Tran Nhuan Minh - 'poet without borders'

“From the horizon of one person to the horizon of all”

“From the horizon of one person to the horizon of all” - a saying of a great French poet often used by poet Tran Nhuan Minh, to talk about the function of a poet. He believes that any poet must walk on his own, from where he lives, and from there bring his poetry to readers throughout the country and more broadly, to many readers abroad.

Tran Nhuan Minh kept that in mind and he seemed to have done it.

By the end of 2024, after 64 years of writing, poet Tran Nhuan Minh had published 65 books at home and abroad, including 49 poetry collections (13 poetry collections published in English and many poetry collections in other languages), 6 poetry collections released globally.

Notably, the thick individual volumes, published in many countries such as "Tran Nhuan Minh - Selected Poetry" (China, 2014), "Passing the World" - Selected Poems of Tran Nhuan Minh (Taiwan, 2018), "Poet and Flowers" (France, 2020); "Awakening" (Canada 2022), were then selected by the European Translation Council and simultaneously translated into 3 languages: French, German, Spanish...

His poetry has also begun to be included in university curricula in some countries.

Poetry from where I live

Tran Nhuan Minh was born on August 20, 1944 in Dien Tri village, Quoc Tuan commune (Nam Sach, Hai Duong). In 1962, after graduating from Hai Duong Pedagogical College with honors, he was selected by the representative of the Hong Quang Department of Education to go to the Quang Ninh mining area.

During his years working as a miner, he published the following poetry collections: “That is love” (1971), “The melody of a land” (1980), “The epic of burning stone” (1985), “The escorting poet” (1989)…

In particular, the collection “Poets and Flowers” ​​written about the two rural areas of Hai Duong and Quang Ninh was completed in 15 years, after winning the third first prize for Vietnamese workers and laborers’ literature, and was awarded the State Prize, Phase II, in 2007. The collection of poems has been reprinted 24 times domestically (currently being prepared for further printing) and translated into many foreign languages, and is highly appreciated, especially in China and France. This is perhaps the most important work in Tran Nhuan Minh’s poetic life. The work has been awarded the record by the Vietnam Record Organization VietKinGS for a collection of poems in the renovation period that has been reprinted the most times in Vietnam.

Talking about “Poets and Flowers”, author Tran Nhuan Minh said: “We can mention hundreds of characters, all kinds of people. Each character is described differently through the characteristics of the poem, as well as through the specific situations and approaches of the lyrical character to the described object. Some characters are described close-up, written directly like a short memoir, some characters appear vaguely in the memories of this person, or in the stories of that person… with flexible and versatile writing styles, no one is the same, no poem is the same”.

Or like “The Epic of Burning Stone”, completed after 23 years of hard, persistent work, praising the workers’ movement and miners in the history of the formation of the Vietnamese working class (since 1840) and in the process of defending and building the Fatherland. “The epic was drafted from 1962-1969, completed in 1985, but in the end I resolutely cut out everything that I considered to be recounting events and illustrations, keeping only less than 1,000 lines of poetry from the manuscript of nearly 5,000 lines of poetry”, poet Tran Nhuan Minh shared.

This epic poem was awarded a special prize by the Vietnam Writers Association in 2011 and also reached Chinese readers in 2014.

Poetry for everyone

Writer, Professor, Doctor Tuong Vi Van, Director of the Center for Vietnamese Studies (Taiwan) once said: “Tran Nhuan Minh’s poetry is everyone’s poetry, and translations of Tran Nhuan Minh’s poetry are easily accepted in any country. Tran Nhuan Minh’s poetry has no borders.”

Another collection of poems that is also very favored by poetry lovers is the collection "Awakening" written about human awakenings and premonitions before reality and the world, combining real and virtual writing styles, published in Canada in English, then translated and reviewed by the European Translation Council, Ukiyoto Publishing House (Canada) further translated into 3 languages: French, German, Spanish, released globally in 2022 and 2023 and then all 4 volumes were selected and introduced at the international book exhibition in Frankfurt (Germany) in October 2023.

In 2024, Prodigy Publishing House (USA) published Tran Nhuan Minh's English poetry collection, consisting of 4 volumes, published in Canada, Korea and the United States, showing how flat the world is in international publishing links.

The poems in these 4 volumes are all drawn from 30 Vietnamese poetry collections published in Vietnam by Tran Nhuan Minh. They are: volume I “Flared up Subconscious”, volume II “The day I live”, volume III “Human realm” and volume IV “Go Alone”. According to poet Tran Nhuan Minh, “it is the awakening of humanism that he felt after World War II (since 1939), when its impacts had a terrible impact on the fate of people in Vietnam as well as in other countries”.

His prose has also been translated into seven languages ​​and published in seven countries.

In the field of research, his three works on Hai Duong and Quang Ninh, mainly during the Tran and Le dynasties, were awarded the 2023 Dao Tan Prize (Time Speaks, Searching for Truth, Literary Dialogue) and will be republished in turn.

The nearly 1,000-page collection "Literary Dialogue", reprinted and released in early 2024, shows how devotedly he has worked on writing about the country, people, and homeland of Vietnam.