Nguyen Du – a marvelous matchmaker in literature

Abstract

Nguyen Du entered the literature world as an experienced genius. Being a highly sensitive person, living in the chaotic times and going through many vicissitudes, the poet Nguyen Du was always anxious. However, those almost constant anxieties seemed to be transformed into the power, into the sublime (with the meaning given by Sigmund Freud) which in some moments helped the poet get into the calmness overcoming his ordinary ego. It was the calmness coming from the poetical creativity.

In his calmness of creativity, Nguyen Du made the marvelously cultural matches. My paper focuses on seven matches in Nguyen Du’s works as of the following: (1) Vietnam and China, (2) Buddhism and Confucianism, (3) Man and Nature, (4) Vulgarity and Holiness, (5) Poetry and Novel, (6) Romanticism and Realism, (7) Traditionality and Modernity.

The contents, the manners and the characteristics of those cultural matches could light up the cultural mind, the aesthetic perception and the intertextual tendency of Nguyen Du as representative of Vietnamese literature.