APPLETON, WIS. — A scholar of classical and modern Chinese literature examines the influence of Chinese literary traditions on the writings of Vietnamese revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh in a Lawrence University Main Hall Forum.
Jane Parish Yang, associate professor of Chinese at Lawrence, presents “Appropriating the Chinese Poetic Canon — Ho Chi Minh’s Prison Diary” Wednesday, Oct. 11 at 4:30 p.m. in Main Hall, Room 201. The event is free and open to the public.
The talk will focus on a manuscript Ho titled “Prison Diary,” which consists of 133 poems he wrote between August, 1942 and September, 1943 while he was imprisoned in China on suspicion of being a Japanese spy.
After leaving Vietnam at the age of 21, Ho lived abroad for more than 30 years. During his travels, he learned to write in English, French, Russian and modern Chinese. But in prison, Ho chose classical Chinese poetic form, which he had learned as a child from his father, over his native Vietnamese and the other foreign languages. By using a verse form typically associated with expressing the beauties of nature, Ho shifted the focus of the poems from an appreciation of nature to the prisoner within — his discomforts, his thirst for freedom and justice and his determined will to survive.
In traditional China, poetry was viewed as revealing the author’s true feelings and experiences as opposed to a fictional creation. By using a poetic style, Ho’s diary contains a retrospective element usually lacking in a regular prose diary.
Yang, a translator of modern Chinese fiction, joined the Lawrence faculty in 1991. Among her latest translations is “Tall One and Short One: Children’s Stories,” which was published last October in Taipei, Taiwan. She earned her Ph.D. in Chinese at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
