Accumulation, Attrition, Selection, Invention

• In Event: Orthodoxy, Invention, and Appropriation in 17th- and 18th-Century Nôm Texts

Abstract

In 1752, two books about “the Cloud Dharma Buddha at Cổ Châu” were published zylographically in northern Vietnam using demotic Nôm characters. One is a prose interlinear translation from literary Chinese (Hán) to literary Vietnamese (Nôm); the other is a vernacular Nôm interpretation of this text in a popular poetic form. These texts are about the introduction of Buddhism among the ancestors of the Vietnamese at the turn of the third century C.E. The prose text is an accumulation of lore and writings written in Hán over many centuries rendered line-by-line into seventeenth-century Nôm. This is a text of Buddhist devotion to the female spirits that became the first Buddhas to appear in the land; it describes the worship of trees and of stones, and irregular sexual relations. The poem was written in eighteenth-century Nôm and presents a sanitized version with a strong Confucian bias. This paper will discuss how ideological struggles over the ownership of traditions among Vietnamese were pursued in translations from Hán to Nôm and from high-register Nôm prose to low-register Nôm poetry. It will address how various ways of writing Nôm reflect different phases in the history of Nôm writing as well as the phonetics and vocabulary of different regions and localities. These texts undermine the assertion of a center for Vietnamese cultural authority; cultural debris accumulates, is amended and discarded from generation to generation amidst a constant struggle among competing efforts to create traditions.

Author

• Keith Weller Taylor, Cornell University