By Jonathan Chan

Jonathan Chan talks to translator Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng

This conversation took place just after the American publication of Nguyễn Thanh Hiện’s novel Chronicles of a Village, translated by Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng from Vietnamese into English. Jonathan and Quyên discuss approaches to translation, notions of ephemerality, and modes of literary relationship.

Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng is a writer-translator born in Việt Nam. Her recent publications include Masked Force (Sàn Art), a bilingual pamphlet on a set of propaganda photographs by Võ An Khánh, and Chronicles of a Village (Yale University Press), her English translation of a novel by Nguyễn Thanh Hiện. Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Margins, and various other venues. She studied at Stanford University.

Jonathan Chan: Two of the works you’ve translated have just been published: Chronicles of a Village by Nguyễn Thanh Hiện and https://everything.is from Samuel Caleb Wee. Why and how did you choose to translate each book?

Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng: The question of choosing is interesting because I don't think I've ever really chosen anything I've translated. I rely on friendship to stumble upon and generate new work. With Chronicles of a Village, there's a clear rhythm that I intuitively enjoyed and could almost hear. That was the hook for me. For Sam, he comes from a totally different tradition with his background in poetics. I thought that’s something I’d never really read, especially as an Asian-born writer. His turns and his phrases were quite potent, beautiful, and careful.

Jonathan Chan: It sounds like you’re drawn to the orality of the works. That’s a sensitivity that you have both to Vietnamese and English, how the words cohere or how they enjamb the line or in those turns of phrase or images. I think that’s palpable in Chronicles in the way Nguyễn is able to weave naturalistic depictions of the village, folkloric thinking, and thinking about his own relationship with his father.

What were some points of contrast? Mr. Nguyễn is much older, so was it different working with him, especially in having to adopt a more deferential posture, compared to with Samuel, who’s more of a peer?

Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng: I totally felt that contrast, probably as a matter of attitude. Mr. Nguyen was like an esteemed elder to me, not only because of his age but also because of the wisdom and tone in his emails. They sounded like a grandfatherly figure writing to me. As a translator, I tried to translate his text with as much fidelity as I could manage.

When I translated Sam's work, the wonderful thing about him was that he came into this collaboration with me and Ajar Press with an open idea of authorship. We also only communicated via emails, but the lightheartedness, kindness, and openness in his tone made me feel like I could enter his text with a sense of play.

Jonathan Chan: I guess they’re also writing in different genres, though that’s not to say Chronicles isn’t playful. When I was reading it, it felt to me like I was reading a younger voice, maybe because so much of it is framed by Nguyen’s recollections of his youth. There was a sense that this was someone who was older as well as someone who had lived through occupation and war, and saw how that had transformed the village and its culture.

Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng: I wonder how much of that youthfulness, as you said, came from the fact that many of the stories are seen through the eyes of a child or a teenager, and how much of it was also because I'm a young translator. Maybe there's something in that as well, that it's an older author’s text, mediated and transformed by a younger translator of a different gender.

Jonathan Chan: I think that was what helped make it work so well: your own sensibility, your own place, and where you are in life right now, especially in being able to bring that to a new audience. It’s all fruitfully bound up.

Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng: I love that, and honestly, when I read it now, it already feels like a younger person's translation. I feel like I'm older than the person who was translating, which is factually true and just always happens to me all the time. Aging, timing, and poetry. It's really hard to grasp.

Jonathan Chan: For sure, I mean, so many poems that I've written capture a particular emotional or intellectual intensity or tenor of a particular period of my life. But that is also why those pieces feel like they're written by a different person, because of the ways we grow and we change. That brings me to this question on ephemerality that I have, the place of it in your practice as a translator and how it influences how you think about shifts of time, place, and meaning.

Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng: I feel like it's really tricky to be a writer or a translator with a belief in the ephemeral. Every time I reread something that I wrote, especially when it's been published, I feel like I've already come up with 15 other possible translations for a single word. For me, probably the most ideal form of publication is what we're doing right now. A conversation between friends can continue over years, year after year, hour after hour, because I feel like only that form of publication can keep up with the changes in our lives.

Otherwise, I think the written mode and publication, like you said, are like keepsakes and condensations of a particular time. But if I zoom out and view my thought in the longer beginning with an endless stream of time, which I think is how Buddhists think of existence, then it's not just writing or translating, but publishing in every single mode of life. I feel like it's most alive when I'm in conversation and in relation with other human beings. This is not to say that publications are mere reification, but I think there's something that's so vitally alive about being in intimate conversation with another human or another being… One can talk to a tree and feel alive. It’s different than putting our words into a manuscript and sending it off to be printed as a book object.

