U Sam Oeur 
U Sam Oeur is a Cambodian poet who survived four years in concentration camps under the Pol Pot regime by feigning illiteracy and by destroying his manuscripts. He now lives in Texas where he writes and translates Walt Whitman into Khmer. His volumes include Crossing Three Wildernesses: A Memoir, and Sacred Vows.
Click here for a sample of Crossing Three Wildernesses: A Memoir
Links to other texts about U Sam Oeur
Critical Review
Carlo Coppola celebrates Oeur's poetry and laments the scarcity of English translations of contemporary Cambodian literature in this critical review, originally published in World Literature Today.
"Many of us may have learned about the Cambodian holocaust of the 1970s through Sydney Schanberg's book The Death and Life of Dith Pran. For others, the film The Killing Fields (1984), based on Schanberg's work, probably served as teacher. However moving those two works are, we are presented the events by outsiders, Westerners, drawn over the large canvas of reportage, then of film. In contrast, the Cambodian poet U Sam Oeur (b. 1936) configures the events from the inside, as he lived and suffered through them. Moreover, these experiences are transformed into and filtered through the terse medium of poetry, here in an elegantly printed, deeply personal, magisterial bilingual volume...
Article
In this personal narrative, Ken McCullough, U Sam Oeur's translator, describes how his life intersected with U Sam Oeur's before and after Oeur's imprisonment in Cambodia under Pol Pot's regime, and relates how he became Oeur's translator.
McCullough explains, "Sam and I were classmates at Iowa from '66-'68 and had adjacent apartments for a time. We became close friends. It was my plan to eventually travel to Cambodia and work with Sam in translating Cambodian folk tales into English. Sam returned to Cambodia in '68 as soon as he finished his degree, married, taught for a short time, then entered light industry in several managerial positions. We corresponded until 1970 when Sam informed me that there was little point in writing anymore as all the mail was being censored by the government. I heard nothing from or about him until fourteen years later, when I learned that he volunteered as a captain in the army for two years ('70-'72), then returned to continue working his way up the managerial ladder of Cambodian industry. He was elected a member of Parliament and was selected as a delegate to the U.N. And he continued to write poetry. Then, in April '75, the Khmer Rouge took over. Sam, his wife, son and mother-in-law were herded from their home and spent the next four years in a succession of six concentration camps..."
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