An Anthology
ietnamese Poems

An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems
From the Eleventh through
the Twentieth Centuries
Edited and Translated by
Huynh Sanh Thong
This superb anthology brings together a thousand years of Vietnamese poems for the Englishspeaking 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 so-

Continued on back flap

RICHMOND

LIBRARY-RICHMOND,

CA 94804-3081

Richmond Public Library
E

An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems

An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems
From the Eleventh through the Twentieth Centuries

Edited

and translated by Huynh Sanh Thong

Yale University Press

New Haven and London

Copyright © 1996 by Yale University.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in
whole or in part, including illustrations,
in any form (beyond that copying per-

mitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the
U.S. Copyright Law and except by
reviewers for the public press), without
written permission from the publishers.
Designed by Sonia L. Scanlon
Set in Bodoni type by Asco Trade
Typesetting Ltd., Hong Kong.
Printed by Vail-Ballou Press,

Binghamton, New York.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Data

An anthology of Vietnamese poems : from the
eleventh through the twentieth centuries /

edited and translated by Huynh Sanh
Thong.
p- cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-300-06410-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Vietnamese poetry—Translations into

English. I. Huynh, Sanh Thong, 1926PL4378.65.E5A57
1996
895.9'221008—dc20
95-37761
CIP
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of

the Committee on Production Guidelines
for Book Longevity of the Council on
Library Resources.
100987654321

The muse lends me her lyre of myriad tunes,
her brush of myriad tints—I want to play
a wizard working wonders, magic tricks
with all the sounds and colors of the earth.

—Thé Li

wo

ee

Contents

preface

ix

acknowledgments
introduction

xi

1

Vietnam and China 27
The Buddhist Ethos 61
Responses to the West 84
After the Russian Revolution
Men and Women

153

211

Life and Art 296
The Passage of Time 316
Peasants, Merchants, and Scholars

War and Peace 378
index of poets and poems
bibliography

427

419

352

ote

Preface

In 1979 Yale University Press published The Heritage of Vietnamese
Poetry. Although that collection of premodern poems has gone out of

print, there is renewed demand for such an anthology on the part of
instructors of courses on Vietnamese history, the Vietnam War,
Southeast Asian and East Asian literatures, Asian-American studies,
and women's studies.
Not only to meet the needs of those academic constituencies but

also to provide for Vietnamese throughout the world and their international friends an omnibus of Vietnamese verse in English translation, I have prepared An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems. This
book consists of 322 works by about a hundred fifty poets, celebrated, obscure, or anonymous. It includes 125 poems (many revised)
from the 1979 volume, as well as two long narratives written before
the twentieth century: the Bich cau ky ngé (“The marvelous

encounter at Blue Creek,” Poem 209] and the Trinh thw (“The
constant mouse,” Poem 210). Besides those two, this book numbers
five other traditional poems of above average length: the Chiéu hon
(“Calling all souls,” Poem 45) by Nguyén Du, the Cung oan ngém
khitc (“A song of sorrow inside the royal harem,” Poem 44) by
Nguyén Gia Thiéu, the Chinh phu ngam (“The song of a soldier's

wife,” Poem 322) by Dang Tran Cén and Phan Huy {ch, the Tré céc
(“Catfish and Toad,” Poem 37), and the Luc sic tranh céng (“The
quarrel of the six beasts,” Poem 302). Significantly, the new anthol-

ogy omits most of the poems written in Chinese and instead features
hundreds of works composed during the twentieth century. The new
introduction, an emended and expanded version of the introduction
to The Heritage of Vietnamese Poetry, takes such changes into

account.
All the poems, ancient and modern, are grouped under nine
headings meant to suggest the various ways in which, for a thousand

years or so, the Vietnamese people collectively or individually have
responded to either cultural pressures or military and political
changes and have debated in their minds such universal issues as the
relations between men and women, the role of art in life, war and
peace, conflicts between the social classes, and attitudes toward time,
change, old age, and death. Because history is not created—nor its

burdens borne—solely by the powerful and famous, I have made
room in this anthology for poems by ordinary, uncelebrated persons:

they have something to say and thus earn their place in a book that is
meant to contribute toward understanding the Vietnamese experience. The omission of works by many far better known poets by no

means implies that I consider them unworthy of inclusion.
Translating poetry has always enjoyed a place of honor in Vietnamese literature. As heir to that tradition, I have attempted to the
best of my ability to meet the three criteria observed by successful
translators in the past: fidelity (tin), expressiveness (dat), and
elegance (nha). I hope that my work does not fall too short of
standards once set by such poets as Phan Huy Ich and Tan Da.

