Sang et Fleurs (v)

From poet Tố Hữu and translator Mireille Gansel with poets Xuân Diệu and Pierre Emmanuel at Les Éditeurs français réunis

Behold nothing that is not there and the nothing that is:

BLOOD AND FLOWERS:

BLOOD AND FLOWERS

The path of the poet To Huu

interviews, translations in presentation by Mireille Gansel

with a preface by Pierre Emmanuel of the Académie Française

avant-propos du poète Xuân Diêu

Reunited Editors and Publishers of France

21, rue de Richelieu - 75001 Paris:

The line,

avant-propos du poète Xuân Diêu

was not on the cover with the others. It means:

introduction from poet Xuan Dieu.

I will tell you more about him on another occasion. What else do you need urgently to know about somebody more than that he is a poet? It’s what we know about Homer.

© Les Éditeurs Français Réunis, 1975.

This book is not the intellectual property of To Huu, Mireille Gansel, Pierre Emmanuel, or Xuan Dieu. The Communist publisher who did own it has gone out of business. I wonder who owns what now.

The rights of the author in France are moral as well as private. I don’t understand them. They don’t understand them. A Jew of Hillel, I shall avoid harming any of the authors here as I should not wish to be harmed myself,

as I do not wish to harm the spirit of their work together:

beyond many stories, comments, anecdotes, we owe to the poet Xuan Dieu the irreplaceable and patient work of explaining, word after word, verse after verse, working from the Vietnamese text, of each one of the poems translated here.

we thank Nguyen Khac Vien for having given us the means to make this labor real.

Hanoi, 1974.

I met Nguyen Khac Vien once as he lay dying while I worked in his old publishing house across the street. Mireille Gansel and Xuan Dieu are each the friend of some friend of mine, at one remove only, more than once, in Ha Noi and Paris both. So Pierre Emmanuel cannot be more than two removes from me, many times.

I am introducing to you these friends’ labor of love in sub-tropical Ha Noi looking back through 50 years of hot blood. The book itself comes from sub-arctic Paris, and I am from Connecticut where the poems of my climate are those of capital. The poet whose verse I began this letter with was a Hartford insurance man.

I am by birth a Federalist, of New Haven, by schools a New England cadre for the District of Columbia, Main Street, mid-town Manhattan, and Wall Street. I write from North Carolina where the last 3 revolutions we had were by capitalist enemies of free labor.

I am introducing you to the great Vietnamese Communist poet To Huu. As my poet Wallace Stevens sang from Hartford, one must have a mind of winter, and have been cold a long time to behold nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

This was the fifth Viet Nam letter of 5 so far addressing Sang et Fleurs from poet Tố Hữu and translator Mireille Gansel with poets Xuân Diệu and Pierre Emmanuel at Les Éditeurs français réunis.

I had sent the first on February 28, 2023, the second on March 3, 2023, the third on March 9, 2023, and the fourth on March 12, 2023.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.