Han Mac Tu ( 1912 - 40)

Don’t say, were you a young man behind
a cold curtain ? Or a young scholar
with inkpot and brush ? One was assigned
a hospital screen to be a horror

behind, the other made leprosy
a moonlight flood, with a landing ahead.
Madness is illness without secrecy
at least, and poetry is a mucus spread

by tears, but not by means of snivelling.
Youth is beauty eaten by the moon,
a cocoon of saliva unravelled
for the body’s silk. Whoa - what a loon !

How you howled, when you caught a falling star.
You went lunar, curtained with a grab bar.

Woodford Halse - 10 January 2025

Shame that I cannot transcribe the Vietnamese Latin script. Maybe in this case, I preserve the ambivalence. The penname Han Mac Tu without a breve on Mac means young man behind a cold curtain. With the breve it means young man with inkpot and brush.

The poet Francis Nguyen Trong Tri died of leprosy at 28 years of age. The poem refers to the aetiology of Hansen’s Disease. He so much wanted to live. French Symbolist version influenced his Vietnamese verse, as did Buddhist themes. He coped with his lust to live by turning himself into the moon, as he said. He said that if he had been cured, he would have burned his Mad Poetry collection. No penname was better chosen.

I know his verse through the edition by Helene Peiras, Le Hameau des roseaux (2001).