Starting tolearn Vietnamese and do research on Vietnam in 1959, Prof. Dr. IvoVasiliev has made great contributions to connecting the two cultures ofVietnam and the Czech Republic (formerly Czechoslovakia ).
He is the translator of the Czech version of President Ho Chi Minh’s“Nhat ky trong tu” (Prison diary) poem collection. In addition, he hasintroduced to Czech readers more than 60 poems by 50 other Vietnameseauthors as well as research works on the culture, history and traditionof the Vietnamese nation.
Talking with Ivo Vasiliev,one can hardly notice any foreign accent in his Vietnamese. But aboveall, he has a deep understanding of Vietnam .
Theresearcher remarked that Vietnamese people are open, friendly and fondof joking. He said he also likes the Vietnamese family ties and the wayof thanking that it is a bliss when children surpass their parents.
For Ivo Vasiliev, translating Vietnamese poems into Czech is anenjoyable job as he can discover many things interesting. He said he hasa passion for poems on love during the war.
At the ageof 80, with over 50 visits to Vietnam , Ivo Vasiliev is stillpassionate about the Vietnamese topic. He confided that each visit toVietnam for him is like “returning to the homeland”.
At present, the professor is joining with engineer Nguyen Quyet Tien, aVietnamese in Czech, to compile two new Czech-Vietnamese andVietnamese-Czech dictionaries.
Together with theVietnamese Association in Czech, he is implementing a project to improvethe position of the Vietnamese community in his country./.