Tang Poetry in Vietnam

Forty-eight thousand nine hundred poems.

That is how many poems sit inside a single collection. It runs to 900 books, laid one after another.

The number is too big to picture, so try it this way. Every night before bed, one person in the house reads aloud exactly one poem. Not a single night is skipped. No break for the Lunar New Year, no break for illness, no break on nights when the power goes out. At that steady pace, it would take more than 130 years to finish the collection.

So the grandparents would start reading as small children and keep reading for a whole lifetime, then hand the books to the parents. The parents would read for the rest of their own lives, then pass them on to the children. The children would read until their hair turned white, then hand them to the grandchildren. Three lifetimes in a row, and the last book would still not be turned to its final page.

There is one more number, and it is much stranger. Those 48,900 poems were not written by one person. They came from more than 2,200 different people.

A crowd of 2,200 people would fill a whole large school. Think of a school where every pupil, every teacher, even the guard at the gate, left behind one poem. And every one of those poems was copied out by later generations, kept safe and bound into books.

The collection is called the Complete Tang Poems. In 1705, the Kangxi Emperor ordered every poem of the Tang era still surviving anywhere to be gathered up. He was an emperor of the Qing, the dynasty then ruling China. Two years later, in 1707, the printing was finished.

But the poems inside are far older than that. The Tang began in 618 and came to a close in 907. By the time anyone sat down to copy out the collection, these poems had already been wandering through everyday life for anywhere from nearly 800 to more than 1,000 years.

Now comes the best question.

Out of 48,900 poems, how many does an ordinary Vietnamese person know by heart?

Not a thousand. Not a hundred. Usually just a few. Four or five, learned back in school and kept whole in the mind until the hair turns gray. Generation after generation of Vietnamese schoolchildren have read them, and the odd thing is that the few survivors are all very short. One of them has just 20 characters.

The first is about someone lying in bed who cannot fall asleep.

Moonlight falls in front of the bed, so white that the sleepless one mistakes it for frost on the ground. The person looks up at the bright moon. Then looks down, and thinks of home.

That is all. Nothing more. Twenty characters, two movements. Looking up, then looking down.

The poem was written by Li Bai, whom people in Vietnam call Lý Bạch. He was born in 701 and died in 762. In the Vietnamese reading of the Chinese characters, his last two lines sound like this.

Cử đầu vọng minh nguyệt, đê đầu tư cố hương.

The second poem leaves grown-ups with an even bigger lump in the throat.

An old man returns to the village where he grew up. He left it as a child, and now that he is back, the hair on his head has thinned away. Only his voice has not changed at all. It is still the voice of the village, the accent he carried all his life without ever letting it slip away.

The children of the neighborhood meet him in the lane. They look at him, and they do not know who he is. They have no reason to know, because they have never seen him before. So they smile, and politely ask him a question.

Tiếu vấn, khách tòng hà xứ lai.

It means: smiling, they ask where the guest has come from.

Khách, the word for a guest. A guest in his very own village. That poem is by He Zhizhang, who was born in 659 and died in 744, and it is exactly four lines long.

The third poem sets a tower beside a river: the Yellow Crane Tower. It is said that long ago someone flew away from that spot on a yellow crane and never came back. The crane is gone, and only the tower is left standing there, bare, while the white clouds keep drifting by, one thousand years after another. As evening falls, a traveler on the tower looks toward home, but the mist over the waves hides everything, and nothing can be seen. The poem was written by Cui Hao.

More than a thousand years later, in Vietnam, there lived a poet named Tản Đà.

His real name was Nguyễn Khắc Hiếu. He was born in 1889 and died in 1939. His pen name joins two things from his home region, Mount Tản Viên and the Đà River. He wrote poems and newspaper pieces, and he translated Tang poetry into Vietnamese so well that he is still considered one of the finest translators of it.

On October 10, 1937, his translation of the Yellow Crane Tower poem appeared in the newspaper Ngày Nay. It opens like this.

Who rode the yellow crane, and where did it go?

And here the Yellow Crane Tower is left standing, alone and bare!

There is a small detail here, and it is a lovely one. The original is written in eight lines, seven characters to a line. Tản Đà turned it into lục bát, a line of six syllables followed by a line of eight. It is the very rhythm a grandmother uses to sing a grandchild to sleep in a hammock at noon. He did not simply carry the poem across. He brought it home.

And Vietnamese poets wrote in that eight-line form too, for several hundred years. From about the 13th century, Vietnamese people used chữ Nôm, a script for writing down their own spoken language. Then poets poured that script into the eight-line mold. Nguyễn Trãi was one of them. Hồ Xuân Hương and Nguyễn Khuyến were others, and there were many more.

What they poured in was entirely their own. The village pond in autumn. A fan in the hand. The everyday talk of the market, so plain that a single reading tells you a Vietnamese poet wrote it.

So what happened here was not copying. Vietnamese people read these poems, translated them, chanted them, and carried them into classrooms and into memory. The form stayed the same, but everything inside it became their own a very long time ago.

Now, back to the number at the start.

Forty-eight thousand nine hundred poems. More than 2,200 writers. Nine hundred books. Almost all of it still lies quietly in those books, never read in an ordinary home, and perhaps never to be read.

What slipped through that sea of poetry to reach the classrooms of so many generations of Vietnamese schoolchildren turns out to be neither the longest poem nor the most skillful.

It is only an old man who spent his whole life far away and came back to the edge of his own village with his voice unchanged. The children of the lane politely asked him where he had come from. Four lines, that is all. And wherever it is read aloud at home, someone is bound to fall quiet at the word khách.