Truyện Kiều và Nghiên cứu văn bản
An Introduction to Truyện Kiều
An electronic version
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The Truyện Kiều, The Story of Kiều, by
Nguyễn Du (1765-1820) is the
great classical poem of Vietnam. Written in 3,254 lines in a couplet
form popular with the native, oral, ca dao folk tradition, while at the
same time drawing its narrative from a prose romance written in Chinese,
the work remains resonant with Vietnamese concepts of individual
responsibility to self, to society, and to conflicting spiritual codes.
The Truyện Kiều was written in ideographic Nôm, not in the modern roman-script writing system known as quốc-ngữ, which replaced Nom in the early 20th century. No single, definitive text of the Truyện Kiều exists and, historically, the work was never printed except in woodblock editions. Recent scholarship has revealed differing versions of the Truyện Kiều. Our Foundation and its Nôm Na staff have digitized six variant versions of the poem, dating from 1866 (the earliest found so far) to 1904, the so-called Imperial Edition. Using the brilliant scholarly work of Nguyễn Tài Cẩn (Moskva), Nguyễn Quảng Tuân (Thành phố Hồ chí Minh), Nguyễn Thế, Phan Anh Dũng and Nhà giáo Ưu tú Nguyễn Ðinh Thảng (Huế), and Dr. Nguyễn Huy Hùng, MD (Texas), we have created a tool that allows the display of each version as well as immediate comparison of individual lines from version-to-version, as well as the identification of the repetition of individual words and glossaries.
With tools like these, we hope to unlock the treasures of Vietnam's
Nôm literary past in an open digital archive for which the Truyện
Kiều
is the first offering. |