“What earthly use are these Confucian graphs?
Masters and doctors lie curled up and wilt.
Why not take lessons and become a clerk?
At night champagne, at break of day cow's milk!”
Poem 71 in An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems, trans. Huỳnh Sanh Thông (Yale University Press, 1996), ISBN 978-0300064100
Variant translation:
What good are Chinese characters?
All those Ph.D.'s are out of work.
Much better to be a clerk for the French:
You get milk in the morning and champagne at night.
Source: Understanding Vietnam by Neil L. Jamieson (University of California Press, 1995), ISBN 978-0520916586, p. 55
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Trần Tế Xương 1
poet 1870–1907Related quotes
Introduction, st. 4
1790s, Songs of Experience (1794)
“A career is wonderful, but you can't curl up with it on a cold night.”
Variant: A career is wonderful, but you can't curl up with it on a cold night.
Source: On Being Blonde (2007), p. 53
“The sweet mellifluous milking of the cow.”
The Milking of the Cow, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Speech of July 19, 1985. Quoted in David Robinson Simon, Meatonomics (Conari Press, 2013), p. 193 https://books.google.it/books?id=PY0KUnaIU5AC&pg=PA193.
Public Opinions
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XVII - Material for a Projected Sequel to Alps and Sanctuaries
“Let the child's first lesson be obedience, and the second will be what thou wilt.”