Language: Vietnamese

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

Dispatches from the Philippines, Bulgaria, and the Vietnamese Diaspora!

This week, our editors report on (attempts) at elucidation in the humanities and the cruelties of historic expatriation; the instating of Living National Treasures in the form of indigenous practitioners and their singular crafts; and a word that is meant to sum up a year. 

Thuy DinhEditor-at-Large, reporting on the Vietnamese Diaspora

The National Museum of Immigration History in Paris, France is currently offering a sobering exhibition on the history of Indochinese workers-soldiers, called les lính thợ or les công binh. As colonized subjects, twenty thousand men from Indochina—i.e., Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia—were brought to France at the onset of World War II to help with the war effort. Aside from a small percentage of educated volunteers who wished to escape the colony’s lack of social advancement, the majority, ranging from ages 18 to 30, was forcibly recruited from the poor peasantry to work in France’s defense industry.

Besides the exhibit, recollections by surviving workers have been compiled in recent years by various sources, such as the photographic essay “The Forced Oblivion” by Alejandra Arévalo, the graphic memoir “Les Lính Thợ: Immigrés de force, les travailleurs indochinois en France 1939-1952” (2017) by Pierre Daum and Clément Baloup, the film Công Binh, la longue nuit indochinoise (2013) by Lê Lâm, and the Vietnamese-French monograph, Những người lính thợ – Les travailleurs indochinois requis by Liêm Khê Luguern (2010).

When Germany invaded France in June 1940, the Indochinese workers were evacuated to the free zone in Southern France, where they worked in forestry and pioneered the rice-growing industry in the Camargue region. Both state-run and private companies employed these workers, but salaries were either paid to the French government, or distributed to the workers at rates significantly below those paid to locals. When Germany invaded the free zone in 1942, the workers were conscripted by German occupation troops to work in weapon factories. Besides harrowing working conditions, the men suffered physical and mental trauma due to prolonged exile and mistreatment by their superiors. READ MORE…

Winter 2024: Highlights from the Team

Get excited to dip into our Winter 2024 issue with these highlights from our team!

Ilya Kaminsky’s “Reading Dante in Ukraine” makes an impassioned case for the crucial role of art amid the horrors of war. What we need, as Dante’s journey shows us, is to defend ourselves with it: a tune to walk to, even in the underworld, as long as one still walks. In Miklós Vámos’s “Electric Train,”  translated by Ági Bori‚ the question-answer format gives the piece levity and rhythm, and the counterpoint of the humor interplaying with the troubled relationships brings it powerful depth. I found wisdom in the wry humor of Jaime Barrios Carrillo’s poems in David Unger’s translation. I love the image of angels spending the evening in their hotel rooms, ironing their enormous white wings.

—Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor

The masterful language in Ági Bori’s translation, as though hand-holding the reader through a children’s story, and the simple act of gifting a present in the story belie the depth and complexity of emotional turmoil that wash over Miklós Vámos’s characters in “Electric Train,” a turmoil that seemingly hits out of nowhere like a wave yet in fact stems from a deep brewing well of built up memories and tensions. The contrast highlights all the more the challenges, and perhaps even limits, of recognizing and understanding another’s intentions, experiences, and feelings.

Rage, sorrow, resilience, helplessness, hope, a hunger for life and love and connection, grief, a numbing screaming despair: it is difficult to put into words the sensations that ran through me as I read Samer Abu Hawwash’s “My People” in Huda J. Fakhreddine’s translation. It cannot possibly compare to the feelings and thoughts of Samer Abu Hawwash and the Palestinian people, to the reality of having each day and moment narrow down to dried bread and tear tracks.

I was intrigued by Laura Garmeson’s discussion, in her review of Brazilian author Itamar Vieira Junior’s Crooked Plow, of the tongue as “both creator and destroyer. It has the power to make and unmake worlds.” It is a through line in Crooked Plow that reminds us of the power and possibilities of language and story to shape our lives. Garmeson’s review, in a way, is also a fire that kindles awareness of Itamar Vieira Junior’s work and the legacies, realities, and possible futures for Afro-Brazilian communities. The tongue as symbol also feels like a through line between these pieces in their rumination on what is gained and lost and pushed aside in the choices we make of what, how, and when we say (or write) things, or not.

