In the fall of 1939, in my native city in Vietnam, the now sadly famous imperial capital of Hue, a young poet, Luu Trong Lu, published his “Tieng Thu” (“The Sounds of Autumn”). Overnight he became our idol. He wrote of the “murmurs of autumn leaves,” of a “startled golden deer walking on dry yellow leaves,” of a “front-line soldier's silhouette in the heart of his lonely wife.”

I was then in the last year of high school. My classmates and I were all enchanted by his verses. We copied them in our notebooks to read during our mathematics classes. We had enjoyed a relatively peaceful year and a bountiful harvest, although some among us sensed that the war in Europe might soon affect us. But we did not care. We loved our poet all the same.