Vietnamese poetry "wades into the fields" and deeply sympathizes with the country people, to hear:
“Last night drums in all the villages beat loudly, Who doesn't welcome spring?”
(Opening pen)
He truly immersed himself in the suffering of the people, Nguyen Khuyen understood all the advantages and difficulties of farmers. He worried about all the natural disasters that could happen. When the harvest was good, the poet was happy with the people, that joy was not much, but then he was heartbroken when "immediately caught in the rat disaster" . Farmers were worried and worked hard all year round, never having a moment of peace, but life was still hard, "working day and night", with debts piling up:
"Interest in mother, interest in child, giving birth forever,
Ten years, seventeen years, is that too much?
(Debt)
Witnessing the hard work, hardship and hustle of farming, the poet understood the hardships that farmers had to endure. Nguyen Khuyen shared the hardships and difficulties of farming. Although his family had a tradition of academic achievements, he did not forget to tell his children every spring:
" I am a fool and I can take advantage of you,
The pen has no path, no end, no beginning.
(Spring day teaching children)
"Children who follow their father's footsteps should know: Don't forget to work with the pen, rice, beans, and eggplants."
(Translated by Vu Mong Hung)
It was the return to his hometown that helped Nguyen Khuyen not completely depend on the outdated ideology of loyalty, gradually moving away from the influence of Confucianism, quoted chapters and verses, and empty symbolic conventions. On the other hand, he inherited and innovated traditional literature to have authentic literary works describing the difficult life of the people. There, he built specific images, describing a rich and vivid reality that was no less meaningful. To do that, Nguyen Khuyen had to immerse himself in the people's lives, hoping to ease his remorse, pain and suffering about his own inferiority complex. He found in nature the peace of mind, the optimism and love of life when immersing himself in the difficult life of farmers, living with the intimate feelings of the village.
Nguyen Khuyen lived close to the farmers. In the book Nguyen Khuyen and Anecdotes, Chu Van wrote: “If he met some old men, he would stop and ask about the rice fields, which potato fields were good or bad, whether the chickens and pigs in the house ate well and grew quickly? When he saw a group of workers chirping and chiseling bamboo and sawing wood to build a new house, the workers were chattering, he turned his way in and sat on a mat that the homeowner hastily spread out on the sidewalk, drinking a bowl of fresh tea. He offered betel to the first and second assistants, and his fellow workers, casually and intimately.” [4,16].
From here we can see that Nguyen Khuyen had a truly ordinary soul. And literary history shows us that there has never been a high-ranking mandarin or governor who wrote parallel sentences or funeral sentences for his neighbor, his mother-in-law, the blacksmith, the dyer, the butcher... The parallel sentences were truly beautiful, truly interesting and also filled with emotion, sometimes with a bit of humor inside, like the parallel sentence for the butcher's wife to hang in the house:
“The four seasons and eight blood puddings are faithful, the willow bank and the pair of lotus flowers decorate the garden.”
(Four seasons, eight solar terms, steadfast loyalty, Willow miles, bo hills, wanting to adorn)
The two sides of the parallel sentence are very neat, it shows sympathy for the widow's feelings, but also has images that match the couple's profession: "a bowl of blood pudding, a pair of testicles". The author is very humorous and also very profound.
From the past to the present, there have been many poets writing about the Vietnamese countryside, but more or less the scenes in them are still unfamiliar, the poems are still borrowed from Tang poetry. Later, there were poets such as Doan Van Cu, Bang Ba Lan, Nguyen Binh, Anh Tho who described many beautiful features of the countryside and the feelings of the rural people, but perhaps the most rustic and authentic, we should still look to the poems of Mr. Tam.
We sympathize with the poet's anguish, worries, tears and smiles. Nguyen Khuyen was attached to rural life, so he used folk poetry to describe the rural landscape, realistically depicting the hard but still poetic life of the good people. He "poeticized" friendship, laughed at what should be laughed at and cried at what should be cried at in society, and most importantly, loved his homeland with a sincere heart. Thus, from here we can once again affirm that Nguyen Khuyen is truly "the poet of the Vietnamese countryside".
