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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. 

Nguyễn Lâm Thảo Thi (they/them) is a writer and translator from Saigon. They’re pursuing a PhD in Film & Media Studies/American Studies at Yale. Their research looks at the writing/typing body, communication failures/errors, and the Vietnamese modern script.

Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng is a writer-translator and occasional art curator born in Vietnam. She is the author of Masked Force, a lyrical pamphlet interleafed with the war photographs of Võ An Khánh. She is also the translator of Chronicles of a Village by Nguyễn Thanh Hiện and https://everything.is/ by Samuel Caleb Wee. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Jacket2, Poetry and other venues.  

Nguyễn Lâm Thảo Thi: I don’t know what Vietnamese literature is or what that word entails because my way of coming to a translation is because I found something fun and interesting and that speaks to me in some way and it has a connection, effectively, to me and I want to translate it. So the initial thing is not that I want to archive everything. I guess, when we say the words ‘Vietnamese literature’ what I think of is literature class in high school and I was very bad at those classes because I felt like it teaches you to feel a certain way about a certain thing and I can’t. I’m very much the disaffected student, the unbelonging student. I came to literature class and was like, I don’t feel a lot of the things you’re telling me this text is giving, effectively. So I have all that stuff. High school, very bad grades, too. I think that what we learn in school, textbook-wise, is a sort of national project or some sort of project of fostering this national belonging that lands very unevenly on different bodies. I’ve also arrived at a point of uncertainty about Vietnamese literature. Even the word Vietnamese itself is very complicated. But what I can say from my own interest is that I’m interested in tones because the way Vietnamese sounds is very tonal and I guess I always come back to that. What is tone’s relation to sound? What is its relation to musicality or music? And so, my relationship to the language is mostly to the pitches, the tones. It’s been a long time since I talked to you, Quyên, and I’m so happy to hear your voice. That’s Vietnamese language to me, even if we’re speaking English.

Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng: If you speak Vietnamese, you would know that Thi and I speak very different Vietnamese. I’m a Northerner and I speak a brash type of Vietnamese and Thi speaks much gentler and more beautiful to my ear. So that’s exactly what I think Thi is saying, that there are specificities to the tonality, not just of regional Vietnamese but in a way that each person enunciates their body and their thought in the grain of their voice. How do we translate that? How do we even archive that? That’s like trying to translate or archive a song when you can probably just replay it. But I think it’s an interesting question to think about. I also appreciate that you brought up the literature classes we had to go through. I think it’s helpful for whoever’s listening, and PA, you’ve shared your own experiences of growing up. Thi and I were born in Vietnam, we grew up in Vietnam, so our experience of Vietnam is kind of alluded to in my mention of 1975. It’s very much a Vietnam that’s still struggling and stumbling on its way to find itself after a very brutal series of war. But if you were to talk to a South Vietnamese, their version of Vietnam, in a way, ended in 1975. So, where Vietnamese begins and ends is very complicated and different. Of course, beginnings and endings are always intertwining and you can go back centuries and talk about Vietnam in the Medieval sense, for example, before our script was Romanised. So there’s a much longer history to Vietnam. But I feel like it’s interesting, even just for the three of us, to talk about what is the Vietnamese music that is being played inaudibly. But we know because we kind of know each other and where we grew up.

Phương Anh: In terms of the intangible, for some reason it makes me think of the essay about bánh mì. I had to write a whole paper on that. The concept of bánh mì, the signifier, still works across various different Vietnamese diaspora. But what it actually signifies is very different. I also grew up in Vietnam but then I went to a French school, so I had a whole different experience of literature. They taught you how to follow a very particular way of rhetorics and they disciplined you on how to react to a certain text, saying that this is the technique that evokes this effect, so you need to feel this or that kind of thing. But that applies to a lot of different education systems. With GCSEs and A-Levels, there’s lots of discipline of affects, I suppose, of how to react to a certain text, which I find is kind of being done through translation because translators introduce the texts and all the power texts around that moulds how readers should react to certain texts. I suppose that’s why I was interested in this question of translation and archives. Because I’m asking myself, why do I want to translate this into English in the first place? Which I suppose is a question both of you probably contend with when you decide to get on a project because of the question, is it a harmless thing to do, to open this cultural knowledge up to the Anglophone sphere? which for the longest time was very tied up with colonial extraction of knowledge. It’s something that a lot of translators working from so-called minor literatures often have to think about, that you give more access and you try to challenge the status of minor literature but at the same time you’re giving access to those who might use it wrongly. That leads me to a third big question. In a sense, conversation about archives is always about the past and preserving the past, but I was really intrigued by this article called Archival Futurism, which is about Afro-archival practices, and this comes from Afro-futurism, the word itself. I find it interesting because I see similar kinds of desires from other community archives. They’re not looking to preserve, necessarily, but more at how these objects and the stories that we’re collecting, gathering into this space, address the question of a tomorrow. There’s this quote by Derrida that I find quite interesting. It says, ‘The question of the archive is a question of the future itself. The question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow.’ This is from his seminal work Archive Fever, which is also used a lot in archival studies. And I find it interesting because it’s such a seminal text, yet I feel like the futuristic aspect of archives has rarely been brought up, except for in community archival spaces. In big institutions and archives, colonial archives, it’s always about preserving the past, that’s the emphasis. And that brings me back to what Thi was saying. You were talking about how to live without history. I was thinking about that and I suppose a lot of us feel we don’t need a history, per se, to live, as long as we’ve got a community. So it’s much more about the now and the new possibilities in the future rather than what has happened or what is recognised to have happened. Sorry, that was a big question. I’ll let you digest.

