In a poem titled “Wash Your Hands,” Phan Nhiên Hạo writes “Gentlemen, this is no trivial matter / another story about art for art’s sake, or art for life / this is the story about a cut the length of decades.” The poem, written in 2009, seems to disrupt time, speaking as much to our harrowing present as it does to Phan’s own complex past. Indeed, much of Phan Nhiên Hạo’s latest collection, Paper Bells, appears to confirm Diana Khoi Nguyen’s view that Phan is a poet “gifted with the ability to be present in multiple planes of existence.”
Meticulously translated from the Vietnamese by Hai-Dang Phan, Paper Bells was recently published by Brooklyn-based press, The Song Cave. As the world contended with the rampant spread of COVID-19 and millions of people were struggling to adjust to a frightening new reality, Phan Nhiên Hạo graciously agreed to correspond with me. We emailed about Paper Bells and balancing the lockdown with writing and family. And Phan shared his thoughts on censorship, writing in exile and the vital importance of personal narratives when it comes to (re)writing history.
—Sarah Timmer Harvey, March 2020
Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): We find ourselves corresponding at a very strange and challenging time. You’re in Illinois, I’m in New York, and both of us are at home due to the coronavirus pandemic. I hope that you and your loved ones are well. How are you isolating and spending your time? Do you feel compelled and able to write?
Phan Nhiên Hạo (PNH): I work for a university library, and the university has been closed due to the coronavirus—yet, we are expected to work from home. Interestingly, we now have more meetings than ever before, but they are virtual meetings. I feel I am mentally well-equipped to be socially distant. Most poets are introverted people, I guess, and that helps a lot in this situation. I want to write, but I need time to absorb the current situation. The pandemic is so surreal, so absurd, so impactful to life at an unimaginable magnitude. It looks like I will stay home for a while, so hopefully, I will be able to write more eventually.
STH: How do you usually balance your work and writing with parenthood and family life?
PNH: I don’t know if other poets write daily. I wish I could. The truth is I don’t write that often, and I write poems, not novels, so time is not really a factor for me. Nonetheless, I have come to realize that even if you don’t write regularly, as a writer, your mind needs to be on writing all the time. Working a full-time job and having a family with young kids, it is very challenging for me to constantly think as a writer. Furthermore, a poet in exile is isolated from the literary environment that can support and inspire him. I have not met a Vietnamese writer in America for the last fourteen years, since moving to Illinois; even before that, when I lived in Southern California, I met only one or two Vietnamese writers. In Vietnam, writers frequently get together, sometimes too often, but that helps stimulate your intellectuality and incites you to write. Maybe these are just my excuses for not writing regularly. I wish I could be more prolific.
STH: Paper Bells is your second collection of poems to be translated into English. What was your vision for the book? And did you approach it in the same way as you as your 2006 bilingual collection, Night, Fish and Charlie Parker?
PNH: Both Night, Fish and Charlie Parker and Paper Bells were translated over long periods of time. I first met Linh Dinh, who translated Night, Fish and Charlie Parker, in 2000, when I was asked by a Vietnamese literary journal to translate a short story by Linh from English to Vietnamese. We soon became interested in one another’s writings, and Linh started to translate some of my poems for American literary journals. After a few years, when about twenty poems had been translated, we discussed making a bilingual book. At that point, Linh had translated about ten additional poems, conducted an interview with me, then put together a manuscript for the publisher, Tupelo Press. Paper Bells, translated by Hai-Dang Phan, went through the same process. Hai-Dang met me about ten years ago when he was working on his Ph.D. dissertation in literature. Like Linh, he translated my poems over the years for different journals, including Asymptote. Over the past two years, when Hai-Dang and I decided to put together a book, the translation was accelerated, and we finally came up with a collection of about forty poems, this time published only in English translation. Because the translation took place over many years and they were not originally intended as book projects, there was not really a focused vision on how we selected the poems for each book. As Hai-Dang Phan wrote in the introduction of Paper Bells: “There was little design, but much desire in the process.” However, I did choose not include a few poems that I thought would require heavy references to the historical and political context of Vietnam. The longest poem that I have written, and one that I considered important to me, “Lịch Sử Thời Đại Tường Thuật Bởi Một Người Lưu Vong” [History of the Modern Time as Reported by an Exile], for example, was not included in Paper Bells. The poem talks about how horrible life was in South Vietnam after 1975, when the Vietnamese communists took over the whole country, and about the lives of Vietnamese refugees when they first came to America. You really need to know about the complexity of the Vietnam War and its aftermath, especially from the various Vietnamese perspectives, to read through this long poem. Poems that are playful with language or fragmentary in structure were also not included. They are simply impossible to translate.
