Discuss the Tale of Kieu with Eric Henry and the Triangle Yale Club

Please come discuss The Tale of Kieu, the national poem of Viet Nam.

It is a short epic, like a novel, with melodramatic action whose stern, compassionate insights lead many Vietnamese to learn the entire poem by heart.

In one hundred years, it begins, in the span of a person's life, talent and fate are at each other's throats. As the waters rush over the land you will see such things as make you sick at heart. Attend to the story of Kieu, the most talented and graceful of them all.

DISCUSSION LEADER

University of North Carolina professor of Vietnamese language and literature Eric Henry will introduce the poem and lead group discussion. Henry earned his doctorate at Yale in 1979 after Army service in Viet Nam. He is the author of articles on the Vietnamese verse novel, Kieu among them .

SPONSORS

Viet Nam Literature Project and the Triangle Yale Club welcome their members and all others who want to read the poem. Host Dan Duffy, the VNLP editor, graduated from Yale in 1982 and later edited the Viet Nam Forum publications there.

WHAT TO DO

If you would like to come, please read the book. Yale's wartime Vietnamese language instructor, Huynh Sanh Thong, won a MacArthur fellowship for his Yale University Press translation of the poem, The Tale of Kieu, available from Yale University Press via Amazon. An earlier version by Thong, from Vintage books, can be found through used booksellers. Another recommended translation, Kim Van Kieu by Vladislav Zhukov, is also at Amazon. RSVP to editor@vietnamlit.org or (919) 383-7274.

WHERE TO GO

Please come at 6 PM on Sunday, April 1 to 5610 Buck Quarter Road, off Pleasant Green Road just south of St. Mary’s Road eight miles north of downtown Durham and 5 miles east of downtown Hillsborough. Duffy lives on a horse farm at the back of a barn that looks uninhabited from the gravel road. Look for an old white Chevrolet Caprice, a big police-style sedan, parked out front. Those lost should call 919-383-7274.