entrails" and figuratively what is "inside" a person, has a common etymological root
with trong, the more abstract concept of "insidedness." Today, Vietnamese long covers
a semantic field that includes what in English are distinguished as "head" and "heart"
or "rational intent" and "emotion"; in modern Vietnamese there has been a tendency
to extend the emotive possibilities of the word, and, an emphasis on "will, intention,
purpose," while generally assumed in Vietnamese, is not always represented in
Western-language translations. I linger over this word because I want to compare
Nguyen Binh Khiem's use of it with the way it is used in a poem of Dao Duy Tiu'
that I will cite below. In the above poem Nguyen Binh Khiem seeks to stop the
operation of long, to bring it to restful immobility. Dao Duy Tui, as we will shortly
see, makes lbng the source of enlightenment and salvation. Where can this striking
reversal of value given to the word long be located? One sharp difference between the
poetry of these two men is about the rhetoric of spatial orientation. One poem of
Nguyen Binh Khiem's expounds the wisdom of the stay-at-home and ends with these
lines:
Why trail along behind others and dissolve in fatigue?
Why pray to any and all Sakyas [but) scorn the Buddha at home?
(My translation from Nguyen Binh Khiem, 60)
Here there is disdain for those who run off to other places looking for what the poet
believes can be found only at home. Dao Duy Tui, a younger contemporary of
Nguyen Binh Khiem, was such a person (on Dao Duy TCu see: Duong Tu Qu-an 1944;
Dinh Gia Khanh 1962, 599-627; Nguyen Dien Nien 1993; Tran Thi Lien 1992).
Dao Duy Tiu (1572-1634) was the first Dang Trong poet. Born in Thanh Hoa,
he was excluded from the competitive race for position and wealth in the north because
the Trinh lords categorized and disdained him as being from a family of entertainers,
so he went south and served the Nguyen lords, for whom he designed the system of
walls at Dong Ho'i; he was determined to put an insurmountable barrier between
himself and what he had left behind in the north (Pham Dinh Ho and Nguyen An
1962, 56-61, and 1972, 40-44). His poetry is in a very different rhetorical mode
from the poetry of Nguyen Binh Khiem. Time, rather than being cyclic, is empty
and open. The metaphor for human character is not the carefully tended garden plot,
but rather nature untouched by human hands.
Compared with the cyclic, competitive, and duty-bound images found in the
poetry of Nguyen Binh Khiem and northern poetry in general, the poetry of Dao Duy
Tiu' suggests freedom and self-confidence, the assertion of one's will without regard
for convention, history, or ancestors. This has been noted by Vietnamese literary
specialists, who have contrasted the "joy and faith in the future" of southern poetry
with the "passive . .. feeble, life-weary ideology" of northern poetry (Buii V'an Nguyen
'The prefatory "to the reader" at the beginning of the dictionary explains that Latin words
were added to what was initially a Vietnamese-Portugese dictionary to aid Vietnamese who
were learning Latin, so it is reasonable to surmise that the choice of Latin words represented
to some extent ecclesiastical efforts to control the semantic gates between Vietnamese and Latin
for Vietnamese Christians. With this in mind the elision of Portugese coracao in the Latin gloss
may have been an explicit efforto limit the emotive aspects of the Vietnamese word long for
Vietnamese Christians moving into Latin. On the other hand, it may represent an emphasis
that was felt to more correctly account for usage current at that time or it may even represent
semantic shifts that occurred in Vietnamese as it was spoken in DEang Ngoai and DEang Trong