FVH – Meet the Poets

Fri 14 Nov 2008, 7–9pm

Friends of Vietnam Heritage presents
Vietnamese Women’s Poetry Evening
Women’s Development Training Center
20 Thuy Khue, Room 6

Come listen to Vietnamese poems in Vietnamese and English. Meet famous women poets and add this truly Vietnamese cultural experience to your life in Hanoi.

The program will include:

• A classical performance of Ca Dao (oral folk poems), which will take us as close as possible to what these poems would have sounded like hundreds of years ago
• Readings of modern poems by the authors
• Ending with the recitation in English and sung in Vietnamese of two poems known to all Vietnamese people

In 2007, a remarkable anthology of poems, The Defiant Muse: Vietnamese Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present appeared on the market. It is remarkable because the anthology spans more than a thousand years of Vietnamese poems, all of them written by Vietnamese women. It showcases the work of seventy-two named poets with the Vietnamese and English versions side-by-side. According to Lady Borton, the book establishes women as primary creators of Ca Dao and shows that Vietnam’s tradition of combining military arts (vo) and literary arts (van) began with a woman. It includes the first known Vietnamese resistance poem, which was written by Trung Trac (one of the famous Hai Ba Trung) in 40 CE (AD).

What is also remarkable is that the first print of this book of poetry has already sold out and it has gone back to press. The book will be for sale at the start and after the program. We will be joined at this event by the Vietnamese community invited by the Women’s Publishing House. Join us in meeting some of the women poets for a great evening of poetry and song.

Cost: 100,000 VN
Max: 100 participants
Registration: Jelena Lenggenhager