—Julie Shi, Senior Executive Assistant

READ MORE…

Our Milestone 50th Issue Has Landed!

Featuring Emily Wilson, Ilya Kaminsky, Michael Cronin, Nam Le, and Samer Abu Hawwash alongside new work from 35 countries!

Living today is a feat of coexistence. In Me | You | Us, our Winter 2024 editionAsymptote’s landmark fiftieth!—people seek ways to equably share a world of jostling values, languages, and stories. Embracing the rare spotlight in mainstream English media almost never afforded translators, Emily Wilson discusses her groundbreaking translation of Homer and its place in the constellation of existing English Odyssies. Public intellectual Michael Cronin makes the case for translation’s centrality in the construction of new narratives necessary for the continued survival of our species amid other species. Headlining our Special Feature themed on coexistence, Nam Le’s frenzied poems are just as preoccupied with Carl Linnaeus’s taxonomy in the original Latin as they are driven to distraction by the insufficiency of that same scanty alphabet against the tonal splendor of Vietnamese. In Ilya Kaminsky’s Brave New World Literature contribution, truckloads of Dante’s Inferno being delivered to a besieged Kharkiv speak to a different, tenuous, and moving, coexistence. As support for Ukraine wavers in the US, we at Asymptote have kept up our coverage of the region also through Elina Sventsytska’s devastating poetry, a review of Oksana Lutsyshyna’s latest award-winning novel in English translation, and a dispatch about the chilling aftermath of a Russian dissident’s self-immolation. Alongside these, I invite you to discover the Mexican pioneer of magical realism Elena Garro, Palestinian poet Samer Abu Hawwash, Cuban artist Gertrudis Rivalta Oliva, and Romanian playwright Edith Negulici amid never-before-published work from a whopping thirty-five countries. All of it is illustrated by the Netherlands-based guest artist Ehud Neuhaus.

Winter-2024-v9
If, as Taiwanese author Lin Yaode put it, “literature’s history is really a history of readers of literature,” the history of Asymptote might also be in part a tale of its readers. But why should it stop there? To all collaborators and supporters, past and present, I say gratefully: this one is for you! As hinted at by last year’s closures of The White Review and Freeman’s—both similarly prestigious journals with a focus on world literature—existence (by which I mean mere survival) has not been easy. We made it to our 1st, 2nd, 3rd . . . and to our 50th edition because of you.

If you are an avid reader of the magazine and haven’t yet signed up, we hope you’ll consider becoming an official sustaining or masthead member today for as little as USD5 a month in addition to subscribing to our socials (FacebookXInstagramThreads) and our monthly Book Club. If you represent an institution advocating for a country’s literature, check out this (slightly outdated) slideshow and get in touch to sponsor a country-themed Special Feature, as FarLit has recently done. (The deadline to submit to our paid Faroese Special Feature is February 15th, 2024; the guidelines and a new call for reviewers to contribute to our monthly What’s New in Translation column can be found here). If you work for a translation program, prize, or residency, consider advertising through our myriad platforms, including our newly launched “Upcoming Opportunities in Translation” column. And, finally, if you’d like to join us behind the scenes in advocating for a more inclusive world literature, we just announced our very first recruitment drive of the year (deadline to apply: February 1st, 2024). Thank you for your readership and your support. We can’t wait to hear from you!

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest in literary news from Guatemala, Costa Rica, and the Vietnamese diaspora!

This week in world literature, we hear from our Editors-at-Large reporting on the latest in literary developments! In Guatemala, we’re covering the literary community’s response to threats to the electoral process, as well as the country’s most recent award-winning authors. From the Vietnamese diaspora, we take a dive into two authors’ recent publications. Read on to learn more!

