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Vietnam

The book covers of Animals in Our Days, Brisbane, Flowers of Lhasa, Radio Siga, Linea Nigra, and...

The Watchlist: May/June 2022

By Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll recommends noteworthy new books translated from Tibetan, Vietnamese, Arabic, Russian, Spanish, and Croatian.

An Interview with WWB Poetry Contest Winner Nguyễn-Hoàng Quyên

By Words Without Borders

Making texts that are potentially wrong or slippery keeps me heedful of officious frames of correctness.

A Note from Contest Judge David Tomas Martinez

It was an Hunahpúan effort to choose only four poems from this extraordinarily strong pool of poems.

Learning Late Letters

By Nguyễn Hoàng Quyên

The dead don’t let us go, I say to my friend Sirius, putting my father’s letters in a drawer.

Translated from Vietnamese by the author

MultimediaMultilingual

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

Nihilism

By Nhã Thuyên

I can’t stand that one the way someone with a chronic sinus infection can’t stand abnormal shifts in weather.

Translated from Vietnamese by Kaitlin Rees

MultimediaMultilingual

Vi

The realities of life in Indochina had nothing in common with those of France.

Translated from French by Sheila Fischman

Sage on the Mountain

By Đỗ Bích Thúy

She couldn’t bear living with any of her own sons or daughters.

Translated from Vietnamese by Charles Waugh & Nguyen Hung

From behind a Closed Window

Is there, out there, a nothingness / With no future, and no past?

Translated from Vietnamese by Martha Collins & Ngo Tu Lap

The Utopian

A sleepwalker with nothing to lose or gain

Translated from Vietnamese by Martha Collins & Ngo Tu Lap

A Bullet Fired into the Night

No one knows he used to be a man

Translated from Vietnamese by Martha Collins & Ngo Tu Lap

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