Jonathan Chan: I like that thought on the vitality of that process and being in relation to others. You’ve mentioned how translation is or does function as the mode through which a relationship can be enabled. I was wondering if there's anything you noticed about your state of mind when you're translating from Vietnamese to English, and by contrast from English to Vietnamese. I am curious to understand a bit more about how that works for you, not necessarily in a bidirectional sense, but just the fact that you're engaged in the shifts and movements of meaning from both languages to the other.

Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng: This notion of bidirectionality and ambidextrousness in thinking, writing, and translating - I think for me it's related to your question of the ephemeral, because to me the ephemeral is not just about the transient or the temporary, but also basically about change or movement. Things change, things rise and fall away. Meanings form and then deform over time. I think the reason I translate both ways, even though I now do more translating into English than the other way around, is that it’s nice to have the option to turn both ways. When we sit too long just facing one direction, our body becomes stiff and our lower backs hurt a little bit. We have to stretch and turn the other way around. When I look towards English and then I turn around, I look towards Vietnamese, that's my way of stretching the body of my language.

Jonathan Chan: That also brings to mind that relational question, the fundamental idea of communication. The importance of your linguistic relationships in both languages is borne out in the life that you've lived so far, given that you've been in the US and in Vietnam, being immersed in linguistic contexts where either language is the dominant mode of communication. There is that relational vitality that comes from being fluent in both languages and using them regularly. I was wondering if you had any idea of the kinds of Anglophone audiences you imagined would read Chronicles.

Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng: I feel like for both of us language is the zone of the heart and of intimacy. Vitality and kinship are so important. I think the role of fluency might be overstated. I think a lot of the times I definitely felt unready when I first moved back to Vietnam after spending time in the US as an undergraduate at Stanford. I felt like I had forgotten a lot of my Vietnamese, even though I grew up speaking it and still speak it, but not in an intellectual or literary mode.

Over time, with some nudges from friends, I learned that it’s ok to translate into a tongue I didn’t feel completely fluent or proficient in. I don't feel like I mastered or even want to ever master it. And it's fun. Even if you know some people in Vietnam say that my Vietnamese is westernized or bad or weird, that's fine. I think that's the fun of it.

As for an audience, why did I translate Chronicles? When I first translated it, I didn't know anything about the publishing industry. I definitely had no consideration about the market. I really did that because I liked a good challenge, I wanted to translate a book-length project, and it felt pleasurable to me at the time. I was freshly out of college and unemployed, so it was like a game that I played with myself and with language.

I admit I still don't know who is the audience. I always feel like I can count the number of my readers with my hands and sometimes my feet. That’s how small my vision of my readership is. I don't mind it because I feel comfortable in small, intimate time and space. I don’t think of nationality or geography, or age group, but more the feel of the heart of it, the feeling of smallness in a good way.

Jonathan Chan: I think that's how I felt about my own book as well. I don’t know if it’s too pretentious to think that there's more integrity when you're translating or writing maybe for yourself first, rather than thinking about commercial dimensions. I was reflecting on the fact that Chronicles came out with a big, corporate, well-known publisher in the US. At least to me it indicated that Yale thought that there was an audience for it in the US. That had me thinking about the flourishing of Vietnamese American writers in the US, but also the ways the relationship between Vietnam and the US has transformed over the last 50 years.

There is this growing interest and desire to read, learn, and understand more about Vietnam coming from the US and maybe that's because there are many young Vietnamese Americans who feel like there's some element of loss that they're trying to surmount. I feel it too – when your parents or grandparents are from places not necessarily the same as where you grew up. That’s why I’m curious about who the press envisioned the audience to be, even if commercial considerations shouldn’t be paramount.

Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng: I still hope that Penguin and Yale don't feel like they've completely made the worst choice of the century with my translation because I was shocked when both agreed to print it. I think on commerciality… I feel like I've grown to be alright with it. I was much more anti-commerce when I was younger and more idealistic, but if certain things work with the market, it's not necessarily an evil thing. I wish to be less anti-commercial but I also think my work will never sell, and that’s also cool.

Do you have thoughts about selling and commerce? I feel like we as poets tend to want to have this pure idea of poetry. I totally do. I have that desire. But reality teaches me that it's really hard to have pure poetry. I mean, one not just has to live, but you know, poetry travels in the world a lot of the time by either the market or social media to the space that it feels like it can thrive in.

