Bài mới
Danh mục thơ Hồ Xuân Hương : - Đền Thái Thú
| Title: |    - At the Chinese General's Tomb | |
| Nôm | English | |
| Content: |                          | I see it up there in the corner of my eye: the General’s tomb standing all alonẹ If I could change my fate, become a man of heroic deed, couldn’t I doF better? |
| Notes: | Hồ Xuân Hương has no reverence for the shrine st up by the peasants of Đống Đa to propitiate the spirit released by the violent death of Shin Yi-Tung (Sầm Nghi Đống in Vietnamese), governor of occupying Chinese troops who, after losing to the Vietnamese in 1789, committed suicide. What a niggling thing, she suggests, if the General’s heroic endeavors merely resulted in a ling-thiêng (“vengeful ghost”) that scares farmers. She would have shared the Tây-Sơn scorn for superstition: “The dog is more useful than a genie,” quied in Minh Chi, Hà Văn Tấn, Nguyễn Tài Như, Buđhism in Vietnam (Hà nội: Thế Giới Publishers, 1999), p.168 | |
