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An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems: From the Eleventh through the Twentieth Centuries. Huynh Sanh Thong, ed. & tr. New Haven, Ct. Yale University Press. 1996. xii + 429 pages. $37.50. ISBN 0-300-06410-1.
Following A Thousand Years of Vietnamese Poetry, edited and translated by Nguyen Ngoc Bich (Knopf, 1975), Yale University Press brought out in 1979 The Heritage of Vietnamese Poetry, a collection of premodern poems edited and translated by Huynh Sanh Thong, a Vietnamese scholar based in New Haven. Now the latter professional translator provides the English reader with another superb collection of Vietnamese verse-322 works by some 150 Vietnamese poets.
As pointed out in the preface, of the 125 poems here that appeared in the earlier volume, many have now been revised. The editor has also added "The Marvelous Encounter at Blue Creek" and "The Constant Mouse," two long narratives in verse which had been published separately, and five other traditional poems composed in the vernacular six-eight meter or the double seven-six-eight elegy style. Students of classical Vietnamese literature are indeed grateful for exquisite renditions of "Calling All Souls" by Nguyen Du, "A Song of Sorrow Inside the Royal Harem" by Nguyen Gia Thieu, "The Song of a Soldier's Wife" by Dang...