Nguyễn Lâm Thảo Thi: I think I’ve also arrived at that point where I believe we don’t need a history to sanction any kind of living. Just let living be living. But I think there’s a big impulse within the queer community to have this salvage operation because, again, I think it’s true that so much has been erased and that’s also a violence in and of itself. But then there are also absences that are there wilfully. I remember this amazing sentence by Anjali Arondekar. She writes about the colonial archive and sexuality and that impossibility of recovering or discovery or recoverability of a subject through the forms that archives archives. I remember a sentence that she said, ‘How can we return an absence to itself?’ and I think that’s also worth ruminating on. The gaps that we see sometimes are there because they want to be there. But back to the future. I read your questions when you sent us the email and I kept thinking of not content but forms because archives are so dependent on papers and now those papers are getting digitised on another form, which is the file on a hard disk, on a storage, the drive. And I was also thinking, can an archive be liquid or airy or something else, as a futuristic project, if we want to escape the captive whole of that project? But even in traditional archives, I feel like there is also a sense of futurity in that as well. When people preserve records, it’s also for the future and usually historians are the one who enact this futurity where those things will go into the book as history. So I’ve tried to also reroute this question of the future into questions of time. We have little pockets of pastness, or what is assumed to be the past, and we tap into it, we write our history, we live our future. What does that do to time and how do we reframe that relationship? I think the question for me in terms of future is to reroute or question that very strict periodisation of time, chopping things into past, present and future. Because, for me, everything is fused. I hope that makes sense.

Phương Anh: Thank you. I definitely share that sentiment. As you guys can already tell, I ramble on a lot about archives because in a way, for me, that’s a space, and similarly with translation, when all the temporalities melt together. You’re reconstructing the past or the present is reconstructing the past, which then affects the future. Because, I suppose, especially through English and a lot of the literature written in English, the idea of time, the culture of time has been so ingrained that I find that it is quite difficult at times to articulate that melting of temporalities.

Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng: The past, the present, the future – I don’t think of them as separate or separable either. I think we currently operate in a Eurocentric way of thinking about time and so there’s this segmentation and fragmentation and linearisation of time, where you have the past there and the present is here and the future is up there. I think mingling and fusing temporalities is the fundamental nature of time. If we look at indigenous ways of knowing, I think a lot of indigenous cultures in the world will tell you that time is a river, that time is a spiral, that time is one with the earth. We wouldn’t even use the vocabulary of the past, the present and the future. That’s interesting to think about, even the fundamental ways of dividing or suturing time. I love what Thi said about how if translation and archiving were like a door or a screen or a divider in a folder, it could be made of water or even air. I think that’s very interesting. What if we think differently about the materiality of the literature we work with, if literature is what we’re working with? We can also ask this question of art. What if translation and archive is made of breath or of an ephemeral gathering? What would that look like? That sounds to me a lot closer to what you said, PA, this communal way of archiving, not so much to preserve and then having a record and later look it up in some forest of data. In the breath, in the air around and with the bodies that are in it. That was a very striking point for me. And the article that you mentioned about archival futurism and also Afro-futurism, when we think about justice, which I grapple with a lot, especially right now, where I feel like a lot of writers and artists feel quite helpless, when we think of how you can contribute to the justice in the world and, PA, with your work in fundraising for friends and folks in Gaza, you would have personal experience of talking about justice in that way. But anyhow, going back to translation, and then this flood of memory of having to go to literature class in Vietnam because Thi mentioned it.

Nguyễn Lâm Thảo Thi: I’m sorry! Unleashing the trauma.

Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng: When I first came back to Vietnam after I graduated from college, Thanh Hien was one of the poets I translated and later the author of Chronicles of the Village. Thanh Hien was an important author in my translation trajectory. Other poets and writers that I’ve translated from Vietnam were people that I never encountered in textbooks, in the canon, when I was going to school in Vietnam. I don’t want to paint the translator’s role as heroic in any way but I think one of my strongest impulses is to translate them and I don’t know if you two share this when you translate the people and the work you translate. I thought it was unjust that these brilliant authors were struggling to publish in Vietnam, even though they’re based there, they never left. So, even though I think we’re all aware of the hegemonic power or excess of power of English, and even though I hesitated even speaking, not to mention translating, literature into English, I thought of translation as a way to make it just a little bit more just for this incredible writer, for their work to have an extension or a continuation of literary life in a different language. It’s only because I only know English. If I had another language, I would translate into that language as well, but because English was a powerful language, that was what my parents taught me. So, we’re conditioned by our histories and by the economy, by politics, by the nation state, all of it, all the things we don’t want to talk about. But justice continues to be a big, difficult door for me to stand by. Maybe if we think about it as a way of exchanging air, breath, in a way, between languages and histories through the translation and through the archive, maybe it’ll be just a little bit lighter. I don’t know if it’s more just, but maybe lighter and more airy.

Phương Anh: I really like the idea of forms and you talk about liquidity and that just reminds me – for one of my film classes, we were looking at liquid surveillance and the idea that how power is structured now is itself very liquid, in the sense that it trickles through lots of holes and cracks and whatnot. The platform that we’re using, I’m sure they’re gathering some kind of data from us. I’m sure archives can exist to counter that. There’s a way that liquidity itself can be used, or air, airiness, to resist this and create something that is just for the community. It’s a big task, especially given how pervasive surveillance and power is nowadays. I think we’re reaching the end and my final question is, what hopes do you guys have for translation and archives, personally or related to a bigger current event? We’ve been talking a lot about the limits of what archive and translation can do, so it would be nice to end on a hopeful note. For me, myself, I suppose I’m hopeful in the sense that through all these practices of archives and translation, not so much through the work itself of collecting objects or translating a text but being able to meet you two, for instance, through that connection of people who are in the circle of words and movements and other people who might have read a translation of mine, things like that, I remain a bit hopeful in the sense that I feel this journey so far has connected me to a lot of people and stories that I cherish very much.

Nguyễn Lâm Thảo Thi: I think I have the same hope about people. I also came to translation through Nhã Thuyên when she was like, ‘You want to translate this?’ and I think the most precious thing that came out of that is the friendship, the people who care a lot about words, who care a lot about lives. So, very much like you, I treasure those people and relationships and friendships that we have. It gives you a sense of not being isolated. It gives you a sense of there being this collective or a commons that we are all airily in relations with. It’s great to think of yourself in that, not as a self-contained, liberal individual but as someone who exists in relation to other bodies. I think that’s my current love for – if I can say that I love translation – that’s what I love, to be in this mesh. I don’t love the documents, particularly, or paper or anything. That’s what I love about translation. And my hope, too, that it will maintain or sustain. We’re so fucked in a lot of ways – sorry to curse – but we have people and we have relationships and solidarity. I think that’s what we have right now. The only thing we can do is also maintain and sustain those.

Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng: I think you’ve given us so much hope in your very beautiful response. I also think that friendship is huge for me. The fact that I’m here – I think I wouldn’t be here at this table if we weren’t connected through friends. And it definitely came through translation and literature and from mentors. But also I think of them as friends now and I think all the authors, even and especially the ones whose texts I work with, that I read and translate, I think of them as friends, too. I feel an intense love for not just the one line of poetry that someone wrote centuries ago. It’s an incredibly clear and powerful way of being in the world and perhaps translators and archivists experience this very intimately. So, yeah, friendship, love, all these words that I feel we take for granted a lot of time, can always be there, even though, as you said, PA, the clarity, the airiness, all these things we like to romanticise and theorise, movement and translation can be co-opted by political surveillance and capitalism, but I think that the moment that bodies come together and share breath, share space, and it doesn’t even have to be human, you can have others species as well – I feel like translation, archiving, breath, intra and interspecies friendships, they all sit at the same threshold and it can be a hopeful and maybe a scary one and a difficult one but also beautiful.

Phương Anh: Thank you both for those beautiful answers. While you were talking and giving a response to my questions, I’ve been typing dazzling quotes and I’m like, Oh, I’m going to keep this. They’re lovely quotes and this is why I wanted to talk to you. The conversations, even though it’s quite rare that we actually sit and talk, I really appreciate that, all this knowledge and friendship and sharing that often inspires me. I think that we will end it there, our chat about translation and archives. We hope you enjoyed this conversation and keep in mind that translation and archives can be, rather than strict, codified practices, more like a transient space where you can meet other people. Thanks so much for watching. Thanks again, Quyên and Thi, for agreeing to talk with me and ramble on with me and share great knowledge and insights. Thank you.