Ho Chi Minh translation

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32663, 20 July 1971, Page 11

Ho Chi Minh translation

/By

HENRY RAYMONT,

of the New York Times

Netos Service, through N.Z.P.A.)

NEW YORK. “Calamity has tempered and hardened me and turned my mind into steel,” wrote Ho Chi Minh in 1943 when he was a prisoner of the Chinese Nationalist police in a South China gaol.

A collection of 115 verses, < depicting his stoic endurance,! of 13 months imprisonment.' has been published by! I Bantam Books under the it title “The Prison Diary of Holt Chi Minh.” i l The book makes available!? an English translation of the! 1 poetry-memoir of the Viet-1 namese revolutionary who I ‘ said: “The poet also should, 1 know how to lead the I attack.” The 103-page volume will; be issued as an original I paperback edition with an initial printing of 500,000 — the kind of printing usually; reserved for reprints of bestsellers. The book will sell at SUSI.2S per copy. A Vietnamese edition of the poems was brought out ! of Hanoi in 1967 by Harrison I 1 Salisbury, an assistant man- i aging eiditor of the “Newi York Times,” who became < the first United States; journalist to visit North! Vietnam during the war. WRITTEN IN CHINESE ' In an introduction to the' Bantam edition, Salisbury) writes: “Ho’s 'prison diary’; is not a diary in a Western! sense. It consists of 115verses—quatrains and tang poems in the classical; Chinese style. They were written in the Chinese calligraphy in a common notebook, specifically written in Chinese rather than Vietnamese because Ho knew that any writing in a language they could not understand would anger his j

captors and arouse their suspicions.” Ho was arrested in August, 1942, while trying to reach the Chiang Kai-shek Government in Chungking in the hope of concluding an alliance against the Japanese invaders. His sense of bitter irony about the arrest was set .forth in the poem “Sadness”: The whole world is ablaze with flames of war, And men compete as to who will be the first at the front. In gaol, inaction weighs [ heavily on the prisoner. ) My noble ambitions are, valued at less than a cent. PRISON HARDSHIPS Other verses record the! hardships of prison life—the) lice, the scabies, the meagre-; ness of rations, the cruelty; [of wardens. Yet, in a spirit of defiance, he writes: I People who come out of ) prison can build up the I country. ; Misfortune is a test of I people’s fidelity. Those who protest at injustice are people of true I merit. When the prison doors are opened, the real dragon ! will fly out. “The Prison Diary of Ho Chi Minh” is the second book of verse by an Asian Communist leader published by Bantam books. In 1967, it . issued “quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung,” ■\which is in its eighth print;ing.