preface

x

Acknowledgments

An amateur loves not wisely but too well. Since the early 1970s, I
have enjoyed the good fortune of finding in academia scholars with
such openness of mind and largesse of heart that they have glossed

over all my eccentricities and shortcomings and welcomed me as one
of their own. For offering me the chance to dream of a book like this
and then to see it achieve realization in print, I honor the memory of
the late

John M. Echols and of the late

to thank Oliver W. Wolters,

John K. Musgrave; and I wish

James C. Scott, Alton L. Becker, Eric

Henry, Alexander B. Woodside, David G. Marr, John K. Whitmore,
David Chandler, Gerald C. Hickey, Keith Weller Taylor, Stephen
O'Harrow, Kristin Pelzer, Marion W. Ross, John C. Schafer, David

W. P. Elliott, Nguyén Khac Kham, Nguyén Dinh Hoa, Hé Hué Tam
(or Hue-Tam Ho-Tai), Céng-Huyén Tén-Niv Nha-Trang (or NhaTrang Pensinger), Lucy Nguyén Héng Nhiém, Tran Van Dinh, and
Truong Bwu Lam.
At the request of Yale University Press, two of those scholars
(who prefer anonymity) set aside their personal concerns and read

the manuscript with care. Their judicious comments resolved most of
my perplexities, helping me to temper my excesses and decide on the
final shape and size of this book. As it still leaves much to be desired,
I take full blame for all its flaws and infelicities. Kim Ninh and Dan
Duffy gave me recent materials from Vietnam, and I gratefully

acknowledge their assistance.
To the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation I am
grateful for a generous fellowship, awarded in 1987: it has freed me
from financial pressures and let me focus both time and energy on
this project and on several others, too.
The book has benefited in no small measure from the suggestions

of Susan Abel, the manuscript editor, and I deeply appreciate her
professional skill and devotion.

xt

As a token of my love and gratitude I dedicate this book to my
wife, Yén, who, in the heroic tradition of Vietnamese womanhood,
has put up with me for forty years.

acknowledgments

xii

An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems

Introduction

The strikingly worded and artfully measured utterance, whether it
takes the form of a saying, a riddle, or a song, has doubtless enlivened the speech of Vietnamese peasants from time immemorial. But

not until Vietnam had been exposed for many centuries to Chinese
writing and literature did Vietnamese oral poetry come to be set down
on paper and become a favorite and highly regarded pursuit of the
educated class. An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems gathers in translation a varied and representative sampling of works composed by
Vietnamese poets over the past thousand years, both in Vietnamese
and (occasionally) in Chinese. (Italics for the title of a poem indicate
that it was originally written in Chinese.) All the poems, whether
they were created by consummate artists or by dilettantes, provide
instructive glimpses into Vietnamese experience and history.
The poems composed before the twentieth century, in particular,
reflect Vietnamese society and culture from the vantage point of the
dominant group: the ruling kings and mandarins, along with those
whose influence derived from their scholarly training and expertise.
A study of those poems may answer some questions about Vietnamese ambivalence toward Chinese culture, and about the dual process
of cultural borrowing and cultural resistance in Vietnam. How did
transplants from China, the seedbed of all East Asian classical civilizations, fare in Southeast Asian soil? To what extent did they manage to survive more or less intact in the tropical climate? To what

extent did they have to change and adapt? Here I seek to trace the
birth and growth of a national poetry, which at its most mature rec-

onciled and wedded into a harmonious whole two disparate, even
antagonistic elements: the “little,” or oral, folk tradition of the Vietnamese village, and the “great,” or written, learned tradition from

China.

