INTRODUCTION of the ' WHO PROMISE ONE ANOTHER ' by DON LUCE ....

   
          INTRODUCTION OF THE ' WE PROMISE ONE ANOTHER '
          by DON LUCE , JOHN C. SCHAFER & JACQUELYN CHAGNON..

 Lời dẫn:
         Khi  Don Luce  , John C. Schafer và Jacquelyn Chagnon  ... soạn tuyển thơ, lời nhạc , sketches in trong ' We promise one another ' ,  trên đầu trang ' dành tặng' AI ĐÃ LÀM ĐƯỢC  MỘT VIỆC KHÔNG THỂ MÀ  SAU CÙNG VẪN  THÀNH CÔNG, nói khác đi , đó là  chuyện   '' VÁ TRỜI   LẤP  BIỂN' .   ( From  Vietnamese mythology comes  an aspiring proverb about struggling towards the impossible and finally succeeding.   We dedicate these poems to those who promise "  TO MEND THE SKY AND FILL THE OCEAN" /  VÁ TRỜI LẤP BIỂN ".)
         Don Luce là một trong  những  ' tên đầu sỏ  phản đối Mỹ xua quân vảo  Nam Việt Nam từ
 1965 ' -  có mặt ở Saigon  từ 1963, như  một viên chức Mỹ bên cạnh chính quyền Saigon , người đã  dẫn  một phái đòan  Thượng Nghị sĩ Mỹ   thăm Côn Sơn vào 1970 -  sau đó  tung ra vụ' chuồng cọp' - làm xiểng liểng  chính quyền miền Nam hồi ấy.  Không biết chàng học tiếng việt  với ai, từ bao giờ ;  tuy vậy, thầy dạy tiếng việt phải là người miền bắc giỏi, đã  dạy dỗ  tới nơi tới chốn  ' tên học trò yêu tiếng việt như yêu nhân tình'  khiến  chàng ta  viết tiếng việt rất chuẩn,  giỏi  cả  cả ngũ âm: sắc, huyền, hỏi, ngã, nặng .     Và  hình như chàng tham gia viết báo việt ngữ ,  bài đầu  tiên góp mặt ở mục ' cây viết mới'   tạp chí Trình Bầy ( Thế Nguyên chủ  nhiệm )   đồng môn với  ' cây viết học sinh xuất sắc Huỳnh Như Phương '   hồi ấy ?
         Tôi không oán thán , chàng ta  đã   đăng bài thơ ' What a Sight : 550,000 GI's in Vietnam' , khiến tôi bị  đại sứ E. Bunker từ chối  cấp visa  tham dự International Writing Program ở Iowa  từ 1968, mà  còn  khâm phục ,  đã  dám  dịch,  in tuyển thơ chống chiến tranh Việtnam  -   lại in  đầu tiên   sách  -   dạng' mimeographed book' -  ở   giữa Washington, D.C,  Thủ đô Hoa Kỳ  - và  tôi , người chủ trương Đại Nam văn hiến xuất bản cục, in sách rô- nê- ô đầu tiên  ở Sài Gòn,   Thủ đô  Việtnam Cộng Hòa trước 1963.
           Tuyển thơ ' We Promise  One Another' giới thiệu  nhiều tác giả  Việtnam,  chia từng  mục  :
 NGUYEN DU : AN ANCIENT MASTER ,   THE TWO WORLDS OF LUU TRONG LU,    COMING UP  IN VIETNAM,    FOREIGN INTERVENTION,    STRUGGLE,    ALTITUDE TO WOMEN,   LOVE'S SADNESS,    MOTHER I DO NOT WANT TO KILL MY BROTHERS,
TRINH CONG SON , POEMS FROM PRISON,  ,NHAT CHI MAI,  THICH NHAT HANH ; PRAYRES FOR PEACE ,   và ARTWORK giới thiệu  các tấm sketches của các   họa sĩ  Nguyễn Tử Nghiêm  , Huỳnh  Phương  Đông,  Võ Đình, Duy Thanh, ( không ghi tên )   và nhiều nghệ sĩ khuyết danh ( artist unknown )  vv..

             Đã   in ' What  a Sight : 550,000 GI ' s in Vietnam ' /  Thế Phong, lời nhạc Trịnh Công Sơn  trên THẰNG PHẢI GIÓ' S BLOG , và sẽ  tiếp tục  giới thiệu  một số tác giả khác.
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Thếphong .    
                                             
                                      I  N T R O D U C T I O N  O F   T H  E                           
                  ' THESE ARE THE POEMS OF THE YOUNG OF VIỆT NAM '

         THESE ARE THE POEMS  of the  young of Việt Nam.   They express the hopes and sorrows of a youth which has known only war.   There is little joy.   Joy does not come often to a land where brother is send to kill brother.   But there is love which shines through in rare moments.   Tragically, the love is often for a friend lost in the war.

