Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng is the translator of Nguyễn Thanh Hiện’s Chronicles of a Village, first published by Penguin Southeast Asia in 2022 and reissued by Yale University Press in April 2024. Narrated by a self-appointed scribe who sets himself the task of recording a rural community’s myths and evolutions, its idiosyncrasies and ghosts, Hiện’s book weaves a collective story. The oneiric, formally inventive text is composed of poetic fragments that dwell as much with wind and birdsong as with the havoc and carnage of wartime bombs. History and fiction mingle in confused orders of time, caught between the oral and the written; each chapter flows on uninterrupted by periods, the clauses separated only by commas. Across the rise and fall of dynasties—beneath the traumas of colonial modernity and ecological crisis—Hiện’s narrator appears to affirm the “profound philosophy of existence concealed within the deepest sentiments of human beings”. A single rice grain might distil within its slight body the voice of heaven and earth; a “small fragment of the world” might be the bearer of the universe’s sorrow.
In this correspondence with Quyên, I began with her approach to translation and genre. Much else soon crept into our conversation: the labour of literature, the cosmologies harboured within letters and scripts, the symbiosis between Chinese and Vietnamese, the ‘meshes of ash’ beneath Celan’s poetry, and the kind of imagined readership demanded by such a challenging and singular text.
Alex: Something I love about my current edition of Chronicles of a Village, published by Yale University Press, is that it doesn’t loudly proclaim itself to be a ‘novel’—that ambivalent, homogenising category in the asymmetrical field of world literature which tends to flatten diverse literary traditions into something legible and consumable by a presumptively white reader. Instead, in the jacket copy I see words like “stories”, “fragments”, “elegy”, and “meditation”. These provisional designations feel faithful to the text’s generic slipperiness, its commitment to the minor and the ephemeral, tales that might otherwise elude archival capture.
I know you’ve already said elsewhere that the polyvalent “tin tức” in the original Vietnamese title encompasses everything from news to informational updates and narratives. “Tin tức” itself perhaps speaks more to the gesture of transmission and retelling, regardless of the veracity of what is being circulated. And indeed, embedded within the text are all these layered notes, palimpsestic quotations, circumspect disclaimers (like when the narrator, the village’s self-appointed scribe, apologises for adding words to a fictional quotation to render it “more contemporary”). How did you go about approaching the Chronicles’ form and its complex relationship to historical truth? Why did you settle on the word “chronicles” rather than, say, “myths”, “legends”, “stories”, etc.?
Quyên: Thank you for these sharp noticings of the novel’s strange form and my attempt at its translation. About the title, I settled on “chronicles” because chronicling is what the protagonist, a village scribe, claims to do in the novel. He calls himself “người chép sử làng,” the one who copies down the history of the village. Of course, his mode of history is closer to what we normally call memory fragments, even trivial events, fantasies, dreams, longings, and other slippery modes of transmission. But he insists over and over again that these floating fragments are history, that they matter immensely, and that they deserve careful study. So the word “chronicles,” with its dimensions of historical record and diverse newsiness, seemed fitting to me, though it does sound more self-serious than, say, “news of a village” or “tales of a village.” The protagonist has his self-conscious moments of self-righteousness in the book, so I was hoping that he’d like being called a chronicler in English, instead of being merely a news reporter.
There’s also the word “chronic” lying within “chronicles,” the seed of a recurring illness lying within the fragments of history. Brutalities and many other blindnesses persist throughout the centuries in this village, as they do in our human world.
I also quite like the Vietnamese term for “chronicles”—“biên niên”—which can literally mean to write on the margins of history; to the record the years into history; to compile the years into books; also to weave, to plait with the years; and finally, to fabricate, to make things up. It seems “biên niên” after all isn’t so different from “tin tức,” so perhaps the boundaries between news, chronicles, histories, and tales can also be rethought from time to time.