When Ngé Quyén won his battle on the Bach-dang River and in-

dependence for his country in 938, Vietnam had gone through a little

more than a thousand years of Chinese domination, from the Han to
the T'ang dynasties. The refusal of the “Southern” people, after ten
centuries of “Northern” influence, to allow the Chinese empire to
assimilate them, and their demand for a separate existence, demonstrate an almost obsessive sense of ethnic and cultural identity, a selfaffirmation tantamount to xenophobia. Therefore, at first blush, it

may seem perverse that as soon as they had thrown off the Chinese
yoke, native Vietnamese rulers would methodically proceed to reimpose on their people a structure of social and political control
patterned on the Chinese model. This paradox, more apparent than
real, can be explained by the uniquely vulnerable position into which
both geography and history had thrust Vietname vis-a-vis China.
Here was a land that in size, population, and resources was overshadowed and dwarfed by its gigantic neighbor to the north, which
never willingly curbed its appetite for expansion and always kept an
eye out for the first chance, the flimsiest excuse, to march south again
in the name of a civilizing mission. Even as today many non-Western

peoples all over the world have chosen deliberate Westernization as
an alternative to colonialism and imperialism, Vietname's leaders
preferred to sinicize the country selectively and voluntarily, rather
than allow it to be sinicized totally and by force. When some northern
visitor inquired about local customs, H6 Quy Ly replied as if he had

been challenged to defend his country against a charge of barbarism
(Poem 14 in The Heritage of Vietnamese Poetry): “The Quiet South
boasts polished ways. /Our King and subjects heed Han laws. / Our
caps and gowns obey T'ang rules.”
The need to “civilize” their country themselves and forestall
Chinese conquest lay behind Vietnamese monarchs' decision to bor-

row from Sung China the neo-Confucian ideology and its institutional
apparatus. Imitation of the Chinese model, moreover, had a profound impact on Vietnamese society in two ways: classical Chinese
was adopted as the language for official business; and through the

system of civil service examinations, literature was elevated to a

introduction

2

preeminent status among all pursuits. Because those examinations
required the writing of verse as a crucial exercise, poetry—which
had been thriving in the oral tradition—now came to occupy a cen-

tral niche in the written culture imported from China, as well. If
before, farmers had won admiration at village festivals for their skill
in improvising rhymes and ditties, now scholars too were expected
to rise to any occasion—an academic contest, a reunion of friends, a
farewell party—and compose serviceable poems, if not masterpieces,
in classical Chinese. Throughout the millennium of Chinese domination, Vietnamese men and women were in all likelihood schooled in
the script of the conqueror and encouraged to put it to poetic use.

The earliest extant specimen of Chinese verse written by a Vietnamese, however, dates from the waning decades of the tenth century,
when Vietnam had already driven its conquerors out (“Farewell to
Ambassador Li Chiieh,” by the monk-diplomat Khudng Viét, Poem 1
in The Heritage of Vietnamese Poetry). Once integrated into the civil
service examination system, verse writing in classical Chinese grew to
be a major concern of all Vietnamese scholars and persisted as such
for nine hundred years, until French colonialism toppled the whole
neo-Confucian setup toward the end of the nineteenth century.
Vietnamese literati who wrote in classical Chinese employed verse
forms that were the stock-in-trade of Chinese poets: they either fol-

lowed the “old style” (ku-feng) with its few requirements or tried to
observe the stricter rules of T'ang prosody, those pertaining to the

“regulated poem” (lii-shih), sometimes conveniently defined as an
eight-line “sonnet.” It came as no surprise that the latter ended up

dominating the scene, because it was the touchstone on state examinations for a candidate's versificatory know-how. With its bewildering requirements and intricacies packed into a narrow compass (the

use of rhymes at the end of alternate lines; syntactical and semantic
parallelism in the two middle couplets; fixed patterns of tonal contrast in all couplets; avoidance of eight specific defects, such as the
“wasp's waist,” the “crane's knee,” and so on), the regulated poem

epitomized the virtues in which students eager to join the political

introduction

3

establishment should be trained: the cult of punctilios, a reverence
for authority, and an aversion to heterodoxy. Nevertheless, some
poets did not regard the Chinese norm as sacrosanct; they tried to

innovate and introduce features of Vietnamese folk prosody into the
writing of Chinese verse. Some experimenters, like Nguyén Huy Oanh
in the eighteenth century and Dinh Nhat Than in the nineteenth, even

went so far as to produce extensive poems in classical Chinese,
adopting the Vietnamese “six-eight” (luc-bat) and “double-seven—
six-eight” (song-that luc-bat) meters, respectively. But given the
length and weight of the learned tradition, those tinkerings with
Chinese verse remained isolated instances of quixotism.
It may appear self-evident that a foreign language ill qualifies to
be the midwife of a national literature. And yet Chinese did in fact
make the birth and growth of literature possible in Vietnam by sup-

