We have also made a point to include voices here from the three main geographic regions of Vietnam, the north (mien Bac), the central region (mien Trung), and the south (mien Nam). With Hanoi usually considered the cultural and political center of the country, Vietnamese literature and state-controlled publishing have tended to favor the war writing of northern writers, work that often focuses on depictions of pastoral village life and traditional village culture. Southern and central writers often present a different experience of the war by focusing on issues unique to their own experience: life alongside the American soldiers, brothers forced to fight on opposite sides of the conflict, the seizing of private property in the postwar period. Nguyen Ngoc Tu’s “Brothers,” Nguyen Thi Thu Tran’s “An American Service Hamlet,” and Lai Van Long’s “A Moral Murderer” are all examples of stories written by southerners that enrich the corpus of Vietnamese short fiction about the war because they address issues not normally found in short fiction written by northern writers.
Bringing a short story from its original Vietnamese into English poses a number of challenges. To begin with, the Vietnamese language does not have simple, generic pronouns like the English “you” or “she” or “they.” Instead, Vietnamese speakers use a system of relationship-dependent pronouns—anh, em, chi, chu, chau, ong, and ba, among others—that change according to the respective ages of and the relationship between the speakers. But attempting to translate these pronouns into English would have resulted in something like, for example, “How is sister today?” or “How are you today, sister?” We felt this sounded unnatural and stiffly formal, whereas the pronouns in the Vietnamese original often convey familiarity and friendly rapport between speakers. We have chosen, therefore, not to represent the original Vietnamese pronouns in dialogue with an attempt at literal translation. The only exception is the title for “Brother, When Will You Come Home?.” Without the Vietnamese pronouns, of course, we lose some of the associative information the characters communicate. Thus, when necessary, we have tried to indicate the relationship between speakers in other ways. This usually meant the addition of small identifying phrases to the description of some characters, like “brother-in-law” or “my sister,” or adjectives like “older” and “younger.”
We have also had to wrestle with the inevitable fact that some Vietnamese phrases lose their associative and cultural richness when rendered into English. One example is the term “ve que,” which appears at the beginning of Nguyen Trong Luan’s “The Corporal” and acts as the initiating frame for the rest of the story. Ve que is a common fixed phrase in Vietnamese that translates as “to return to one’s hometown.” The Vietnamese would never say “di que,” or “to go to one’s hometown.” The concept is always conveyed using the verb ve, “to return,” suggesting the speaker’s deep connection to his or her ancestors and the land where he or she originated. The English word “hometown” also does not carry the same cultural weight as the Vietnamese word que, which is often used as shorthand to mean “the countryside.” Ve que, therefore, implies returning to a simpler, less hectic, rural life.
This is just one example of several challenges we encountered during the translation process. The editorial note at the front of each story is meant to help cover any lost associative ground similar to this, as well as to provide some cultural and historical context. We have opted to include the notes rather than attempt this contextualizing work within the text of the stories themselves in the service of offering a reading experience in English that hews as closely as possible to the experience of reading the story in its original Vietnamese.
Written Vietnamese can also sometimes feature small regional differences. For example, the word for “bowl,” as in “a bowl of rice,” is different in the North versus the South, as is the word for “spoon.” Northern Vietnamese tends to use more formal phrases of greeting and expressing thanks; southern Vietnamese is generally considered more informal. We have tried to maintain these regional differences in the tone of our translations as best we could, though the editorial note for each story will also help regionally locate the author for readers unfamiliar with these more subtle linguistic differences.
In all of these translations, we have tried to remain as faithful as possible to the Vietnamese original. Preserving the integrity of each author’s artistic vision was always the priority. This included maintaining the aesthetic uniqueness of each author’s use of language and voice. In some cases, the resulting English sentence or phrase felt redundant or wordy, and we were forced to make minor adjustments to the sentence structure or the phrasing to make the English more readable. However, these adjustments were always informed by the author’s style and in keeping with the aesthetics of their cadence, tone, and word choice.
One final note on the text: we have opted not to include the diacritic markings on Vietnamese words that remained in the English translation. We believe these markings would have proved distracting to most readers, and those who are familiar with the Vietnamese language can easily infer the appropriate diacritics for each word.
1 / UNSUNG HERO
NGUYEN VAN THO
Nguyen Van Tho, who sometimes writes under the pseudonym Thu Nguyen, was born in 1948 in the northern province of Thai Binh. He is a veteran of the war with America, which he fought in for nearly a decade, from 1965 to 1975. He has written several books, including six short-story collections, one novel, and four works of nonfiction, and has won several awards from the Vietnam Writers’ Association, though his work is not well known outside of Vietnam. Many of his short stories deal with the experiences of the common soldier; his characters are often bo doi, the enlisted men of the North Vietnamese Army. “Unsung Hero” is in this vein, with the addition of a new, unique type of soldier—the canine combatant. The original