Jonathan Chan: I think you're right. A poem lives once when you're writing it and bringing it into being, then it lives again every time someone reads it and allows themselves to be affected by it. I think it goes back to that question of relationality because the poem can serve as a way in which a relationship can be established with a person, maybe if not with the poet per se, but through the presentation of language or a subject.

I’m curious to learn about some of the contrasts you've experienced working with a big corporate press like Yale versus Ajar, a smaller indie press, two publishers based in different countries, different places.

Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng: The funny thing about the good people at Yale is that they were so sweet. They didn't feel like a corporate environment to me. I think I got lucky because they were just so lovely and it was an all-female team of editors and staff members. I think that’s rare because I feel I don't thrive in corporate or institutional contexts. Being mentally and also semantically averse to being around big business or market-minded people is one of my weaknesses.

I'm grateful to them because I think they really read the book. It felt like I was working with peers who were professional, sure, but also caring and kind human beings full of goodness, which made it feel collaborative. If corporations can get that going in their system, then we would all be in a better place

Ajar is very different. I can't speak for all small indie publishing presses. I only know Ajar and Ajar feels like family to me. It is also an all-female and nonbinary tribe of human beings who run it and I've been working with them since I graduated from college. It's been almost ten years now, and we've shared many cups of tea and strong coffee, rice wine and beer, packets of peanuts and instant noodles in tiny alleys in Hanoi where we were based a couple of years ago. That was just how we worked and played together. Long hours of sitting in some bar or cafe or by the river.

I really miss that because I've never again gotten to work with such a tender and loving and beautiful and weird group of people. We're scattered all over in Europe and New York now because we have different jobs and obligations and we keep saying to each other in our emails and notes that hopefully someday soon we'll get together again by the Red River in Hanoi and be children, responsible children again, and difficult poets. I don't know if that will happen soon, but it's been our dream.

Jonathan Chan: Maintaining long-distance friendships is not easy, but it’s not impossible either. And when you're so tightly bound to another person you really care for one another. Everyone makes it work.

Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng: It's the best thing, long-distance relations that sustain us over time. Very beautiful intimacy over distance. Very rare and beautiful.

Jonathan Chan: My last question pertains to the contemporary landscape for Vietnamese literature. I don't claim to know a lot. I don't know how familiar you are with the entire scene. At least in Chronicles, there's this critique of social scientific methods in describing all the changes that the village has experienced. I'm curious to learn just a little from your perspective about the role of literature in capturing some of these really drastic transformations that have happened in Vietnam over the last 20, 30, even 40 years, since the beginning of economic reform.

Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng : I think the kind of literature that I love is unprofitable in a sense. It is similar to what we’ve been talking about – it’s not market-aware and does not yield intellectual or social or literary profit or meaning in the most explicit sense. Yet they're crucial to my livingness, my sense of being in the world. Because despite their, let's say, material unprofitability or seeming political powerlessness, I think good literature unleashes important and graceful streams of questions.

I think we need such questions. Questions of power. Questions of language. Questions of meaning. Also, questions of beauty, like in Chronicles which is written by an unknown narrator who doesn't use full stops, for example. That's probably conventionally not considered beautiful literature. Yet here we are having this wonderful conversation because it’s in the world and it's traveling. I think literature does that. I think it just opens little doors. There are questions that are probably unanswerable. But we need those openings, those doors.

As for Vietnam, I can't speak for the whole scene or the whole history of its literature, but I think I just see the wheels of modernity in progress, sometimes in the guise of war and violence and sometimes in the form of the economic renovation that you mentioned. Those wheels have really flattened Vietnam in a lot of catastrophic ways.

I think, for me, works of literature and art are creatures that reach their hands or fingers into the soil, into the birth-soil for me, and pull out the bones of the dead and the seeds of the unborn and seeds of things that we can't see, that we can't feel all of the time, haunting or floating in the air. I think it's a sense of reaching into the earth, and I think that’s what literature does for me.

Jonathan Chan is a writer and editor of poems and essays. Born in New York to a Malaysian father and a South Korean mother, he was raised in Singapore and educated at Cambridge and Yale Universities. He is the author of the poetry collection going home (Singapore: Landmark, 2022) and serves as Managing Editor at poetry.sg. More of his writing can be found at jonbcy.wordpress.com.