Chế Lan Viên (1920- 1989) was born Phan Ngọc Hoan in Đông Hà, Central Vietnam. He grew up in Quy Nhơn and started writing poetry at an early age. His first collection, Điêu Tàn (In Ruins), was published in 1937. As Neil Jamieson writes, a "bright star on the literary scene in the late 1930s was a young man from central Vietnam who wrote under the pen name Che Lan Vien. His reputation was based primarily on one slender volume of poems, entitled In Ruins, published in 1937 when he was only seventeen years old. Although he was Vietnamese, his poems are mostly about Champa and written from a Cham rather than Vietnamese point of view. It seems, however, that behind his preoccupation with the long-crumpled glories of Champa, deemed worthy of countless centuries of lamentation and regret, lay a view of Vietnam in the 1930s as a decadent and dying society whose true glory was 'in ruins'" (Understanding Vietnam, 163).
Hai-Dang Phan was born in Vietnam and raised in Wisconsin. His translations have appeared or are forthcoming in St. Petersburg Review, Waxwing, Cerise Press, Drunken Boat, Anomalous, and were awarded a fellowship from the American Literary Translators Association. His introductory essay to The Deluge: New Vietnamese Poetry, an anthology edited and translated by Linh Dinh, was recently published by Chax Press and first appeared in these pages. A graduate of the University of Florida's M.F.A. program in creative writing, he currently lives in Iowa and teaches at Grinnell College.
