Troi Cakes
Poet: Ho Xuan Huong
My body is white, my shape, round,
Many and many a time, I emerge and sink in the water...
My body is white, my shape, round,
Many and many a time, I emerge and sink in the water,
The hand which kneaded me made me hard or soft at will
But I always keep my heart vermilion
Still livelier is the scene of the "Night weaving"
Light up the lamp... what exquisite fairness!
The stork’s bill does not cease to hop all the night through.
Limbs go to work, and then relax, all with a lively will,
The shuttle does the weaving, full joyfully applied.
Wide, narrow, small or big, the dimensions always fit,
Short or long, if the part is good, it goes
For the one who likes the perfect job, let him dip full good and long
Three falls you need to come before the true color comes.
How can we explain the Ho Xuan Huong phenomenon, the sudden appearance in the XVIIIth Century of a woman who dares deal with themes that were taboo in the ancient Far Eastern poetry?
The answer that comes at once to mind is punished by Freudian analysis. More than one critic sees Ho Xuan Huong as sexually repressed, ugly but passionate. Typical in this regard is Nguyen Van Hang's attitude in "Ho Xuan Huong, tac pham “than the va van tai" (Ho Xuan Huong. Her works, life and talent), Saigon, 1937, Imprimerie Aspar - Truong Trieu calls her 'a genius for lust".
If Maurice Durand writes that "she was obsessed by sexual desire as by a real illness", he hastens to add a corrective to this judgment some pages farther: "Nowhere in her works do we notice morbid traces characteristic of the illness called repression. On the contrary, her poetry evinces confidence, vivaciousness, a balance of senses and judgment, all this very far from the reactions expected of a sick person’.
No doubt we can recognize in Ho Xuan Huong the natural repression of a concubine, a widow, a woman subjected like all her sisters to the inexorably rigid frame of Confucianism.
But let us not forget the impact of the social environment surroundings in which she lived: a troubled epoch, continual wars, which loosened customs, the splitting of the rigid frames of feudal morality, the thirst for enjoyment, the rush for pleasures. If Ho Xuan Huong seems to be out of place in scholarly literature, she is not a lonely voice in popular literature, where social criticism and erotism provide the subjects for many stories, fables and ca dao.
Ho Xuan Huong’s licentious verse no doubt also originates from the conditions of her life and her own temperament.
An independent mind, a passionate character, she doesn't feel herself inferior to men and claims liberation for woman, including sexual liberation. But why must we stick to that idea of sexual obsession and not see, in her inspiration, also the anger of a superlatively gifted woman against the injustice of society and fate!
In any case, she is worthy of the homage which Henry Miller two centuries later pays to a woman-writer of the 20th century:
'We are tempted to say: she writes as a man. But no, if she writes like someone, it is like a woman who is 100% woman. On many points, she is more direct and frank than many male writers. For here is a free woman, who speaks her need for men, a subject- matter which has not been sufficiently dealt with by women writers.’
