Truyen Nom

Truyen Nom is a genre of Vietnamese narrative poetry written in the demotic chu Nom script, most often in the native luc bat (six-eight syllable) verse meter, that flourished in Vietnamese literature during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Its poems tell extended stories, frequently adapting Chinese source tales into a distinctly Vietnamese idiom, and their scope is broad enough that some scholars describe the form as a medium-length verse novel. The genre's best known work is Nguyen Du's The Tale of Kieu, a 3,254-line poem in luc bat meter considered a landmark of classical Vietnamese literature; Nguyen Dinh Chieu's The Tale of Luc Van Tien is another widely cited example.