Rubén López, Editor-at-Large, Reporting on Guatemala

On August 31, sixty-two Guatemalan writers, editors, and artists signed a statement calling for the resignation of María Consuelo Porras, Head of the Public Prosecutor’s Office. Ms. Porras, who was included in the Engels List of 2023 for obstructing investigations against corrupt political allies, has been the main actor in the attempt to sabotage the Guatemalan electoral process of this year. 

On June 25, the progressive presidential ticket composed of Bernardo Arévalo and Karin Herrera surprisingly made it to the second round of the election. This started a series of legalistic arbitrariness from Ms. Porras in an effort to prevent the duly elected candidates from taking office democratically on January 14. 

READ MORE…

Come, Sisters: In Memory of Lâm thị Mỹ Dạ

In my memory, Mỹ Dạ’s speech takes on the resonance of wind chimes, softly rolling pebbles, and rustling waves.

In this essay, Thuy Dinh, one of the translators of Vietnamese poet Lâm thị Mỹ Dạ, remembers and reflects on the visual beauty, delicate music, and subtle dissonances of her work, in light of her recent passing.

On July 6, 2023, Lâm thị Mỹ Dạ, one of Vietnam’s major poets whose poetry was featured in Asymptote’s July 2013 issue, passed away in Saigon, Vietnam, due to complications from Alzheimer’s. She was 74.

An author of several acclaimed poetry collections and children’s stories, Mỹ Dạ attended the Nguyễn Du Writing School in Hà Nội in 1983 and Russia’s Maxim Gorky Institute of Advanced Studies in Literature in 1988. In 2007, she was awarded the National Prize in Literature and the Arts ⸺Vietnam’s highest literary honor ⸺ for her three poetry collections: Trái Tim Sinh Nở (The Blossoming Heart), Bài Thơ Không Năm Tháng (Poems Without Years), and Đề Tặng Một Giấc Mơ (Dedicated to a Dream). Her last two collections, Soul Brimming with Wild Chrysanthemums (Hồn Đầy Hoa Cúc Dại) and The Love Poems of Lâm thị Mỹ Dạ (Thơ Tình Lâm thị Mỹ Dạ) were also published in 2007. In the U.S., Green Rice, an anthology of Mỹ Dạ’s select poems, co-translated by poet Martha Collins and myself, represents her poetic legacy in translation.

I first met Mỹ Dạ in the summer of 2000 in Boston, Massachusetts, when she came to the William Joiner Institute as part of an invited four-member delegation of writers from Vietnam. I had come to the Institute that summer to attend workshops in translation and creative nonfiction; serendipitously, Martha, who taught the translation workshop, was looking for a Vietnamese co-translator to work with her on an anthology of Mỹ Dạ’s poetry. I happily embarked on this project, sensing that this collaboration—besides being my first major translation project⸺would also give me an immersive opportunity to study an important female poet from “the other side.” As a young writer whose family had been airlifted out of Saigon by U.S. military personnel near the end of the Vietnam War, I knew very little at the time about literature from the Communist perspective. We were still in the early years of the internet, and barely five years into the normalization of U.S-Vietnam relations.

Most of all, I was drawn to the prospect of translating Mỹ Dạ’s work by the voice of the poet herself—a voice that I have found, in person and through her writing, to be artlessly nuanced. I was born in the south, years after the 1954 separation of North and South Vietnam, but have remained deeply attuned to my family’s Hà Nội accent; as such, I had to learn to decode Mỹ Da’s voice. Her melodious Central Vietnamese cadence gradually revealed a mordant sense of humor that was not too different from my late maternal grandfather’s Northern brand of sarcasm. In my memory, Mỹ Dạ’s speech takes on the resonance of wind chimes, softly rolling pebbles, and rustling waves.  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Muscovy Ducks” by Tô Hoài

Mostly it’s the ducks’ recalcitrant nature that does not endear them to people.

The mores of domesticated Muscovy ducks are the focus of today’s Translation Tuesday. Tô Hoài documents the lives of these gnarled, delinquent, “sybaritic” birds (translated into English with verve and gusto by Thúy Đinh), seeking in vain a sort of understanding. His focus settles on their eyes and faces, but for all his careful watching, he can find nothing to reveal the inner lives of these particularly unaffectionate, unmaternal animals. It seems they live simply to eat.

