An essay by the Modern Poetry in Translation Poet in Residence 2023, Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng
not admirations or victories
but simply to be accepted
as part of an undeniable Reality,
as stones and trees.—Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Simplicity’
What happens when the grandness of history and the coherence of story lines undergo a blur, a darkening, as if soon devoured by the inexplicabilities of night? What remains is a flickering cycle of birdsongs and humansongs, some joyous, almost indestructible, some sorrowful, infinitely dissolving into desolate cries. Chronicles of a Village is a succession of such songs. Nominally a novel, it is written in Vietnamese as a series of prose poems, or prose-poem-like meditation-mirages, that confound expectations of a legible, propulsive read with linear timelines or transparent takeaways. It thereby softens and liquefies the modern genre demarcations between the prosaic and the poetic, the literary and the oral, the dreamed and the real. The book is a web of cadenced tales woven around a nameless village where the narrator, also nameless, was born.
This narrator, self-designated as the local scribe who records village news, refers to himself using the lowercase first-person singular pronoun ‘i’. His village is somewhere near the Mun Mountain in Central Vietnam, the region where the author of Chronicles of a Village, Nguyễn Thanh Hiện, was born. What unfolds in this little village at the foot of the Mun Mountain is a series of story fragments in which the author’s autobiographical memories and fictive creations lyrically mingle. The tales reflect and refract the past and ongoing catastrophes of a land—dynastic crises, colonial policies, asphyxiating modernisations. The pastoral harmony of the mountainside village is transformed, or deformed, by the long years of war and indoctrination in the name of progress. By writing down his self-admittedly slippery, moth-eaten memories, as well as those of his fellow villagers, the scribe eternalises for himself, and for us, the vanishing beauty of his village. He is the vessel through which the land, now barren, tells its myriad stories of sacred forests, enchanted animals, ordinary humans and mythical humans, all entangled in events now mundane, now wholly bizarre.
By calling his constellation of wandering tales a novel, Nguyễn Thanh Hiện disturbs the conventions of novelistic plotlines, not to mention the common rules of punctuation. He uses only commas instead of periods to mark the breaks between sentences, which creates the effect of the narrator speaking in one long breath, or one long poem, with regular pauses instead of full stops. The news and dialogues recorded by the scribe, seemingly random or unfinished, suggest that not only the construction of the sentence, but also the common idea of ‘history’, turns out to be a fiction, and thus can be prolonged, reshaped. Similar to how a riverine sentence or a tortuous thought can go on for entire pages, Nguyễn Thanh Hiện’s concept of history also embodies a sense of ceaselessness, shifting with each teller, each gaze. It is this perpetual shape-shifting quality that gives the stories the mesmerising rhythm of whispered incantations.
The magic of Nguyễn Thanh Hiện’s work lies in the oral quality, the spoken beat of his lines. This oral quality shines, for example, in the way the narrator’s father describes a mythic birdsong as a tune he heard from his father, who had heard it from his father, who had also heard it from his father, and so on. The distinct sonic quality shines, too, in the narrator’s memory of his mother’s unforgettable lullabies about faraway animals frolicking on a cloud-swathed mountaintop. The motion of sound also shapes the way a radio broadcast is spread by word of mouth across the village, and reinvented into faintly comical mistranslations. In the memory of the scribe, the echo of these news, lullabies and birdsongs are never static, but carry the vagaries of time as the tales shift with each day, each year, each teller. Quietly ringing in his head are many shards of tales about the French colonists, myths about ill-starred humans reincarnating as birds, reports on recent land-grabbers, and other cruel games of history. These protean tales are disorderly, personal, full of repetition, full of incompleteness. They articulate the ungraspable and changeful face of history: peace in the earthly realm is impermanent; disasters might break out at any time; thriving dynasties could suddenly collapse overnight; the heroes of yesterday are suddenly labelled traitors; the winners and losers of history are always being rewritten without end.
