Language: Vietnamese

Lover as Intimate Other: Chinatown by Thuận

July 13, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Thuy Dinh

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

May 31, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Phuong Anh

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

May 18, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Phuong Anh

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

May 3, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai and Bruce Weigl

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

April 29, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar and Thuy Dinh

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…

A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

April 13, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Andriana Hamas and Thuy Dinh

A selection of staff reads from Asymptote’s Fortnightly Airmail!

Recently, our staff has been revisiting modernizations of canonical works. Our editors recommend their latest favorite reads from Vietnam and Japan, including a collection of poems meditating on the Vietnam War and a Japanese essay on aesthetics. Sign up for our newsletter to get these recommendations delivered right to your inbox.

Vietnamese book

In May of 1966, Thích Nhất Hạnh, 39 years old and not yet famous, arrived in Nyack, New York, at the invitation of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR)—an American peace organization—to lecture on the escalating Vietnam crisis. He then traveled to Washington, D.C., and throughout the continental U.S., to present a Buddhist-led peace proposal that called for a cease-fire with the North Vietnamese government, followed by humanitarian assistance from the U.S. toward a peaceful reconstruction of Vietnam. Thích Nhất Hạnh’s 1966 peace tour included readings of his folk poetry, which he also translated into English, to portray the raw feelings of Vietnamese who “[could not] speak for themselves; [did not] know or care much about words like communism or democracy but [wanted] above all for the war to end….”  The poems were subsequently published in a chapbook entitled Thơ Việt Nam (Vietnamese Poetry), by Unicorn Press, Santa Barbara, California. Three of them, “Condemnation”, “Our Green Garden”, and “Peace”, also appeared in the June 9, 1966 issue of the New York Review of Books. Visceral and intimate, Thích Nhất Hạnh’s poems define the Vietnam War as a civil war. Beyond the Cold War context, all warring nations are seen as misguided brothers. Thích Nhất Hạnh’s peace sojourn was denounced by his brethren on both sides of the Vietnam conflict and turned what he thought was a three-month journey into a 40-year exile. He was eventually allowed to return to Vietnam and passed away on January 22, 2022, a month before Russia invaded Ukraine.

–Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large for the Vietnamese Diaspora READ MORE…

Bercer un poème: On Nursing Poetry in the Showcase Ù Ơ | SUO: A Poetic Exchange

March 28, 2022  |  in Essays, Reviews  |  by Phuong Anh

Sound, she argued, is the space in which an utterance bears meaning.

“What is language if it is not sound?”—Trần Thị NgH

Speaking of translation in one of the pre-recorded sessions of the poetic showcase Ù Ơ | SUO, writer Trần Thị NgH reminded the audience of the importance of sound in language. Sound, she argued, is the space in which an utterance bears meaning.

This focus on sound and other sensory aspects of poetry permeated the week-long Ù Ơ | SUO, which brought together poems in translation and multilingual works mixing Welsh, English, and Vietnamese, as well as panel discussions and visual and performative responses. This collaborative work was the result of a three-month residency for Welsh and Vietnamese women and non-binary writers.

Ù Ơ | SUO’s point of departure, according to Nhã Thuyên’s introduction, was the “familiar sounds of lullabies” and how they might serve as a clue to the “origins of poetic language and the role of women in transmission of language and memory within families.” The title of the showcase, which refers to the act of singing a lullaby, inspired me to experience this showcase through the dialectal metaphor of “bercer un poème“: cradling a poem as a mother would a crying child. The reader is also important to the “growth” of the piece: reading is how we cradle a poem. Nous sommes bercés par le poème, et nous berçons le poème—we are cradled by the poem, and we cradle the poem.

As I viewed the exhibition, Piaget’s theory of cognitive development came to mind. His theory deals with the nature of knowledge: how a child comes to acquire it, build it, and use it. According to Piaget’s framework, children go from experiencing the world through actions, to learning how to represent it through words, to expanding their logical thinking and reasoning. It isn’t that children know less, Piaget argued; they just think differently. This thinking “differently” is then a space where creative potential can emerge.

READ MORE…

Happy World Poetry Day!

March 21, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Celebrate with an eclectic selection of the best poems from our archives!

