According to the University of Rochester’s Translation Database, since 2008, only nine Vietnamese original works of fiction and poetry have been published in the US in English translation. Translator Kaitlin Rees is working toward changing that. Since 2011, Rees has been back and forth between New York and Hanoi; she now works closely with poet Nhã Thuyên, with whom she founded AJAR, a small bilingual publishing press which hosts its own online journal and a poetry festival. Her translation of Nhã Thuyên book of poetry words breathe, creatures of elsewhere was published by Vagabond Press in 2016. The following year, she received the PEN/Heim Translation Grant. We recently spoke about her unconventional education, obsession with dictionaries, and intimate collaboration with Nhã Thuyên.
Suhasini Patni (SP): You’ve been alternating between Hanoi and New York since 2011. When did you first visit Vietnam? Did you visit because you knew you wanted to translate the national literature, or was it something you decided to do upon visiting? How did your relationship with the Vietnamese language first begin?
Kaitlin Rees (KR): I started learning Vietnamese when I first arrived in Vietnam, though I can’t say this was my intention before going. My relationship with the language really began out of friendship, love, and curiosity; I was quite ignorant of any possible career path at that time. Besides the practicality, it’s a politics too—being able to communicate in the language of where I lived. The strongest motivation to learn Vietnamese was the simple, personal wish to read the poets whom I met and admired, in particular, the poet Nhã Thuyên.
SP: Since you became interested in the Vietnamese language only after you met poets you admired, why did you decide to visit Vietnam in the first place?
KR: The “why” of deciding to visit Vietnam for the first time is strange for me to look back on; I have to transport myself to a different me to really remember what was going on in my head at the time of leaving New York. And I always feel like I’m making it up, like I’m inventing a biography of someone else that seems to make the most sense now, but never feels completely true.
The truth is perhaps that I will never know exactly why I went; it wasn’t with any kind of job or fellowship. But I think I can say that I wanted to visit Vietnam because I wanted to go to a place I hadn’t expected myself to go. I had only been introduced to the country in the context of its most recent war with America, and I wanted to complicate that narrative, I wanted to complicate myself, to be far away from whatever I felt comfortable with. There is so much privilege wrapped up in my story of travel—people spend years of their lives attempting to cross some borders and yet, as a white American passport holder, I could just decide on a place and go. I had told myself I’d stay for one year, but learning the language, meeting friends I was starting to really love, feeling curious and challenged every single morning—these things kept me there.
SP: What was it like learning Vietnamese? Was the Vietnamese language something you had encountered growing up in New York? Or was learning Vietnamese an alien experience?
KR: The process of learning Vietnamese was inseparable from what became my translation practice. My tutor, cô Nhạn, is an incredible woman who was eighty-three years old at the time we met. She taught Vietnamese, English, and French to a range of students from her tiny apartment in the middle of the jam-packed Old Quarter of Hanoi. She was a perfect teacher for me—I would bring her literary texts that I wanted to read and together we slowly worked our way through them. When I started translating, it was because I wanted to read Nhã Thuyên’s poetry specifically. The poems are not exactly easy, but cô Nhạn would sit with me and read word by word, through these long winding Proustian lines. With endless conversations, constant dictionary consultation, and the self-guided practice of using my burgeoning “poetic” vocabulary as much as possible at the market, I started to learn the language. Ultimately, translation was simply the only way for me to read who I loved. I consider how my approach might be backwards, in that I am learning the language through translation, rather than translating after mastering the language. But I also question if one can really be a master of Vietnamese, or any language really.
My lack of a formal university education still shapes my relationship to the language. Words are so contextualized by the places and the people I learned them from. Everyone can give you a slightly different take on the meaning of a word, and without a classroom authority to be the final say of correctness in definition, I often have a cloud of understanding around certain words that have been informed by different contexts, and I don’t distinguish a hierarchy among them, which I think is valuable.
SP: I’m curious to know what you feel about the ethics of translating. I get the sense that you don’t translate with a sense of responsibility to bring Vietnamese works into the international stage—but do you think your role as a translator complicates because of the history between America and Vietnam? Do you think there is a politic of race and nationality that one cannot separate oneself from when translating?
KR: Totally. Don Mee Choi, a brilliant translator from Korean into English, is someone who articulates this politics so sharply. She writes, “My translation intent has nothing to do with personal growth, intellectual exercise, or cultural exchange, which implies an equal standing of some sort. South Korea and the U.S. are not equal. I am not transnationally equal.” Because of the history of the United States’ violent military aggression in Vietnam, how Vietnam in the white American consciousness has become cemented as this metaphor of shame, how giant US corporations are multiplying within the country, how fetishized tourism and “expat” lifestyles are perpetuating the exploitative practices of colonial occupation and, in turn, orientalism and white supremacy—the English language is never pure. Language is always in a context—even as it’s decontextualized, it’s decontextualized from something. For me to say that I translate in order to restore cultural relationships, to change anyone’s view of Vietnam, or even to make a statement about the white Eurocentric limitations of US readerships—all of those big intentions feel a bit like stealing something from poetry, from language itself. I want to acknowledge the power dynamics between languages and not deny the politics of translation between English and Vietnamese. At the same time I want to insist on seeing all languages as equals, on seeing translation as a playground space where languages can play together. I’m still not sure how to maintain that double vision.