plying the script in which the vernacular could be recorded. Vietnamese scholars selected Chinese graphs for either their semantic
equivalence or their phonetic similarity to Vietnamese words and,
through various combinations, devised a writing system that they
named the southern script (chit nédm). As an instrument for representing the sounds of Vietnamese, the southern script suffered from
many limitations and defects. Of course, because of the peculiar
manner in which it was put together, it presupposed a considerable
knowledge of Chinese graphs on the part of both writers and readers.
Then, too, it was never rigorously standardized but remained dependent on the skill and whim of anyone who chose to write in it; its
inconsistencies and obscurities bedeviled anyone who tried to deci-

pher it. For all its shortcomings, it was a momentous invention. It
freed Vietnamese poets from complete reliance on an alien medium
and allowed them to speak in their own voice at last.
A latecomer to the lists where prospective bureaucrats tilted their

writing brushes, verse writing in Vietnamese started under a handicap. Still, its position was rather that of a younger sister or favorite
concubine than that of a stepchild or poor relation. It was true, on
the one hand, that scholars being groomed as leaders composed Chi-

introduction

4

nese poems as part of their professional training and in that sense
were playing a game of national survival according to rules laid down
by the Chinese colossus. On the other hand, outside the province of
duty and career, reading and writing poetry was something that

Vietnamese scholars cherished and pursued by inclination in their
own language, without ulterior motive, any thought of preferment or
gain. They wrote Vietnamese verse in the morganatic sense, for
love and not for reasons of state. Indeed, sovereigns were known to
practice the craft diligently and to pride themselves on an expert
appreciation of it. As proof of his active interest and patronage, the
fifteenth-century king Lé Thanh-téng assembled an important body
of poems written by either himself or his court ministers, The Hong

Ditc Anthology of Verse in the National Language (Héng Ditc quoc
am thi tap, referred to henceforth as The Hong Dic Anthology). In
the nineteenth century, King Tw Dive admired Nguyén Du's masterpiece The Tale of Kiéu enough to forgive the sentiments of lésemajesté lurking therein; he simply edited some lines to suit himself.
Vernacular verse enjoyed such esteem among scholars that they made
a point of translating or adapting into Vietnamese any Chinese poem

that caught their fancy. If successful, a translation or adaptation
might surpass the original in popularity. The Phan Huy family excelled in that cross-cultural role. Like several other scholars and with
greater success, Phan Huy ich rendered “The song of a soldier's

wife” (Chinh phu ngém, Poem 322) by Dang Tran Cén into “doubleseven” quatrains. Either his son, Phan Huy Thv, or his grandson,

Phan Huy Vinh, performed the same metamorphosis for “The ballad
of the lute,” by Po Chii-i.
The southern script was the brainchild of scholar-poets who had
been tutored exclusively in Chinese versification. They used it first to
domesticate that type of Chinese verse with which they felt most at

home: the lii-shih, or regulated poem. Although the process must
have enlisted the efforts of many, credit for it goes to one man,
Nguyén Thuyén, who wrote during the second half of the thirteenth

century. He was one of the heroes whom the Vietnamese people hon-

introduction

5

ored for having effectively incorporated into their culture valuable
elements of Chinese civilization. It is alleged that on being ordered to
repeat the feat of Han Yii (Han Da in Vietnamese), he penned an

ultimatum and flung it at the crocodiles in the Lé River, thus chasing
the monsters away: an impressed sovereign renamed him Han

Thuyén. It is also claimed that he emulated such luminaries as Sung
Chih-wen and Shen Ch'iian-ch'i and incorporated elements of T'ang
prosody into the composition of Vietnamese verse. The precepts he
proposed gained acceptance and currency as “Han [Thuyén]'s
metrics” (Han-luét). Within the context of victories over Mongol
troops dispatched by the Yiian court, Han Thuyén's well-received

attempt to Vietnamize the regulated poem could be interpreted as
a gesture of southern assertiveness, as a declaration of greater
independence from the northern model. Poems that he and his
contemporaries wrote in the vernacular should serve as precious
indices of those exhilarating times. Unfortunately, all such works

were lost in the early part of the fifteenth century; during that
holocaust, the Ming occupation, the avowed policy of the Chinese
emperor Ch'eng-tsu was to destroy Vietnamese culture through book
burning and other means.

