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The Weight of History: Writing from Vietnam

November 2018

November-2018-Writing-from-Vietnam-Do-Thanh-Lang-Emotion-Chart-5

Image: Do Thanh Lang, Emotion Chart 5, acrylic on glossy pp synthetic paper, April 2014. By arrangement with the artist.

This month we bring you writing from Vietnam. The prose writers and poets here explore and depict lives shaped by the country’s fraught politics as well as by their own personal histories. Poet and literary critic Nhã Thuyên escorts us through the poetic underground. In two wildly contrasting portraits of marriage, Bùi Ngọc Tấn pens a gentle ode to lifelong love, and Trần Dần observes a household torn apart by infidelity and political betrayal. Trần Thị NgH’s wry divorcée looks back at her checkered romantic past, while Dương Nghiễm Mậu unfurls a hallucinatory reunion. Poets P.K., Pháp Hoan, and Nguyễn Hoàng Quyên suggest the vitality of the poetic scene in Vietnam today. Guest editors Nhã Thuyên and Kaitlin Rees contribute an illuminating introduction.

Presences, Ruins, Silences: Writing from Vietnam

By Nhã Thuyên & Kaitlin Rees

Silence, among Vietnamese authors, seems to have become a compelling tradition.

Translated from Vietnamese by the author

Multilingual

Endless Universe

By Bùi Ngọc Tấn

The passion and blind devotion are no longer. The ending is near.

Translated from Vietnamese by Nguyễn Hoàng Quyên

(Un)contextualizing Underground Poetry: Reimagining a Critical Community

By Nhã Thuyên

I don’t want to put underground poetry into a concrete conflict with mainstream poetry.

Translated from Vietnamese by David Payne

A Chair on a Highway on a Rainy Afternoon

a chair standing by itself on a highway / means its life is over

Translated from Vietnamese by the author

Multilingual

The Sitting Woman

By Trần Thị NgH

I had just finished reading Francoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse and he had imagined me as Odile from André Maurois’ Climats.

Translated from Vietnamese by Kaitlin Rees

Fragments

Dissonant music lingers in the bodiless ear of the present tense

Translated from Vietnamese by Kaitlin Rees

From “Crossroads and Lampposts”

By Trần Dần

He said it was politics disguised as debauchery.

Translated from Vietnamese by David Payne

Somewhere Better Than This Place Nowhere Better Than This Place

By Nguyễn Hoàng Quyên

We have found in the deterioration of flesh and bones a spiritual liberation

Translated from Vietnamese by the author

Multilingual

A Dream

By Dương Nghiễm Mậu

Does he know I intend to murder him?

Translated from Vietnamese by Nguyễn Hoàng Quyên