lichtrausch wrote:The last piece of Vietnam literature to make a splash on the international scene was Truyen Kieu.
Modern and early-modern Southeast Asian literature... well, let's not be pedantic here... SEA literature
of all ages is not very visible on the global stage. Whoever into it must be a weirdo standing in defiance of the mainstream.
At any rate, Vietnam is a particularly dismal case, because it has only opened up to the big decadent capitalistic world recently. It's a bit amusing that the new tourism slogan is "Vietnam the Hidden Charm" - hidden, as in
fantastically obscure. So don't count on "the international scene" when discussing Vietnamese literature.
lichtrausch wrote:Could you name a few of the main works from this classical era you mentioned? I might be interested in reading them.
Sit through Vietnamese highschool and you should have a copious amount of them deep-bored into your brains, then have them liquefied and pouring back out through the hole after you're done with highschool. My long-term memory is able to retain some of the more prominent names, mostly in the poetry realm, like
Xuân Diệu,
Hàn Mặc Tử, the fuzz about Thơ Mới ("New Poetry") Movement or that Tự Lực Văn Đoàn society, etc., etc. But my favorite author's got to be Chế Lan Viên with his gotho-tastic collection Điêu Tàn ("In Ruins"), on whom there's sadly no Wikipedia article yet. Communist/revolutionary poetry is pretty impressive as well, with authors like
Tố Hữu.
Nôm literature, needless to say, does not limit itself to Nguyễn Du. The other wonder of Nôm poetry is none other than
Hồ Xuân Hương, whose mind was dirtier and more subversive than any 21st century teenage boy.
After that little showcasing, I feel obliged to add that it will be hard to find translated Vietnamese poetry on the internet.