Alex: That’s really beautiful: a chronic genre, ever susceptible to being reactivated. On my first reading of Hiện’s Chronicles, each fragment seemed episodic, almost sequestered. Only upon revisiting it did I intimate the more subterranean movements threading through the reappearances of figures and phrases. There might even be an unseen logic precipitating each chapter’s birth from the previous, a kind of analogical juxtaposition mimicking the fugitive flight of thought (like between Chapters 28 and 29: Chapter 28 ends with a death by sorrow, Chapter 29 expands sorrows to a generalising condition afflicting the village like “late afternoon winds”). Most extraordinary to me is Dr Quân, an elaborately fabricated character essential to Hiện’s metafictional entourage. He’s only hinted at by the narrator, who recurrently quotes from or alludes in morsels to Quân’s prose work Entangled Letters, until the carnivalesque, surreal story of the letter-eaters in Chapter 34. In it, the literal ingestion of letters of the alphabet effects bodily metamorphoses in a group of people, elevating them into a kind of paradisiacal bliss. We could say the story itself, composed of Quân’s words, devours the chapter and irrupts in the text as quotation.
Maybe we can call it logophagy. It made me think of how letters themselves, and the condition of being “lettered” as rural inhabitants, structure the rhythm of the Chronicles. What are the valences of the Vietnamese “chữ nghĩa”, which the narrator keeps using to describe the erudition of his father in the very midst of agricultural labour? In what ways do you see these letters, this “movement of literature along the arduous struggle for fabric and rice”, fitting into Hiện’s larger project? I wonder if it’s something recuperative, a way for the work to theorise its own rural textuality, to stake a claim on universality and abstraction, to say without condescension: village-dwellers, too, are readers and writers and philosophers.
Quyên: Alex, these are superb insights into the book. Perhaps to write, and read, is to flow into our own chronic genre. And each fragment we write, and read, is a fugitive rebirth from the last.
“Chữ nghĩa,” words and meanings, versus, or as, “cơm áo,” rice and fabric. Perhaps many writers feel this condition acutely, this condition of converting their words into their daily bowl of rice. The stories in Chronicles of a Village reveal that the conversion also works in the other way, in an even more profound, more silent manner. Agrarian acts and rural motions like digging into the soil, walking with an ox, watching the rain, are themselves the wordless literature of those who work with earth. This literature, as you noticed, is arduous. It is made of hunger, destitution, and endless wretched labor. It can also be peaceful and indelible. A quiet literature made of flowers opening into the summer sky. Or the blushes of the narrator as an adolescent boy, trying to form coherent words in front of a friend he liked, as they stood in a banana grove, their hearts beating fast.
And then there’s this eerie way of letter-eating in Chapter 34, which, as you can tell from the critical tone of this Dr Quân and the scribe who reprises his words, is a dangerous consumption of literature. What happens to the saintly movements of literature, as the narrator put it, when words are globalized, corporatized, converted wholesale into international coins, opulent palaces, and powerful chariots that serve ‘ruthless lords’? It’s a fantastical tale and also a warning. We should be careful, or our mouth, too, might be smeared with the intoxicating delirium of words. I suppose it’s up to us to ‘eat’ words with less greed, less fanfare, more breath, more attunement. It’s not easy. What is your relationship to chữ nghĩa, Alex?
Alex: Such an immense question, Quyên, and one I will go on thinking about. I’m nervous about claiming too premature an intimacy with Vietnamese, having only learned it for four years. As a native Chinese speaker, I keep noticing phonetic resonances between the two languages. Still, I’m striving to listen to Vietnamese on its own terms—not to let it be cannibalised, as if in an echo of imperial history. “Chữ”, for now, I understand primarily as “script” rather than “word”, though of course it’s capacious enough to accommodate both meanings/nghĩa. Maybe Chữ Nôm* furnishes an apt metaphor for my sojourns between these phonemes and tones. And through your translation “lettered”, now I imagine “chữ” as letters in a dual sense when held within English, not just graphemes but missives as well, addressed in relation to another, like this correspondence.
