Annals of Vietnam: The Preservation of a Literary Heritage

ABSTRACT

In the study of literary language, we often look back to examples from history and look cross-culturally to verbal art forms in literature and in the surviving oral tradition. These observations encompass genres, revealing great diversity, that reach back many centuries. We undertake this kind of study because its lessons must be relevant to understanding literary creation today. Even though art forms have changed over the years, their fundamental underpinnings have probably been preserved. One such instance, not yet sufficiently appreciated, comes from East Asia in the interaction between Chinese culture and the cultures of its neighbours, ongoing from ancient times to the present. The following discussion focuses on the interaction between China and Vietnam because, among other reasons, it was the most longstanding, and because it serves for comparison purposes in understanding crosscultural and cross-language literary contact in general. When languages come into contact it appears that the way in which the different genres of literature are affected is not the same. Prosaic and poetic texts might be affected in different ways. The following discussion will offer one example from the cultural interaction between China and Vietnam: vernacular literature in the nôm script.

KEYWORDS:

• Literary Chinese
• Vietnamese poetry
• music
• morphosyllabic characters
• Nôm
• Kanji

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In order of mention: (1) the historic reform of language and literature of modern China culminating in the May Fourth Movement and New Culture Movement, enacted decisively in the years to come, Chow Tse-Tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), and (2) the fieldwork of the Russian folklorists of late nineteenth century, James Bailey and Tatyana Ivanova, “The Russian Oral Epic Tradition: An Introduction,” in An Anthology of Russian Folk Epics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), xv–xlix, and the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (OPOYAZ), Boris Eichenbaum, “The Theory of the Formal Method,” in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, edited by Ladislav Matejka and Ktystyna Pomorska (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971[1926]), 3–37.

2 Mark Alves, “Sino-Vietnamese Grammatical Vocabulary and Sociolinguistic Conditions for Borrowing,” Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society 1 (2009): 1–9, and Nguyễn Ngọc Bích, A Thousand Years of Vietnamese Poetry (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975).

3 The present proposal for further research is based on still incomplete lines of investigation initiated during a two year collaboration with the Graduate Institute of Linguistics of the National Chengchi University in Taipei that included a series of four research visits to the Institute of Han Nôm Studies and the Vietnam National University in Hanoi from 2018 to 2019. See: Phan Trang and Norbert Francis, “Chữ nôm and the Cradle of Vietnamese Poetry,” Journal of Chinese Writing Systems 3 (2019): 69–71.

4 Phạm Hải Văn, “The Influence of T’ang Poetry on Vietnamese Poetry Written in Nôm Characters and in the Quốc Ngữ Writing System,” doctoral dissertation (Washington, DC: Georgetown University, 1980).

5 Keith Taylor, “Literacy in Early Seventeenth-century North Vietnam,” in New Perspectives on the History and Historiography of Southeast Asia, edited by Michael Aung-Thwin and Kenneth Hall (London: Routledge, 2011), 183–98 and Alexander Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).

6 See the study by Zev Handel, Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script (Leiden: Brill, 2019), on this important distinction and how it affected the course of vernacular writing development in each case.

7 This grouping of languages, belonging to the ‘Chinese family,’ follows general consensus in linguistics that languages such as Mandarin, Cantonese and Wu are independent one from the other, as they are not mutually intelligible. Alternatively, following common practice or political criteria, they are categorised as ‘dialects’ of one language: Chinese (according to this view, not a ‘family of languages’).

8 The term chữ nôm is often used together with the broader category of hán nôm. The former refers specifically to the Vietnamese adaptation of Chinese characters, creating an independent script. Hán nôm encompasses the entire corpus of ancient texts produced in Vietnam, written either in Chinese (chữ hán) or in Vietnamese (chữ nôm). Written materials often included both chữ hán and (Vietnamese-specific) chữ nôm characters in the same document, there being an important overlap between the two systems, in some instances more and in others less, depending on text type and audience. In Vietnam, today, Chinese characters, per se (referring to the script used to write the Chinese language), are called hán văn (Chinese script), chữ hán (characters-Chinese) or chữ nho (characters-Confucian). Literally, chữ nôm means ‘characters-Southern.’

9 ‘Low-fidelity’ refers to the degrees of mismatch between the language itself, as spoken, and a script (e.g. borrowed from a foreign language/culture) in which the native language grammar and sound patterns are not represented faithfully enough.

10 Nguyễn Đình-Hoà, “Graphemic Borrowing from Chinese: The Case of Chữ No^m – Vietnam's Demotic Script,” Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology 61 (1992): 383–432; and Trần Trọng Dương, “A Mandala of Literacy Practices in Premodern Vietnam: A Study of Buddhist Temples,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 13 (2018): 88–126.

11 John Bentley, “The Origin of Man'yōgana,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 64 (2001): 59–73.

12 The question about the misalignment with Literary Chinese could be rephrased: Because the Korean and Japanese languages differ typologically, to a significant extent, from Chinese, writers were compelled to account for this grammatical difference. In comparison, with Vietnamese grammar being ‘closer’ to Chinese, why couldn't writers simply make the necessary accommodations in reading and composing? Interestingly, the Zhuang language, similarly compared in grammar to Chinese, and similarly contrasted to Japanese and Korean, also followed the nôm model.

