The Translator’s Voice is a new monthly column from Ian J. Battaglia here at the Chicago Review of Books, dedicated to global literature and the translators who work tirelessly and too often thanklessly to bring these books to the English-reading audience. Subscribe to his newsletter to get notified of new editions as well as other notes on writing, art, and more.
Many come to art in search of beauty. We hope to see the world through new eyes, so that we might turn that gaze on the world around us, deepening our view of our surroundings. But the beauty that surrounds us doesn’t change; only our perception of it does. I find that when I read something powerful, I’m given just a glimpse into another’s mind, then able to freshly gaze on the beauty that was there all along.
In Nguyễn Thanh Hiện’s Chronicles of a Village, the first book-length translation from Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng, an unnamed narrator attempts to convey their sense of their village and the soil it was built on. Light bounces off the cotton trees; sweetly-scented wind blows through the bamboo groves. Combining the mythic and domestic, the narrator poetically moves us through time and space, without so much as a hard stop.
I spoke with Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng via Zoom about the mutability of history, the poetic mode, and the beauty of the natural world.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Ian J. Battaglia
Could you talk about how you got connected with Chronicles of a Village? What drew you to this book?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng
Chronicles of a Village was my first book-length translation project. I had just freshly graduated from Stanford as an undergrad and I moved back home to Vietnam. I had a lot of free time; I was not employed yet. And a friend of a friend introduced me to Nguyễn Thanh Hiện, the author of Chronicles of a Village.
I fell in love with the book and with the rhythm of it; it has a very particular, sort of poetic, slowed down, leisurely, but also intense rhythm to it. And I’d never really read a work of Vietnamese literature like that.
I’d been away in the U.S. for college and I really had a longing to just return to my mother tongue. And I thought, ‘Hmm. What a quirky, strange, beautiful little book.’ And so I just translated it, because I knew the author wanted it translated and published. And I had no idea how publishing worked at that time.
I just thought I would just take care of the translation first. I didn’t even know that that’s a very silly thing to do, to just translate. I didn’t even have a contract, but I just [translated it]. So I had a draft and then later on the publishing worked out somehow, but that was really how serendipitously I came to know the work, and even the world of translation, really.
Ian J. Battaglia
Wow, that’s so fascinating. I didn’t know this was your first book-length translation. What a good connection from your friend; that really worked out!
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng
Yeah, I think I got really lucky because I think people had to work a long time until they have a substantial enough project to turn into a book.
But I think it just came to me by luck or fate or whatever you’d like to call it. I had translated a lot of poetry and pieces of prose and essays before, but never really a book-length project.
Ian J. Battaglia
You’ve already mentioned this a bit, but I want to talk about the style of the book. Like you said, it’s so poetic.
It has a nearly stream-of-conscious feel in parts, and goes between both the mythic and legendary scale, and these extremely intimate, domestic scenes. Did your poetry background help you with that? What is it like translating a work that has such a particular style and tone?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng
Absolutely, I think my familiarity with poetry helped. I think of poetry as this sort of force in the world, or this rhythm in the world, that just runs through you. And if you’re open to it, I think you just know it, kind of just feel it. And I felt that when I read the first few chapters of Chronicles of a Village; it felt easeful, which I think is a helpful thing when you begin a translation; that the text feels open to you, and you have space to enter into it.
I think that was like a major sort of connection between me and the text, like a poetic atmosphere that I knew—and I think the text also knew that it was operating in that space, because there are no full stops; there are no periods. Everything is separated by a little comma. It feels like a person is just whispering to you this one long breath of their story, from the time that they were a little boy in a village in the mountains, somewhere in the central region of Vietnam. They went through all these adventures and journeys in the world, and now they’re thinking about histories and ghosts. But all in this long rhythmic poetry, which I love.
Ian J. Battaglia
I must admit, I’m sort of a poetic philistine, to be honest. I read poetry, but I’m not a critic of poetry or anything like that. But the way you mentioned “being open to it” and “having it flow through you,” a lot of the books I’m the most drawn to are the ones that kind of get into my head and change the way I think. And I absolutely felt that with this book, where just while reading it, it changed my thought processes.