STH: How do you view the relationship between writing and translation?
PNH: I have done some translation of other authors’ writing from English into Vietnamese, and for me, it is a very technical work. You need to be faithful to the original as much as possible instead of being “creative” when translating, even though this can sometimes make the translated works sound quite foreign. But that is the point; translated work is interesting because it is foreign. I think a translator should not try to naturalize a translated text. I know that many translators would not agree with me on this, and I’ve witnessed heated debates on this subject among Vietnamese translators, some of whom considered themselves co-writers of the works they were translating. That is not how I see myself when I work as a translator.
STH: It is clear from the writings and interviews of your translators, Hai-Dang Phan and Linh Dinh, that you have worked very closely with them over the years to produce the English translations of your poems. Can you share your reasons for choosing to collaborate with translators instead of translating your own work?
PNH: Both Linh Dinh and Hai-Dang Phan are themselves poets, very strong poets indeed. I am lucky they took an interest in my poetry and wanted to introduce it to American readers. There are very few people who can translate Vietnamese poetry into English. Most Vietnamese American writers who write in English are not interested in Vietnamese literature, partly because they don’t read Vietnamese that well. Then there are some Vietnamese writers like me, who write in Vietnamese and speak English as a second language. To translate well, you should translate from your second language into your first language, not the other way around. I could have translated my own poems, but I prefer for them to be translated by translators whose first language is English. Another practical reason I was not so keen on translating my own work is that I did not know many people in the American publishing industry, especially the editors and publishers who were willing to publish poetry in translation. Linh Dinh and Hai-Dang Phan not only translated my poems, they also introduced my work to these people. And I really appreciate that.
STH: Memory and erasure are central themes in Paper Bells. In your essay, “This Year I am the Same Age as My Father,” you also wrote extensively about the need to individualize history and reject the idea of a dominant collective memory. Why has it been important for you to explore and expand upon these ideas in your writing?
PNH: Vietnam is a non-democratic country ruled by a communist party where freedom of speech does not exist. In Vietnam, history—in particular, the history of the Vietnam War which killed millions of people and devastated many more million families—can only be told from the perspective of the communists who won the war. But there were different sides during the war. There were concentration camps and acts of revenge after the war. There were “boat people” who tried to escape from the hellish country only to be raped and killed by pirates at sea. There was starvation and discrimination. There was ignorance of the communist leaders that destroyed not only the economy but also the social and cultural fabric of the country. The Vietnamese government does not allow writers in Vietnam to write about these subjects. As a Vietnamese writer living in America, I feel obligated to speak about these “open secrets,” as Hai-Dang Phan calls them. They are not only the truths that need to be recognized in history books; they are painful memories that millions of Vietnamese cannot bury alive. I am one of them. And the best way for me to approach these truths is to narrate them as my personal experiences.
STH: Your writing has been primarily published in the United States, and, as with many Vietnamese writers in exile, your work has been censored in Vietnam. What has this censorship meant for you as a poet, and how has it influenced your writing?
PNH: Despite having opened the country to a market economy in the 1990s, Vietnam is still a non-democratic country ruled by only one party, the Communist Party of Vietnam. Censorship in Vietnam is pervasive and applied to all kinds of media, including the press, literature, arts, music, television, and the internet. Censorship in Vietnam has been carried out for so long and so effectively that it turns writers into masters of self-censorship. For me, this is the most destructive aspect of the censorship of Vietnamese literature. I could have published my works in Vietnam if I agreed to remove the poems that weren’t in line with the grand narrative molded by the Vietnamese communists about history. This includes poems about my experiences as a child whose family fought against the communists during the war and accounts of how we were punished by the winners after the war, in addition to poems about my life as a refugee in America. The Vietnamese government actually encourages overseas Vietnamese writers to publish their works in Vietnam so that it can project a reconciliatory face to the overseas Vietnamese communities, whose economic resources it wants to exploit. To be published in Vietnam, however, one must accept censorship, and this is the price that I refuse to pay. Censorship only makes me more determined to express myself without compromise.
STH: In your review of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel, The Sympathizer, published in UC Berkeley’s Journal of Vietnamese Studies, you conclude with the hope that more Vietnamese, “in the diaspora and Vietnam, will have access to a faithful translation.” I’ve read several reports which claim that it’s often easier for readers in Vietnam to access censored or “controversial” writing produced and translated outside of the country than it is to find work by dissident writers published within Vietnam. What is your view on this?