In honor of World Poetry Day, we invite you to revisit some of the best international poetry from our eleven-year archive. For a start, Brazilian poet Lêdo Ivo’s work soars to great heights through its accumulation of brilliant specificities. But it also catches one unawares with looser, breath-taking lines like these: “Life itself is a round thing / so that when we go wrong, we go wrong roundly.” Revisit Lêdo Ivo’s “The Earth Is Round” from our Summer 2021 issue.

 

A leading light of South Korea’s contemporary poetry scene, Yi Won takes ‘avant-garde’ to new extremes. Catapulting the reader into a future where technology rules the human spirit, her lacerating social commentary interrogates the very nature of poetry itself. Courtesy of translator Kevin Michael Smith, discover Yi Won’s radical work from our Summer 2018 edition. READ MORE…

We Stand With Ukraine: “Let Me Cry with Your Eyes My Love Affair with Budapest” by Thanh Tâm Tuyền

March 12, 2022  |  in Translations, We Stand With Ukraine  |  by Thuy Dinh

As the war in Ukraine enters its third week, a new column to show that the world stands with Ukraine.

At Asymptote the very notions of equality and social justice are embedded within our advocacy for a more inclusive world literature. Past projects like 2014’s ”Say Ayotzinapa,” responding to the kidnapping of 43 Mexican students, and an entire Special Feature, in our Spring 2017 edition, spotlighting authors from countries targeted by Trump’s #MuslimBan, speak fully to this. The current devastating moment surely calls for collective action again, and so, in this new column at the blog, published henceforth every Saturday, we will be gathering new work—poetry, fiction, essays, and translations thereof—responding to the war, now in its third week. May these pieces offer hope and strength in turbulent times even as they express outrage on behalf of and support for Ukrainians. 

For our inaugural column, editor-at-large Thuy Dinh translates into English for the first time an iconic Vietnamese poem, originally written in December of 1956. Through this work, South Vietnamese poet Thanh Tâm Tuyền expresses solidarity with Hungarian revolutionaries who struggled against Soviet forces. Though published decades prior, the visceral imagery of these lines still evoke empathy for those ardently resisting the invasion of their homeland.

Let Me Cry with Your Eyes My Love Affair with Budapest

Let me cry with your eyes
My love affair with Budapest
My heart and yours each of us a heart
They fill the streets with artillery tanks.

Let me harness the anger in your breasts
As they fire steel into lipstick-shaped muzzles
At each crossroad my face becomes a barricade.

Let me howl from your throat
As the bright morning takes wing
They knock us down like bricks
Drunk in their kill-lust
The way we thirst for the future.

Let me seethe with your cheeks
While they seal off border routes
Our joined fingers flutter like breath
My body waits.

Let me trade my sleep for your
Stress-riven, bullet-grazed forehead
It’s never night for night never comes
They attack in the morning it lasts forever.

Let me die in your skin
Threaded into the tanks’ endless tracks
I will live by your breath
O the ones in your stead

Let me cry with your eyes
My love affair with Budapest.

Thanh Tâm Tuyền
December 1956

Translated from the Vietnamese by Thuy Dinh

Interested in submitting your own work to this column? Send it to the “We Stand with Ukraine” section of our Submittable portal here—fees will be waived for this particular category. We look forward to reading your responses. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

February 25, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by David Boyd, Peera Songkünnatham, and Thuy Dinh

News this week from Vietnam, Japan, and Southeast Asia!

This week, our editors from around the world present reimaginings of Sophocles in Hanoi, memorials and debuts from Japan, and witness writing from Southeast Asia. Read on to find out more!

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

Since November 2021, The Goethe Institute in Hanoi has been in collaboration with the Youth Theatre of Vietnam (Nhà Hát Tuổi Trẻ) to produce six interpretations of Sophocles’s Antigone, exploring a variety of salient themes—fate versus freewill, the family versus the state, moral integrity and political order, feminism versus patriarchy, reason and emotion, loyalty and disobedience. While most of the productions were performed live in Hanoi after the gradual easing of COVID-19 restrictions, “Portrait” (“Bức Chân Dung”)—Antigone’s fifth iteration—is shown online from February 19 through February 26, 2022.