I hadn’t associated that with the poetic mode necessarily, but that’s definitely something I felt while reading it.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng
I’m glad! I think poetry—I think the most beautiful poetry, the poetry that really moves me the most—I think does exactly what you just described: it kind of bends the mind a little bit. It bends your consciousness, and suddenly you think about your language and the world and punctuation and your emotion in a totally different way.
Time feels like a substance that’s been changed a little bit.
Ian J. Battaglia
You said Chronicles of a Village sort of sits apart from other Vietnamese literature, or was different from works you had read in the past. Is there sort of a tradition it’s falling into here, or is it really sort of a new work?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng
It felt really fresh to me. When I went to school in Vietnam, from grade one to grade twelve, I read quite a bit of Vietnamese literature—not as much as I wanted to—but the stuff that we read in school followed a particular agenda of the educational system in Vietnam. It would have certain themes and genres that once you get to grade twelve, you become familiar with, and I just never read anything like Chronicles of a Village when I was in school.
Everything felt a little bit more… I would say, tải đạo, which is a term we say for literature that carries the message, or carries the path, or carries the Dao. It carries a serious or profound message. I think literature, at least the version that I studied in school in Vietnam, had to have a very explicit meaning or mission.
And of course, that has to do with the history of Vietnam and wars and the revolution. So everything was either responding to or belonged to that tradition of revolution, or it was critiquing it in some other way; but they had a very explicit program, I would say. But Chronicles of a Village felt a little bit more free.
It has all of the elements that usually appear in Vietnamese literature. You see war and violence and displacement and lots of pain and suffering. Lots of beautiful moments of lightness and happiness as well. And I think those are the ones that actually drew me the most of the book; it has these almost romantic, idyllic moments, and then suddenly it also undercuts that sort of idyll, the romance of it, because you know that so many wars ravaged this land.
Ian J. Battaglia
There is a sort of romanticizing of this rural life that takes place, and the life that the narrator remembers from their childhood; tilling the fields with his father and that sort of thing. I thought it was so interesting how, like you said, all those themes are present, war and displacement and even just technological progress, but they are sort of an undercurrent to what’s important to the narrator, which is preserving this idea, preserving not just tradition, but what this sort of rural life was like. I thought that that was such a fascinating part of how the book works; it has all these themes, but there felt like a clear priority to me.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng
Absolutely. There’s this intense connection to, like you said, the land: the sound of a little bird, or the way that flowers arise and decay, and the seasons changing as the speaker speaks. I think because Vietnamese literature has always felt this pressure to discuss the more macro, the bigger issues like politics, war, you know, national concerns, I think I was just so relieved to get into this book, where I’m really feeling the sense of grass sprouting from the land, and children sort of weaving together in their front yard among banana trees, the moments like that, that I think are just as profound as the bigger, transnational wars that we’re always embroiled in as human beings.
There’s a casualness to the literature, and yet an intense connection to [the] atmospherics of the world.
Ian J. Battaglia
And the narrator is at times almost incredulous that people are not more concerned with the land, and the day to day. There’s a section where they’re discussing the rice mortar, the specific tool used to produce rice flour, and they’re almost baffled, like, ‘Why isn’t this hugely important item discussed more?’
That intense refocusing on what’s important, I think is so beautiful about this book.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng
Yeah, I think the agricultural, like you said, that was also something that I was fascinated by in the book. Growing up in a big city in Vietnam—I mean, it’s a tiny city; I grew up in Hanoi—but a totally urban person. I knew nothing about all of these important, super important tools that really make our lives possible. They create the rice, the grain that we eat every day, but we never pay attention to it. I think that was one of the agendas of the author, to really get you to pay attention to the rural, the agricultural, the really lowly, humble instruments of people who work with the land.
Ian J. Battaglia
Would you talk a bit about your process for translating this? Did it differ from other pieces you’ve translated, just being a longer work than previous [works]? Does your process of translation differ from your personal writing practice?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng
With this book, my process resembles the way I translate most other works; even shorter ones. I just work very fast in my first iteration. I try to produce a draft of the complete work. This book took me, I guess, half a year, translating on and off, and also doing other independent writing, art writing gigs in Vietnam at the time.
I would just do like a chapter a day, or maybe two chapters a day if I had the time. Again, this book felt quite easeful to translate, because it’s structured in a way that there’s no chapter that’s longer than three or four pages. There are really short ones and then there are some longer ones, but they all felt like a long poem to me.
[It was] really beautiful to be able to sit down at some point in the day, and just sit with that text and generate a draft. And for me, usually the first draft is usually quite fast, and I don’t really pay attention to the like tiny word choices and punctuations. And then in the revision process, which took me years afterwards, that was a much more arduous [task] and I really had to [think] like, ‘What is the right thing to place in line four of page 23?’
Ian J. Battaglia
I’m not super familiar with the Vietnamese language; could you talk about some of the nuances that arise between Vietnamese and English, or some of the key differences? Are there things that you keep front of mind, or have to often think about when you’re working between both languages?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng
There are many challenges. As Vietnamese people say, it is actually a pretty difficult language, but I think all languages are really difficult; you have to really study and live in it deeply. One of the key difficulties of translating Vietnamese is the pronouns.
We have a range of many diverse and nuanced pronouns, whereas in English, it’s only this sort of controlled set of “I, you, she, he, they, it.” Whereas in Vietnamese, for example, the narrator would sometimes switch to a moment when he’s addressing a female lover in the past. It’s never so explicitly said in the book, but there are certain chapters when he’s basically speaking to this “young maiden” who, over the years, has left him, over the course of time and separation.
If you’re a male identified person speaking to a female identified person who’s younger, or who’s your love interest, you would use a certain pronoun to address that female interest. But if I just say “you” in English, you’d not really know, it’s just like, “You haven’t returned to see me again.”
So in the English I had to kind of make it more explicit by saying, you young maiden have not returned, for example. There are certain glosses you have to add to the English to get across the nuance of the pronoun in Vietnamese. I’m not quite happy with it, because to add “young maiden” is quite explicit, whereas in Vietnamese it’s just the word “em”.
If you call someone “em,” there’s so much tenderness and love and care all wrapped up in that single syllable word. Whereas if I have to say you, young maiden, it still sounds gentle, but it’s a little bit, I don’t know—it has more syllables and therefore it’s already different.
Ian J. Battaglia
Maybe so, but I thought those passages were so sweet. [If I’m remembering correctly,] I think they run off to the bamboo groves at one point, and just being addressed as “young maiden!” I felt like that was such a charming part of the book.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng
It is very charming, in a very simple, undecorated way. It was just like a slightly older boy talking to a slightly younger girl, and they’re sort of being awkward and clumsy and don’t really know how to talk to each other.
Ian J. Battaglia
You’ve talked about the ease of translating Chronicles of a Village, but were there any major difficulties you experienced while translating it?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng
Looking back, I think the process really was quite beautiful. I mean, there were challenges along the way, like picking the right words to translate into, but I think the more difficult part was really just to get the book published. It’s such a strange, little book, and like I mentioned here earlier, I had so little experience with the publishing world.
So just to convince people that this piece of literature coming from Vietnam, which I guess, in our sort of imbalanced playground of literature is still categorized as a minor space of literature, and then Nguyễn Thanh Hiện’s, this author’s work is still also quite minor within Vietnamese literature, and so I [was] working with all kinds of of minorities that are so easily neglected. Just having to talk to potential publishers and articulate why this literature about agriculture and villages and little people really mattered and was actually beautiful. That was like the thing that I had no experience with, and something I kind of struggled with for a long time.
Ian J. Battaglia
Another thing that comes up frequently in Chronicles of a Village is the power of literature and writing in general. It’s talked about having almost a liberating effect; just the way he talks about his father as a man of letters and how much that expanded his world from [being] a farmer, to somebody more connected [to the world], and clearly somebody that the narrator deeply admires. Is that something that resonated with you, that theme, and is that how you view writing as well?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng
Totally. I not only work in literature and translation, I also work in the art world. And I think a lot of the time, both the art and the literary world can be quite separated from the rest of the world, with its own sort of—I’ll just be very frank—its own elitisms and neuroses, and lack of care for other layers of existence. I think it’s it’s nice to be reminded that someone can can work with a plow and soil and plants, and think about seasons and the weather, and worry about whether the monsoon this year will destroy their harvest, and at the same time, they can also be making poetry, even as they plow a till of their land, or when they read a book in the evening, for instance; I learned to reconceptualize my way of thinking about poetry. It’s not just something that exists among the lettered and cultured people, but among everyone, every human being, and even non human beings, like the way the trees rustle in the air, or [how] flowers move in the winds of Spring.
The other thing that I learned from the book was also the way that the author thinks about history as a draft. That was kind of the line that concluded the final chapter, in this conversation among ghosts and basically, the lesson is that history is also very ghostly. It’s also an ongoing draft, and it’s always changing and no one should claim to have a grasp on it because our fates are alive. It’s always new and beautiful and changing. That’s also something that really stuck with me, this idea that poetry undulates and moves through different classes and worlds and timeframes, and so does history, and no one can really control it.
Ian J. Battaglia
The way you speak of it, it’s almost like a reclamation in a way, taking it from these elitist institutions or this specific strata of people and returning it to the people, and to the land itself.
That’s exactly how I felt reading the book. Like poetry, it made me feel more sensitive to things going on around me, and it’s so beautiful when a piece of writing can shift your focus like that.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng
Good literature—I don’t think that my work is at the level of good literature yet—but I aspire to live in the space that good literature generates, which is a space where I think the human ego just gets smaller and smaller and quieter and quieter. And like you said, suddenly we’re aware of how beautiful the air is, or winds are; the trees, how gorgeous they are. Instead of being so wrapped up in our conflicts and sufferings, which are real, but I don’t know, they’re not everything. And our egos are not everything.
Ian J. Battaglia
Yeah, absolutely. I’m a photographer as well. I encourage everybody to take photos. One of the things that I think is really powerful that people can take from photography is just an ability to better recognize beautiful light. I think the way that light falls in a room or something like that, we all see it, but kind of don’t see it in a way, and putting a focus on that, or to bring it back to Chronicles of the Village, the way the trees rustle, or those tiny little moments of beauty and joy that we might not notice in the moment, but really speak to so much more.
I think that’s such a huge part of the human experience.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng
Beautiful. Yeah, light; I mean, what a crazy substance! Photography is also one of my most beloved mediums of art, and in this little book, those moments, those really scintillating moments when the sunlight filters through the cotton trees, for example, you know, the trees [from which comes] the cotton [that] become the fabrics that we never think about, but the book really returns us to the world of light entering the trees, which is really beautiful.
Ian J. Battaglia
The other thing I think that the narrator is trying to do here, like we talked about earlier, is preserve their memory of the village and their connection to history through war and social change; not creating something that’s fixed and unchanging, just preserving this viewpoint that might be lost. Is that something that’s important to you or in art or in writing, or something that you think about as well?
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng
It’s becoming more pressing, I think. Thinking how important, again, the land—it keeps coming up in our conversation—this village that the speaker speaks of, it is a literal village, but I think it also talks about the land, the [lifestyle] of human beings when we were once more bonded with the land and trees and other creatures. The seasons, the weather, our climate, as opposed to how I think we’re living now, which is in this rush of time, this flood of time, really.
And we’re always among our devices, where we live in our air conditioned buildings; we live among highways, and we live among lots of mechanizations of the world, which I think is sort of irreversible now. I think we have to learn to live with that. But at the same time, it’s also really important to know that the natural world is miraculous. Absolutely miraculous.
FICTION
Chronicles of a Village
By Nguyễn Thanh Hiện
Translated by Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng
Yale University Press
Published April 2, 2024
