A reinterpretation of some selected Nôm characters in the 1866 edition of the tale of Kiều

Abstract

While researching 1866 Lieu Van duong woodblock printing of Kim Van Kieu tan truyen, the oldest extant printed version of Truyen Kieu, we discovered that a considerable number of romanizations of Nom characters in previous romanizations of this text were forced, contradictory, or generally unconvincing. Our goal is to decipher and explicate the Nom text of the 1866 Lieu Van duong printing in a manner informed by historical phonetics, literary context, and poetics in order to recover and preserve, as much as is possible, the original intent of Nguyen Du.