This essay is part of Transpacific Literary Project’s monthly column, with art by Juyon Lee. Read its companion piece “Từ Thức Tiên Hôn Lục | The Story of Từ Thức’s Marriage with a Fairy.”

On a late summer day in 2022, I made a pilgrimage to the famous Strand Bookstore in Manhattan, which is not far from my university. My mission: to procure Thuận’s Chinatown, a novel freshly translated from Vietnamese into English by An Lý, a translator I deeply admire. 

After some hunting, I found these three books sitting side by side gracefully in the translation section, tucked away in the farthest corner of the bookstore basement: in the center, Thuận’s Chinatown. On a minimalist purple cover, the book’s title was intricately intertwined with a vibrant yellow railway. It was as if the railway had become a conduit connecting the two distinct worlds portrayed on the adjacent covers. To the left, Guan Yu, his saber aloft, riding the Red Horse with fervor, his battle cry echoing through the pages. Meanwhile, across the divide, Lady Murasaki Shikibu seemed to pause on her way to the solace of her chamber, captivated by the distant clamor.

A modern Vietnamese novel sandwiched between two East Asian medieval classics—that juxtaposition caught me off guard. Scanning the shelves, I sought out any remnants of Vietnamese medieval literature. Putting aside bestsellers by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai and Ocean Vuong, I ventured into any book with a spine that featured either a Nguyen or a Tran, only to encounter more retellings of the Vietnam War and its aftermath. At the end of the day, the only book I found that could hyphenate “Vietnamese” and “medieval” was Timothy Allen’s translation of Kiều, the iconic eighteenth-century epic poem.

The allure of Vietnam seems to captivate Westerners only if it offers either exotic landscapes they can romanticize or the war in which their troops were embroiled. If the war stories don’t center on Americans, they must pique curiosity about the mysterious communist rivals. Bảo Ninh’s The Sorrow of War is subtitled A North Vietnam novel, while Dương Thu Hương’s Novel Without a Name features a cover depicting an iconic North Vietnamese lady guerrilla. In American eyes, there is no such thing as pre-American Vietnam. At this juncture, Vietnamese history becomes their history, and their stories become our stories. Many English works about the Vietnam War, including translations, feel like timepieces set to the wrong hour. To me, as a Vietnamese reader, these stories tick to a foreign rhythm and their narrative mechanisms are calibrated to a different cultural meridian.

The following spring, I enrolled in a literary translation workshop at my university. My professor is a familiar figure in the circle of New York translators. There were fifteen students in the workshop, most of whom were from the MFA program, along with myself, an aspiring creative nonfiction writer. Over the next fifteen weeks, we would work independently on our translation projects under our professor’s mentorship before showcasing our work to the world at an annual reading event in Brooklyn.

I decided to translate Truyền kỳ mạn lục, a sixteenth-century anthology of stories all set in Đại Việt, which is now northern Vietnam. Đại Việt was a kingdom that was deeply involved in the Chinese tradition umbrellaing East Asia, yet threads of Vietnamese landscapes, mindset, and lifestyles are cleverly woven among the fabric of highly didactic Confucian motifs, tropes, and stock characters. Ranging from folk mythology to ghostly thrillers interspersed with poetry, the stories are mystical enough to intrigue common English readers while culturally distinct enough to give them a sense of pre-war Vietnam.

Nguyễn Dữ, who is conventionally attributed with its authorship, claimed this work to be a collection of stories that he gathered across northern “Vietnam” at the time. Some stories had been retold many times by many other authors, and numerous variations are available depending on the region. After all, legends and fantasies make up a great part of the oral tradition of the country. 

I thought Truyền kỳ mạn lục particularly suitable for this workshop as it represents an intriguing example of translation in medieval Vietnam. Originally penned by Nguyễn Dữ in classical Chinese, a language synonymous with the intellectual elite of the time, the collection was later translated into Nôm, or classical Vietnamese, by Nguyễn Thế Nghị, a contemporary of Nguyễn Dữ. Nôm, a derivative of classical Chinese, was commonly utilized by the lower classes of society. The grammatical structures of the two languages differ to a considerable extent.