The transfer of lii-shih requirements from Chinese to Vietnamese
could be brought about with few hitches, since the two languages
share major traits. Both are predominantly monosyllabic. Both include two categories of tones that can be set off against one another
for musical effect: the “flat,” or even, level, which is constant in pitch
(called p'ing in Chinese, bang in Vietnamese), and the “sharp,” or
oblique, which is deflected, changing in pitch (called tsé in Chinese,
trac in Vietnamese). Both languages are blessed with supple, economical syntaxes that can do without empty (or merely functional)
words and pare a sentence or line down to muscle and sinew. It is

remarkable, then, that the regulated poem in Vietnamese took quite
a long time to assume the shape it would have from the eighteenth
century onward. It would seem that Vietnamese poets were not con-

tent to abide by lii-shih rules; they wanted to play fast and loose with

introduction

6

them, bend them to fit different practices of native oral verse. Some-

times they displaced the medial caesura in the seven-syllable line of a
regulated poem—a liberty they had taken with that verse form in
Chinese. More often, they substituted a six-syllable line for that
seven-syllable line—another bias of folk prosody, which favored the
even number over the odd number. In the long run, the Vietnamese

ear grew attuned to the peculiarities of T'ang metrics, and such
breaches were recognized as infelicitous and were abandoned; by the
end of the nineteenth century, the rigidly built poem of “eight sevenword lines” (that-ngén bat-cit) had established its dominance in
Vietnamese poetry. The Chinese ideal had to compromise with Vietnamese reality on one point, however: the preferred number of
syllables in a lii-shth line became seven, not five. Most Vietnamese
poets judged the poem of “eight five-word lines” (ngii-ngén bat-cir)
to be too confining a vessel for their vernacular, which, though
pithy, could not match the lapidary quality of classical Chinese.
On its southward migration, the Chinese regulated poem maintained its outward structure virtually unscathed. But in the hands of
Vietnamese poets, the very nature of the poem underwent changes
so profound that they altered it beyond recognition. In its original
habitat it remained an aristocratic medium, the embodiment of Confucian decorum and restraint. Over and above the explicit rules
governing its formal construction, it obeyed an implicit etiquette that
not only controlled style, diction, and subject matter but also tended
to detach the poet from the toiling masses and their mundane cares

and isolate him in the most rarefied of atmospheres. In Vietnam, by
contrast, the regulated poem shed its haughty reserve and fastidious
aloofness and went native—it fell into such laxity that even the
blithest spirit among classical Chinese poets would have disowned it.
It lifted all taboos and welcomed any word, however vulgar, that
circumstance might justify. In “Carrying a cangue around the neck”
(Poem 46), Nguyén Hiru Huan, soon to face the executioner, hurled

in his righteous wrath an obscenity at the fellow countrymen he

despised for collaborating with the French. The verse form accom-

introduction

7

modated any topic or theme, from the most solemn to the most ridiculous, any poetic fancy, from the elegist's to the limerick-monger's.
The regulated poem became a vehicle for all purposes: descriptive,
lyrical, expository, satirical, didactic, and even narrative. (Stories
were told in long sequences of “regulated” octaves.)
Purists might frown on such a plebification of the regulated poem,
yet it was actually carried out under the most unplebeian auspices:
already, there were abundant signs of the tendency in the oldest
works that have come down to us in Vietnamese, from the fifteenth
century: poems by Nguyén Trai, a paragon of neo-Confucian learning
and rectitude, and by King Lé Thanh-téng or members of his court.
In thoroughly domesticating lii-shih, those patricians veered away
from slavish worship of foreign culture and took a giant stride in the
direction of ethnic originality. Others who wrote verse went further
yet: they wielded the southern script not only to propagate Confucian
doctrine among the populace but also to rediscover and celebrate
their ancestral roots. Now more and more they would lend their ears
to the melodies and lyrics, naive but hardly lacking in charm or wisdom, of a poetry cultivated by their own people in the mud of their
fields. Nguyén Du, whom the Vietnamese hail as their greatest poet,
wrote: “Folk songs taught me hemp and mulberry lore. / Poor peasants' cries told me the tale of war.” A classicist who composed many
brilliant poems in Chinese, Nguyén Du was and is acclaimed above all
for vernacular masterpieces written in two folk meters, “six-eight”

