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An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems
444 pages
A sweeping, deeply felt journey through a millennium of voices, capturing the soul of a nation through its enduring verses.
What it feels like
Reading this anthology feels like walking through a vast, centuries-old garden where every stone and blossom holds a story. The pace is inherently leisurely, inviting you to linger over ancient verses before stepping into the turbulent, elegiac currents of the twentieth century. Huynh Sanh Thong's translations are both reverent and accessible, capturing the rhythmic heartbeat of a culture that has long turned to poetry to process love, war, and exile. The mood shifts from the quiet contemplation of nature to the profound sorrow of diaspora, yet a thread of remarkable resilience binds it all together. It is a deeply grounding experience, perfect for readers who want to absorb the emotional and historical landscape of Vietnam through the intimate, enduring voices of its people.
- Mood
- contemplative
- melancholic
- sweeping
- rooted
- Tone
- scholarly
- reverent
- elegiac
- intimate
- Pace
- leisurely
- Themes
- cultural resilience · the passage of time · exile and diaspora · nature and the seasons · war and its aftermath
- The writing
- Meticulously translated with an ear for the rhythmic subtleties of the original Vietnamese, supported by deeply illuminating historical commentary.
- The arc
- Moves from the quiet reverence of ancient traditions through the turbulent sorrows of war, arriving at a poignant reflection on exile and endurance.
- Who it's for
- Readers who love immersing themselves in the literary heritage of a culture, appreciating poetry that bridges the personal and the historical.
Content notes
- war
- colonialism
- exile
- grief
About the book
This superb anthology brings together a thousand years of Vietnamese poems for the English-speaking world. Huynh Sanh Thong, widely regarded as the preeminent translator of the poetry of Vietnam, here presents more than three hundred poems by 150 poets, some celebrated, some obscure. Many of the poems are not otherwise available in English.
The author's historical and critical introduction to Vietnamese poetry, and his abundant explanatory notes throughout the collection, assist readers in understanding and appreciating each work. Huynh observes that Vietnamese people in all walks of life compose, read, and listen to poetry; this collection of poems thus reveals much about Vietnamese language, literature, history, and culture.
He has organized the poems - which range from ancient to very recent works - around nine main themes that include Vietnamese views of society, responses to foreign influences, and feelings about such universal themes as relationships between men and women, the role of art in life, and conflicts among social classes.
A generous selection of twentieth-century poems represents the work of well-known poets, major political figures, and men and women of the Vietnamese diaspora after the Communist victory in 1975.
Description from Open Library.
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