The interwoven stories in this book can thus sound both historical and mythopoetic, written and spoken, colloquial and solemn, thereby disrupting the usual legible mood and forward motion of the Western novel. To parody the language of scholarly study and its claim to exactitude and objectivity, the author also often mixes references to historical texts, written by a real encyclopaedist or government official, with fictional accounts, made-up personalities and aimless anecdotes, both amusing and incisive. With his deliberate refusal of full stops and capitalisation, Nguyễn Thanh Hiện writes down his playful and poignant perception of history in a manner akin to what he calls an act of drifting. Writing, he said, is a way for the bard to record how he drifts in the world, to note down the things he sees and hears on his journey.
The spontaneity of this drifting method unleashes him from the confinement of reason and the ossification of official history. In Chronicles of a Village, the stories of war, revolution and other modern violences, instead of offering grand, comprehensive portraits of Vietnam, tend to center intimate relations and peculiar events, like the scribe’s memory of his father carrying the plow while exhaling poetry, or the recollection of a wounded, blood-smudged mountain crying for help. The digressive tales and details conjure a land at once cosmic and quotidian, romantically idyllic and constantly vulnerable to turbulent changes. It is a land made of memories of splendid forests as well as ongoing scenes of ecological annihilation, charming love legends as well as sweeping collective catastrophes. As contemporary events mingle with ancestral remembrances, the chronicles quietly retold by the scribe can feel both timely and timeless.
A timely and timeless phrase that occurs throughout the book is ‘rice and fabric’ (cơm áo), whose English equivalent could be ‘bread’, ‘livelihood’, ‘means of subsistence’. When the narrator speaks of ‘rice and fabric worries’, he is referring to the perennial struggle of the peasant to make ends meet, or as the Vietnamese say, to take care of rice and fabric matters. A decent harvest and a couple robes to wear are the dreams of every farming household—humble dreams easily crushed by a sudden change in weather. Unspoken worries about rice, clothes and the weather’s disastrous fickleness run in the village like a weary rhythm from one generation to another, cancelling the possibilities of romanticizing rural hardship. Yet despite this rhythm of hunger and poverty, the scribe’s father, a plowman-poet, keeps nurturing a profound love for a life attached to what he calls ‘the song of soil’, of sky, of rain, of sun. The plowman-poet, under no illusion about the toil of rural life, still dwells in the elegance of plowing his fields, walking with his cows, entering the rhythm of earth and sky.
Birthsoil is another imagery that recurs in the scribe’s meditations. Birthsoil is my way of translating the Vietnamese word quê, usually translated as ‘homeland’ or ‘hometown’. Birthsoil summons the image of soil as a space of creation, the burial ground of one’s placenta and umbilical cord, the base of one’s being and nourishment. The soil of the village bears the seeds of the cotton plants that sustain the narrator’s family. It also bears the roots of the banana grove that witnessed his nervous teenage attempt to strike up a conversation with a girl in the village. The same soil bears, too, the impact of war bombs that took away the lives of his loved ones. ‘My village’ is a dumpy couple of words that bring to his mind all kinds of memory linked to birthsoil, from the fatigue of the industrious adults to the fleeting romance of his youthful years, from the sound of grandmothers sighing at noon to the merry cries of little cowherds playing in the forest. One’s love for the land runs in the body like a divine flow of rice wine, as declared by Mr. Hoành, an elder in the village whose homemade wine distills the purest flavors of heaven and earth 1 . The intoxicating fragrances of the land run on and on in the memory of the villagers, for whom their birthsoil is deathless, because it is remembered.
Over the years, war bombs, political purges and other forms of suffocation have triggered countless cycles of persecution and death in the village. In a time when humans are largely invested in the growth and profit of the living, the scribe tells us tales that resist the lethal, progress-driven impulse to forget the dead. His dreamlike stories recall the vanished cries of the night herons, the young cowherds shot dead in the crossfire of war, the villagers who died unjust deaths. They are grief-honoring tales that will ‘not allow the dead to be killed’, as said by the poet Zbignew Herbert. It is in the night, the time of resting, reminiscing and dreaming, that the scribe often descends into his flickering pool of memory, a zone ridden with ghosts of times past. In the night, the smiles and cries of his long-gone ancestors, family and fellow villagers return to the soil of his mind, along with ‘many voices of leaves, of birds, of rocks, of streams sinking into the flow of time’. The scribe is a human who remembers the traces of the dead, whose sorrow and wisdom flood the pages of his village history.
