and Temple Yards

" The Song of A Soldier's Wife"
I learned the story in the poem when I was in high school in Saigon. I heard this version on radio and tape,
and learned it by listening. There is freedom in improvising melody with apoem. I included this particular poem
intentionally. Many Vietnamese people have been cut offrom tradition because of the war and organization
of the country now. It is my hope that this collection will reveal and nurture the mild character of the Vietnamese
people, especially the young people who have lost our music and many of the traditions to a great extent.
"Chinh Phu N gh Khlic," "The Song of the Soldier's Wife," was composed by Dang
Tran Con and Phan Huy Ich. Both were Vietnamese poets and scholars in the eighteenth
century. Dang Tran Con, a mandarin nobleman under the Le dynasty, first wrote the legend
in classical Chinese, while Phan Huy Ich, a much revered Doctor of Literature, translated the
verses into the vernacular Vietnamese language. His 408 verses tell the tale through the voice
of a wife, who laments the absence of her husband, who has been called to war for his country.
The themes of the story-poem are the search for peace and the longing for a return to the
simple joys of life prior to the advent of war.
Vietnamese storytelling is often heightened into a type of chant called ngh
(pronounced "nyah-m" and meaning "hymning' "chanting:' or "singing"). Because of a
melodious tonal language system, well-known legends and traditional stories are rhymed into
poems that resemble songs when recited. A short story may have a hundred verses, while a
long one contains more than eight thousand verses! The long stories require several nights
of chanting in order to be completed; occasionally, particular sections are extracted from the
larger legend for performance, as we have done on the companion tape. These legends may
be historical, religious, social, educational, or mythical in nature.
The chant styles, their pitches and rhythms, vary from one region to the next.
Traditional art music offers some of these styles, although some chant styles .are specific to
story-telling. There are three principal types of storytelling chant: doc thd(reading poems),
nbi fbd (speaking poems), and n gh thd(chanting poems). A good storyteller knows his or
her expressive art: when and how to coordinate pitches, rhythms, and modes to the
developments in the story. Two styles are demonstrated in the taped performance of the first
section (twenty-four verse lines) of "The Song of a Soldier's Wife": doc Ihdand n gh tho.
Even though Phuong Chi is reading the poem aloud, she is using a stylized elaboration of
conversational speech to enhance communication of the mood and structure of the poem. The
sung version flows searnlessly from the spoken, as the melody is clearly based on the
intonation of speech and is not many steps from Phuong Chi 's fluidly recited version.