Besides poetry, Ho Xuan Huong had another passion: contemplating landscapes.
A free woman without husband or children to take care of loving nature and extolling it, she was able to devote her time to excursions and walks.
She practiced long walks at a time when scholars liked taking their ease at home on their beds or travelling on palanquins.
"She travelled like a man in a society where women lived retired from the world."
A boyish girl, with off-hand manners", I should say. "She laughed at mandarins' sons neglecting the culture of the mind who only wanted to show off; for her part, she was always eager to learn."
Asked about her, Xuan Dieu, loving and admiring her as most Vietnamese poets do, tosses his head back a little to tell this following anecdote about her:
One day walking in the rain along a slippery path, she fell. She lay full length on the ground with arms and legs all spread out. Some boys laughed at her.
On the spot she improvised a couplet:
I raise my arms to span the immense sky I spread out my legs to measure the earth.
These lines are a little grandiloquent but they were to the taste of the day.
- How old was she?
- I don’t know! In any case, she was an adolescent.
And Xuan Dieu smiles his usual smile with half-closed eyes.