My translation is an attempt to listen to, while recreating, the scribe-narrator’s rhythm of nostalgia and contemplation—a captivating rhythm embedded in the dignified simplicity of the original Vietnamese. Reading Nguyễn Thanh Hiện’s tales, I realised that a translator is someone trying to grasp not only the rhythm, or tone, but the scent of the text.
It so happens that in Vietnamese, the noun hương (etymologically rooted in 香), meaning ‘scent’ or ‘perfume’. is homonymous with another noun hương, rooted in 鄉, meaning ‘village’, ‘native land’, or as I often say, ‘birthsoil’. As the sound of hương recurs throughout the book, these two homonyms have woven in my mind a tapestry of birthsoil memories, redolent with the many aromas that wind their way through the village roads: the scent of ripe mangoes, the scent of pomelo flowers, the scent of rain, the scent of mountain ghosts, the scent of upturned soil, the scent of young rice, the scent of grass.
It is the drifting fragrances of nature and the drifting nature of fragrances that carry and protect the scribe in the bedlam of the world. His store of memories, his stream of reverie, is infused with scents so sharply intense they have at times absorbed my translation into their perfumed cosmos. If you move closer to the pages, perhaps you too can feel the scent of this distant village, an atmosphere that eludes the sayable. A blend of the wild odour of the forest, the earthy aroma of childhood playtime, the giddy fragrance of adolescent adventures, the blood-red smell of human warfare, the scent of the village is an ephemeral, indelible flow, through which the ancestral land remembers its vanished woods, its forgotten meadows, its drifting chroniclers. The memory of the land is a maze of a thousand sweetbitter fragrances, gathered into an endlessness that floats in the sky of your mind.
A previous version of this essay was published as the Translator’s Afterword in Chronicles of a Village (Penguin Random House SEA, 2022), a novel by Nguyễn Thanh Hiện, translated by Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng.
Find out more about Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng and their residency.
1. More information on Mr. Hoành and his philosophy on earth can be gleaned from the following conversation, excerpted from Chronicles of a Village, an informal interview between the scribe and the venerable elder, Mr. Hoành. The section is lightly revised from its previous version in my 2022 translation of Chronicles of a Village:
a flash interview i conducted with Mr. Hoành
(tentatively titled ‘something is turning’)
sir, to leave an imprint on the reader’s memory, could you please provide a very brief summary of your life thus far?
born at the foot of the Mun Mountain, close to the venomous wind of remote forests, day by day lay in the cot, got breastfed by mother, likely heard the tigers roar in the mountains, ate rice, drank water, grew up, walked around the village, plowed fields, herded cows, took up eating letters, then left the village, walked around the earth, got bored, returned home, saw how the village had aged, likely felt very sad, began to make wine for myself, to drink.
and could you summarize, again very briefly, what you saw during those days of walking around the earth?
many things, but in short, saw humans walking on the road, these huge crowds, sometimes they paused in order to cry, then walked on, sometimes they paused again in order to laugh, or dance, or sing, or scream, then sometimes they paused to heap praise on each other, sometimes to thoroughly berate each other, or to shoot and kill each other… in short, I felt that everyone had lost their way.
that is all?
that is all.
and what about you, sir, do you think you have lost your way?
not in a million years, for I have returned to my birthplace.
sir, could you please speak in simpler terms?
if I still remember the way back to where I crawled out of my mother’s womb onto earth, then the primeval image still remains intact in my consciousness.
and so, those who never lose their way are those who never forget that which shaped their primeval form?
one can put it that way, though that sounds a little too quiet, let’s add a bit of flavor like this, we could never lose ourselves, as in we could never let ourselves turn into inert things, because in our consciousness, something is turning.