Chapter 2: NGUYEN KHUYEN'S VILLAGE POETRY - Haunted with Sorrow and Sorrow
2.1. Sad and desolate through the countryside scenery
2.1.1. Suffocating, unreal scene
When doing this thesis, we surveyed the number of poems written about the haunting, sad, and desolate countryside scene by Nguyen Khuyen in both Chinese and Nom scripts according to specific criteria, and in this section we surveyed the following data:
Criteria
Quantity | Total | Part hundred (%) | |
The stuffy, unreal scene of the village hometown for generations | 05 | 353 | 1.4 |
Maybe you are interested!
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Personal life themes in Nguyen Khuyen's poetry - 12 -
Tradition and innovation in Nguyen Duy's poetry - 6 -
Nguyen Trong Tao's poetry from the perspective of artistic thinking - 18 -
Colloquialism in Nguyen Trai's Nom poetry - 17 -
Nature, Life and People of Hue in Nguyen Khoa Diem's Poetry.
Table 2.1
Known as the poet of Vietnamese landscapes, Nguyen Khuyen wrote many poems about spring and summer, but what really made Mr. Yen Do famous was the collection of three autumn poems: Thu am, Thu dieu, Thu vinh. Along with the strange formula of the parasol leaves and the sound of the pestle pounding cloth in his autumn poems in Chinese characters, the three Nom poems appear as a masterpiece. Most authors believe that the three autumn poems vividly and realistically depict the autumn scene of the Northern Delta; Nguyen Khuyen's poems were not simply poems describing the scenery, but the author silently conveyed in them the hidden pain of the times before historical reality. These comments have existed for many years through many generations and received the sympathy of readers. Each autumn poem appears like a beautiful picture carved with words that accurately describe the situation of an autumn day in the Northern Delta with its typical features: blue sky, clear water, yellow leaves, deserted coriander... Reading the three poems, we can feel in them
The atmosphere is gentle, quiet, and peaceful for ages. However, literature does not have absolute accuracy. If we approach these three masterpieces of language from a different angle, we will see somewhere the stuffy, unreal scene of the countryside.
Nguyen Khuyen's three autumn poems are a combination of suffocating and illusory scenes. In the conception of most medieval authors, people are placed between heaven, earth and the universe, valuing the vast space to express heroic spirit:
"The mountains and rivers spread throughout the autumn,"
( Thuat Hoai - Pham Ngu Lao)
Here, Nguyen Khuyen does not follow the beaten path of scholarly literature. He opens the poem Autumn Fishing with the image of a small pond:
" Cold autumn pond, clear water"
There seems to be something both vague and desolate in this quiet space. The village pond, the pond in the garden is usually a small, narrow “stagnant pond” limited on all four sides, and then shrunk by the cold weather of autumn, making it even smaller. In addition, the adjective “trong veo” describes the clarity of the water and evokes the feeling of being able to see the bottom of the pond. Thus, the word “trong veo” evokes both the width and depth of the small, narrow pond. The narrowness of the pond still shows no signs of stopping, but seems to become even smaller due to the appearance of the rhyme “eo” – any word with this rhyme when pronounced, the mouth curls up. In the first line of the poem, we see the rhyme “eo” in two words: “ lanh lon” and “trong veo” . The word “eo” also appears many times in the poem: “veo, teo, vèo, teo, beo” creating a feeling of suffocation and siege for the reader. Thus, the state of narrowness has been expressed three times in the first verse, after each word the narrowness of the space becomes even smaller. The pond, which was already small, now seems to be trying to shrink to the limit.
It cannot be any smaller. The smallness also pervades the entire poem because the author uses the rhyme “eo” as the main rhyme for the entire poem.
The water was clear and cold, cold because it was late autumn. But the coldness here also evoked a strange feeling of loneliness and on that blue, a very small gray streak, a small boat appeared:
“A tiny fishing boat”
The verse only talks about the scene, not the person, but it is the poet who is shrinking himself even smaller in that tiny fishing boat. The scene and the person seem to have merged into a motionless mass, a vast silence that is stretching out forever. Furthermore, the author has used the singular word “one” combined with the reduplicated word “teo teo” to make the boat even smaller – as if it were just a tiny dot and could not be any smaller. A similar state also appears right at the beginning of the poem Thu am :
“Five low thatched houses, Dark night with flickering fireflies.”