Directed by Lê An of Ho Chi Minh City’s Saigon Theatreland, “Portrait” shifts the first act of Antigone into 1970s wartime South Vietnam, where An (Huỳnh Ly)—whose name means peace and contentment—must forge her identity out of her family’s traumatic past. Creon, Antigone’s uncle in Sophocles’s play, is transposed into her emotionally repressed father, Đắc (Công Danh), a high-ranking officer in the South Vietnamese Army. Đắc forbids An to bring home Kỳ’s dead body—his son and An’s brother—an enemy soldier who fought and died for the Communist cause. Despite the obvious ideological landmines evoked by this premise, director Lê An, in a pre-performance podcast, sidestepped politics by discussing her heroine’s psychological quest “to find herself”— possibly to detract from the production’s more provocative implications.

While ideological heresy still cannot be addressed explicitly in modern adaptations of Antigone within Vietnam (despite the heroine’s Greek name which can mean “one who resists/is of the opposite bend”), this theme plays a central role in Vũ Thư Hiên’s oeuvre—including his newest story collection, Confessions at Midnight (Lời Xưng Tội Lúc Nửa Đêm) (California: Văn Học Press, 2022). A well-known dissident writer and translator, Vũ Thư Hiên has become Vietnam’s persona non grata since the 1997 publication of Night at Midday (“Đêm Giữa Ban Ngày)—a memoir, inspired by Arthur Koestler’s 1940 novel Darkness at Noon, which recounts the nine years (1967-1976) he spent in various North Vietnamese prisons after being charged with “anti-Party, anti-State, spying and revisionist conduct.” READ MORE…

Residing in Language: On the Exhibit, “i write (in Vietnamese)”

November 29, 2021  |  in Dispatches, Essays  |  by Phuong Anh

For those working in two languages, Vietnamese was a language of intimacy, while English was the language that liberated them to explore ideas.

In the multimedia exhibit, “i write (in Vietnamese),” held in Hanoi during March of 2021, a group of poets and artists grappled with the fraught nature of writing in Vietnamese through a series of multifaceted installations crossing between poetry, photography, and other forms of visual art. In this essay, the Vietnamese writer Phuong Anh reflects on the exhibit through conversations with the artists and their works to discover their relationship to the Vietnamese language, their experiences of living in multiple languages, and the significance of translation for both the artists and herself. 

What does it mean to reside in a language?

What does it mean to write in a language?

These two questions dance around in my mind, as I pen down letters with diacritics, forming monosyllabic words, known to me as “Vietnamese.” Although every now and again, words from other places are inserted. They mingle together and ring in my ear like soft lullabies. Yet, when it comes to defining what language they are, what literature they are, no labels have yet to satisfy me.

residing in language

“The unsendables,” Hương Trà & Kai, photograph by Bông Nguyễn

Such a dilemma is encapsulated in the title of the exhibition i write (in Vietnamese) that ran in March of 2021, right after the lift of Hanoi’s third lockdown. It took residence at first in the Goethe Institute before migrating to the Bluebird’s Nest Cafe. It was composed of a multimedia showroom, displaying the multifaceted nature of writing “in Vietnamese.” A label so constrained by past and current cultural politics, yet so liberating—a mini tug of war, echoed by the brackets, which both confine and protect the language.

The exhibition brings the creator and viewer closer to the process of art-making. For example, in Hương Trà and Kai’s project nếu có viết ra thì đây cũng là những lá thư mình không bao giờ gửi được | unsendables, viewers were invited to come, sit down, and write. In that room, there was a table on which there were two stacks of paper: one labelled “here are the letters that depart” and the other, “here are the letters that stay.” Those who chose the first stack could have their letters sent; while the writing of those who chose the latter “will never be able to be sent” and would remain forever with the exhibition. This project also connects languages not just through the bridge of translation but also by placing them within the same space: English and Vietnamese on one double-sided paper (chiếu|  |uềihc reflect|  |tcelfer), on a single page (where is my heart?; Journals to), or on the same line (slow dance in a burning room; skin.da). READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 17, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, Darren Huang, and Thuy Dinh

The latest in literary news from Vietnam, Bulgaria, and Taiwan!

As Venice makes its cinema showcase and the MET spreads its red carpets for the lavishly dressed, literature also serves up September as a memorable month with plenty of international displays and showcases of both known favorites and new releases. This week, a vital Vietnamese poet is commemorated in film, a varied arts festival takes place on Bulgarian shores, and an eminent Taiwanese author makes his English-language debut. Read on to find out more!