The calamity that wiped out the chicken has not affected the Muscovy ducks—strong, stolid beasts, immune to ill winds.

Two large ducks now waddle in the poultry yard. There used to be a brood of ducklings, all gone now. If human lives seem to merge into the sea of time, epic and borderless, rolling on endlessly, for the animals, especially those whose lives are enmeshed with ours, there exist only small injuries and barely noticed deaths. Theirs are insignificant, inchoate lives. Harmless beings, they don’t take much of our space, even though they breathe the same air as us. To us they seem no more visible than earthworms or ants.

Six ducklings there were—six tiny, charming heads, six pairs of round eyes, sparkling and innocent. They clustered and made yip-yip sounds around their mother’s coarse, webbed feet. Their mother is as coarse as her extremities. Obtuse and inscrutable, with a surprised expression etched permanently upon a swaying countenance, the mother duck looks like someone being robbed of her purse money on market day.

A witless bird, she accidentally killed one of her offspring.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest literary news from the United States, Vietnam and the Vietnamese Diaspora, and the Philippines!

This week’s roundup of literary news from around the world highlights exciting new publications and publishing trends! From a literary marriage in the United States to the return of a beloved author and history titles in the Philippines, read on to find out more!

Meghan Racklin, Assistant Blog Editor, reporting from the United States

Last week, at their annual awards ceremony—in person again for the first time since the onset of the pandemic—the National Book Critics Circle awarded the inaugural Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize to Grey Bees by Andrew Kurkov, translated by Boris Dralyuk. The new award brings attention to books translated into English and published in the United States, where only a small number of books in translation are published each year—Publishers Weekly’s translation database lists only 419 books in translation published in the United States in 2022.

Dralyuk, the award winner, is a poet and critic as well as a translator and until recently was the Editor-in-Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His translation was selected from a competitive group of finalists which, notably, also included the translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob by Jennifer Croft—Dralyuk’s wife. Prior to the announcement of the award winner, the two gave an interview to the L.A. Times about their relationship to translation and to each other. Croft said “Once we started dating, I would find Boris on my steps, where he would tell me about what he had just translated. He gets so emotionally invested. . . . He’s so careful about every word. It was very moving and, I think, a large part of how we came together.”

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

Literary news from New York, Vietnam, and Sweden!

This week, our editors from around the globe report on Spanish poetry readings in New York, new Vietnamese translations of classic Japanese novels, and the Gothenberg Book Fair in Sweden. Read on to find out more!

 Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from New York

Though I usually report from Mexico City, I recently moved to New Haven to begin a PhD program at Yale. However, relocating has not prevented me from engaging with Hispanophone literary communities, particularly in New York City, a creative hub that connects people from all over the world, and where literary readings in Spanish are common.

The first event I attended was a multilingual poetry open mic at the Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan. Hosted by Spanish poet Marcos de la Fuente, the soirée “Se Buscan Poetas / Poets Wanted” takes place every last Wednesday of the month. It brings together poets from New York and beyond, who sign up to share their work to the Bowery’s attentive audience. I went on Wednesday, August 31, and participated both as spectator and reader among other emerging Spanish- and English-speaking poets. The event opened with a performance by De la Fuente and actress Clara Francesca. They set the mood for the night with a dramatic interpretation of the bilingual poem “Solstice,” published in the anthology Poetryfighters (Ultramarina Editorial, 2022), assembled by De la Fuente himself. The reading was both exhilarating and engaging. Beyond simply voicing words from the book, De la Fuente and Francesca modulated their expressions and walked around the stage in synchrony with the content and rhythm of the text, creating moments of emotional and aural tension that excited the audience, more like a concert or play than a traditional poetry reading. In addition to hosting the monthly open mic, De la Fuente also directs the New York City part of the Kerouac Festival, an international poetry, music, and performance celebration that takes place in Vigo, New York, and Mexico City. Earlier this year, the festival featured the Chilean writer and Asymptote contributor Arelis Uribe.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest in world literature from Sweden, India, and Vietnam!

