Anh à, tôi bắt đầu. Thực sự tôi đã vượt qua giai đoạn bị ám ảnh bởi những thứ như thế. 

Those two sentences open the second paragraph of ‘Nam anh em trên chiếc xe’; a short story I spent time with, in the autumn of 2024, during my residency with the NCW Visible Communities program. A photo taken by Nick Út frames this intimate short story of two siblings, materialized as an internal monologue of the narrator who is writing a letter to their brother living abroad. A family of seven on a single motorbike speeding along Highway 13, is what the photo depicts. And behind them is the soon-to-be site of the bloody An Lộc battle of 1972.

In this instance, the narrator is proclaiming that they are beyond the hauntings, they are insisting that they have moved on. Yet, as I translate the rest of the story, I wondered if that statement is factual, or is the narrator saying out that of exhaustion? Perhaps they are frustrated with the melding of time and memories as they reflect on and thread the past, the present and the future together.

Time in this story feels like playing with an elastic band—malleable, but tensed, and subjective. Rather than the usual linear line, or isolated shards, the experience approximates to when I play with a new elastic band, stretching and twisting it into various shapes, until finally it becomes effortless and the potential elasticity, expanded.

In Vietnamese, the word ‘ám ảnh’ means to ‘to haunt ‘or ‘to obsess’ and was once written with two Chinese characters. The first one 暗 (ám) can mean  ‘dark’ or ‘murky’; while the second one 影 (ảnh) can mean ‘shadow’, ‘phantom’, or ‘silhouette’. Coincidently, the Vietnamese word for photograph is also ảnh, and represented with the same character of 影.

Perhaps this is just a serendipitous connection, though I couldn’t help but be enthralled by the correlation. For when reading the Vietnamese text in its physical book form, the photo is placed right at the end, just as you turn over the final page. Its placement, in a way, marks both the end of the story and at the same time a return; a return to the beginning of the story.

Similarly, I find affinities between the image of the dark, murky shadows and the feeling of being haunted. The former, to me, signifies the opposite of clarity and purity of the senses: these shadows are not so much an object apart but rather instantiated perceptions. And so, perhaps, one could configure being haunted as having the senses blurred, hazy, muddled, discombobulated, ill-defined.

So, has the narrator truly overcome their hauntings, or do they feel like that because they have alienated themself from the people inside the frame? For although it’s never explicitly stated, I highly suspect that the two siblings are indeed amongst the children in the photo, though they could no longer recognise themselves. As a consequence of the barrage of changes that they have witnessed and experienced, perhaps, it’s now too overwhelming or perhaps too disorientating to see themself within the context of that photo.

But the photo has made a spectre, a ghost of the memory, as Roland Barthes would say. The photo embalms the moment; it’s the index that contains the return of the what-was-there, a return of the dead. A return that, I would like to emphasise, is slow and often belated, often out of time. A return that only reaches us like “delayed rays of a star”. So, maybe the narrator hasn’t, or rather, couldn’t overcome these dark shadows of the past, or that very least, not in that instance of enunciation. The very existence of the photo muddles that.

//

I had come to this residency with the intention of exploring the interstice of translation and archive, and at this point I began to notice how translation acts similarly to archival photographs. Not so much in that it captures the what-was-there, though it certainly does in a way, but rather how the act of translation are moments of returns. Translation forces you to reread, be attentive and be open to revisits, or as saying goes, to cross the river twice.

Considering the context of the war and conflicts that frame this short story, this return can feel for many, including me, at times as though it is written in the stars. Though I was born far past the ending, as determined by the history books, at times I feel as though I am pushed back from the finish line, pushed back into the story, because this story of war is not yet completed. And perhaps it never will, so enmeshed it is in the collective iconography of the West, a transnational symbol. But these returns, both in my translation practice and my studies of archives, done with certain intention pave the ways for beautiful possibilities, filled with meaningful connections.

In the autumn, as part of my exploration, I facilitated a translation workshop with An Việt Archive in November. We worked on a poem that my co-facilitator, Cường Minh Bá Phạm, had picked from the deposited material in the AVA archive. Titled ‘Biển Đợi’, at first glance the poem seems to be about a speaker to who is asking the sea to wait. But in the three to four hours, we spent on this, we couldn’t even decide on how to translate the title. Is the sea waiting? Or is this a command for the sea to wait? Could it be a waiting sea? Is the sea an active agent or a passive entity?

Besides these translation conundrums, we also spent time sharing our relationships with translation and language, as well as the poem itself as an archival material. It comes from a collection, sent in anonymously to An Việt Foundation, the former manifestation of the archive. Though a name is attached to it, Lê Xuân La, it is very likely that it is a pen name. We couldn’t gather anything beyond that, and so we decided to continue this workshop, promising to see one another again so that we can all return to this piece and see what’s anew. Because to AVA, archive is not just a place to deposit materials, rather as Cường has told me, it’s a conductor to other things.

//

Les morts ne nous lâchent pas, is how Linda Lê’s 1998 novel Lettre Morte begins.  If there is unforgettable quote that I take from a novel, this would definitely be one. It is a quote that has returned to me during a few significant moments since I first read it, and it was a companion of mine through last spring as I worked on a translation of an extract. It also came back to me as finished the first translation draft for the short story of the two siblings and the motorbike.

It came back to me because I realised, perhaps, it’s not so much that the dead won’t let us go, or that I’m haunted by the ghost of my family, or of one of my ancestors, or someone who perished, or even by the general past. Rather, it’s the uncertainty, it’s the muddled senses that I feel I’m constantly veiled by, that I’m constantly returning to. So within shadow’s reach, I stay.

Phương Anh

Phương Anh is a translator and writer from Vietnam. They have published translations, poetry, reviews and essays on Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, PR&TA and in Here Was Once The Sea: An Anthology of Southeast Asian Eco-Writing among others. They once worked as a bookseller and are currently a Publishing Assistant at Tilted Axis Press. They study cultural studies at university.