Vietnamese Literature (PDF)

# Vietnam Literature - A literature, both oral and written, created largely by Vietnamese speaking people. - Although, Francophone Vietnamese and English speaking Vietnamese authors in Australia and the United States are counted by many critics as part of the national tradition. - For much of its h...

# Vietnam Literature - A literature, both oral and written, created largely by Vietnamese speaking people. - Although, Francophone Vietnamese and English speaking Vietnamese authors in Australia and the United States are counted by many critics as part of the national tradition. - For much of its history, Vietnam was dominated by China, and as a result, much of the written work during this period was in Classical Chinese. - Chữ nôm, created around the 10th century, allowed writers to compose in Vietnamese using modified Chinese characters. - It gradually grew in prestige and flourished in the 18th century, when many notable Vietnamese writers and poets composed their works in chữ nôm and when it briefly became the official written script. - While the quốc ngữ script was created in the 17th century, it did not become popular outside of missionary groups until the early 20th century. - When the French colonial administration mandated its use in French Indochina, by the mid-20th century, virtually all Vietnamese works of literature were composed in quốc ngữ. ## Two Major Components of Vietnamese Literature 1. **Folk literature:** - Held a great significance in Vietnam and made immense contributions to preserving and developing the national language as well as nourishing the Vietnamese soul. - Diversified in mythologies, epics, legends, humorous stories, riddles, proverbs, and folk songs. - **Written literature:** - Born roughly in the 10th century. - Up to the 20th century, these components existed at the same time: - Works written in Han Chinese Characters - Works written in the Nom 'Vietnamese' character. - Since the 1920’s written literature has been mainly composed in the National language with profound renovations in form and category such as novels, new style poems, short stories and drama, and with diversity in its artistic tendency. ## Vietnamese Scripts ### Script - Classical Chinese/Hán Văn (漢文) - Chữ nôm (字喃) - Quốc ngữ ### Classical Chinese/Hán Văn (漢文) - Many of the official documents in Vietnamese history were written in Classical Chinese. - These works are mostly unintelligible even when directly transliterated into the modern quoc ngu script due to their Chinese syntax and vocabulary. - These works include official proclamations by Vietnamese Kings, Royal histories, and declarations of independence from China, as well as Vietnamese poetry. ### Chữ nôm (字喃) - They can be directly transliterated into the modern quoc ngu and be readily understood by modern Vietnamese speakers. - Some highly regarded works in Vietnamese literature were written in chữ nôm, including Nguyễn Du's Truyện Kiều, Đoàn Thị Điểm's chữ nom translation of the poem Chinh Phụ Ngâm Khúc (Lament of a Warrior Wife) from the Classical Chinese poem composed by her friend Đặng Trần Côn (famous in its own right), and poems by the renowned poet Hồ Xuân Hương. ### Quốc ngữ - While created in the 17th century, quốc ngữ was not widely used outside of missionary circles until the early 20th century. - During the early years of the 20th century, many periodicals in quốc ngữ flourished and helped to popularize quốc ngữ. - While some leaders resisted the popularity of quốc ngữ as an imposition from the French, others embraced it as a convenient tool to boost literacy. - After declaring independence from the French in 1945, Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh provisional government adopted a policy of increasing literacy with quốc ngữ. - By the mid-20th century, all Vietnamese works of literature were written in quốc ngữ, while works written in earlier scripts were transliterated into quốc ngữ for accessibility to modern Vietnamese speakers. - The use of the earlier scripts is now limited to historical references. ## Genres of Vietnamese Literature - **Folk Literature:** - An intermingling of many forms. - It is not only an oral tradition, but a mixing of three media: - HIDDEN - only retained on the memory of folk authors. - FIXED - written. - SHOWN - performed. - Usually exist in many variations. - **Legends:** - **Myths:** - Consist of stories about supernatural beings, heroes, creator gods, and reflect the viewpoint of ancient people about human life. - They consist of creator stories, stories about their origins (Lac Long Quan, Au Co), culture heroes (Son Tinh or Mountain Spirit: Thuy Tinh or Water Spirit). - **Cadao:** - Are folk poems. - The term CADAO comes from a line in the WEI WIND section of the Chinese Classic Folk Poetry Anthology, Shih-Ching (Book of Odes) and means unaccompanied songs. - It was transmitted orally, sustained and nourished the Vietnamese language through its centuries of domination and influence by China. - Cadao poems flourished, telling of the everyday life and concerns of ordinary Vietnamese. - Poems tend to be short, many comprised of a single couplet of fourteen syllables but there are also many longer ones with 20 lines or more. - They span all genres: flirting poems, work songs, lullabies, etc. Some cadao deal with trivia, such as the rituals of farming life and when to plant certain crops. ## Vietnamese Poetry - **New Poetry Movement:** A revolutionary literary movement took place during the first part of the 20th century, representing a paradigm shift in Vietnamese poetry. - Vietnamese poets eager for modernization wasted no time adopting French versification and prosody rules and, in the process, began to sever their ties to the old classical poetic tradition. - The emergence of this rebellious and energetic movement was not taken gracefully by the old guard, the Ancients, for whom centuries-old tradition was sacrosanct. - For a time, the war between the Ancients and the Moderns raged mercilessly, with the former deriding the upstarts as clueless poetasters with little sense of art or poetry. - This whole process was sparked by an unlikely poem by the revered but renegade Confucian scholar Phan Khôi with an equally unlikely title Tình Già (Elderly Love). - The poem was not the first to break existing prosody rules. Other poets such as Tản Đà and Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh had done so for years. - But Phan Khôi’s 1932 poem came at an opportune time, when a generation of young modern-educated men and women was thirsting for a whiff of fresh air amid the stuffy atmosphere of traditionalism. - Phan Khôi's poem was fresh on two points: the theme of ill-fated love and the unconventional verse form bordering on free verse. - The language was the everyday vernacular spoken with spontaneity and simplicity, with no allusions to Chinese myths, no concession to traditional form or substance. It was plainly the passionate language of two lovers who could not marry while young because of the tyranny of prejudice and the - New verse forms and stylistic techniques were introduced, new ways of expression, new ideas, and a totally new artistic tradition were being established that were to change the direction and tenor of Vietnamese poetry forever. - Breaking out of the mold of traditionalism, and imbued with Western ideas, Vietnamese poets of the first four decades of the 20th century staged their revolution with fervor and enthusiasm fueled further by a multitude of thematic orientations. - Emotions, ideas, and thoughts of all kinds, romantic, pedagogic, cultural, philosophical, historic, and even political, dominated the creative process, riding effortlessly and spontaneously on novel stylistic and prosodic forms.