(luc-bat) and “double-seven—six-eight” (song-that luc-bat).
In the last analysis, both verse forms can be traced to two basic
meters that reproduce the common cadence of Vietnamese speech, a
rising rhythm—the iamb (a group of two syllables with the stress on
the second syllable), and the anapest (a group of three syllables, with
the primary stress on the last syllable and sometimes a secondary
accent on the first). Vietnamese sayings and proverbs are often folk
poems in miniature; they combine two iambs, two anapests, one
iamb, and one anapest, or varying numbers of both. A line of folk
verse tends to be made up of an even number of syllables, a series of

introduction

8

Le L PatS

Se
Gae ETS

Figure 1

iambs in particular, when there is an odd number of syllables, the
line usually ends with an iamb, not an anapest. That double propensity of folk verse accounts for the practice, persistent in the past, of
replacing the normal seven-syllable line (four |three) of a regulated
poem (lii-shih) with a six-syllable line or with a “three |four” line.
The constituent unit of six-eight (luc-bat) verse is a couplet in
which the first line has six syllables and the second line eight syllables. Usually, both lines consist of iambs, and the stress falls on each
even-numbered syllable: in such a case, they can be described as
iambic trimeter and iambic tetrameter, respectively. On occasion,
the first line departs from the norm and comprises two anapests,
instead: two equal, balanced hemistichs divided by a medial caesura

(three |three). The last (or sixth) syllable of the first line rhymes
with the last-but-two (or sixth) syllable of the second line (or, as an
archaism, with the fourth syllable). What stamps six-eight verse with
individuality, however, is its pattern of euphonic requirements, an
ingeniously plotted alternation of “flat” (bang) and “sharp” (trac)
tones. The scheme, as observable in a typical couplet, is diagrammed
in Figure 1: the double-headed arrow indicates rhyming, an open
space represents an unstressed syllable, and F and S stand for
flats and sharps. It will be noted that the tonal rules apply only to

accented (even-numbered) syllables; that the same type of tones is
assigned to syllables taking up the same position in both lines (flats

for I-2 and II-2, sharps for I—4 and II-4, and flats for I-6 and
II-6); and that flats predominate: they flank a single sharp in each
line and monopolize the rhyme-fellows (I-6 and II-6) as well as the
last two stressed syllables of the second line (II—6 and II-8). There

introduction

9

is another prescription, not specified in the diagram: both II—-6
and II-8 carry level tones, as shown, but they must be different;
“monotony” is thus avoided or at least alleviated. (There are only
two flat, level tones in Vietnamese, as compared with four sharp,

oblique tones.) Also, flats for syllables in the second position (I-2
and II-2) are recommended though they are not mandatory.

Six-eight verse amounts to a concatenation of such couplets. A
simple device provides the needed linkage: the last (or eighth) syllable
in the second line of one couplet rhymes with the last (or sixth)
syllable in the first line of the next couplet. The way two consecutive
couplets look is shown in Figure 2, which makes it clear that in sixeight verse, rhymes work according to a consistent yet varied arrangement, in two distinct fashions: internally within each couplet
(I-6 and II-6, I1I-6 and IV-6), and at the end between couplets
(II-8 and III-6). Each line rhymes with the next, but a new, different
rhyme appears in every other line, in every couplet.
A six-eight couplet can stand by itself as a poem, and it often does

in folklore. The following is a riddle about the chicken: Cé chan ma
chang cé tay, /cé hai con mat, an may duong-gian. (“It has legs and
yet no arms; /it has two eyes and lives on alms from the world.”)
Here is a bit of folk astrology: Thang mudi coi cai sao tua, /khi nam

khi déy lam mia méi nén. (“In the tenth month watch the stars of
Orion, /when you lie down or wake up, if you're to get a good harvest.”) This is how a lad attempts to strike up an acquaintance with a
lass as both work at night in the rice fields: H6i c6 tat nwéc bén

introduction

10

dang! /Sao cé mic anh trang vang dé di? (“Hey, young lady, you
who are bailing water by the road! / How come you scoop the golden
moonlight and pour it all off?”) Two lines can wrap up a philosophical comment inside a vivid image:...