This week, our editors report on literary news from around the world as summer gets under way, from threats to dissident writers in Sweden to censorship in India to the anniversary of a pioneering author’s death in Vietnam. Read on to find out more!

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

As Sweden’s application to NATO proceeds, the Turkish government has used the opportunity to raise demands on the country to extradite certain individuals. One such person is Ragip Zarakolu, a publisher, journalist, and human rights activist who has lived in Sweden since 2012 as part of an asylum program for threatened writers and publishers. Last week, the International Publishers Association voiced their concern regarding the situation and encouraged Sweden to safeguard Zarakolu’s freedom. Since then, the Frankfurter Buchmesse and the German publishers’ association Börsenverein have followed suit. In 1977, Zarakolu founded the publishing house Belge together with his wife, Ayse Nur, and they published books in Turkey for over thirty years. He was the 2008 IPA Prix Voltaire laureate and is the former chair of IPA’s Freedom to Publish Committee, as well as an honorary member of the Swedish branch of the international PEN organization.

Another writer who has taken up exile in Sweden is poet and Swedish Academy member Jila Mossaed, who last week was awarded the Prix Max Jacob for her poetry collection Det åttonde landet (The Eighth Country), translated into French as Le huitième pays by Vénus Khoury-Ghata. Mossaed was born in 1948 in Tehran, Iran, where she had her literary debut at age seventeen when her poetry was published in the literary journal Khoshe; she later worked as a playwright for Iranian radio and television. In 1986, she fled to Sweden for political asylum. Initially writing exclusively in her native Persian, since 1997 she has also written in Swedish. Recurring themes in her poetry include exile, injustice, and censorship. About writing in her second language, she has said: “To write in the language of exile is to create a small room in that country’s memory. It is a great triumph to become a part of the literary history of a foreign country.”

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Lover as Intimate Other: Chinatown by Thuận

Thuận’s protagonist roams ceaselessly yet neurotically in her imagination even as the main action is confined in both time and space.

Chinatown by Thuận, translated from the Vietnamese by Nguyễn An Lý, New Directions, 2022

In an interview with Italian journalist Leopoldina Pallotta della Torre in 1989, Marguerite Duras revealed she had chosen the rather nondescript title of The Lover (L’Amant), her celebrated novel about a love affair between a fifteen-year-old French girl and a Chinese man in French Indochina, as “a reaction against all the books with that same title, [for] it isn’t a story about love, but about everything in passion that remains suspended and incapable of being named.”

In employing Chinatown as an equally unassuming yet versatile title for her 2005 novel, Thuận responds incisively to the Duras’s work from which she took inspiration by showcasing her pair of star-crossed lovers—an unnamed Vietnamese protagonist and Thụy, her ex-husband who is born in Vietnam but has Chinese ancestry. A Hanoi-born writer and literary translator living in France but choosing to write her novels—ten at last count—in Vietnamese, Thuận (full name Đoàn Ánh Thuận) deftly balances her complex content with a wryly confiding style. Making its English debut via Nguyễn An Lý’s incantatory translation, Chinatown’s generic title is deceptive, its compact length trapping layers of tensions to illustrate how political struggles in the public realm mirror emotional struggles in personal relationships. Subversive yet casually framed like a run-on conversation between friends, Thuận’s novel explores various iterations of Chinatown to convey exile, alienation, oppression, and artistic freedom.

