The first Kiều Lesen – Reading Kiều explored Nguyễn Du’s image of a drifting flower through poetry, music, and performance. Conceived by Dạ Thảo Phương, the evening extended this image toward questions of displacement, diaspora, and the self.
We wanted to make time to read Truyện Kiều together – in Vietnamese, German, and English, with people who know the poem and people discovering it. A reading group seemed a good place to start. The idea is simple: meet, read selected passages aloud in Vietnamese, German, and English, and talk about them. We’re curious…
Inspired by Hồ Chí Minh’s gift of Truyện Kiều, Franz and Irene Faber spent seven and a half years translating Nguyễn Du’s epic into German. Their Das Mädchen Kiều became a milestone of Vietnamese-German literary exchange, first published in East Germany in 1964 and reissued in 2015 as a bilingual edition. In 1954, German journalist…