Poetry
Lục Vân Tiên
Not translated into English
Nguyễn Đình Chiểu · 1851
Synopsis
On his way to the examinations, Vân Tiên comes upon brigands who are carrying off a young girl and scatters them with blows of his staff. Kiều Nguyệt Nga, whom he has saved, pledges herself to him. Then he learns of his mother's death and weeps until he loses his sight, and finds himself blind and penniless in the hands of people who betray him one after another. The young girl, for her part, refuses the marriage forced upon her and keeps her word to a man she believes lost.
Context
Two thousand and eighty-two lines in alternating metre, dictated to pupils by a man who could no longer write, and at first passed on by word of mouth throughout the South. The text was not engraved in demotic script until around 1864, by a scholar of Chợ Lớn who had collected its versions. A professor of oriental languages in Paris gave a bilingual edition of it as early as 1883, which made the poem known in France; a French officer, having read it in this translation, had a fully illuminated copy painted in 1897 by a court painter, found in Paris in 2011.
Who it is for
A long narrative poem, readable in French. It is not read but listened to: in the South it is still sung, and that is how it lived for half a century before being printed.
Prizes and reception
The last great narrative in verse of ancient literature, and the most recited book of the Vietnamese South.