Epic Space. War Memory Space

Sometimes, the poet depicts the epic space by recreating the battlefield scene when the guns are silent . The peace helps the young female volunteers in Fire in the season of drying shirts to gently wash each other's hair, read a letter from home together, sit and sew shirts together... creating in us admiration and love for the girls who forget their youth; leave their families to serve the resistance.

Ngan Vinh, in the epic poem The Quiet Sunset; told about a mother from Dien Ban who had nine children sacrificed, quietly visiting the graves at the end of the year. The epic space is the cemetery afternoon with silent graves, half-burned incense sticks, the white clouds in the sky creating an effect of sympathy, sharing with the mother and remembering the deceased: " Bringing flowers/ mother to the cemetery/ At the end of the year, on the twelfth day of the twelfth lunar month, the incense sticks burn, the horizon is white with clouds/ the graves are silent and mother's tears are blurred".

Le Anh Quoc chose a scene of a windy afternoon blowing like smoke as the background for the wounded soldier appearing with a wooden crutch knocking along the road: "The man returned / his body was full of injuries / The wooden crutch knocked along the direction of the whirlwind / Understanding the road was dripping with sweat ". That scene made the reader feel sorry. The epic space could also be the trenches of the past when the old soldier searched for

return: " Who is still alive like me, with silver hair on their head/ One morning I went to visit the battlefield/ Oh my god, the old trenches were covered with grass/ The cannons were rusty, the old bomb craters were leveled" (Soldier's Sky) .

Thus, through a number of epic poems that have been examined, we see that the artistic space chosen to describe in epic poems about the anti-American period mostly comes from the author's intention on a realistic background and has a great, powerful effect on the soul of the writer, the lyrical character and the reader. Each selected scene is mostly valuable in serving to express the ideological content of the work, especially for the modern epic genre which contains within itself real people, real events, real scenes... The artistic space in most epic poems about the anti-American period is an epic space with fierce battlefields, whether composed during the war or after the country has been at peace. Such heroic scenes are described in association with the fierce, fierce atmosphere of the battlefield, of the struggles. The epic space in epic poems written in the years after the war is mainly the space of war memories, the space of reminiscing about war but is also a real image of the epic space of the anti-American period . Of course, the epic cannot lack scenes of everyday life with many emotional nuances due to the extremely richness of life; and that artistic space also contributed to reflecting the brutality of war.

3.4 Association

Le Dinh Ky once said, " Association is to bring closer, to mix together two things that are strange to each other, the farther they are, the more interesting they are" [42, 235]. In the Foundations of Vietnamese Culture , when philosophizing about the time structure of the universe, Tran Ngoc Them stated: " Up to now,... based on the time of the moon's appearance, the shape of the moon, people have accumulated experience in watching the moon to accurately determine each day " [94, 73].

The association of time sometimes lies in the folk way of calculating months and days through the image of the full moon rising periodically every month. Nguyen Duc Mau had a very strange way of associating. The mother followed her son's marching steps by counting each of her thin fingers to calculate the time, creating a unique impression: " Withered, thin fingers/ Mother counts the time/ When her ten fingers are full of the rising moon/ Then we will liberate Saigon" (Division Epic).

In Homeland of the Golden Sun , Thu Bon talks about the future with details that give us quite interesting associations : “ The bridge has been built, my dear./ It is not built across the river/ The bridge has spanned two banks of desire” . The image of Saint Giong is also expressed in a creative, rustic, funny and close-to-life way: “ My country dreams of iron horses/ Still loves ivory bamboo clumps/ So saints are all on the poles ” (Homeland of the Golden Sun).

Sometimes the comparison and association make Thu Bon's poem more unique when depicting the image of a hard-working mother: " Mother's tears here dry and bitter on the hills/ Mother's life is also a rice plant/ Her bare back bears the mark of the passing sun/ Mother carries the whole village on her shoulders, heavy and painful (Badan Thirsty).

In chapter 4 of the epic poem Road to the City , Huu Thinh has some particularly evocative verses. The poet’s perception of past time intertwined with future time is truly strange and sharp; highly implicit, creating profound associations like the poetic idea: “ The areca tree in the garden has fallen, leaving an old leaf ”.