I did want to ask you about scriptworlds, the horizons opened up or foreclosed by the writing system in which a language is housed. Chronicles seems to challenge such fixity through the orality that animates each fragment, the endless sequence of commas like breaths drawn, on the verge of flight. The text reckons, too, with the wounds of coloniality: one chapter points to how the French mimic the Chinese in desiring to “control the holy spirit of the soil”, which could almost be an image of how the medium of print, as a colonial technology, tames and fixes into legibility the elusiveness of sound. You wrote in your Translator’s Afterword of the homonymous “hương” (香/鄉), referring to “scent” and “native soil” at once, a word demanding to be read out loud. To what extent do convergences between Vietnamese and Chinese inform your translational practice and, if it’s not too broad, your poetics as a whole? I was noting how, in your poem “tôi”, you quoted the Tang poet Xue Tao/Tiết Đào/薛濤 as an epigraph, and its words are absorbed into the surfaces of your own writing: “dreams mistylike reprised chinese wisdom”.
[NB, for our readers: Chữ Nôm is a script in which Chinese characters were adapted to represent Vietnamese words, widely used between the 15th and 19th centuries until its replacement by the Roman alphabet in the 20th century.]
Quyên: As you’ve already noticed, Vietnamese is a language reluctantly (and perhaps joyfully, too, I don’t know) informed by imperial and colonial scripts, alphabets, and other demarcations of power. Most prominent are the Chinese influence and the transfiguration of Vietnamese into the Roman alphabet, initiated by European missionaries. The narrator of Chronicles of a Village is aware of this complicated history of our tongue. It’s hinted at in stories like the one about that seasick Việt peasant who became a conscript worker-soldier in France. He was shipped to Marseille, which he pronounced as “Mạc-xay,” then “taken to Tu-lu (Toulouse) to make guns, then later to Ca-ma (Camargue) to plow the fields.” These naïvely pronounced names hold in them deep, fraught power relations. Then there are also numerous fleeting references to Chinese literary and cultural practices, like the use of geomantic governance that you mentioned. Or the many stories of ghosts and magical beings, which gently recall the strange tales of Pu Songling.
As for me, because of my nerdy interest in the three teachings and wuxia literature, I like to read Chinese tales and poetry, though merely as an ignorant fan. I rely on dictionaries and Việt translations to wind my way through the maze of chữ Hán. I admire the ancientness and condensedness of classical Chinese. A single character can harbor a whole cosmology. Even a simple one like tâm / 心 / xīn, for heartmind, already diffuses so much of the tired body-mind dualities that have colonized our modern head. If I could quit my day jobs, I probably would spend my days reading Tang poetry and learning Chinese. Someday I’d also love to learn Japanese, which my parents studied, or French and Russian, which my older relatives spoke. This is my poetics—just nerdy, wayward aspirations in the hopeless labyrinths of language.
The poem “tôi” was originally titled “brushing, brushing, brushing her grave: a love song.” The editors (who are wonderful humans) by chance published it as “tôi,” a lonely “I,” which I thought was fine. They also misprinted the line “dreams misty / like reprised chinese wisdom” as “dreams mistylike reprised chinese wisdom,” which I thought was also fine, better really, because it’s senseless and unwise. Anyhow, I wrote this poem during the Covid years, after a friend passed away. The words by Xue Tao, quoted as my prelude, were 送友人, her “poem to send off a friend.” It felt romantic and apt at the time. Also, this poem’s haze, which many Chinese poets and painters were marvelous at, reflects my feelings about language in general. A vast expanse of haze.
I reread my translation of Xue Tao just now, and as usual, feel an urge to make a new translation, not better, just a different one:
a nation of water, night, grass, frost. a mirage
of icy moon, stoneblue mountains mingling into
ash, ash—they speak—tonight the separation begins.
our thousand-mile parting, hazy as towers of fog.