At the end of the 19th century, one of the common features of the people in the Northern Delta was the five-room house. The characteristic of this type of house is that it is small and very low, so that when entering or exiting, you often have to bow your head. So low that it is le te - meaning so low that it cannot be any lower. This small, narrow space continues to be expressed through the image of "coriander". Above is the vast blue sky, below is the quiet and lonely bamboo coriander, the two words "winding" are like a flexible drawing that creates a moving, winding line, at the same time creating a feeling of desolation and loneliness: "deserted guests" further increases the extreme stillness of the scene: not a single person, not a sound. The scene is silent, time seems to stop, giving way to a vast and boundless autumn idea. In Thu am, the coriander space is immersed in darkness - dark coriander. The darkness covers the small coriander, making it even narrower. We feel that every space is cramped,
small. Looking at each image, we see that every image is small: pond, house, coriander, a small fallen leaf, wave, duckweed, boat... From the above analysis, poetry lovers can feel that Nguyen Khuyen's autumn poetry has the gloomy, cramped, suffocating nuances of the poor rural scene of the North.
Besides the suffocating, dark scene, there is also a state of illusion and desolation. The illusion and desolation is first expressed in the time of the three autumn poems. Autumn inherently evokes sad, calm emotions; in this poem, the author describes the autumn weather around dusk, making people's moods even more depressed. People in the Middle Ages had a clear yin-yang mindset. Autumn and dusk belong to the yin time (yang is spring, summer; morning, noon...). Nguyen Khuyen placed the yin time of the day in the yin time of the season. The autumn afternoon in Thu Vinh, then the afternoon and night appear in turn in Thu Am, Thu Dieu. The only difference is when there is a moon:
“ The sparse windows let the moonlight in, the pond shimmers with the moonlight’s reflection.”
At times, only thick darkness covered and surrounded the village road:
" Dark night, fireflies flicker"
The evening time of any season evokes decay and desolation. Parallel to decay is the state of illusion (always moving, changing, instantly changing from one form to another). In the decaying, illusory moment of that autumn evening, other images appear one after another in the same system. That is the structure in the poem Thu vinh :
"Bamboo leaves sway in the cold wind"
The reduplicated word “lơ phơ” evokes a feeling of sparseness, thinness and lack of vitality. In the cold wind, the bamboo branches become even older, weaker, withered and listless. It has almost exhausted its vitality. The image of yellow leaves seems to emphasize the desolation of the scene: “Yellow leaves will blow away in the wind”
The yellow color of leaves is a sign of withering, old age, and preparation to leave life. With the images of “the bamboo stalk swaying” and “the yellow leaves in the wind” , the decay in Nguyen Khuyen’s poetry is expressed from two perspectives: time and things. Those images suggest the illusion – the end of the life of trees and leaves.
The state of illusion is also expressed in many other images. These are images of water waves, clouds, the “flickering” light of fireflies, the faint smoke, the “glittering moonlight”. Even the clumps of duckweed on the pond remind us of the word “duckweed”. Everything is moving but very slightly, and the most subtle change that makes people “startled” is the image of “last year’s flowers, which water geese”:
“A few clusters of flowers in front of the fence last year, A sound in the sky of which country.”
If in the above verses, the real-virtual nuances still lean towards the real, then in these verses, the state of illusion takes the dominant position. The above verse has given the reader an illusion of time, while the following verse is a startle before the vast and vast space. With these two verses, the autumn picture becomes more illusory than ever. Anyone who understands Nguyen Du's poetry can recognize the word "last year" (associated with flowers) which was originally created by Thanh Hien from the word "y cuu" (still the same) in Thoi Ho's poem. Centuries have passed, and now it appears in Yen Do, perched on a cluster of flowers behind Nguyen Khuyen's fence, bringing a bit of wistful nostalgia into the poetic image. "Before the fence" is authentic about space. "Last year's flowers" is not necessarily authentic about time. It seems that on that cluster of flowers there is a moment of condensation. Could it be that the flowers have been quietly there since last year, or could it be that the flowers have just appeared in memory? It is difficult to predict exactly. We can only be sure that the poet must carry deep, secret worries that are not easy to express in his heart for him to have such an illusory feeling.