Consisting of one vertiginous 184-page paragraph, the novel is compressed within a two-hour timeline during which the protagonist and her young son are trapped in a Paris metro tunnel while local authorities investigate a bomb threat. With nowhere to go, the protagonist soon launches into reminiscences spanning two eventful decades—from the last years of the Cold War to the period following Vietnam’s implementation of free-market reforms. As such, the novel is simultaneously expansive and claustrophobic, its experimental form disrupted only by two fragments from I’m Yellow, a novel-in-progress by Chinatown’s protagonist. This novel-within-a-novel structure embodies the ambiguous push-pull between oppression and freedom: Thuận’s protagonist roams ceaselessly yet neurotically in her imagination even as the main action is confined in both time and space.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Flowerie Dream” by Hàn Mặc Tử

I beg, please empty out words and let yourself be present

This Translation Tuesday, treat yourself to a poem by the poet Hàn Mặc Tử, a celebrated figure of the New Poetry Movement in colonial Vietnam. Translator Phương Anh—whose interview with Vietnamese writer Thuận we recently featured—brings to us this poem with its modernist and mist-like qualities. “Flowerie Dream” is a meditation on the quality of presence from the early twentieth century that refracts the influence of French symbolism. 

“Hàn Mặc Tử’s poetry, with his surreal and ambiguous imagery, has often been considered untranslatable. It doesn’t help that, with each printing, there have been tweaks in punctuations and even words. In my opinion, his poems invite multiple translations, with mine being one of the possibilities, based on the version found in the bilingual edition Le Hameau des Roseaux by Hélène Péras and Vũ Thị Bích. My approach for this poem was mainly to bring out that meditative and quality of mystique in the Vietnamese, and to take liberties in changing the structure, particularly in the first stanza. In Vietnamese you can often create a double action in a very short space, but when translating into English (or French), in unpacking all actions, sometimes the line becomes too long, taking away that succinctness from the Vietnamese. Therefore, I decided to move a few words around—but only when it fits the effect. For example, instead of directly translating the word ‘không gian’ (space), I left the line hanging on ‘staining.’ Partly because I felt the line was getting too long, but also because I wanted to bring out the idea of the staining movement of the smoke by having it intrude onto the next line. This adds to the mystical quality of the ‘khói trầm’ (smoke) which also can refer to the agarwoods sometimes present in spiritual practices. Similarly, I moved the verb ‘daring’ up a line, and placed it at the enjambement to underscore both the speaker’s confidence and hesitation.” 

Phương Anh

Flowerie Dream

Low-hum smoke gently ripples across, staining
Bluish time spills into golden dream
This evening’s dress is too formal—daring
To kiss chrysanthemum soul’s in the dew

Can you water the flowers with your warm tears?
Count a petal for each loving time
Can you bury the pieces of withered spring?
And please, bury them in the depths of the heart. READ MORE…

Only I Could Come Up With That: Thuận on Chinatown

My characters and stories are often considered too complicated, following neither moral nor cultural standards.

In the finest of fictions, many worlds converge. All the maps the writer has walked through, all the sights seen and tasted, all that was heard and spoken. The work of lauded Vietnamese author Thuận exists in this potent amalgam of experience, bringing the poetry of hidden meanings to the surface with her singular perspective. In her Anglophone debut, Chinatown, translated by Nguyễn An Lý and soon to be published by Tilted Axis, Thuận paints a thinking portrait from the Paris metro to the streets of Chợ Lớn, a love story of trespasses and reimagined borders—fictions residing in fictions, life nestled in life. In this following interview, the author speaks to Phương Anh about Chinatown’s unique structure, how her work in French translation has informed her writing, and the complex political relationships informing her narratives.

Phương Anh (PA): Based on your previous interviews, it seems that rhythm is very important to you. When I was reading your writing, I was easily swept away by its cadence—could you speak to your process and style?

Thuận (T): I wanted this book to have one single rhythm, cut into three steady parts with two short breaks entitled “I’m Yellow”; I did this to both challenge and encourage the reader’s patience. I think my novels’ rhythms should attack the reader, confront them, suck them in. And when I’m feeling out the rhythm, I like to think of myself as trying to compose a piece of music.

Also, I wanted to find words that are concise and clear, with no hidden meanings, few adjectives, and generally without many embellishments. I use short sentences, one following another, utilizing space so the words may gain more strength. And then I would repeat—like small waves that come in every now and again, disappearing into the rock and sand. That’s how I approached writing Chinatown. The cadence, for the most part, is created by repetition—of a word group, a sentence, or even a whole passage. It could also be an action, a saying, a name.

