Tale
Truyền kỳ tân phả
Not translated into English
Đoàn Thị Điểm · 1740
Synopsis
Six tales of the strange written in Classical Chinese, in which women play the leading roles. The best known tells of the goddess of Vân Cát, a daughter of heaven exiled on earth, who becomes a wife and a mother, returns among her own and is given worship; others tell of the lady of the temple at the river mouth, the widow of An Ấp who follows her husband in death, a meeting with an immortal woman beside the Bích Câu canal. Passages in verse are inserted into the prose and sometimes make up half of the tale.
Context
The book presents itself as the sequel to a sixteenth-century collection, whose genre and even title it takes up; its author mixes with the prose verse pieces, songs and a funeral oration. The old sources do not agree on its contents: the chronicler Phan Huy Chú counts six tales in it, a family genealogy gives five, and two titles differ from one list to the other. The first of these tales has become the reference version of the legend of Liễu Hạnh, of which it fixed what the country still tells of it.
Who it is for
Prose in classical Chinese interspersed with verse, read today in a modern version. The tales are taken one at a time; one must accept that half a page may be in verse.
Prizes and reception
The collection that fixed the legend of the goddess Liễu Hạnh, and one of the few classical texts of the country in which women drive the action.