Divided Soul

By Stanley Cloud

THE TALE OF KIEU by NGUYEN DU

Translated by HUYNH SANH THONG

162 pages. Random House. $6.95.

Somehow Viet Nam still haunts us. That unfortunate nation seems on the verge of full-scale war again, even though Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize for the part he played in fashioning the precarious cease-fire that President Nixon called "peace with honor." The U.S. Government, meantime, continues to play a major role in South Vietnamese affairs.

It is entirely appropriate, both for Viet Nam and the U.S., that The Tale of Kieu, a long epic poem that has captivated the Vietnamese for more than 150 years, should now be published in English. Ho Chi Minh incorporated many lines from Kieu into his own poetry. Students in South Vietnamese high schools study it today just as English-speaking students study Shakespeare. In remote villages, mothers recite it to their children as moral instruction and entertainment. If Americans are to understand the Vietnamese and their war --even at this late date--The Tale of Kieu is a good place to begin.

Crying Cuckoos. The poem, based on a 16th century Chinese novel, is romantic, melodramatic and at times mildly erotic. Westerners will detect elements of The Perils of Pauline and The Story of O. The 3,525-line poem recounts 15 hellish years in the life of a young girl, Vuong Thuy Kieu. She is beautiful, talented, virtuous--and just headstrong enough to make her interesting in spite of her other sterling qualities. To help pay her family's debts, Kieu sells herself into concubinage and is tricked into becoming a common whore in the house of a ruthless madam. Thereafter Kieu is ravaged, reviled and degraded by a host of villainous men and women. At last, after a rebel warrior who helped her obtain revenge is killed, Kieu throws herself into the Ch'ien-t'ang River. She is rescued by a Buddhist nun and finds peace in the contemplative life--only to be reunited unexpectedly with her family and her first love, a young nobleman named Kim Trong, whom she weds on condition that the marriage never be consummated.

There is much more to Kieu than escapist melodrama. Written by a renowned Vietnamese classicist named Nguyen Du (1766-1820), the poem in Vietnamese has a wide range of wordplay. The meter is a flowing iambic called luk-bat, full of rhyming and nearly as easy to memorize as a song. Much of this is unavoidably lost in the otherwise excellent English translation by Huynh Sanh Thong, a Vietnamese scholar who has lived in the U.S. all his adult life. Jaded Western readers who may find Kieu's plight unconvincing can still enjoy the poem for its language, especially descriptions of people and nature:

Strange scenes and landscapes met his mournful eyes.

The cuckoos, perched on branches, cried and cried--

Geese winging homeward wrinkled heaven's edge.

More important for Americans are the clues Kieu provides to Vietnamese attitudes. Like the heroine of the poem, a great many Vietnamese today believe that they are being punished for some collective sin committed in the dim past. The Tale of Kieu holds out hope that virtue will be rewarded, that free will can alter a person's karma. But it is a slim hope for a people who have known centuries of war and endured a series of foreign occupations. As Translator Thong writes in the introduction: "By an accident of history, the autobiography of a divided soul [Kieu's] has come to epitomize a moral crisis that confronts all Vietnamese . . . Until the Vietnamese people can shape their own destiny, free from the stranglehold of a superpower, countless Vietnamese women and men will see themselves as Kieu--victims of a perverse fate."

.Stanley Cloud

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.