Posts filed under 'Vietnamese history'

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.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

December 4, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Clémence Lucchini, MK Harb, and Thuy Dinh

The latest news from Lebanon, the Vietnamese diaspora, and France!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Lebanon, the Vietnamese diaspora, and France. In Lebanon, Jadaliyya has published an essay on the late Lebanese poet Iliya Abu Madi and Lebanese author Nasri Atallah has been included in a new anthology, Haramcy; in the Vietnamese diaspora, December 6 marks the 183th birthday of Petrus Ký, a prominent Vietnamese scholar who helped to improve the cultural understanding between French-colonized Vietnam and Europe; and in France, whilst bookshops have suffered from national lockdowns, a new translation of poems by contemporary poet Claire Malroux has been released. Read on to find out more! 

MK Harb, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon

Arab sci-fi lovers rejoice! An Arabic translation of the late American science fiction author Octavia Butler’s Kindred is coming out with Takween Publishing. Dr. Mona Kareem Kareem, a writer, literary scholar, and Arabic-English literary translator, worked on the Arabic manuscript during her residency at Princeton University. She will be holding an online talk, “To Translate Octavia Butler: Race, History, and Sci-Fi,” on December 7. Tune in as you wait for the manuscript with sci-fi jitters! In other translation news, Kevin Michael Smith, a scholar and translator of global modernist poetry, translated two poems by Saadi Youssef for Jadaliyya. Yousef is a prolific writer, poet, and political activist from Iraq and we are delighted to see more of his work profiled in English. Also on Jadaliyya is this beautiful rumination on the late Lebanese poet Iliya Abu Madi and his political imagination. Abu Madi wrote spellbinding poetry and was part of the twentieth-century Mahjar movement in the United States, which included the renowned Lebanese author, Gibran Khalil Gibran.

In publishing news, Bodour Al-Qasimi, founder and CEO of Kalimat Group, an Emirati publishing house for Arabic books, has been announced as the president of the International Publishers Association! Al-Qasimi has tirelessly worked on expanding the scope of the Arab publishing industry and we are happy to see her achieve this feat. Award-winning artist and cultural entrepreneur, Zahed Sultan, is seeking to release Haramcy, an anthology with twelve writers from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, including Lebanese author Nasri Atallah. It is set to be published with Unbound Books and the anthology addresses pertinent themes of love, invisibility, and belonging. In the spirit of the holidays, if you are feeling generous and capable of donating, then consider contributing to the Haramcy Fund.

We know the holidays are upon us and you are looking forward to cozying up with a book or two (or five in our case!). We have some new Arabic literature in translation for you to read during the holidays! The Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize shortlist has been announced! Another shortlist we are excited about is the Warwick Women in Translation Prize, which features Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Sudanese author, Rania Mamoun, translated from Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette.

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

December 6, 2020 marks the 183th birthday of Petrus Ký, also called Trương Vĩnh Ký, whose prolific achievements as scholar, translator, and publisher helped broaden the cultural understanding between French-colonized Vietnam and Europe. His vanguard efforts popularized chữ quốc ngữ, or modern Romanized script—leading to its official adoption as Vietnam’s national language in the early twentieth century. READ MORE…

Land / Water: A Chronicle of Vietnamese as a Diasporic Condition

May 27, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Maya Nguyen

There can be no firm diasporic life. Only affirmation of the un-firm: the resolution of irresolution between one home and another.

The journey that a language takes to arrive at us is often unimaginably intricate, with all the marks of history, people, and land upon it. In the following essay, gorgeous with lyricism and intimate with the facts and ideas of past and present, Maya Nguen takes us through the emotional and physical cartography of Vietnam and its language, and how such structures reverberate against the ever-mutable definitions of identity, personhood, and home.

In the beginning is a creation myth.
Âu Cơ meets Lạc Long Quân where mountain meets sea.
They form a bond and Âu Cơ bears an egg sac with a hundred children.
At the core of their bond with one another is another bond of one with the mountain and the other with the sea. So it came to be that fifty children followed Âu Cơ for the mountain whence she came and fifty followed Lạc Long Quân for the sea whence he came. And as Âu Cơ calls for land and Lạc Long Quân calls for water their children come to call a country
land  water
đất   nước ¹
 where land begins at the edge of the water that starts at the end of the land: is a shore that holds the country in the crossing between one word and another: between 越南 & Indochine Française & Việt Nam & Vietnam
the Vietnamese language emerges at the border
thoroughly other & utterly ones own
& defined by a border endures
Diasporic
& Pure

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In prehistory: Austroasiatic tribes living in the Red River Delta (today’s Northern Vietnam) speak a Proto-Viet language belonging to the Mon-Khmer language family.

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Beginning in 111 BC: Colonization by the Chinese empire for eleven centuries to follow. Classical Chinese is imposed as the written language of the government elite, forming the basis of politics, science, and literature. Proto-Viet continues to be spoken, and its speech, to be influenced by Classical Chinese.

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Beginning in the tenth century: Independence from the Chinese won by King Ngô Quyền at the shores of Bạch Đằng River. After a millennium of foreign occupation without a formal writing system of its own, independent Vietnam continues as before: with Classical Chinese at its helm.

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Beginning in the thirteenth century: A vernacular written script called Chữ Nôm (lit. “southern characters”) is developed on the basis of Classical Chinese to record Vietnamese folk music and poetry. Considered as the pillar of Vietnamese literature, Truyện Kiều (Tale of Kieu) by Nguyễn Du is written in Chữ Nôm. For this script, Chinese characters are naturalized to fit the Vietnamese spoken language, which itself includes Chinese words naturalized into Vietnamese. “Southern characters” in Chữ Nôm: 𡨸喃. “Southern characters” in Classical Chinese: 字南. 𡨸喃 is taught in reference to 字南. 𡨸喃 exists alongside 字南: forming a pillar: a porous border. READ MORE…