Alex: Wow, thank you for generously sharing that re-translation (or parallel translation). It’s an act that has fascinated me—I’m thinking of two of my favourite Arabic translators, Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger, who teamed up to author an unbelievable collection of poetic correspondence-translations titled Agitated Air; for each sequence, they took turns translating/rendering/interpreting/rewriting (no one verb feels adequate) the same Ibn Arabi poem and sending it to the other person. With each version, they varied form and syntax and language, sometimes embellishing, sometimes paring down, sometimes completely transforming the text. Have you read it? I’d love to discuss it with you someday. Now, I’m putting your two translations of Xue Tao side by side, thinking about “nation” vs. “kingdom” for “quốc”. Each word seems in its own way to carry a burden of history—a different imaginary of what politics can look like. And—in this new iteration—“ash, ash”, which sounds like a doubled Chinese phrase, almost a riff on 苍苍/thương thương. It reminds me of Paul Celan for some reason? Does he have a poem where he says “ash, ash”? I love the stark, elemental feeling of “water, night, grass, frost”, partitioned by caesuras.
If you were to look back on your translation of the Chronicles, is there anything you would re-translate and rewrite? Do you read your translation out loud to yourself, as you work on it? I’d just like to mention two moments I relished when I reread Hiện’s work this time and shuttled between his Vietnamese and your English. First, in Chapter 11: “tale upon tale of yesteryear, yestercentury or yestermillennia”. You aren’t afraid to defamiliarise the sound of English, and here it’s marvellous, how it replicates the anaphoric rhythm of “trước”, from “năm trước” to “thế kỳ trước”. Second, in Chapter 14, the narrator describes the palm-leaf raincoats his family used to weave, and “cứ thấy lấp lánh trong ký ức tôi”, which you render as the objects continuing to “shine in my memory with the same shimmering lustre”. I was moved by this, the alliterative and almost effulgent quality of language you’ve preserved from “lấp lánh” to the shining and shimmering.
Quyên: I didn’t know of Agitated Air but would love to read it now. Sometimes I think my goal in life is to find a poem that I intensely love, or a set of poems like Ibn Arabi’s love songs for Seale and Moger, a cycle of words that I can translate hundreds of ways, and still feel unexhausted. And perhaps like the thirty birds of Attar, I’ll realize that the poem has been here with/in me all along. Or possibly “the” poem is some unassuming poem that, by a karmic force, will just fall onto my head one day.
The form of Seale and Moger’s correspondence also feels like a beautiful kind of friendship/co-authorship/co-translatorship to me. It must have taken a lot of labor and devotion to fashion a work like Agitated Air into being. Anyhow, I must read it before I talk more about it with you. Just one more thing, I see online that some of the covers of this book feature Hasegawa Tōhaku’s screens of pine trees. Do you know why and whether it was the translators who picked the image? I love those pines, so drunk with fog. Makes me wonder about the place of Buddhist painting in translation, but that’s really a topic for a much older me to ponder.
Thank you for inspiring me to return to Celan. I haven’t found the stillness of mind to read him for a while, but I deeply long to. There are meshes of ash glimmering under his language. Maybe all languages have some burning beneath. And all nations are split and singed somewhere. If I could meet Celan, I’d ask him about ashes. Though I have a feeling he’ll just be silent the whole time.
As for Chronicles of a Village, I’m sure there are many things I would change. Every time I read an old translation or piece of writing, my tendency is to tinker with it, “update” it to my current temperament, as I just compulsively did with my translation of Xue Tao. But with Chronicles, I guess I’d let it rest, with all of its clumsinesses and occasional shimmers preserved. Perhaps what I’d change is the process. I wish I’d taken the time to be in a small village, and the vast nonhuman world, for longer stretches of time, to be surrounded by the sound of mountains, to listen to rain, to see strange animals playing on mountaintops, to inhale the earth. To do all the things the narrator liked to do as a little boy, which are all the things I still like to do as an inchoate adult.
Alex: I’m unsure why they selected the fog-drunk pine trees as their cover image—maybe there are affinities between mysticisms in their ascent towards a vanishing point. I’d love to hear your thoughts if/when you read it.