The longing and longing of a wife whose husband went to fight in the resistance war was expressed by Huu Thinh: " Staying at home for years / Stepping from the doorstep down to the yard

also long” . Perhaps the idea was taken from “Five watches, six hours a day ” but it was very creative. Saying “five watches” is a way of calculating the time of the night, but saying “ long for five watches” helps us think of the waiting for many nights, the endless waiting. The verses do not have a single word about “night” but have a high evocative power. And when the poet wrote: “ I am the fickle place of the wind/ When the lover takes off his shirt and gives a scarf” (The Road to the City) , we think of the lyrics : “ When we love each other, we take off our shirts to each other/ When we go home, my mother asks if the wind has blown over the bridge” .

Sometimes, to express a distant message: revolutionary cadres return to the grassroots, Huu Thinh has used two sweet and meaningful folk songs: The people return through the hands of the person who connects them/ Through a distant lullaby/ “I forgot to bring the moon into the house/ The moon is sad, the moon must shine through other people's gardens”. That rustic, simple, and quiet folk song helps us visualize the real scene in a more concrete way.

In epic poems, association is not simply an expression of poetic inspiration, but it becomes a condition for expressing creative style . For epic poems with political philosophy and lyricism, the more the use of association is, the higher the use of association, sometimes considered one of the internal structural principles of many epic poems, and association is sometimes expressed in very close and gentle rhetorical devices of comparison and metaphor.

Lai Nguyen An is very interested in the poetic quality of a long poem: " It is impossible to say that a long poem is good without finding good verses. In addition to good verses, we must also think about the good things at another level . I want to talk about the ideas that run throughout the entire long poem..." [3, 122]. "Another level" is association.

Sometimes that association is expressed in consecutive verses that wander from one issue to another that seem to have no connection to each other. But overall, the poet still reveals a high level of generalization in the spread.

The poetic ideas highlight the richness and diversity in the inner life of modern Vietnamese people.

The intense association also brought Huu Thinh's poetic soul to the land of eighteen villages and betel gardens with a wife wearily waiting for the day of victory, so that there would be no more scene of hiding her husband, an enemy cadre, in the basement: " She waited and turned away at night/ Twenty years hoping for the sky to get dark soon/ Twenty years of cold food/ Please don't come back for Tet, my sister will be sad...".

Huu Thinh's association is accidental, sudden but has a unique meaning, the image is deeply engraved thanks to the comparison and contrast method ... "my sister cannot be like a skinny snake", "she lacks her brother so she is redundant", "on windy nights, one hand holds the other", "alone with a tray of food, sitting on either side is uneven", "she buries her youth in her dimples", "she is sad like a butterfly torn in two..." (The Road to the City).

To Huu also had many very new associations , typically the verses written about the immortal image of President Ho: " I thought: the fragrant soul was being reborn/ That star set into dawn" (Following Uncle Ho's footsteps).

In Those Who Go to the Sea , the vestiges of war also become a poetic quatrain rich in association : " By the scorching B52 bomb crater/ Sao Mai is as green as a well by chance."

The association of modern epic poems has linked very different and distant events together, giving the poet more freedom in the composition of the epic poem. Whether the association is reasonable or not, accepted or not depends on the talent of the poet.

Modern epic poems often express the deepest contemplations about people, life, country, the world and also mention ethical issues. Nguyen Khoa Diem used the method of association to create a unique writing style of his own. In Mat duong khat vong, the poet expressed a very new perception and a very creative definition of the country. That is the image of the country from the old days; in the old days, my mother often told me, in the betel nut she ate, the country from the folk songs and myths, the country is very unique and also very common: " The land is where you go to school, / the water is where I bathe, / the country is where we date, ... / the country is where the phoenix flies to the silver mountain, / the water is where the fisherman claws the water of the ocean...".

Each different definition of the country and people is each thought and experience to finally realize the daily life that is still lived, the people that are still met every day, but not necessarily fully understand the bright gems in them: " Every month and year, there are people in layers/ Boys and girls the same age as us/ Hardworking/ When there is an enemy, the boys go to war/ The girls return to raise their children" . Perhaps that is why Nguyen Khoa Diem often philosophizes, presenting his thoughts about the people, the country of the people with unexpected associations : " My dear, the Country is our blood and bones/ We must know how to bond and share/ We must know how to transform into the shape of the country/ To create the eternal Country " (The Road of Aspiration).

Modern poetics has given an extremely important, if not decisive, place to words because literature is the art of language. And those words, if placed in a new association and correlation, will create a