As the average Vietnamese today, myself included, cannot read classical Chinese texts, the most widely used version of Truyền kỳ mạn lục in the country is the 1943 modern Vietnamese translation by Ngô Văn Triện. This is also the source text for my translation. However, Ngô took great liberties with his translation. In one of the stories, he completely replaced a whole paragraph explicitly describing the titular character’s emotions with a famous classical poem, written about two centuries after the story, implicitly conveying the same sentiment. 

A few weeks into the semester, I brought my first translation to the class, which was “The Story of Từ Thức’s Marriage with a Fairy.” I anticipated that the text might be challenging for those who haven’t been much exposed to Vietnamese culture and Confucianism. Therefore, I added footnotes to lighten the load. I read the title out loud in class. Everyone seemed deeply focused on my translation, as if they were waiting for the sound of the strange Vietnamese name to interrupt a chain of English words.

“This story is wild,” remarked one of my classmates, her sentiment echoed by approving nods from other students. “But I was confused about some of your word choices. Are the word choices also confusing in Vietnamese?” 

She was referring to a particular paragraph where the protagonist Từ Thức, who is a scholar, reflects on his situation after losing his bureaucratic job:

I won’t let my hands be tied by the lure of fame and benefits, just for the sake of a measly salary. Forsooth, all are destined to return to whence they came from. The wonderful scenery of my homeland shall not fail to keep me enchanted.

[Original: Ta không thể vì số lương năm đấu gạo đó mà buộc mình trong đám lợi danh. Âu là một mái chèo về, nước biếc non xanh vốn chẳng phụ gì ta đâu vậy.

Gloss: I can’t due to that five-đấu-of-rice salary tie myself to fame and benefits. Anyway, a downstreaming paddle, blue water and green mounts won’t let me down.]

I thought it was evident that I was attempting to evoke an archaic tone with the “forsooth” and “whence.” This antiquated flavor is further heightened when intertwined with the philosophical core message, which I thought I had conveyed through nature imagery. 

“Such verbose expressions are common in classical East Asian literature,” I explained, “although the original text is even more expansive.” Everyone stayed silent. Maybe they were not familiar with the subgenre that I mentioned.

I came to realize that repeatedly explaining my translation like this wasn’t ideal. The translation should stand on its own and allow readers space to interpret its content. The challenge lies in how readers with limited exposure to Vietnamese culture can understand the text as comprehensively as I, a Vietnamese person, do. But the more I pondered and worked towards this, the more I doubted that complete understanding could be found.

In Toward a Science of Translating, American linguist Eugene Nida endeavors to bridge modern linguistic discoveries with the translation of the Bible, a work similarly fraught with considerations of form and content. Standing in the shadow of Chomsky’s influence, Nida conceptualizes the translation process as one of breakdown and recrafting. Every divine decree and every Kiều’s lament possesses a deep structure. A translator must deconstruct their original text to capture this structure, then transfer and recalibrate their translations based on it. Imagine a horologist disassembling a Japanese wadokei into its cogs and wheels, then reassembling it as a Victorian clock.

Trickily enough, this de- and reconstruction involves a considerable degree of subjectivity from translators. When a translator attempts to transfer historicity from one language into another, they of course cannot render them in the original abstract form. What they do is navigate these shapeless feelings of antiquity into specific stylistic elements such as word choices, imagery, grammatical structures, and so on. It’s in this decision-making process that the translator’s personal taste sneaks in. 

I found this to be the case in the last sentence of the paragraph of my translation that we were discussing. The young protagonist assures himself that the “wonderful scenery of [his] homeland shall not fail to keep [him] enchanted.” The original, meanwhile, is more specific. It reads, “paddling downstream, the blue water and green mounts won’t let him down.” Did he live by a river? Was that river flowing by green hills? Not necessarily, and by all means, that’s not the point. These concrete images, in fact, refer back to the general description of a serene and idyllic rural scene in northeastern Vietnam.

Therefore, on translating the text, I tried to extract the core meaning of those images, then find some potential equivalents in English. “Are there sceneries like that? Could they evoke such tranquility and a reclusive feeling as in the original?” Tons of questions lined up in my mind. Quite often, they led me either to a Scottish highland or a valley in a Hudson River School painting. Finally, I trimmed all of them out, leaving only the core meaning in the translation.

