Poetry
Tum Teav
ទុំទាវ
Preah Botumthera Som · 1915
Synopsis
Tum, a young novice from Ba Phnom with a magnificent voice, sets off to sell bamboo baskets for his pagoda in the direction of Tbong Khmum district; his singing charms Teav, the daughter of a rich widow, who gives him betel and a piece of cloth as a pledge of love. Back home, he pines for her and leaves the robe to join her, then is summoned by King Reamea to sing at the palace. Meanwhile, Teav's mother, who is unaware of this love, promises her daughter to the son of Archun, the powerful governor of the province.
Context
Completed in September 1915, the palm-leaf manuscript has one thousand and fifty stanzas, including a preface of thirty-nine in which the author dates the work and names himself; in 1935, the venerable Oum made a copy of it in two volumes. The story existed before him in oral and written forms, and Étienne Aymonier had given a French translation of it as early as 1880; the authorship of the poem remains disputed, as George Chigas examines, who translated the 1915 version into English. The anthropologist Alexander Hinton has read in it the cultural model of a disproportionate vengeance.
Who it is for
For those who want to read Cambodia's great tragic love story, often compared to Romeo and Juliet.
Prizes and reception
Adapted for the theatre and cinema, notably by Fay Sam Ang in 2003, it has been on the Cambodian secondary school curriculum since the fifties.
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