The little white attic

Under my last blog post, I got a comment from Thomas Parker asking how I selected translations, so let’s jot down some thoughts.  1/ Anyone ...

1/ These chapters of Hong lou meng make me think about Truyện Kiều : both Giả Liễn (Jia Lian) and Thúc Sinh are terrified of their wives an...

1/ In chapter 24, 2 new servants are introduced.  The first one is Uyên Ương (Yuanyang) , a servant of Giả Mẫu (Jia Mu) the grandmother. She...

1/ My last blog post about Hong lou meng wasn’t very positive, but chapter 5 is where things get interesting. As it happens, I like realist...

A few months ago I read and wrote about Truyện Kiều (known in English as The Tale of Kieu ), Vietnam’s greatest literary work ( click here ...

Me being featured at The Common Breath : talking about Jane Austen, Murasaki Shikibu, Lev Tolstoy, Edith Wharton, Nguyễn Du, and some other...

My copy.  1/ One may ask why Royall Tyler, as a translator, doesn’t pick a nickname for each character and stick to it, to make it easier...

1/ In Truyện Kiều , Nguyễn Du focuses on the eponymous character, but there’s another female character I’m curious about—her younger sister ...

In writing Truyện Kiều ( The Tale of Kieu ), Nguyễn Du took the plot from Kim Vân Kiều truyện ( Jin Yun Qiao ), a banal and insignificant C...

1/ In my brief blog post about Confucianism, I wrote that Truyện Kiều must be understood in light of Confucianism. Indeed,  Truyện Kiều is...

This blog post is written for my non-Vietnamese friends who are interested in Truyện Kiều ( The Tale of Kieu ) and intend to read it in tran...