python3 raw strings and \u escapes

[Jason Friedman]

This is a related question.

I perform an octal dump on a file:
$ od -cx file
0000000   h   e   l   l   o       w   o   r   l   d  \n
           6568    6c6c    206f    6f77    6c72    0a64

I want to output the names of those characters:
$ python3
Python 3.2.3 (default, May 19 2012, 17:01:30)
[GCC 4.6.3] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import unicodedata
>>> unicodedata.name("\u0068")
'LATIN SMALL LETTER H'
>>> unicodedata.name("\u0065")
'LATIN SMALL LETTER E'

But, how to do this programatically:
>>> first_two_letters = "6568    6c6c    206f    6f77    6c72    0a64".split()[0]
>>> first_two_letters
'6568'
>>> first_letter = "00" + first_two_letters[2:]
>>> first_letter
'0068'

Now what?