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

Each year, on September 16, the village of Tiên Điền, in the province of Hà Tĩnh, commemorates the death anniversary of Nguyễn Du (1765-1820), its venerated native son and author of The Tale of Kiều—a 3,254-line epic poem unequivocally embraced as the Vietnamese soul. This year, to mark the 201st year of his passing, the three-hour biopic Đại Thi Hào Nguyễn Du (The Great Poet Nguyễn Du) will make its premiere at the XXII National Film Festival in Hue, Central Vietnam. The film’s original September release—meant to coincide with Nguyễn Du’s death anniversary—has now been rescheduled to November 2021, due to safety concerns related to Vietnam’s recent surge of COVID cases.

The Tale of Kiều, created during a time of warring loyalties and written in the Nôm (Southern) script with Chinese characters modified to reflect Vietnamese spoken vernacular, has been endlessly adapted into cải lương (“reformed” Southern Vietnamese folk opera), chèo (Northern Vietnamese musical theatre), Western-styled opera, and films. Since the idea of trinh 貞 (chastity/integrity/ faithfulness) in Nguyễn Du’s oeuvre represents both a conceptual and linguistic challenge, its complexity has inspired at least six English translations in recent decades. Huỳnh Sanh Thông’s Nguyễn Du, The Tale of Kieu–A Bilingual Edition (Yale University Press, 1983), while still considered the gold standard, employs unrhymed iambic pentameter that often lapses into wooden syntax. Vladislav Zhukov’s The Kim Vân Kiều of Nguyễn Du (Cornell University Press, 2013), in grafting iambic pentameter to lục bát (six-eight syllable Vietnamese rhyme scheme), results in obtuse renderings reminiscent of Nabokov’s eccentric translation of Eugene Onegin. Most recently, Timothy Allen’s The Song of Kieu: A New Lament (Penguin, 2019), while ebullient with vivid syntax, contains numerous errors and self-indulgent interpretations.

Nguyễn Du’s mistrust of chastity goes hand in hand with his concept of exile; his heroine wanders far-flung places and learns to survive by endless transformations—also a recurring theme in Kiều Chinh: Nghệ Sĩ Lưu Vong (Kiều Chinh: Artist in Exile) (Văn Học Press, 2021). Penned by veteran Vietnamese American actress Kiều Chinh, the memoir echoes Nguyễn Du’s art of story-telling “to beguile an hour or two of your long night.”[i] The Joy Luck Club actress—whose dramatic flight to freedom is recounted in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer—will embark on a September-November book tour to Vietnamese diasporic communities in the U.S., sharing chapters from her own life that reflect the larger history of Vietnam.

[i]Huỳnh Sanh Thông’s English translation, The Tale of Kiều, line 3254, p. 167.

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Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2021

July 19, 2021  |  in News  |  by Allison Braden, Shawn Hoo, and Xiao Yue Shan

Our blog editors pick their favourite pieces from the Summer 2021 issue!

As Asymptote celebrates the first issue of our second decade in world literature, we bring to you new work from thirty-five countries and twenty-four languages in our Summer 2021 issue! Drawing from the theme of our Special Feature, “Age of Division,” these varied writings speak to a moment of mounting borders, fractious politics, and heightened suspicion towards the other—but so too do they hint at the possibility of unexpected solidarities, strange encounters, and new geographies of affinity. Not sure where to begin with this bountiful issue? Let our blog editors take you through some of their favourite pieces to reveal a world that is, in the words of Lêdo Ivo, “sweet, full, pungent, and luminous.” 

In the spring of 2004, an intifada singer in Ramallah said to his interviewer, “What I do on stage and what martyrs do on the streets are one and the same, just with different instruments.” Were resistance embodied in genre, the shape would undoubtedly be that of music. The art which “all art constantly aspires towards” for its certain coherence of form and content, this singular quality also speaks to its ability to move people passionately, crucially, to action. For music is a verb; it must be performed and enacted. It embodies, within its very idea, its eventual actualisation.  

In the excerpt from Olivia Elias’s forthcoming poetry collection Your Name, Palestine, she makes a graceful address: “Musicians, a few minutes more.” Moving on to materialise the scene in sensual, wondering lines, she makes gentle work of speaking the terrible wreckage done to the country where she was born. Born in Haifa and living now in France, she is said to occupy a privileged space within the Palestinian diaspora as one of the few poets in French. In these poems, translated masterfully by Sarah Riggs and Jérémy Robert, she creates in her adopted language the continuation of the Palestinian nation, transcending geographical realities to rhyme with the poetics of Palestinian agency, with both singing and the witness of singing.

