Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest news from the Vietnamese Diaspora, Taiwan, and the United States!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from the Vietnamese Diaspora, Taiwan, and the United States. The diasporic Vietnamese community has been mourning renowned poet Nguyễn Lương Vỵ; in Taiwan, Leo Ou-fan Lee and Esther Yuk-ying have released their highly acclaimed co-authored memoir; and in the United States, PEN America has announced the Longlist for the 2021 PEN America Literary Awards. Read on to find out more! 

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

The diasporic Vietnamese community is mourning poet Nguyễn Lương Vỵ, who recently died of COVID-19 at aged sixty-eight. Tributes and essays devoted to his fruitful legacy have appeared online, with mentions of his March 3, 2021 funeral in Midway City, California.

Born in Quảng Nam, Central Vietnam—a hardscrabble terrain famous for its revolutionaries and poets—Nguyễn Lương Vỵ used onomatopoeic speech to create multivalent “compressions” of sound, image, and sense. Instructed in Chinese and Nôm scripts by his grandfather, Nguyễn Lương Vỵ gravitated toward Tang poetry, haiku, and Zen philosophy. These influences shaped his lifelong exploration of Âm, a Vietnamese homonymic concept that represents the motherlode of sound, voice, language, female, and night, overlapping with the Buddhist, Hinduist, and Jainist Om.

Nguyễn Lương Vỵ’s career—eleven acclaimed collections spanning half a century—began at the age of sixteen with the publication of a four-line poem, “Awake at Midnight to Look at White Cloud.” It foreshadows his future exile in the US and looks back at an adolescence ruptured by the brutal execution of his father for ideological heresy:

Shimmering soul old place
White cloud holding sky
Dry moon drained of blood
Mountains overlapping

An esteemed translator, Nguyễn Lương Vỵ also published in 2017 an annotated translation on the Zen poetry of Emperor Trần Nhân Tông (1258-1308). His favorite poem was Trần Nhân Tông’s Buddhist prayer, “Verse Not a Verse,” which he translated into modern vernacular:

Verse not a verse
Always been this way
Point finger, forget moon
Body left elsewhere.

Verse not a verse
Been this way always
Eight words wide open
Nothing left to say
.

Like Nguyễn Lương Vỵ, the translator Ngọc Thứ Lang was celebrated for his intuitive gift in transmuting texts. His incomparable rendition of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather—which will celebrate its fifty-second anniversary on March 10, 2021—has assumed the status of original creation. Translated as Bố Già—or “Old Forebear”—the Vietnamese title suggests either an Old Testament or Taoist presence. Since Vietnamese has an array of personal pronouns for different social situations, Ngọc Thứ Lang was also astute in modulating forms of address to reflect the hierarchy of professional and emotional attachments between Don Corleone and his circle.

In the decades since Ngọc Thứ Lang’s death in 1979, Bố Già’s inventive approach has transformed Vietnamese speech and popular fiction. Readers even admit being disappointed by Francis Coppola’s film adaptation, since his cinematic characters don’t seem as “real” as their paper Vietnamese constructs.

(English translation of the above excerpts by Thuy Dinh)

Darren Huang, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Taiwan     

On January 15, the academic Leo Ou-fan Lee and writer-visual artist Esther Yuk-ying released their highly acclaimed co-authored memoir, Ordinary Days: A Memoir in Six Chapters, translated by the Taiwanese translators Carol Ong and Annie Ren Luman. It is notable for following in the traditions of Shen Fu’s eighteenth-century sentimental memoir, Six Records of a Floating Life. The authors narrate the story of their marriage, as well as their spiritual and emotional journey during turbulent times in Hong Kong and their many years in Taiwan. The memoir also bears artistic influences ranging from well-known Chinese writers such as Eileen Chang to Oscar Wilde to composers such as Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. The work is formally inventive, as it mixes history, memoir, and criticism, as well as the varying styles of the two authors. One chapter includes a past letter the agnostic Leo wrote but never sent to his late father in heaven, in which he describes the failures of his first marriage, while Esther grapples with her past depression in the final chapter, including an account of her three suicide attempts and a Depression Diary.

Another recent major publication, “Daughter of Great Harbor” by Chen Rou-jin, published in December 2020, was shared by President Tsai Ing-wen as part of her book reading campaign, in which she promoted support for the Taiwanese publishing industry, in light of the shift of the Taipei International Book Exhibition to the virtual space as a result of the pandemic. In this work of historical fiction, Chen relates the story of a Taiwanese woman, Sun Aixue, who was born in Kaohsiung in 1928. The novel follows Sue’s fitful life during the oppressive atmosphere in Taiwan after the arrival of the Kuomintang government. Sue’s father and husband flee for Japan to escape a period of persecution known as the White Terror. Five years later, Sue and her daughter reunite with the rest of the family in Japan. The novel conveys the evolution of Taiwanese society, as well as all the joys and difficulties of a woman’s life during the country’s twentieth-century historical upheavals.

Clémence Lucchini, Educational Arm Assistant, reporting from the United States

PEN America announced their Longlists for the 2021 PEN America Literary Awards on January 27. Out of 1,850 submissions, the judges selected the work from 125 writers and translators to then be narrowed down to a list of fifty-five finalists that was revealed on February 10. PEN America, the US branch of PEN International, defends free expression, protects writers and the press, and celebrates literature by offering a total of $380,000 this year to the winners of the prestigious PEN America Literary Awards. While waiting for the winners to be announced during a virtual ceremony in April, anyone interested in reading works in translation should look at the finalists of the PEN Translation Prize and PEN Award for Poetry in Translation present on Asymptote.

My preference goes to the translation from the French by Chris Andrews of Our Riches, written by Kaouther Adimi, as Edmond Charlot’s vibrant life story and publishing endeavors in Algeria are still with me today. To get a sense of Garous Abdolmalekian’s Lean Against This Late Hour, translated by Ahmad Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey, Mandana Chaffa reviewed it highlighting the poems’ dream-like features. Also accessible on Asymptote are the work and translations of Steve Bradbury translating from the Chinese, Johannes Göransson translating from the Swedish, John Hennessy and Ostap Kin translating from the Ukrainian, Emma Ramadan translating from the French, and Eric M. B. Becker translating from the Portuguese.

BookExpo, New York City’s landmark publishing fair that went virtual in 2020, was officially discontinued in December. Citing the need for a revamped vision, ReedExpo (BookExpo’s organizer) explained in a statement that “the COVID-19 pandemic arrived at a time in the life cycle of BookExpo where we were already examining restructuring our events to best meet our community’s needs.” While we wait for a reimagined BookExpo, you can read here how the Helsinki Book Fair could inspire a new BookExpo.

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