Truyện Kiều: verse form, context, language, translation

This blog post is written for my non-Vietnamese friends who are interested in Truyện Kiều and intend to read it in translation. 


Truyện Kiều (in English: The Tale of Kieu) by Nguyễn Du is the most important work in Vietnamese literature, and is recognised as Vietnam’s national treasure. The original title of Truyện Kiều is Đoạn trường tân thanh, which has been translated as A New Cry from a Broken Heart. 
In Vietnamese literature Nguyễn Du has the same place as Shakespeare in England and Pushkin in Russia, with a similar impact on the Vietnamese language and culture. A few characters from Truyện Kiều have come to be used as nouns to refer to types of people (Sở Khanh= philandering douchebag, Tú Bà= procuress, Hoạn Thư= a very jealous woman, etc.) and every Vietnamese person knows at least a few lines from it. 
As Truyện Kiều is an epic poem, I should write about its form. It is written in lục bát, meaning 6-8, a Vietnamese verse form: a 6-syllable line is followed by an 8-syllable line. 
The rhyme rule in lục bát is the 6th syllable of the 8 line rhymes with the final syllable of the previous 6 line, and the final syllable of the 8 line rhymes with the 6th syllable of the following 6 line. Look at the opening 6 lines of Truyện Kiều: 

Trăm năm trong cõi người ta,
Chữ tài chữ mệnh khéo là ghét nhau.
Trải qua một cuộc bể dâu,
Những điều trông thấy mà đau đớn lòng.
Lạ gì bỉ sắc tư phong,
Trời xanh quen thói má hồng đánh ghen.

You see the point.  
In addition, Vietnamese is a tonal language, and has 6 tones: ngang (flat/ mid level), huyền (deep/ low falling), sắc (sharp/ high rising), nặng (heavy/ low falling), hỏi (asking/ mid falling-rising), ngã (tumbling/ mid rising). 
These tones are denoted by diacritics—for example, note the diacritics on the letter a: a, à, á, ạ, ả, ã.  
(For those of you who have seen ă and â, those are different letters). 
The 6 tones are grouped into bằng (even) and trắc (not-even): bằng are ngang and huyền, trắc are the rest. 
The lục bát verse form also has general rules for bằng trắc, i.e. rules for tones. However, I will not go into details. 
Lục bát is Vietnam’s own verse form, and it is significant that Truyện Kiều was written in lục bát, because whilst some other verse forms, such as thơ Đường luật (Vietnamese variant of Chinese Tang poetry), were traditionally enjoyed by high class people, lục bát was written and enjoyed by everyone. Most of Vietnamese folk poems (ca dao) were written in lục bát form.  


To foreigners, Truyện Kiều stands out as the greatest Vietnamese literary work, but it wasn’t a sudden work that came out of nowhere—it was part of a development. But before I clarify that point, I need to talk about the Vietnamese language. 
Throughout history, Vietnam has had 3 writing systems. As Vietnam was under Chinese rule for a thousand years, the first one was chữ Hán—Chinese script, which was over time pronounced differently by Vietnamese people. Nguyễn Du himself wrote 3 poetry collections in chữ Hán: Thanh Hiên thi tập, Nam trung tạp ngâm, and Bắc hành tập lục. 
The first Vietnamese writing system was chữ nôm, based on chữ Hán—Chinese characters were usually combined to write Vietnamese words. Truyện Kiều was written in chữ nôm. 
Chữ quốc ngữ is the Vietnamese language written in Latin script, specifically based on the Portuguese alphabet. The writing system used in Vietnam today is chữ quốc ngữ. Truyện Kiều was written in chữ nôm, but I’m reading it in chữ quốc ngữ. For the most part, texts in chữ nôm can be directly transliterated and understood by Vietnamese modern speakers, but because chữ nôm was not fully standardised, there are sometimes ambiguities about which word is being used. In short, even though I say I’m reading Truyện Kiều in the original—it is not actually the original. 
Hán words written in chữ quốc ngữ are called Hán Việt, meaning Sino-Vietnamese. A large part of Vietnamese vocabulary is Sino-Vietnamese. 
To go back to my point earlier, Truyện Kiều didn’t come out of nowhere. In the 18th century, there were many works written in chữ nôm. The 2 most important works in chữ nôm that came before Truyện Kiều were Chinh phụ ngâm (Lament of a Soldier’s Wife), which was a translation into chữ nôm by Đoàn Thị Điểm and Phan Huy Ích from the original in chữ hán by Đặng Trần Côn, and is more highly regarded than the original; and Cung oán ngâm khúc (Lament of a Royal Concubine) by Nguyễn Gia Thiều. Interestingly, you may note that the 3 most important Vietnamese classics in chữ nôm were about women.  
Also in the 18th century, Vietnamese literature had Hồ Xuân Hương, a great female poet. She has been translated (would you be interested in her poems if I mention that they’re full of sexual innuendos?). 


