Four-faced Bayon Tower

This volume fills a gap, its significance goes beyond its literary historical value: it simultaneously documents the difficult decades of the Vietnam wars and presents at close quarters those bending, testing times for people and peoples, which defined not only the spirit of the Vietnamese people centuries ago, but also the entire humanity in the 20th century. they are also eternal witnesses of its 19th century history. This anthology, on the other hand, sheds light on the war from a completely unusual angle, viz. from the perspective of the poet-soldier. Like most Vietnamese soldiers who were conscripted as young men or volunteered to go to the front, the poets in the volume spent a significant part of their lives here, became men here, learned love, the lifelong longing for love, home and peace. after; in the trenches, in the forests, and in the bunkers, they tried to live a normal life, to love, to calm down, to settle down ad absurdum permanently in the madness - often for years or decades, despite the daily death and losses. We see the simple man up close, who grows up quickly, becomes a soldier and a poet at the same time, who not only tries to stay alive, but also not to go crazy and preserve the most important thing: the integrity of his soul, his belief in beauty and the future peace. We see the grieving soldier-poet, the angry, the humane, the uncertain, the dreamer, the lover, the singer, and we realize that the people they fight with are exactly the same people. And when we tune in to the poems, we are no longer in Vietnam, but we see the people of Corvin before our mind's eye and the Soviet soldiers, the hot-headed Petőfi, the defenders of the Eger castle, Frederico Garcia Lorca, the vulnerable masses of the Normandy landings, the many noble goals and the many senseless deaths in an eternal cycle. The poems are dominated by the timeless and simple themes of life, and although their language is from the last century and their themes are conceived in an ideology that we can already know behind us, the immediacy, life-affirmation and basic morality of the poems quickly make us forget these surface concerns and lead us for a deeper experience and compassion. Since each of the six authors in the volume was born between the two world wars and lived to a long age, we can also gain insight into the authors' old, often self-reflexive confessions, such as in one of the volume's emblematic poems, Ki? in E!, in which the old poet is tormented by serious concerns and remorse, seeing the difficult fate of the orphans whose fathers so many times thoughtlessly rushed to their deaths by reciting the poet's propaganda poems and being encouraged by them. Such an anthology is an important imprint of an age and the last century, its power lies not in poetic virtuosity, but in the way human destinies come so close to us that we can no longer withdraw from their influence, so much so that, almost through the eyes of Robert Capa and Alajos Chrudinák we see it, color by color. Of the six authors in the volume, only one of them is still alive, the current president of the Vietnam Writers' Association, who is still active and tirelessly building his country's literary relations with the world, and at the same time looks at contemporary world literature, especially Hungarian, with youthful curiosity. According to our intentions, in a future anthology we would like to provide an insight into young, contemporary Vietnamese poetry and show what an interesting world the children and grandchildren of military-poets who became out of necessity can create, not forgetting the inherited tradition, but breaking out for themselves with new vigor and youthful impudence. roads.