Hồ Xuân Hương
Nicknamed “the Queen of Nôm poetry,” Hồ Xuân Hương was born in 1772 during the later Lȇ Dynasty (1428–c. 1789) in Ward Khán Xuân, Hà nội, to the mandarin Hồ Phi Diễn (1703–1786) and his young concubine with the surname Hà. The biographical details of Hồ Xuân Hương’s life vary and much of what is known about her is derived from her poems, though some scholars have contended that she may not have existed at all, having instead been a persona invented by a collective of rogue scholars. Hồ Xuân Hương likely lived in the West Lake neighborhood in Hà nội and studied both Classical Chinese and Nôm, or “southern script,” a written language based on phonemes and reflecting the everyday speech of the general population. It was unusual for women of this period to have had such an education. Based on her poetry, she was likely married until her reputed husband was executed for bribery, followed by a period of serving as a concubine to a man whom she called “Mr. Toad” in her poems. Disaffected with the servility of both conditions, she likely entered a Buddhist convent. Then, having grown discontented with monastic life, she chose instead to travel the countryside in northern Vietnam, an experience vividly chronicled in her poems.
Hồ Xuân Hương wrote in the Đuờng luật (lüshi) style, based on the structural framework of seven-syllable, eight-line verse, and quatrains often seen in classic Tang poetry. However, she deftly “vietnamized” it by incorporating the double entendres that interwove erotic imagery with diction, scenes, or objects from everyday life. Her clever ability to equivocate the sexually suggestive nature of her work earned her the admiration of court mandarins and protected her from punishment during an era of restrictive Confucian rule. Hồ Xuân Hương was most prolific during the rule of Emperor Gia Long (1802–20), using her poetry as a vehicle to critique the hypocrisy of social institutions and conventions, particularly the maltreatment of women.
Antony Landes, a French colonial administrator and de facto mayor of Hà nội, commissioned the earliest surviving hand-copied volume of Hồ Xuân Hương’s Nôm poetry in 1893. Subsequently, her work was widely disseminated via woodblock templates in the early twentieth century. As Chữ Quốc Ngữ—the romanized script first developed by European missionaries in the seventeenth century—became the preferred mode of communication, her Nôm texts were simultaneously reproduced as romanized Vietnamese by anonymous transcribers, yielding variations in print. While she is chiefly known for her Nôm poetry, in 1964, a manuscript containing twenty-four poems written in Classical Chinese (among twenty-eight in Nôm script), was discovered and attributed to her. In contemporary Vietnam, Hồ Xuân Hương is regarded as a prominent figure in Vietnamese literature while the Nôm script in which she mostly wrote has been key in the preservation of Vietnamese literary heritage. Modern Vietnamese scholars, however, are still debating her total poetic output, ranging anywhere from forty-six to 213 poems.
Regarding the scholarship and translations of Hồ Xuân Hương’s work, French scholar Maurice Durand first introduced Hồ Xuân Hương to a wider Western audience by discussing her complex use of double entendres in L’oeuvre de la poétesse vietnamienne Hồ Xuân Hương (École francaise d’Extrême-Orient, 1968). Vietnamese literary critic Nguyễn Khắc Viện, together with scholar and translator Hữu Ngọc, showcased her English translated poetry in Vietnamese Literature: Historical Background and Texts (Red River, 1972), an anthology geared toward foreign visitors to Hà nội during the Vietnam War. In the United States, Hồ Xuân Hương’s poetry was first translated into English by Nguyễn Ngọc Bích in A Thousand Years of Vietnamese Poetry (Alfred A. Knopf, 1975) and subsequently by Huỳnh Sanh Thông in An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems (Yale University Press, 1996). Other translators of Hồ Xuân Hương’s poetry include John Balaban via Spring Essence (Copper Canyon Press, 2000), Lady Borton and Xuân Oánh via The Defiant Muse: Vietnamese Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present (The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2007), Marilyn Chin, Linh Dinh, and Thuý Đinh.