Viet Nam. Hữu Ngọc

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СКАЧАТЬ States. He had published works about French, Japanese, Lao, and Swedish culture. Now, he wanted to write about American culture.

      Hữu Ngọc often cites this caution: “You can go to Paris for three weeks and write a book, but if you live there thirty years, you dare not write a word.”

      With his own caveat in mind and long before the Internet, Hữu Ngọc read everything he could about American culture. He asked any Americans he met to send books with the next visitor and to write articles. He went on to create a thousand-page volume in Vietnamese with essays from friends, summaries from his own research, and a very extensive bibliography. Hồ Sơ Văn Hóa Mỹ (A File on American Culture) remains in print today after twenty years. Hữu Ngọc’s oeuvre also includes many books about Vietnamese culture. Perhaps most important among them is his Dictionary of Traditional Vietnamese Culture, which has been available in Vietnamese since 1994 but was published in English only in 2012. This must-have book holds gems on every page.

      When Hữu Ngọc was still in his late eighties, he walked to work, carrying his bag of books and covering the five kilometers in a little more than an hour. He used his far-sighted eye to negotiate Hà Nội’s famously horrendous traffic while reciting poetry in Chinese, English, French, German, and Vietnamese, with William Wordsworth still among his favorite poets. And so, it is no accident that Hữu Ngọc’s Wandering through Vietnamese Culture opens with his favorite lines from Wordsworth’s “The Daffodils.”

      Several years ago, Hữu Ngọc’s family moved too far from World Publishers for him to walk to work. Now, for exercise, he walks forty-five minutes every day, covering three kilometers inside his house, often reciting the ten Buddhist precepts. He begins with the first precept, then recites the first and second precepts, then the first and second and third. When he finishes all ten precepts, he starts over again. Then Hữu Ngọc continues his day, writing his essays in heavy black ink, a felt-tip marker as his pen.

      Hữu Ngọc has a rather wry approach to his prolific writing. “Do you know why I write?” he will say, pointing to the shelves of books he has written and edited. “When I need to check something, I know where to look!”

      Three days a week, Hữu Ngọc rides on the back of his son’s motorbike to his office at World Publishers. He is a mentor to many. His door is open. Whoever pops in is welcomed, introduced, and linked to anyone already in the room. His open door emphasizes the great role of “the random” in life. Hữu Ngọc says his own life has been a continuous series of random events. As a youth in Hà Nội, he dreamed of marrying a girl from the mountains and nesting in a house by a stream. However, the random from an interview question and lines from his favorite Wordsworth poem led him to teaching. In 1945, he joined the Việt Minh because of random events of history. His limited eyesight and assignment to work with POWs and the random in life led him to a career as a researcher in culture. Yet, despite his belief in “the random,” Hữu Ngọc recognizes opportunity without being an opportunist. Those who take advantage of his open door know that he has an unusual ability to discern and develop a new idea or a novel approach.

      After retiring as chairman of the Vietnam-Sweden Cultural Fund and of the Vietnam-Denmark Cultural Fund, in 2012 Hữu Ngọc established the Cultural Charity Fund to provide children in remote areas with world literature. The translated books range from works by American John Steinbeck to Russian Boris Pasternak to the newest Harry Potter books. He has also given rural children the chance to study English first hand by organizing courses taught by English-speaking volunteers.

      Hữu Ngọc continues to give his ever-changing lecture, “Three Thousand Years of Vietnamese History in One Hour.” He will hand Wandering through Vietnamese Culture to a listener in the first row. “Take a look,” he says. “Pass it around.” One by one, members of his audience marvel at the book’s weight and peruse its 1,255 pages, pausing here and there to measure the book’s depth.

      For this volume, Professor Elizabeth Collins from Ohio University has worked with Hữu Ngọc to select essays from Wandering through Vietnamese Culture. This was a huge task, one I had seen as important for years but had found overwhelming. Hữu Ngọc worked over successive drafts of the Contents, restructuring some sections, making minor changes in other sections, and adding a few pieces, which do not appear in Wandering through Vietnamese Culture.

      A weekly newspaper column is like a ticking metronome rushing the writer on and leaving little time to ponder chords, trills, and grace notes. However, collecting columns into a book of essays gives the writer a chance to revisit his work—to consolidate some pieces, expand and tighten others, and to play with the melodies and harmonies of language. At ninety-eight, Hữu Ngọc is still writing weekly essays and assembling books. He is busy moving forward. For that reason, he asked me to assume responsibility for shifting his selected newspaper columns into the essays that appear in this volume.

      That task provided me an opportunity for many random discussions of this text in Hữu Ngọc’s office. In consultation with the author, I have updated paragraphs, made corrections, and inserted some sentences and phrases for clarity and context. I have left in repetitive details because readers may approach the essays out of order. I have also added a note on the Vietnamese language, a historical timeline, and an index.

      Additions made to Hữu Ngọc’s text include the titles of the works he quoted, with the Vietnamese titles in parentheses and the English translation in italics or quotation marks in the body of the text. This intentional reversal of usual practice is for easier reading; it does not indicate that the quoted excerpt is from a work that has been translated into English. Indeed, very few of these works have been translated in full.

      Vietnamese Literature, the English version of the French anthology, was the source for many of the excerpts from poetry and prose that Hữu Ngọc quoted in his newspaper columns. The Vietnamese works in Vietnamese Literature had been translated sometimes from Chinese (Hán) or Vietnamese (Nôm) ideographic script into Romanized Vietnamese script (Quốc Ngữ), then into French, and, only then, into English. As a result, understandably, many English translations in Vietnamese Literature and in Hữu Ngọc’s original newspaper columns were rather distant from the original texts.

      For this reason, I have re-translated all the quotations from Vietnamese works, returning to the original Romanized Vietnamese versions and, when relevant, to the transliterated Hán and Nôm versions of the ancient poems and prose. By adding the Romanized Vietnamese titles, I hope to encourage interested readers to explore the original texts, many of which are available on the Web at <www.thivien.net> in Quốc Ngữ and, for the ancient works, also in Hán or Nôm at that same website. Some of our translations in this volume appear in our other books and articles and will appear in the new edition of Vietnamese Literature.

      Hữu Ngọc chose not to read the final manuscript for this book because he wants to conserve his time to work on new projects. His son, Hữu Tiến, read the manuscript and alerted me to several errors. Phạm Trần Long, deputy director of World Publishers and the book’s editor in Việt Nam, is always a careful, helpful reader. Trần Đoàn Lâm, the director of World Publishers, is well versed in Chinese Hán script and Vietnamese Nôm ideographic script. In addition, he is fluent in Russian and English and can read French. Mr. Lâm has checked our translations with the original texts (Hán, Nôm, Quốc Ngữ, and French). As director of World Publishers, he is also the book’s final Vietnamese reader. Trần Đoàn Lâm brings to any text an extraordinary ability to think broadly yet concentrate on the smallest detail.

      This book does not attempt to be a systematic study of Vietnamese culture or of Việt Nam’s traditions and changes. Rather, it is a compilation of some of the СКАЧАТЬ