         There is hatred to.   This is the consequence of brother being pitted against brother.    It is the result for a foreign army trying to protect the corrupt and power -hungry.

           Underlying all else in these poems is the closeness of the family and the great love for Việt Nam.   The respect and veneration of the ancestors is told here, the struggle to be worthy of the family is recorded in the writings of the youth.

            These are the poems that have sent to the young to jail -- and the poems that were written in jail.   Some were smuggled out of the jails like Côn Sơn and Chí Hòa, meticulously copied by hand and passed from youth to youth.   Others were  printed in underground newspers and distributed in the crowded corridors of the schools and the secret meeting places of the youth.    Many of the poems have been put to music by the popular young songwriters : Tôn Thất Lập, Trịnh Công Sơn ,  Miên Đức Thắng.  These are sung wherever the youth meet... at  work camps, in crowded cafes, by lovers , in the prisons and during street demonstrations.

             The Vietnamese love poertry.   Thir culture is best understand by their poems.   Though Vietnamese recognize the superior talent of their especially gifted  poets and songwriters, they do not consider poetry and song to be te special property of a small group of literati .   At the end of a party each poem attending is usually expected to sing a song of recite a poem.
        
       The interest in poetry is part of the Viwetnamese love and beauty, their devotion to aesthetics, which is  evident in their approach to the spiritual as well as the physical world.   They are fond of saying of a particularly courageous and inspiring person that his life was like a poem.   Nowhere are poetry and life more closely intertwined than in Việt Nam.

         But few outsiders have read the poems and understand the culture of Việt Nam.  Few have listened to the voices of the people of Việt Nam.   We can also appreicate their beauty and the evidence they provide of the courage of a people who can  still sing after years of unrelieved sadness and war.

         The words are simple, but there is a  depth of meaning.   There are, however, difficulties is appreciating poetry filtered through literary and cultural sensibilities very different from our own.    To many Western readers these poems may seem overly sentimental and even perhaps self-indulgent.   We may tire when we hear  continually of poorsuffering Việt Nam, doomed love affairs, prison tortures, war and death.   But one must remember that these are all a part of life  in Việt Nam today, and Vietnamese cannot avoid them.   In the poem  " The Present "  , the poet tells of sitting down to write his girlfriend a love letter but finds the words " I love "  slanted by the explosion of rockets, shaking his handholding the pen.   He ends by saying " Some day when there 's peace  /  I will write you a different poem ".

            When one considers ll that has happened to Việt Nam.  it is remarkable that Vietnamese have not lost their ability to hope.   In a collection of songs called " Songs from the Devasted Fields" , Miên Đức Thắng, a popular young songwriter and singer, expresses what has happened to his land and people.   These songs, particularly " Mother Raise Me to Be a Prisonner " , are very critical of the Thiệu regime and its American  allies .   Miên Đức Thắng was put in prison for singing them, but he does not give in to despair.   In the title song,  "Song from the Devasted Fields " , he sings:

               From the devasted fields of today we sing these songs ;
               Despite a thousand frightful years our life is still happy,
               Though weariness is printed on our dry hands ,
               We will never give up .
               Though our fields  now are abandoned we will still work for tomorrow ,
               Though  our fields now are destroyed and lie fallow ,
               Tomorrow flowers will blossom and the future will be bright .
                So let us go and recultivate our fields ,
                So we can live and die in our homeland;
                And tomorrow our land will blossom with more smiles,
                Tomorrow our land will be greener than the mountains and hills ,
                For tomorrow we are determined to live in our land .

          In the best  we are taught to suspect those who wear their hearts on their sleeves.   Many of us  cling   to the belief that an emotional cry in to our true feelings.   With us there is the real danger that the levels of self-control we achieve may make us forget the validity of the feeling they are designed to mask.   And it is wrong,  it would seem,  for Americans who can absorb the horrors of a Mỹ Lai and saturation bombing of a land and people with only ripples of guilt in the national consciousness to pass judgment on people who have not lost their capacity to weep in the face of suffering.   These poems are affirmations of feelings on the part of a people who have long been treated by many Americans  as if they had no feelings.   By  reading their poetry we can learn what has happened to them, and hopefully, what has  happened to us.

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DON LUCE ,  JOHN  C. SCHAFER & JACQUELYN CHAGNON.

( from WE PROMISE ONE ANOTHER, selected, translated and introduced by DON LUCE, 
and... , 
 The Indochina Mobile Education Project, Washington, D.C, 1974 - p. 1- 4)