Column: Charles Waugh and his latest translation of “No Man River”
In our cultural imagination, Vietnam still exists mainly as the battleground of a bloody war. But the Vietnamese have their own stories to tell: thousands of years of folklore and a unique perspective on the events of the war and what came after.
Charles Waugh, a professor of English at Utah State University, is publishing his fourth translation from Vietnamese: “No Man River” by Duong Huong. In 1991, “No Man River” shared the Vietnam Writers’ Association’s Best Novel prize with Bao Ninh’s novel “The Sorrow of War.”
While Ninh became a recognized literary figure, “No Man River” has yet to receive recognition in the English-speaking world.
Learn a language, and suddenly, a whole world of people, stories and new perspectives are opened to you, but in a world with thousands of languages, we’re cut off from valuable perspectives by our innate inability to communicate. Translation is what allows a story like “No Man River” to step across its borders and enter ours.
“That story was well received in Vietnam and at large, in some ways, better received than the ‘The Sorrow of War,’” Waugh said. “It was made into a movie multiple times. It’s been translated into other languages but not into English. Here’s this classic story that the Vietnamese themselves love that still doesn’t yet exist in English. It’s about the war, but Americans don’t know the story.”
Without translation, Huong has remained a ghost in American circles. Beyond a short book synopsis, I couldn’t find any mention of him on Google. An English translation will introduce American readers to a new way of seeing the impacts of war.
Waugh was drawn to the novel’s deep connection to its rural environment and its portrayal of Vietnamese culture. He explained the novel allows you to step into the lives of its characters.
“You really get to be in a family in a village,” Waugh said. “You get a sense of what it would really be like to be a young person in the 1960s, to be trying to put your life together as the American War starts and then to be apart from your loved one for the next 10 or 15 years.”
Waugh grew up in the 1980s in a culture grappling with the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Despite growing up in a house where R-rated movies “just didn’t happen,” his father made an exception for “Rambo,” a film that shows an American soldiers’s experiences in Vietnam and his unsuccessful reintegration into society because he thought the message was so important.
“There’s lots of stories about vets being spit on,” Waugh said. “It’s hard to find an actual case in which that happened, but I think, metaphorically, that they felt spit on.”
During his undergraduate and master’s programs, Waugh took classes on Vietnam, learned the language and wrote his thesis on the Americans who went to Vietnam before the war to fight against the French. He spent six months writing for a newspaper in Vietnam, and then returned to teach in 2004. During his time there, victims of Agent Orange filed a lawsuit against the manufacturers which was dismissed by the judges.
“That was really hard,” Waugh said. “My students were asking me, ‘How can it be that the courts recognize that American soldiers are suffering from exposure to Agent Orange but that the people who got sprayed and had the most exposure are not being compensated?’ They saw it as an issue of morality — of ethics.”
Waugh decided to put together a collection of stories that focus on characters that have been exposed to Agent Orange and published his first translation, “Family of Fallen Leaves.”
Waugh initially saw translation as a “social good” but said he came to love the work itself.
“I’ve always really loved puzzles of all kinds, especially word puzzles. There are all sorts of word puzzles that light up all the different parts of my nerdy word brain,” Waugh said. “Translation is like that. For me, it’s a puzzle to figure out. You try to maintain the parts of the story that really reflect the artist’s work while trying to make something that is as beautiful in English as it is in Vietnamese.”
After the war, there was a movement by American veterans to translate Vietnamese work into English.
Waugh explained “They thought, ‘We shouldn’t have been there in the first place, and we’ve treated them like animals or worse, and we need to understand who they are as human beings.’” Waugh hoped to continue where that movement left off. “What happens with the next generation of Vietnamese writers?”
Waugh continued his work in translation, publishing a collection of short stories by young Vietnamese writers “Wild Mustard” and a novel “The Termite Queen,” which focuses on the impacts of “development at any cost.”
Though Vietnamese history is radically different from our own, Waugh said there are universal themes that are the same across all literature.
“We’re all human beings. We all want to find love. We all want to spend our lives with someone. We all have families. We have parents. We have sisters and brothers and grandparents,” he said.
Reading translated work allows us to step into the lives of people whose lives are entirely different from our own and recognize them as human beings. In the case of Vietnam, it means moving beyond American history’s black and white portrayal of the war and finding real people who experience love, fear, anger and grief as complex as our own.
Waugh collaborated on “No Man River” and “The Termite Queen” with Vietnamese scholar Quan Manh Ha, who teaches at the University of Montana. He said he enjoys working with someone who understands the intricacies of the culture.
“I also love it because I love what that partnership represents: two people coming together across different cultures to make something beautiful,” he said.
For students interested in translation, Waugh points to USU World Language’s translation program designed to help students with both literary translation and day-to-day interpretation. Waugh didn’t receive formal training in his university years and said his knowledge comes from doing.
“A lot of translation exercises assume you don’t know another language. A modern interpretation of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is also a translation. They’ve taken that Renaissance language and put it into something that is more modern,” Waugh said. Once they understand these principles, students can focus on translating from other languages.
For more information on the translation and interpretation program visit artsci.usu.edu/world-languages-cultures/translation-interpretation.
Charles Waugh will be reading from “No Man River” on Sept. 25 at 7 p.m. at Helicon West in the Logan Library.