Kieu: The tale of a beautiful and talented girl, by Nguyen Du (1765-1820). Translated from the Vietnamese into rhyming verse by Michael Counsell (English Edition) [Kindle-editie] beoordelingen het boek quotes

It’s always been the same: good fortune seldom came the way of those endowed, they say, with genius and a dainty face. What tragedies take place within each circling space of years! ‘Rich in good looks’ appears to mean poor luck and tears of woe; which may sound strange, I know, but is not really so, I swear, since Heaven everywhere seems jealous of the fair of face. The tale of Kieu, a beautiful and talented young girl, was written in verse in Vietnamese by Nguyen Du, who lived in Vietnam from 1765 to 1870. Although the story is set in China, it was the greatest work of literature until then to be written in the Vietnamese language, and many would say it is still unrivalled. It tells the story of a beautiful and talented girl, who falls in love with Kim, a handsome student, and they become engaged. But while Kim is away, Kieu’s father is arrested on a false charge, and Kieu follows the Confucian teaching that duty to one’s parents overrides all other duties, and gives herself to be sold as a bride to a stranger. The ups and downs of her life after that include being sold two more times as a bride and twice as a prostitute, captured as a slave, and married to a soldier who becomes Emperor of South China. She serves two periods as a Buddhist nun, and finally attempts to commit suicide. Eventually she and Kim – who has now become a mandarin – are reunited, and live together in peace and calm. Michael Counsell is an Anglican priest, and was living in what was then called Saigon from 1968 for more than three years. He read the tale of Kieu, and was deeply moved by the human drama and the descriptions of nature. It seemed to symbolise the suffering which the Vietnamese people, and especially Vietnamese women, endured during the twentieth century. Among the many misunderstandings of the Vietnamese people by the English-speaking world in our days, he says, we must include the failure to understand that they are a nation of poets and heirs to a great culture. So to make this story more widely known, he learnt Vietnamese and spent the next 25 years translating it. This was probably the first and may still be the only translation made by a native speaker of English directly from the Vietnamese into English verse using the same scansion and rhyme-scheme as the original. This translation was published in Hanoi in 1994 in a bilingual edition, and again in 2011 with beautiful illustrations, both by the Thé Gioi Publishers. But for various reasons it has proved difficult to buy these editions outside Vietnam, so in order that many more people should be able to enjoy it, the English text only is published on Kindle. Michael Counsell was born in 1935, and is now retired and living in Birmingham in England. His dream is that eventually, like Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, his translation of Kieu may prove as popular among English-speakers as with those who can read the original. ‘J. M.’ writes: Kieu is not a love story in the romantic, light-hearted sense. But it expresses not only the profound and lasting love between Kieu and Kim, but also their patience and endurance through years of cruel, undeserved trials. Yet even through the darkest parts of the poem, the reader has hope of the triumph of goodness over evil, and that Kuan-Yin will eventually bring about a happy ending. All the characters are delicately drawn, and bring a Far Eastern culture, with its modes and manners, vividly to life. So many stories from far-away lands lose much of their fascination and genuine warmth and believability in translation. It is not so in this instance. Michael Counsell, with a true understanding for, and sympathy with the Vietnamese traditions, has brought before the English reader a literary experience of extraordinary beauty.