PA: I feel that you really have a meticulous and, one could say, impersonal approach towards writing. For instance, in an interview with BBC Vietnam, you said that you don’t write to confess. What did you mean by that exactly?

T: I didn’t want the novel to become a memoir, but rather a direct experience of consciousness, taken from the disordered and persistent thoughts of the main character. For many people, writing is about opening up about oneself. At twenty-six, after ten years being away from home, I began to write. But not for the purpose of talking about my life. My first thought was to serve a desire, a fantasy, a need to escape from myself, from my life.

Here, the need to write informs the responsibility of writing. In other words, a writer becomes professional only when they can express, defend, and prove their attitude towards reality. For me, writing is difficult. Writing long is even more difficult. With novels, the number of pages itself is already a challenge. Not to mention the structure, style, rhythm, characters. . . I think of writing a novel as a dangerous adventure—the most dangerous thing being not knowing where it’s going to go.

PA: Besides being an author, you are also a translator, and a ruthless one at that. When editing the French translation of Thư gửi Mina, you cut out almost one fourth of the text, feeling that there was too much excess. Could you tell me why you decided to do so?

T: Thư gửi Mina is a novel with thirteen chapters, composed of letters written to Mina—a girl from the main character’s time in Soviet Russia. When writing that particular novel, I tried to write longer, sort of drifting from one story to another. In Vietnamese, I guess the result wasn’t too bad. But when I was editing the French translation, the language of Descartes helped me to realize that there were too many words—that it was an overkill. After editing out around twenty thousand words in the French edition, I took out the Vietnamese one again and revised it. Hopefully, Thư gửi Mina will be re-published with a different spirit: short and succinct, strong and direct, following the economical literary art that I’m pursuing.

PA: You also said that translation helped you to see your work more clearly, which I find quite refreshing in a way, because people tend to focus on what is “lost in translation”.

T: Whenever I have doubts about a sentence I’ve just written, I double-check it by translating it into French and immediately, anything illogical or superfluous will come out. If translation takes one thing from us, it makes up for it in other ways. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Rain in Bình Dương” by Văn Giá

Somebody had said that there were professions which set the teeth on edge, the profession of pointing with five fingers . . .

From 1954 to 1975, Việt Nam was divided into North Việt Nam and South Việt Nam. Exacerbated by the Việt Nam War, the division caused tremendous tension among the people on both sides. This Translation Tuesday, we are brought back to this age of division through a tale by the acclaimed short story writer Văn Giá, one that portrays an undercurrent conflict in the most casual of encounters and the writer’s strong desire for all Vietnamese people to unite, to reconcile, and to heal. Translators Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai and Bruce Weigl’s short, sharp sentences give the story a stuttering rhythm that conveys a sense of wariness and caution that permeate the characters’ minds

My tooth and gums are now okay. My dentist says a scar has grown onto the gum. “Leave it alone for around a year and come back for a check-up,” he tells me. I tiptoe, open my mouth wide, tilt my face, and look into the mirror. It’s true that a scar is there. This tooth. A windy and raining evening in Bình Dương . . .

It was so unlucky, that trip. My tooth suddenly betrayed me. My gum swelled so much. I couldn’t stand the pain. I would lose my cool standing at the classroom’s podium looking like this. I thrashed around all night, drained of energy. After a quick and barely chewed dinner, I asked my student, “Please, could you find some place for me to get my tooth fixed? Otherwise I’ll be in big trouble.” 

“I will look for one now. Stay calm, Teacher. Don’t worry.” 

But . . . the rain was pouring so.

I glided into the car. A brand new one. Its interior still had that new smell. Super shiny. I praised him, saying the public could benefit a great deal from such a posh head of the sub-district People’s Committee. Having said that, I startled myself and I was afraid that he thought I was mocking him. 