13 Yoon Seon-Tae, “The Creation of Idu,” Korea Journal 50 (2010): 97–123.

14 In Vietnam, a 1718 imperial order called attention to persons who had ‘taken vulgar sentences from tales in the national language, and without any distinction between what could be done and what should not be done they have engraved them on woodblocks, then printed and sold.’ The imperial decree stipulated that the practice ‘must be prohibited.’ ‘Henceforth, all those who own in their homes either printing blocks or printed copies of such books must turn them in to the mandarins so that they can examine them and destroy them completely’ (cited in Nguyễn Đình-Hoà 412). In contrast, during other periods nôm attained either official status (Hồ Dynasty 1400–1407) or widespread recognition (nineteenth century years of the Nguyễn Dynasty).

15 Huỳnh Sanh Thông (editor), The Heritage of Vietnamese Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979).

16 Trần Trọng Dương, personal communication, 2019.

17 Thi Nhiť-Quýnh Cao and John Schafer, “From Verse Narrative to Novel: The Development of Prose Fiction in Vietnam,” The Journal of Asian Studies 47 (1988): 756–77.

18 Nguyễn Tuấn Cường, “Research of Square Scripts in Vietnam: An Overview and Prospects,” Journal of Chinese Writing Systems 3 (2019): 189–98.

19 Phan Truyen Van, Nguyễn Kha Cong and Nakagawa Masaki, “A Nôm Historical Document Recognition System for Digital Archiving,” International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition 19 (2016): 49–64.

20 John Balaban, Ca Dao Vietnam: Vietnamese Folk Poetry (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2003), 4.

21 John Balaban, “Vietnamese Oral Poetry,” Literature East and West 16.4 (1975): 1217–243.

22 Huỳnh Sanh Thông, “Introduction,” in The Tale of Kieu, edited by Huỳnh Sanh Thông (New York: Random House, 1973), 3–29.

23 John Balaban, “Translating Vietnamese Poetry,” Manoa 11.2 (1999): 76–80.

24 John Balaban (translator), Spring Essence: The Poetry of Hồ Xuân Hương (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2000).

25 Laszlo Szegö, “On the Genre of the Truyện,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 47 (1994): 417–34.

26 Công Huyền Tôn Nữ Nha-Trang, “The Role of French Romanticism in the New Poetry Movement in Vietnam,” in Borrowings and Adaptations in Vietnamese Culture, edited by Truong Buu Lam (Manoa: University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1987), 52–61.

27 Công Huyền Tôn Nữ Nha-Trang, “The Emergence of Modern Vietnamese Literature,” paper presented at Center for Southeast Asian Studies, UCLA (November 17, 1999): 1–8.

28 The work of recovering and documenting the vast body of oral tradition poetry is closely related to the study of the national musical traditions, Stephen Addiss, “Hat a Dao, the Sung Poetry of North Vietnam,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 93 (1973): 18–31. Coinciding with the emergence of the new poetic styles (in turn tied to widespread literacy in the alphabetic script, quốc ngữ), international influences in popular music began to be felt beginning with the founding of the Conservatoire de Musique Français d'Extreme-Orient and other European sources, Jason Gibbs, “Reform and Tradition in Early Vietnamese Popular Song,” Nhạc Việt 6 (1997): 5–33. The nhạc cài cách, ‘reformed music,’ arose in parallel to the New Poetry movement. Rather than an opposition between traditional and modern, study of the linked literature-music developments will be able to find important continuities in each phase of transition and convergence associated, as they are, with cultural contact. Initially, discussion of musical convergence came to be highly politicised; today it is much less so.

29 The authoritative study of diglossia involving the Chinese languages is Don Snow, Cantonese as Written Language: The Growth of a Written Chinese Vernacular (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004). Two illustrations of the concept in relation to literacy would be Vietnam and the region of China where Cantonese is widely spoken. Before the modern era, in Vietnam, among the urban elite both literacy and knowledge of Chinese coincide, and conversely in the villages non-literacy and monolingualism in Vietnamese. Today, among speakers of Cantonese, young people in Guangdong are, as a rule, bilingual and learned literacy via Mandarin. In Hong Kong, potentially there would be more interest in the use of vernacular Cantonese characters among the significant portion of the population that does not speak Mandarin. The converse, conceivably, would be the case in Guangdong, aside from the difference in using simplified and traditional characters.

30 Lê Thị-Nhâm and Norbert Francis “Language and literacy learning of Chinese-Vietnamese immigrants in Taiwan,” (in preparation).

31 Robert Bauer, “The Chinese-based Writing System of the Zhuang Language,” Cahiers de linguistique Asie Orientale 29 (2000): 223–53.

32 The remarkable method of intergenerational transmission from priest to acolyte, described in fieldwork report by David Holm, in some special way, apparently, has preserved the integrity of the Zhuang texts – the master's copy is normally burned along with personal belongings on the occasion of his death, David Holm, “A Typology of Readings of Chinese Characters in Traditional Zhuang Manuscripts,” Cahiers de Linguistique-Asie Orientale 38 (2009): 245–92. In addition, copying by hand of the texts by apprentices is carefully supervised because, in part, many if not most apprentices do not read (decode the Zhuang characters skillfully) from the pages of manuscripts in the normal sense, but rather largely recite from memory the content that they have learned by repeated listening and reciting.

33 Milena Doleželová-Velingerová, “The Origins of Modern Chinese Literature,” in Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era, edited by Merle Goldman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 17–36.

34 Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, a Critical Edition, edited by Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008[1918]), 41–60.

35 For a fair and balanced assessment of the Fenollosa-Pound project, readers can refer to the discussion in: James Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), Xie Ming, Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry: Cathay, Translation, and Imagism (New York: Garland, 1999) and Yip Wai-Lim, Ezra Pound's Cathay (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969).

36 Stephen Addiss, “Music of the Cham Peoples,” Asian Music 2 (1971): 32–38.