991) is enough to show us a portrait, a brand of the disabled poet Hoang Cat.
The poem has a strange structure, the title of the poem is also strange. The strange thing is that the poet suddenly takes the red heart in his chest to make a grave to “bury” his fellow soldiers who fell on the battlefield. A sacred feeling arises from a repressed poetic thought, a poetic soul that cannot help but be more painful.
Strangeness is an element that is very difficult to find in poetry if the poet is incompetent. That strangeness is a wonderful quality of poetry. That quality makes the name of the poet Hoang Cat. One would think that this quality is far away but it is not, it is right in the 23 verses of the poem. Just read it once or listen to it once and you will understand it thoroughly, without needing any explanation:
My heart is a grave
I buried my mother who was killed by a bomb.
I buried my brother, but his body was not found.
On the southern battlefield.
My heart is a grave
I buried Tien, a native of Tinh Gia, Thanh Hoa.
Go on a business trip and never come back.
All month I searched and found rubber sandals.
My heart is a grave
I buried and cherished my beloved brother.
(Linh in Yen Thanh, Nghe Tinh)
I lost my leg, Linh carried me on a stretcher
The enemy fired a barrage, killing everyone.
The plane landed troops and cut Linh into two pieces.
I have buried so many friends
In my heart, in my youth
Revelation, Secret, Request, Reserve, Entangle, Peace
Can't remember everyone
Because life still has to be lived
I keep the graves warm
Between my chest.
The other day, sitting at a cafe with poet Hoang Cat on Cua Lo beach, I heard him read this poem with tears in his eyes. He said, “I love Linh from Yen Thanh very much. I owe Linh a lot. Linh died in my place. But Linh died a very sinful death. Only I know”. It was an extremely tragic scene appearing in the midst of the dark forest of bombs and bullets during wartime”…
Poet Hoang Cat recounted the origin of this story starting from when he left the house at 24 Cot Co in Hanoi of his sworn brother, poet Xuan Dieu, to join the army in 1966. On the second day of Tet in 1969, he was the team leader on a special assignment, learning how to make flying mines at the engineering workshop in Quang Da. After finishing his studies, he fired a few test bombs, and it was good, but when he was about to leave, a B52 bomb hit the engineering workshop. The pressure of the bomb crushed his left leg. In pain, he pulled out his belt, put on a tourniquet and used cotton to bandage himself before the ambulance came to take him away from the dense bomb site to the Quang Da infirmary. Three months after the surgery, his left leg was amputated. The ambulance continued to take him out. One day, at 5 p.m., two fellow soldiers were carrying him on a stretcher. A soldier named Linh carried him from behind. In front was a fellow soldier from the Ta Oi ethnic group. Suddenly, an American helicopter dropped soldiers to sweep the forest. A group of enemy soldiers dropped down and hit the stretcher carrying him. At that moment, the enemy shot Linh dead on the stretcher. His fellow Ta Oi soldier suddenly disappeared. By a natural reflex, he closed his eyes, curled up like a pangolin, and dove into the forest, waiting to die on the bank of a stream.
Up to this point, Hoang Cat said: "But God has not let me die yet". Because, late that night, he suddenly heard the sound of "dog barking": Scratch! Scratch! He knew this was the code to find
of the liberation army. Therefore, he cautiously "peeled the dog" back: Peep! Peep! Just a moment later, the Ta Oi soldier who had disappeared in the afternoon crawled over and turned around to carry him away in the dense forest night.
Regarding Linh’s death, “the enemy fired machine guns, Linh was crushed/Airplanes landed and chopped Linh into two pieces,” there are some other details that the writer of this article could not bear to write. Perhaps, it was this pain that made poet Hoang Cat build a poem right in the middle of his heart, which was bleeding red, to make a grave to “bury” Linh and many other soldier friends who had heroically fallen in the middle of the battlefield.
In the 12 poetry collections that make up the "grand" anthology of poems called "Human Realm" by Hoang Cat, consisting of 1,000 pages (Hoi Nha Van Publishing House, August 2023), we see that the poet does not hesitate to call himself a poet with many self-deprecating emotions. He said: "Poetry must be written with the heart and soul, with endless pain. That heart and soul pain is evoked by emotions, emotions reaching their peak can be used to write verses and poems."
Perhaps, it was this very concept that after the “Ong Lanh apple tree incident” - a literary accident - helped Hoang Cat write memorable poems about 17 different salty and bland jobs, including selling tea and selling chrysanthemums to make a living on the sidewalks and flea markets in Hanoi. And strangely, there was a Hoang Cat who always looked at life with clear blue eyes. Throughout 1,000 poems, only a soul as clear as a grain of sand could be seen:
I want to scream, I want to scream out loud
Dear life - so beautiful
Is that so - we say goodbye forever
So everywhere you look, it's beautiful.
(Romantic)
So clear that he had to hide and deceive the beggar because when he heard the beggar outside, he went into the house to find something to give, but when he searched the bin, there was no rice, when he searched the drawer, there was not a penny, when he opened the rice cooker, the pot was empty of cold rice, only the buzzing sound of mosquitoes. So:
"Reluctantly not speaking up
Go to the kitchen and sit still.
Pretend the house is empty.
Hide, cheat the beggar".
(Hide, cheat the beggar)
In the last years of his life, poet Hoang Cat occasionally returned from Hanoi to visit his hometown in Phuc Chi village, Hung Tien commune, district.Nam Dan. This is the place he left at the age of 18 to go to Hanoi to study at Hanoi Technical College 1 and then worked as a technical officer at Tran Hung Dao Mechanical Factory in Hanoi. This is where the poem "400" - his first poem was published in Lao Dong Newspaper in 1960: "A building with 400 windows/A proud chest as a wall to catch the wind/A friend with the clouds, chatting with the moon and stars"... The poem that Hoang Cat happily showed to Xuan Dieu, but Xuan Dieu read it and then remained silent. Huy Can (at that time, Deputy Minister of Culture) happily praised "the poem is quite good, with many good images; he hasn't praised it yet because he's jealous of you".
Poet Hoang Cat was born in 1942 in Hung Tien commune, Nam Dan district, Nghe An province. He joined the army in 1965 and fought in the Tri
Thien - Hue - Quang Nam until 1969; injured and lost a leg. Poet Hoang Cat passed away on the afternoon of July 1, 2024 in Hanoi.
