Poetry
Lưu hương ký
Not translated into English
Hồ Xuân Hương · 1814
Synopsis
Fifty-two pieces, half in classical Chinese, half in vernacular script, many of them addressed to named men, friends in poetry or lovers: in them a reply is made to something sent, a sorrow is told, autumn, the wind and the solitude of a house are spoken of. The tone is lyrical and restrained, very far from the double-meaning pieces that oral tradition attaches to the same name, and it is this gap that has made the collection a subject of debate since it was found again.
Context
In the spring of 1814, the author handed the manuscript to a scholar friend of hers, telling him it was everything she had written up to then, and asked him for a preface; it is through this preface, preserved elsewhere, that the existence of the collection was known. A researcher had it searched for and received it from a correspondent in 1964; he translated sixteen pieces of it in a Hanoi journal the same year. The manuscript has since been mislaid. The poems in the vernacular passed on by word of mouth under the same name, for their part, were first collected by a French official in 1893.
Who it is for
Short pieces, to be read in an annotated version. The names of the recipients and the circumstances of each sending matter as much as the verses themselves.
Prizes and reception
The only body of work that bears this author's name on a manuscript, and the centrepiece of the case establishing that she existed.