News and Events

The Brilliant Bad Girl of 18th Century Vietnam: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong

8:00 pm, Tuesday, September 6, 2005, Tyler-Tallman Hall
Sponsored by the Davidson College Public Lectures Committee, East Asian Studies Program, and the English Department

John Balaban, who is an award-winning poet and translator, and Dr. Ngo Thanh Nhan (a linguist and musician) will be visiting Davidson to perform the poetry of Ho Xuan Hu'o'ng, "the brilliant bad girl of eighteenth-century Vietnam" --a concubine who wrote remarkable poems that used double entendre and sexual innuendo as a vehicle for social, religious, and political commentary. John Balaban translated the nearly extinct ideographic script in which the poems were originally written into English. He will talk about and perform the poems in English and in Vietnamese and Ngo Thanh Nhan will provide musical accompaniment on a traditional Vietnamese stringed instrument called a dan tranh.

For more information, please contact Prof. Gail Gibson