I hurried to say, “I mean when the head of a sub-district People’s Committee does well, his people also benefit. If local government officials are poor and rough-looking, they get no respect from the common people. If you were poor and held a leader’s position, greed would be born. If you are already rich, you don’t have to be greedy. Therefore the people would benefit . . .”

After I finished speaking, I realized that my own reasoning sounded like that of some kind of pimp. I was startled again, but my student said nothing. I told myself to keep my mouth shut. 

But then I asked whether it was still far away. “Quite close by,” the student answered. He said no more. Outside, Heaven continued to dump down its water. The rain was getting heavier and heavier. Few people were travelling on the road. It was around seven or eight p.m. The student drove so fast. I was fearful. It would be dangerous if someone dashed out from a lane. 

“There’s no need to hurry,” I told him. 

He said nothing. I sat at the back, craning my body to look through the car’s front glass. The wipers worked furiously. The car dashed past a push-cart which was moving through the rain; perhaps a cart of a wandering seller. A white sheet of water, curving like a rainbow, blanketed the person pushing the cart. I knitted my brows. “Please slow down. You made that person soaking wet.” 

The student said nothing. I glanced at the front mirror to look at his face: cold as a metal sheet.

The car slowly turned into a small lane and came to a stop. The student told me to sit inside the car so he could go in and check if the practice was open. He didn’t use personal pronouns, but spoke without using the proper form of address. Perhaps here, people spoke this way. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t important. 

After a while the student came back. “It’s closed. Let’s go somewhere else.”  READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

We report from Guatemala and Vietnam in this week’s literary round-up!

In this week’s dispatches of literary news from around the world, the struggle of Vietnamese refugees is commemorated in text and art, a new documentary celebrates Thích Nhất Hạnh, and a new Guatemalan award honours the country’s female writers. Read on to find out more!

Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Vietnamese Diaspora

Besides T.S. Eliot, April also seems problematic for refugees of the former Republic of South Vietnam. On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese Communist forces captured Saigon—the capital of South Vietnam—ending the Vietnam War, yet triggering a mass exodus of South Vietnamese who fled their fallen nation for political asylum in the West. In recent years, descendants of these refugees have pursued creative efforts to redefine/translate “Black April” as a time of remembrance and rebirth. For example, the traveling exhibit Textures of Remembrance: Vietnamese Artists and Writers Reflect on the Vietnamese Diaspora, curated by the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN), and currently shown at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center, in Oakland, California, introduces a spectrum of “textured” responses to April 30 via visual media, poetry, and prose, to construct an intimate yet diverse composite of the diasporic experience that has been collected, recollected, and reimagined since 1975.

The theme of remembrance and rebirth also manifests in a new Vietnamese translation of The Song of Quan Âm (Quan Âm Tế Độ Diễn Nghĩa Ca), about the life of Avalokiteshvara—the bodhisattva of compassion—known commonly as Quan Âm, who is endowed with the ability to see (quan) and hear (âm) all human sufferings. Translated and annotated by scholar Nguyễn văn Sâm, this anonymous 7,228-line poem—the longest poem originally written in Nôm or the Southern script—vividly illustrates Buddhist concepts such as karma, reincarnation, and filial piety. The book’s magisterial scope, only the second translation since 1925, also reflects the translator’s fervent wish to preserve Nôm—a writing tradition adapted from Chinese ideographs and containing a wealth of premodern Vietnamese thought—yet is mostly neglected today due to the adoption of the Romanized script.

Compassion, inextricably linked to remembrance and rebirth, is eloquently evoked in A Cloud Never Dies, a twenty-seven-minute documentary on the life and teachings of the late Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh. Released on April 2 by the International Plum Village Community in response to the war in Ukraine, the film highlights Thích Nhất Hạnh’s philosophy of engaged Buddhism­ that combines meditation with antiwar activism. Articulated in his 1967 book Lotus in a Sea of Fire (Hoa Sen Trong Biển Lửa), Thích Nhất Hạnh’s practice lent moral support to Vietnamese during the war who refused to take sides and simply wanted the bombing to end. This perspective, however, resulted in his thirty-nine-year exile in the West. READ MORE…