Musicians, I am speaking to you of a country
engulfed in a fault of history
of a people chosen to pay the price
of another sacrifice
of a story more than a hundred years old
full of sound and fury and blood

Intended for voices set to instruments, Elias’s work speaks to the intifada singers, the debke performances that conceptualise art from the violences of occupation, and the traditional melodies evoking the dignity of liberation. But without violence and ideology, the measured cadences of her lines are patient with painterly instinct. These poems draw their necessity from their stoic dreams of clarity. Palestine, untorn, in concert, singing.

In Mulugeta Alebachew’s “Heaven Without Prickly Pears,” writing similarly seeks physical qualities—the savoury texture of the language, the kinetic scan of the eye as it seeks and takes in. The topography of the Ethiopian town, Geneté, is overlaid with the infinite dimensions of the mind. Familiarities, kinships, intimacies run through in capillaries of psychogeography, drawing further on its composite, ramified history: “her mosaicked gum-tattoos of more than a dozen languages and myriad cultures.” With co-translator Bethlehem Attfield, Alebachew has done a wonderful job of rendering the original Amharic text, lush with dialect, into a fluent poetry that nevertheless beholds the precision of references outside of the English language.

This town bears my fondest memories, life vividly lived, and lessons well learned . . . my yesterdays, todays, and predictable tomorrows lay on its streets. . . My home includes the highway. My home does not exclude the other homes. 

In this beautiful passage which eclipses the cautious private/public boundary, Alebachew speaks to the growing of the world. Just as in the acts of reading and writing, the dialectic division of outside and inside loses its binds, and one bleeds into the other. By bringing us into his Geneté, the subtle resentment of possessive being is defied; we are given interior knowing without it being our interior. In this world there is no space indifferent or vacant. It is all compounded in an infinite geometry of living; to inhabit a text that so generously navigates a place, it is an astonishing gift. 

—Xiao Yue Shan

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 9, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Nestor Gomez, Thuy Dinh, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest news from Central America, China, and the Vietnamese diaspora!

Want to keep up with the newest literary developments across the world? This week, our team members cover: an academic conversation on the state of Central American literature, the gargantuan literary output commemorating the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party, as well as the politics and poetics of translation in the film and literature of the Vietnamese diaspora. Read on to find out more!

Nestor Gomez, Editor-at-Large, reporting from El Salvador

Cátedra Centroamerica, an online space for academic analysis of Central America, recently held a series of talks on Zoom focusing on the state of art and literature in the Central American region since its independence about 200 years ago. The conversation, held on July 2, revolved around the question of the future of Central American art and literature after 200 years of independence.

Alexandra Ortiz Wallner, a researcher who specializes in Central American literature and culture at the Freie Univesitat Berlin, presented a “literary roadmap” on how Central American literature has developed after the turn of the century. Currently, Central America is in a postwar era following the wars, dictatorships, and political upheavals of the 1970s to the 1990s. The transition from war to democracy and peace has had two notable effects in the identities, histories, and cultures of Central Americans. The first effect is the mass exodus of Central Americans to settle in other parts of the world. This mass migration has redefined the borders of Central America and the identity of Central Americans as people living in the region of the isthmus. Because of the large and growing size of the Central American diaspora, Central Americans are redefining themselves as global citizens. Secondly, the rise of alternative publishing through social media has provided new spaces that welcome new literary voices in postwar Central America. These new literary voices have led the movement in reconstructing political and cultural identities as well as histories of individual Central American countries into a new, shared regional identity and culture that includes the diaspora.

Wallner also shared an example of postwar literature, Horacio Castellano Moya’s novel El Arma En El Hombre, which describes a new aesthetic of violence. This new violence is born in the urban environment of a postwar city. There is no explanation as to where this violence originated from and the main character of the novel, a displaced ex-soldier, is left alone in the city to combat this new urban violence that attacks from every corner: politics, economy, education, society, family, etc. El Arma En El Hombre is a key novel that aptly foretells the state of affairs in Central America. It describes perpetual chaos and oppression as the normal state of everyday lives of Central Americans. READ MORE…