“As a medium for literature in Vietnam, the native tongue had been fighting a difficult battle against classical Chinese since the early part of the fifteenth century, when Nguyễn Trãi (1380–1442) wrote his short poems of four or eight lines. In a poem of over three thousand lines, Nguyễn Du led that fight to a victorious conclusion... By triumphantly rescuing Vietnamese poetry from the stranglehold of classical Chinese, Nguyễn Du performed for the vernacular what Dante had once done for Italian, liberating it from its position of subservience to Latin.”