Vulgar Experiments: How the Vietnamese Vernacular was Redesigned into a New Literary Tradition

This project examines how oral languages transform when developed into written literary mediums of expression, through the specific case-study of early modern Vietnamese bilingual literature. The textual focus is a series of translation projects dating from the 17th-18th centuries, in which Vietnamese writers took works originally composed in Classical Chinese and transfigured them into vernacular Vietnamese--not as close translations, but as elaborative interpretations of the originals, designed to explore the expressive and aesthetic capabilities of the vernacular language. This project overturns nationalist notions of a competition between Vietnamese vernacular and Classical Chinese cosmopolitan modes, and reveals an iterative process of reinventing an oral vernacular language into a new literary tradition.