Beyond The Court Gate

Poetry. Southeast Asia Studies. Translated from the Vietnamese by Nguyen Do and Paul Hoover. While Li Po and other classic Chinese poets mostly found expression through through landscape, Vietnamese poet Nguyen Trai (1380-1422) wrote about his own life. The literary symbols of T'ang Dynasty poetry are relatively general, traditional, and polite, but Nguyen Trai developed a colloquial and personal style. As a result, his poems have the intimacy and immediacy of the everyday. Over six hundred years old, they appear, in this translation by contemporary Vietnamese poet Nguyen Do and American poet Paul Hoover, to have been written only yesterday, by someone whose feelings we are able to share, despite their distance from us in time and culture. This is the first collection of Nguyen Trai's poetry to be published in English.