If you place Truyện Kiều and an English translation side by side, you might notice that the translation looks longer. Apart from borrowed words (from French and English), Vietnamese words are monosyllabic, and compared to English, Vietnamese has looser and more flexible grammar. In addition, Nguyễn Du packs his poetry with metaphors and literary allusions, so translators have to use more words to convey what Nguyễn Du’s saying. The translation is generally also crude and inelegant, compared to the original, partly because, in order to help the reader understand, the translator has to turn something into a simile in places Nguyễn Du was using a direct metaphor. 
For example, here is how Nguyễn Du writes about Thúy Vân’s beauty: 

Vân xem trang trọng khác vời, 
Khuôn trăng đầy đặn nét ngài nở nang. 
Hoa cười ngọc thốt đoan trang, 
Mây thua nước tóc tuyết nhường màu da.

Here is a translation by Huỳnh Sanh Thông: 

In quiet grace Van was beyond compare: 
her face a moon, her eyebrows two full curves;
her smile a flower, her voice the song of jade;
her hair the sheen of clouds, her skin white snow.

Nguyễn Du doesn’t say Vân’s face is like the moon—he directly says “khuôn trăng”, “trăng” means moon, the word “khuôn” alone means mould but “khuôn mặt” means face. 
The next bit “nét ngài nở nang” has been debated for a long time and never been settled. Some people think it refers to her eyebrows, whilst others think it refers to her curvy body. To quote from an article I read yesterday, “Every translator is first a reader; and our reading is the product of their reading. Or rather: of their reading, followed by their writing.” 
Nguyễn Du doesn’t write explicitly that Vân’s smile is a flower and her voice is the song of jade either—he writes “hoa cười ngọc thốt”, “hoa” is flower, “cười” is smile, “ngọc” is gem/ jewel (here translated as jade), “thốt” is speak. 
Note that I’m not faulting Huỳnh Sanh Thông’s translation—he has to translate it that way so English readers understand the point, I’m only explaining the change and what effect is lost in translation. 
The next line is translated as “her hair the sheen of clouds, her skin white snow”. In Nguyễn Du, the comparison is to say that Vân’s beauty is superior. He writes “Mây thua nước tóc tuyết nhường màu da”—the word “thua” means lose/ inferior to; “nhường” means give way/ cede. 
Now, if you look at Timothy Allen’s “translation”: 

The gentle glow of a full moon
might remind you of the round face of Vân.
Her words sparkle, precious as jewels,
and her smile is as soft as rose petals.

He moves even further away from Nguyễn Du’s poem. He turns Nguyễn Du’s 4 words (comparing Vân’s face to the moon) into 2 lines and throws away the next 4 words, which, as I wrote, could refer to her eyebrows or her body. Then he expands 2 words “hoa cười” into a line, “ngọc thốt” into another line, and comfortably ignores the line about Vân’s hair and skin. Then he moves onto describing Kiều: 

But Kiều is still more beautiful. Her eyes
are dark and troubled as November seas.

I have no idea where that comes from. Here is Nguyễn Du: 

Kiều càng sắc sảo mặn mà,
So bề tài sắc lại là phần hơn.

This is Huỳnh Sanh Thông’s translation: 

Yet Kieu possessed a keener, deeper charm,
surpassing Van in talents and in looks.

Without comment on Huỳnh Sanh Thông’s translation, you can see that there is nothing in Nguyễn Du about Kiều’s eyes and November seas. 
I have briefly looked at some other passages. There is lots of liberty, and there are errors. As Timothy Allen said it himself, he reworked it into English rather than translate it properly. However, this is not stated clearly on the cover of the book (a Penguin), his “translation” got some translation award (probably by people who never read Truyện Kiều in Vietnamese), and a few of my friends have bought this version, thinking they got an acceptable translation. 
Translation is difficult, especially in poetry, and especially when the Vietnamese language and culture are very different from English. In a language, a word is not just a word, it isn’t alone—it’s part of a culture, a tradition. Much is lost in translation—translators do the best they can. It’s hard to truly appreciate Nguyễn Du without reading him in Vietnamese (the same way it’s hard to appreciate Shakespeare not in English, or Pushkin not in Russian), but if you’re curious about Vietnam’s most important classic, you might want to get a decent translation, a translation that is as close as possible. Timothy Allen’s version, from what I saw, is far from it. 

I’m reading an annotated version, by Trần Trọng Kim. I’m also looking at Lê Văn Hòe’s notes.