Quy Nhơn residents mentioned Hàn Mặc Tử with great pride and reverence whenever I mentioned enjoying reading and writing poems.
Hàn Mặc Tử was actually born in Quảng Bình, and spent significant portions of his tragically short life laboring at a newspaper in Saigon after first moving to Quy Nhơn. Still, the famed poet seems to have been adopted by the Bình Định city where he died in 1940 at the age of 28. There is a rather extravagant tomb honoring him beside a scenic overlook downtown, his original grave remains well-kept and his home in the leprosy colony where he suffered greatly has been preserved with paintings of him made by his brother still adorning the walls alongside his humble possessions.
When I lived in Quy Nhơn some years ago, I would often spend my nights reading and writing on a beach not far from where Hàn Mặc Tử had lived. Often described as a near-mythic figure with the power to channel divine inspiration, he represents a romanticization of poetry I don’t personally prescribe to. Yet, on those empty nights spent gazing out across the sea, I often found myself having one-sided conversations with Hàn Mặc Tử. Sometimes the discussions were in the form of poems. Here is one I saved:
Another Letter to Hàn Mặc Tử
— Hàn Mặc Tử
Only an idiot would sell the moon!
Didn’t you know a sky without the moon
would devastate the seas? Stilled currents
starving snails, squids, sardines and seals.
But you were no naturalist.
In your day, no one shed tears at the sound
of an ice sheet cracking beneath a starving polar bear
or a pilot whale suffocating in the surf.
You were a hopeless romantic, though:
with no moon, scientists say nights would be so dark
we couldn’t see our hands in front of our faces,
so how could you have enjoyed
a lover’s smile
after a midnight kiss?
Yesterday, I visited your house,
gazed at the portraits your brother painted
of you alone on the beach at dusk.
How could you have stayed there to write with no moon?
I also saw the bed you died in at age 28.
Is that why you wanted to sell the moon?
Did you know that without a moon, the Earth would spin
so fast years would have more than 1,000 days?
Do we misunderstand you?
Selling the moon isn’t a romantic gesture.
You simply wanted more mornings to watch the sun
pierce clouds the way sorrows pierced you.