PNH: As I mentioned, censorship is heavy in Vietnam, and this is also applicable to translated works. I’ll give you an example. Thomas A. Bass, professor of English and journalism at University of Albany, wrote about the famous Vietnamese communist agent Pham Xuan An in a book titled The Spy Who Loved Us: the Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An’s Dangerous Game (2009). Bass’s book, when translated and published in Vietnam in 2014, bears deep scars from censorship, with four hundred passages either altered or removed from the original text. The experience of his exhausting negotiations with the censors in Vietnam for five years during the translation of the book prompted Bass to write a new book about censorship in Vietnam: Censorship in Vietnam, Brave New World (2017). Viet Thanh Nguyen’s book, The Sympathizer, still has not been published in Vietnam although I believe the translation was completed years ago. I doubt that the book will ever come out without being altered. To avoid censorship, some writers in Vietnam choose to publish their works with overseas Vietnamese publishers, but this comes at a cost. Vietnamese books published overseas are considered illegal by the Vietnamese government and cannot be freely distributed inside the country. These books always mysteriously disappear at the post offices when arriving in Vietnam. Most of the time, nonetheless, overseas Vietnamese can smuggle a few copies of these publications into Vietnam when visiting their home country. Of course, there is the internet and social media, where writers can effectively share their works with a much larger audience if they choose to do so. The majority of my poems were published online before they were printed in books.
STH: Which Vietnamese writers do you most admire?
PNH: Two important poets who are admired by many writers in Vietnam, especially writers from the South, are Thanh Tam Tuyen and To Thuy Yen. I am also a fan of these two authors. Another writer, who worked mostly on philosophy but did produce a thin, but wonderful poetry book was Pham Cong Thien. There are ten poems in that book that are among the most mesmerizing poems in contemporary Vietnamese literature. Thanh Tam Tuyen died in 2006 in Minnesota. Pham Cong Thien died in 2011 in Texas, and To Thuy Yen also passed last year in Texas. They were all poets from South Vietnam who lived and died in exile.
STH: As a student in Vietnam, you were very drawn to literature in translation. In particular, the work of the French Existentialists resonated with you then. Is this still the case?
PNH: Before 1975, Western literature was well-translated in the South of Vietnam, and French Existentialism was particularly popular among Vietnamese intellectuals. The ability of this philosophy to point out the absurdity of life resonated with many Vietnamese who viewed the war as an absurd reality. Facing the uncertainty of life that could be abruptly ended by death during war, people also found in Existentialism a convincing call to live in the moment. Life in Vietnam after 1975, when the communists took over the whole country, was unfortunately even more absurd and uncertain than life during wartime. People were no longer killed by bullets but could starve to death or were murdered at sea on their way to freedom, and no one knew what tomorrow would bring. In that sense, Existentialism soothed my own existence in the face of hardship. I still enjoy reading Camus today, but Existentialism is no longer attractive to me as a writer. I now want to talk not only about the present but also the past, to move closer to things that I consider historical truths; these efforts, as far as Existentialism is concerned, seem to be unnecessary and futile.
Phan Nhiên Hạo is the author of three collections of poetry in Vietnamese, Thiên Đường Chuông Giấy [Paradise of Paper Bells, 1998], Chế Tạo Thơ Ca 99-04 [Manufacturing Poetry 99-04, 2004], and Radio Mùa Hè [Summer Radio, 2019]. He received a B.A. in Vietnamese Literature from the Teachers’ College in Saigon, a B.A. in American Literature, and a Masters in Library Science from the University of California, Los Angeles, as well as a Masters in Anthropology from Northern Illinois University. His poetry has been translated into English and featured in Of Vietnam Identities in Dialogue (Palgrave, 2001), Three Vietnamese Poets (Tinfish, 2001), Language for a New Century (W. W. Norton, 2008), and The Deluge: New Vietnamese Poetry (Chax Press, 2013). In 2006, Tupelo Press published a bilingual collection of his poetry, Night, Fish, and Charlie Parker, translated by Linh Dinh. He currently lives and works as an academic librarian in Illinois.
Sarah Timmer Harvey is a writer and translator currently based in New York. Sarah holds an MFA in writing and translation from Columbia University and, most recently, Sarah’s work has appeared in Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, Gulf Coast Journal, and Cagibi.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: