Translating Vietnamese literature into English is like walking a tightrope, especially because the two cultures and languages differ vastly from each other. During the process of translation, we served as both translators and editors. While we attempted to remain as faithful as possible to the original Vietnamese, we sometimes had to add a few phrases or even an occasional sentence to a scene to make the meaning or intent more understandable to English-speaking readers. Our translations prioritize the story’s context and content as well as the natural flow of the narrative and the voice(s) in the storytelling. Vietnamese literature does not undergo the same rigorous review process before publication that American literature does; therefore, we occasionally have accepted this role, as well. For the sake of conciseness, we removed redundancies, repetitions, and wordiness; we also rearranged passages when necessary for clarity. When making the changes, we were careful not to distort or alter the meaning that the authors have revealed in their stories.
Việt Nam is a tropical country, and in many of the stories, certain regional trees, flowers, or food might be unfamiliar to Western readers. In some cases, we preferred to use the original Vietnamese word. However, in the opening of Dạ Ngân’s story, “White Pillows,” the author describes many regional trees in the Mekong Delta, and none of the Vietnamese names will be recognizable to Western readers. We thus used their English names so that readers easily can look them up and visualize the story’s setting.
A few stories in this collection are a bit longer than their original Vietnamese versions. We selected many of the stories from Vietnamese newspapers or magazines, which often impose strict word limitations. Free of these constraints, we contacted the authors and asked them if they might prefer to include additions that elaborated on descriptions or plots. Võ Thị Xuân Hà added nearly two pages to the beginning of her story, “At the Border,” for example, which affords the story a socioeconomic angle. Tịnh Bảo also elaborated on the abusive male character in “Under the Blooming Silk Cotton Tree.” We also consulted with the authors when we made some minor changes to make their stories more readable and accessible to English-speaking audiences. For instance, in the original Vietnamese version of Trịnh Bích Ngân’s “The Eternal Forest,” the female protagonist’s roommate does not have a name, and in order to distinguish them, we named the roommate Hạnh, which by no means affects the story’s plot.
Communication between characters was an issue in translation, because English and Vietnamese do not mirror one another in casual speech. For instance, it is typical for a Vietnamese to ask, “Have you eaten yet?” or “Where’re you going?” as a greeting, while an American might typically ask, “Hey! How’s it going?” In some cases, we had the Vietnamese characters speak in a way that would be familiar to English readers so as to preserve intent, if not the literal wording.
Another conundrum of translation involves personal pronouns. The Vietnamese address each other with a variety of pronouns dependent on age and gender, rather than by first names, as is common in the West. A man, for example, can be addressed as em, anh, con, ông, bác, or chú, depending on age and relationship with the speaker. Thus, in Vietnamese literature, a character may be treated with various honorifics or titles based on the speaker or point of view, while their given name remains unknown. In our translations, we avoided confusion by adhering to Western notions of referring to individuals by a single name and adding necessary relationship indicators accordingly.
The significance of regional dialects and ethnic attributes are also impossible to capture from Vietnamese to English. More so than English in America or in other Western countries, Vietnamese differs greatly by region. Accents and terms vary among the North, South and central areas, to say nothing of terms specific to ethnic minority groups. Vietnamese readers will pick up on an author’s background based on the use of language when reading a story in their native language, but it is impossible to engender such differences in English. The translations thus make no attempt to translate local slang literally, for which English has no appropriate analogy.
Another decision we were forced to make involves the use of diacritics (the accent marks above letters that inform how a word is pronounced and thus what it means). These markings give words drastically different meanings in Vietnamese (for example: áo means “shirt,” ao means “pond,” and ảo means “illusive”). We chose to keep the diacritics as they appear in Vietnamese to maintain the beautiful musicality of the Vietnamese language and to help those who are interested in learning the language look up certain Vietnamese words easily.
The most fascinating but also the most grueling task we wrestled with was in remaining true to the narrative point of view. In a typical English story, the point of view is normally clearly indicated, whether it be first-person limited, third-person omniscient, or third-person limited. For a variety of historic and linguistic reasons, this is not the case in Vietnamese fiction. Perspectives often shift, and details are presented from the perspective of varying characters who may not logically be privy to the alternate perspectives. In our translations, we attempted to alter the narrative perspectives to conform to Western conventions of storytelling, which provide the narrator with the necessary omniscient knowledge or perspective. This means that we occasionally had to change the point of view for various sections of the stories.
Translation is an imperfect enterprise; thus, some nuances are inevitably lost. However, these minor flaws do not negate the value of the process. If one is unable to read the stories in their original language, translation is vital for unlocking the pleasure and knowledge they contain. We hope these translations do justice to the original authors’ intents and talents, while also standing alone as powerful stories in English.