JarJar Nixon's Blues Kitchen

December 19, 2008 Friday

LENGTH: 616 words

Section: General News - Modern Vietnamese writing, developed by French
colonists, looks much like English or French. But for centuries,
Vietnamese was written in a different script, based on Chinese-style
characters. Now, only a few score of people in the world can read that
language fluently. The Vietnamese Nom Preservation Foundation is trying
to keep this heritage from being forgotten.

At a cafe and cultural center in Hanoi, several dozen Vietnamese and
foreigners are celebrating a decade of trying to save Vietnam's Nom
script.

John Balaban is an American poet who first came to Vietnam as a
humanitarian volunteer during the war four decades ago. He got
interested in Nom while translating the work of Vietnamese poet Ho Xuan
Huong. He founded the Vietnamese Nom Preservation Foundation.

"Ho Xuan Huong was a vo le, or a second wife, who lived around 1800. And
she was, as one critic described her, the brilliant bad girl of the
18th-19th century.

Sometimes entire poems would be reverse-meaning poems, with sex as the
underlying topic," said Balaban.

Huong's poems are shockingly feminist.

One deals with the once common Vietnamese custom of polygamy, which
relegated women like Huong to being "second wives" of powerful men.

"Once or twice a month, oh, it's like nothing.

You try to stick to it like a fly on rice, but the rice is rotten.

You slave like the maid, but without pay.

If I had known how it would go, I think I would have lived alone."
Huong's poetry reads like it was written yesterday.

But most Vietnamese can not read it the way she wrote it, in Nom.

Only a tiny handful of Vietnamese can read any Nom characters. They are
mostly Buddhist monks, old people, or hobbyists.

And as for people who are truly literate in Nom? The foundation thinks
there are about 30 of them in the world.

At Vietnam's National Library, a small staff funded by the foundation is
busy with a huge task: digitizing the most valuable 4,400 Nom
manuscripts in Vietnam's National Archives.

To Trong Duc heads the preservation project at the library.

The staff take high-resolution photos of each volume and enter data
about how it was printed and collected. Then they retype the entire
volume by hand, since there is no character recognition software for Nom
letters.

Duc says the staff find new Nom characters in every book they scan. The
unfamiliar characters must be given Unicode encodings before software
can be written to recognize them. Duc says even Chinese people cannot
understand Nom script.

A few years ago, the foundation sent representatives to an international
meeting of the board that regulates how characters are encoded on the
Internet.

At first, Chinese representatives opposed a separate coding system for
Nom characters, saying they were just a variety of Chinese.

A Vietnamese expert showed the Chinese an inscription in Nom. The
Chinese could not read it, and Nom now has its own official encoding
system on the Internet.

It is a modern development for a script in which nothing important has
been written in 75 years.

Vietnamese today read classic literature like Ho Xuan Huong's poems in
the modern alphabet, which French colonists adapted starting in the 19th
century.

Singer Le Pham Le, who performs Ho Xuan Huong's poems, says it is not
quite the same.

"In a way it's more powerful for me, to read Ho Xuan Huong under Nom
language, Nom script. Because of that kind of connection with the
ancient heritage. So that's the purpose, that's the effort that the Nom
Foundation has done," said Le Pham Le.

With luck and effort by the foundation, a young generation of Vietnamese
may be able to read Ho Xuan Huong's poems as she wrote them when she put
brush to paper in Hanoi 200 years ago. - VOA