I was looking for a short example of lục bát, a Vietnamese verse form built from alternating six- and eight-syllable lines. Naturally, I found one at the beginning of a poem 3,254 lines long.
I am taking only the first eight lines. That gives me four six-eight pairs, enough to hear the form at work without attempting the entire poem at once.
The poem
This is one commonly printed modern text. There is no single definitive version, and some of the earliest editions differ even in these opening lines.
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.
Cảo thơm lần giở trước đèn,
Phong tình cổ lục còn truyền sử xanh.
A rough pronunciation guide
This is only a rough, Hanoi-leaning sound guide. Each space marks one Vietnamese syllable. Combinations such as nguh-uh-ee still have to fit into one beat:
chahm nahm chawng koy nguh-uh-ee tah
chuh tie chuh muh-yng kheow lah ghet nyow
chai kwah moht koo-uhk bay zuh-ow
nyuhng dee-ow chuh-owng thuh-ee mah dow duhn lawng
lah zee bee sahk tuh fawng
chuh-ee sigh-ng kwen thoy mah huh-owng dahyng ghen
cow thuhm luhn zuh chuh-uhk den
fawng ting koh look kawn chwee-uhn suh sigh-ng
Vietnamese tones carry meaning, so this can only get me somewhere near the sound. Kh is the throat sound in the Scottish loch. Initial ng is the end of singer without the si. Final t and c stop abruptly. The native recording below is a much better guide.
A deliberately naive translation
A hundred years in the human realm,
talent and fate somehow hate each other.
Having passed through one sea-and-mulberry change,
the things one sees bring pain to the heart.
No surprise: scant in one thing, abundant in another.
Blue Heaven has a habit of envying rosy cheeks.
Turning the fragrant manuscript before the lamp,
an old record of love is still handed down in the green annals.
Before I read a good translation
The opening reads like the introduction to an epic story, which of course it is. The picture it paints is vivid, and I am already expecting a tireless hero.
Hearing it
I listened to NSND Thanh Hoài recite the opening in the traditional ngâm Kiều style. The first eight lines run from about 0:27 to 1:42.
Unfortunately, the traditional recitation did not add much for me. If anything, the unfamiliar language and melodious delivery distracted me from the more sober story the translation seemed to promise.
Two translations
Here are two working translations. The first stays closer to the Vietnamese imagery. The second tries to read more naturally as an English poem.
Close to the Vietnamese
In the hundred-year span of human life,
talent and destiny seem perversely to hate each other.
Through one great turning of sea into mulberry fields,
what has been witnessed makes the heart ache.
Why wonder? What is scant on one side is abundant on the other;
Blue Heaven has long made jealous war on rosy cheeks.
By lamplight, I slowly turn the fragrant pages:
a chronicle of love, still handed down in the green annals.
More literary
Across the hundred years allotted us,
talent and fate seem sworn to thwart each other.
I have watched the sea become a mulberry field;
what I have witnessed leaves the heart in pain.
No wonder: one gift is lavished, another denied.
Blue Heaven has always begrudged a rosy face.
By lamplight I unfold these fragrant pages:
an ancient tale of love, still living in the annals.
After reading the translations
The second translation is more literary but also, for me, less metaphorical and easier to understand. The tension between talent and fate, abundance and dearth, is a familiar theme in epic stories. This translation makes it clear that this poem is no different.
What I learned
Nguyễn Du wrote The Tale of Kiều in the early nineteenth century, although nobody knows exactly when. He took the plot from a seventeenth-century Chinese prose romance and remade it as 3,254 lines of Vietnamese lục bát. The plot may have come from elsewhere. The form, music, emotional weight and place in Vietnamese culture are his.
The alternating line lengths are only the beginning of how lục bát works. The rhyme carries forward into the next pair, while the Vietnamese tones make a second pattern of their own. The form comes from Vietnamese oral and folk traditions. It is meant to be heard as much as read, even if this particular performance did not bring me closer to it.
Kiều is a young woman whose talent and beauty do not protect her. When her family is threatened, she sacrifices her own future to save them and is carried through years of separation and suffering. The opening is not just a philosophical introduction. It gives us the terms of her story: talent against fate, beauty punished by Heaven, and abundance in one part of a life paid for by deprivation in another.
Nguyễn Du himself lived through civil war, the fall of the Lê order his family had served and the rise of the Nguyễn dynasty. The sea turning into mulberry fields was already an old image for upheaval. It would not have been an abstract one for him.
The poem was written in chữ Nôm, the script once used for vernacular Vietnamese. No manuscript in Nguyễn Du’s hand survives, so there is no single definitive text. The earliest version found so far dates from 1866, and the surviving versions differ even in these opening lines. What I have used above is a commonly printed modern version, not the only possible one.
Rereading it
I am very tempted to read on. The poem and the translation are compelling. The tension between these opposing forces feels like an invitation to witness something bigger than myself.
The line or image I kept thinking about
The opening couplet itself shook me:
Across the hundred years allotted us,
talent and fate seem sworn to thwart each other.
To me, it feels as if talent is destined to fight what fate has already decided, the banal inevitable thing that would happen were it not for the constant battle to push back and turn it into something interesting. This probably says more about me than about the poem.