We could talk forever, but if we were to wrap up our discussion of Chronicles, I’d like to invite you to reflect on the act of reading. Translation, after all, is one of the most intimate forms of close reading. And Hiện’s narrator, too, imagines a reader in Chapter 23 who, confronted with the rise and fall of disparate dynasties and regimes, appears to be literally immersed in the ruins and carnage of history: this figure wakes up on a grave and hears the sounds of war, at the same time struggling to “forget these chaotic vagaries of time in which vast blue seas turn into mulberry fields”. What kind of reader do you think Chronicles demands in a globalised literary field? (My mind floats back to something you raised a few missives earlier: the words that are corporatised into international coins, currency that serves the interests of the powerful, in the story of the letter-eaters.)
I’m also curious how differently you think this text might be received among Vietnamese audiences, especially since diegetically, Chronicles also contains glimpses of “decadent” writing being excoriated. The narrator gives us vignettes of literature class and his teacher being sacked for compromising the “nation-salvaging struggle”. Literature seems reduced to its didactic, panegyric functions, in service of the nascent nation (hiding away its ashes, its splits). And yet the narrator’s genre-bending fragments clearly exceed this narrow scope. In what measure does Hiện’s style feel distinctive among contemporary Vietnamese authors? Does he consciously position himself within any literary lineages?
Quyên: Nguyễn Thanh Hiện used to write and occasionally translate every other day, and he’d post his fragments of text on Facebook. I thought that was quite distinctive, this energy, this propulsion to write and to share fresh writings, free for anyone to read. The other thing I like about Hiện was how, despite his prolific self-publications online, he seemed largely private, an almost recluse like me. Before, during, and after my translation process, we barely talked; we left each other alone; we kept our respect and distance for each other. I’m not sure if he’d place himself in a certain lineage. He’s well-versed in philosophy, both eastern and western, as well as the history of Vietnamese literature. He’s also translated into Vietnamese some poems by Auden, Borges, Miłosz, Zagajewski, among many others. Here are some words from a poem by Borges, which he translated:
. . . và hãy nhớ Thời Gian là một dòng sông khác
để hiểu chúng ta đi lạc như một dòng sông
và gương mặt chúng ta [cũng] biến mất như nước
. . . and remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.
— Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Anthony Kerrigan
As for readership, maybe the book wishes for a reader that cannot forget the condition of mulberry-sea transformations. Perhaps this imagery of 滄海桑田 is familiar to you, this picture of oceans turning into mulberry fields, mulberry fields turning back into oceans, oceans turning back into dust, and so on. The ideal readers know change. They know history’s exuberances and agonies. In their mind, the seas of lucrative words—and the seas of ideological dogmas for that matter—have been, and will eventually be once again, a field of less overblown, more verdant language. As Nguyễn Thanh Hiện put it in the voice of the ghostly father in the book’s last lines, history is only a draft. It’s all incomplete. Now I realize that history, as draft, is also a stream of air running through an enclosure, likely an enclosure ashen and split. Perhaps this current of air is agitated like sprouting desire, perhaps it’s calm like pines moving in fog.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng is a writer and translator born in Vietnam. Her recent publications include Chronicles of a Village (Yale University Press 2024), a novel by Nguyễn Thanh Hiện in English translation, https://everything.is/ (AJAR Press 2024), a poetry collection by Samuel Caleb Wee in Vietnamese translation, and Masked Force (Sàn Art 2022), a bilingual catalogue of Võ An Khánh’s war photographs. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Modern Poetry in Translation, Jacket2 andother venues.
Alex Tan is a writer still in search of a form. They have been Assistant Managing Editor at Asymptote Journal for the past three years, where they frequently review literature in translation, in particular Arabic literature. Other essays are forthcoming in Words Without Borders, Full Stop, and elsewhere. Some of their critical writings can be found here.
minor literature[s] 