The Stories: Peach Blossom Petals: Folk Tales & Poems from Vietnam

The Stories: Peach Blossom Petals: Folk Tales & Poems from Vietnam. Owersetts in Scots by Sheena Blackhall. Published by Malfranteaux Concepts. ISBN : 978 1 870978 90 3 (2012)Printed by Thistle Reprographics, 55 Holburn Street Aberdeen Front Cover: Jessica Le Blackhall. Back Cover: Jessica Le Blackhall & her great grandmother, Lac Le Thi, in Dien Ban Quang Nam, Da Nang. Cost: £4.00. Copyright: S. Blackhall. This is the writer's 15th collection of short stories. I am indebted to Nga Le Blackhall, my daughter in law, for providing the photos throughout this publication, with the exception of those of the monkey, the turtle photos and the gecko. The front cover photograph, taken in the farming village of Dien Ban Quang Nam in the province of Da Nang, is of Jessica Le Blackhall, my grand-daughter. The back cover photograph is of Jessica Le Blackhall (aged 1) with her great grandmother, Lac Le Thi (aged 92) also in Dien Ban Quang Nam. Most of the poems are Scots owersets of Ca dao by Sheena Blackhall from English translations on Wikivietlit by Linh Dinh. Linh Dinh was born in 1963, in Saigon, Vietnam and is a Vietnamese-American poet, fiction writer, translator, and photographer. ‘The term ca dao (derived from a line in the Wei Wind section of the classic Chinese folk poetry anthology, Shi Jing, or Books of Odes) can be loosely translated as “unaccompanied songs.” Ca: to sing; dao: to sing without music. The ca dao poems, transmitted orally, sustained and nourished the Vietnamese language through its centuries of domination and influence by China…Outside of the official purview, the ca dao poems flourished, telling of the everyday life and concerns of ordinary Vietnamese. The poems tend to be short--with many comprised of a single couplet of fourteen syllables (three less than a standard haiku)--but there are also many longer ones with 20 lines or more. Ca dao can be of four-syllable lines, with end rhymes.’ Linh Dinh