Ngô Xuân Diệu was born in his mother's hometown of Gò Bồi in
Phước Hòa Commune,
Tuy Phước District,
Bình Định Province. His father was Ngô Xuân Thọ, and his mother was Nguyễn Thị Hiệp. Due to Vietnamese traditions, only the hometown of a child's father would be counted as the hometown of the child, thus his official hometown was the village of Trảo Nha in
Can Lộc District,
Hà Tĩnh Province. Later in his life, he would use the name of the village as a pseudonym. Xuân Diệu lived in Tuy Phước District until he was eleven years old, when he traveled southward to study in
Quy Nhơn.
Entry into literature In 1936, Xuân Diệu was enrolled in the
lycée Khải Định in
Huế, where he met the young poet
Huy Cận and received his
baccalauréat in 1937. He then left for
Hanoi, where he studied law and joined the left-wing
Self-Strengthening Literary Union (
Tự Lực văn đoàn), mostly composed of young Vietnamese writers who studied under the colonial education system and were well-versed in both
Vietnamese and
Western literature. He was a late comer to the group, which by then had established themselves as a powerful platform for Vietnamese intellectuals, publishing romance novels that entertained the crowd alongside satirical works that lambasted both contemporary society and the French administration. Amongst his peers in the group was
Thế Lữ, whose fantastical poetry and horror short stories were inspired by
French romanticism and
Edgar Allan Poe. According to literary critics
Hoài Thanh and
Hoài Chân, Xuân Diệu borrowed the same inspiration from romanticism, yet he "burned the utopian scenery and ushered the audience back into the real world." They acknowledged
Charles Baudelaire's influence on Xuân Diệu, compared aspects of his poetry to
Anna de Noailles and
André Gide, and judged him as the pinnacle of French-influenced Vietnamese poetry.
First Indochina War Between 1938 and 1940, Xuân Diệu lived with poet and alleged partner
Huy Cận at 40 Hàng Than Street in Hanoi. After
Japan entered French Indochina in September 1940, many members of Xuân Diệu's literary group began to focus entirely on politics, including the founder
Nhất Linh. Near the end of the year, Xuân Diệu departed for
Mỹ Tho and worked as an official. Some of the remaining members, including
Khái Hưng,
Hoàng Đạo and
Nguyễn Gia Trí, were arrested by the French and imprisoned in the faraway
Sơn La Prison, marking the beginning of the demise of the group. When Xuân Diệu returned to Hanoi in 1942, most of the writers with whom he once worked had drifted apart or considered joining the anti-colonial resistance led by
Ho Chi Minh. He pursued writing as a full-time career for two years, before joining
the revolutionaries in
Việt Bắc in 1944. Instead of combatting on the
front line, Xuân Diệu stayed behind to write in support of the independence movement. In the memoir
Cát bụi chân ai of the writer
Tô Hoài, it was also during this time that Xuân Diệu had a few sexual encounters with his comrades, including Tô Hoài himself, and was reprimanded by the commanders.
Interwar period After the Việt Minh gained victory in 1954, Xuân Diệu returned to Hanoi and published both as a poet and as a journalist. In 1956, he married 27-year-old director
Bạch Diệp, but the relationship was not consummated and the pair quickly separated. While Bạch Diệp was later remarried to another man, Xuân Diệu lived alone in an apartment right above the house of Huy Cận, who was now married to Xuân Diệu's younger sister, Ngô Xuân Như. Between 1955 and June 1958, Xuân Diệu was embroiled in the famous
Nhân Văn-Giai Phẩm affair. As the First Indochina War had come to an end, and
some reforms of the new administration had led to disastrous results, dissenting voices began to rise amongst those who had supported the Việt Minh and were now demanding the freedom to criticize the wrongdoings of the government. Although the government did come to admit their mistakes, the movement soon developed from criticism of the government to personal attacks and calls for a major overhaul, causing a rift between pro-government writers and dissenters like
Lê Đạt or
Trần Dần. In the end, Xuân Diệu, along with
Huy Cận and others, took the side of the government; in a scathing response published in May 1958, he accused the likes of
Lê Đạt,
Hoàng Cầm and
Trần Dần of "
capitalistic individualism" and "attempting to poison our atmosphere of prose and poetry, which means that we should wipe them out, that we should cleanse them."
Later years As tensions rose between
North and
South Vietnam leading up to the
Vietnam War, Xuân Diệu continued to write in support of the communist efforts against U.S. and South Vietnamese forces. He also translated a variety of foreign-language writers, including
Nâzım Hikmet,
Nicolás Guillén, and
Alexander Pushkin. His first works of literary analysis, released in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, explored the cultural significance of classic Vietnamese poets like
Nguyễn Du and
Hồ Xuân Hương, the latter of whom was given the sobriquet "the Queen of
Nôm poetry" that is still invoked by other writers generations later. In the last two decades of his life, Xuân Diệu became an advocate for young writers. He wrote the book
Conversation with Young Poets in 1961 to give some advice both as an experienced writer and as an enthusiast who wished to see Vietnamese poetry flourish in the future. When a ten-year-old boy named
Trần Đăng Khoa from
Hải Dương Province gained attention with his flair for poetry, Xuân Diệu himself went to meet the boy and offered to
proofread his first
poetry collection. In his later reminiscences, Khoa remarked on how Xuân Diệu mentored him as he grew up and changed his writing style. By the time Khoa became an adult, he visited the senile poet at his apartment in Hanoi and noticed that Xuân Diệu had become occupied with thoughts of death and old age, yet devoted himself to writing poetry anyway.
Death On December 18, 1985, Xuân Diệu died at his home from a sudden heart attack. His life-long friend Huy Cận was said to have demanded that the funeral be postponed until he could come back from
Dakar,
Senegal; to his dismay, the funeral was carried out soon after and was attended by a lot of Vietnamese artists at the time, including Xuân Diệu's ex-wife
Bạch Diệp and composer
Văn Cao, whom he had publicly insulted during the
Nhân Văn-Giai Phẩm affair. Xuân Diệu was laid to rest in
Mai Dịch Cemetery on the outskirts of Hanoi. ==Works==