SP: You work most closely with poet Nhã Thuyên. Together you founded AJAR press and the first independent poetry festival in Hanoi; you translated her poetry book words breathe, creatures of elsewhere, and recently co-edited an issue of Words Without Borders on Vietnam with her. Do you find that most translators have such a close relationship with the writers they translate? How did your friendship come about? Does your close friendship affect your translation process?
KR: Nhã Thuyên is a poet, a teacher, and now a close friend and enduring collaborator of mine. I met her while organizing a bilingual reading series in 2012 in Hanoi. Over coffee we discussed the problematic attempts to translate Western feminism in Vietnam, and our conversation made me want to read her poetry, which hadn’t yet been widely translated, outside of a few poems. From the beginning, she has been interested in exploring her own language alongside me, making edits and comments on drafts as I stumbled through first attempts. Even today, she educates me about various nuances of grammar and the histories infused in certain vocabulary. It is in the margins of Google Docs where Nhã Thuyên has introduced me to some of the most beautiful crystals of the Vietnamese language.
Our friendship feels so much like a dialogue, a collaboration, a mutual wandering through the spaces between language, a shared burden, a shared loving. I think translators can also feel this closeness to authors who are no longer living, or authors with whom they have limited communication, because so much intimacy occurs just on the page, during the practice of bearing a text into another life. You don’t have to be best friends with an author to feel a sense of collaboration with the work, of course, but I do think my friendship with Nhã Thuyên has totally deepened my awareness of the magical potential of parallel existences in translation.
SP: You also write poetry, and recently exhibited your work “Fragments of an Infinite Dictionary” in Hungary. How do you think your personal work has been affected by your work in translation? Does it work in conjunction, or do you like to separate the two? Are you inclined towards translating work that resembles your own?
KR: My obsession with dictionaries was born from translation work. I was fascinated by their earnest attempts to fix a word’s meaning into a one sentence definition, which often requires divagations to contain multiple definitions, and which often spills into multiple forms of noun, verb, etc. I came to love those sentences—trying to describe a word even more than the word itself.
My poetic work continues to be infected with questions of meaning that are raised in the process of translation. I can’t separate what I write in English from the feelings I have about English, which I’ve been able to touch since inserting that little distance between myself and the language through translation work. I think whatever I write today is entwined in my continuously evolving micro theories about language and translation. In the thick of a translation effort, it’s hard to separate the author’s voice—filtered through my English—from my own voice. I have often experienced the sudden self-conscious question of “is this my thought or hers?” But I don’t mind this disorientation.
SP: What do you think of the popular Vietnamese translations? Is there something you aim to change in the industry with your own translations?
KR: I think in the US, there is often a representation of writing “about” Vietnam as a distant place, written from the perspective of looking at or remembering the country. These efforts are always placed within the context of America, whether from displaced refugee families or, still disproportionately so, from white war veterans. War and the generations of trauma that it causes is not something that can or should be forgotten, and I do think more literature is needed to continue the remembrance and reframing of this history. But there still isn’t much published in translation from the Vietnamese language by Vietnamese writers living inside Vietnam. I would love to see more contemporary translations that reflect what writers in Vietnam are doing today, in a way that does not perpetuate exotic or easy understandings, that are not filtered through ideological lenses of capitalism or communism. I would love to see more of such works in translation, not to “reward” writers with “recognition” on an “international stage,” but because translation offers more layers of knowing and playing with the limits of a language. Translation is about entering into dialogue, so I would love to see how some of the more experimental and challenging voices in Vietnamese poetry today can come into new lives through translation.
Kaitlin Rees is between Hanoi and New York City. With Nhã Thuyên she found AJAR, a small bilingual journal and press that has hosted two intimate-international poetry A-festivals. Her translations of Nhã Thuyên’s poetry recently live in Moon Fevers (Tilted Axis, 2019) as well as the full-length collection, words breathe, creatures of elsewhere (Vagabond Press, 2016). She is currently translating Nhã Thuyên’s self-described ‘nonsense,’ a book of poeticized prose that embraces small subjectivities and relationalities, and works at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop to edit the Transpacific Literary Project, a series of notebooks focused on translations from East and Southeast Asia.
Suhasini Patni is an English and creative writing graduate from Ashoka University. In 2019 she graduated summa cum laude from the Ashoka Scholar’s Programme and since then she’s worked as a teaching fellow and visiting faculty in Nirma University. Her writing has been short-listed for the Toto Funds the Arts Creative Writing in English award 2021. She’s a freelance writer at scroll.in, and her work has appeared in The Tishman Review, A Quiet Courage, and a few other micro-fiction journals.
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