“Maybe you can just leave them as they are. At least, we won’t misinterpret them as Western scenes,” my professor suggested. His suggestion gave me a bit of shame, even fear. I was thrown into a gray area as a translator. Despite a command of multiple languages, I still face constant anxiety that there might be words, phrases, or sentiments floating like mayflies in the dynamic totality of language that can capture the senses at hand but that I myself didn’t catch. More essentially, there is no benchmark through which a translator like me can know if their knowledge of both source and target languages is enough. Even if I could reach this mythical tier of knowledge, my multiple languages might influence each other and become blurred by my own subjective experiences. As a result, I failed to see how a person completely uninformed about a new culture will make sense of these culture-specific implications.

Ironically, it is Nida who advocates for the so-called “equivalence effect.” Essentially, if a translation achieves this, it should evoke the same reaction in target readers as when a native reader enjoys the original text. However, this appears too idealistic when the subjective gap between the two groups is too vast. And that dividing ocean becomes even more vague with the intersection of culture and historicity. Our clocks simply don’t chime the same tune.

When a classmate asked, “How can you tell apart Vietnamese culture from the Chinese?” I found myself befuddled by the question itself, unable to provide a comprehensive answer. 

“What do you mean by these phoenixes?” the professor asked me, frowning.

He was referring to the sentence, “This is a phoenix. That’s also a phoenix. How come there are so many phoenixes here?” 

This sentence is a calque from a Chinese allegory, suggesting that rare and magnificent birds like phoenixes cannot be found in such abundance. There must be mischief afoot, akin to an old ghost impersonating a revered deity.

Everyone seemed doubtful about using phoenixes in this context. “Will they rise from ashes?” my professor asked.

East Asian phoenixes mean immortality, but have nothing to do with ashes. In Vietnamese culture, these sacred birds are seen as glamorous and noble. They symbolize prosperity, harmony, and auspiciousness. Often paired with dragons, they are considered the royal emblem of many empresses. 

“I don’t like that sentence structure. It’s not English,” someone echoed the professor. 

“I know. That’s why it’s a calque.” I was seething but I tried to conceal my underlying offence with a pseudo-calm demeanor.

“Why a calque?”

I couldn’t tell who threw that question at me, but a low-key flow of anger lingered. My feeling was like the cuckoo in the clock hiding amidst all the inner workings that I was reassembling. Then suddenly, it would spring forth and shout, Maybe you can just leave them as they are. At least, we won’t misinterpret them as Western scenes.

Having listened to all of my over-explanations, the professor suggested, “How about we phrase it like this? ‘Since when are the phoenixes as many as the sparrows?’”

It’s a commendable translation, especially considering its adaptation for a Western audience. Despite that, a wave of helplessness washed over me. Suddenly, I recalled the first time I read Tolstoy’s War and Peace through the translation of Cao Xuân Hạo. On every page, he meticulously quoted numerous French sentences on which he based his translation, and extensively elaborated on how those sentences reflected both the French language and the Russian culture. I followed a similar approach with my translation, but thus far, I didn’t believe my classmates truly appreciated the footnotes.

The helplessness then stole my voice and started talking in my mind. Why is it that we, as Asian readers, have always been able to navigate foreignness in translations of Western literature? Why must we alter our language and bend our genres to cater to the tastes of Western readers? Are we spoiling them? How is it that we Vietnamese readers did not misinterpret the phoenix in Harry Potter as the same one in Truyền kỳ mạn lục?

I didn’t go to the reading event at the end of the semester. For one, I lost my MacBook after moving to a new apartment, meaning losing all of my translations (Beware, translators! Please back up your work). Personally, I lost interest in the event as I felt that what came out of the workshop fell short of my expectations.

On a more optimistic note, I did achieve my goal of introducing a Vietnamese medieval work to some English readers. However, whether they can fully grasp it or not requires more extensive and methodical efforts than simply presenting an isolated Kiều or Truyền kỳ mạn lục. Publishing more Vietnamese medieval works, or at least works that have nothing to do with the Vietnam War, may be a good introduction for Western readers to this culture, though publishing’s kingpins may argue otherwise. Sadly, such translations seem to exist primarily for academic purposes. 

Since taking the workshop, the horologist in me emerges whenever I attempt to translate an old Vietnamese text. He advises me to be concise, sensitive, and fastidious. “Crafting a functioning clock is one thing, but what truly matters is calibrating it. Great clocks tell the correct time and sound the right notes,” he says. I wonder how much practice he needs before he realizes he’s sufficiently skilled. And even if he does become skilled, will any of it matter if there is no one who can tell the time?