The Sorrow of War (Vietnamese: Nỗi buồn chiến tranh) is a 1990 novel by the Vietnamese writer Bảo Ninh. The novel was Ninh's graduation project at the Nguyen Du Writing School in Hanoi.[1]
It tells the story of a soldier who is collecting dead bodies after a
battle and then begins to think about his past. The novel won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.[2]
Original version and English version
Bảo Ninh achieved prominence in Hanoi with the first version of the novel, Thân phận của tình yêu (English: The Destiny of Love),
which was published in roneo form (similar to photocopying) before
1990. Soon afterwards Phan Thanh Hao translated it into English and took
the manuscript to the British publishers Secker & Warburg. Geoffrey
Mulligan, an editor there, commissioned Frank Palmos, an Australian journalist who had reported on the Vietnam War and written about it in his book Ridding the Devils (1990), to write an English version based on the raw translation. Bao Ninh had read Phan Thanh Hao's Vietnamese translation of Ridding the Devils
and willingly agreed to this suggestion. After several meetings with
both the author and the translator, Hao, in Hanoi, and journeys
throughout Vietnam to check details, Palmos wrote the English version
over seven months in secret in his home in Warwick, a suburb of Perth,
Western Australia. It was published in 1994 under the title The Sorrow of War.
Counterfeits of the English version became widely available in
Vietnam, aimed at the tourist trade. Counterfeit sales have reportedly
far exceeded sales of the original edition. In November 2017 the Book
Distributors Guild of Vietnam named the English version of Sorrow as the
biggest selling Vietnamese book in the country's history.
The Sorrow of War was not published in Vietnamese, under the title Nỗi buồn chiến tranh, until at least 10 years after its publication in English.
It has since been translated into 14 other languages, most from
the Palmos English version. The versions directly translated from the
Vietnamese include the French version by Phan Huy Đường in 1994, the
Japanese version by Okawa Hitoshi(大川均) in 1999[3] and the Chinese version by Xia Lu(夏露) in 2019.[4]
Overview
The Sorrow of War, written in the stream of consciousness style,[5]
opens with a depiction of soldiers on a postwar mission to collect the
bones of fallen comrades for reburial. Thus begins the non-linear
narrative by Kien, a North Vietnamese soldier during the Vietnam War,
chronicling his loss of innocence, his love, and his anguish at the
memories of war.
Kien rides in the truck searching for the remains of fallen soldiers in the Jungle of Screaming Souls
and recalls that this is where the 27th Battalion was eliminated except
for him. He then undergoes a series of flashbacks that tie the novel
together. The main theme tying these flashbacks together is the love
affair between Kien and his childhood sweetheart, Phuong. Kien writes a
novel about it, but decides to burn it. Then a mute girl whom Kien has
begun seeing when drunk, and has been bouncing his ideas off, obtains
the text after he left. Throughout the book, Kien also reflects on the
many unacknowledged sacrifices, such as Hoa giving up her life to save
Kien and his comrades from American soldiers, and acts of immorality and
desecration, such as the objectification and treatment of a dead woman
in the airport, that he experienced in the war. The climax of the novel
is when Kien reflects on his first personal kill in the novel, which
occurs after he witnesses Phuong get raped. The novel ends with a
passage by a new narrator, who explains that he has received Kien's
novel from the mute girl .
Reception
Michael Fathers of The Independent noted how both American and Vietnamese cultural depictions of the Vietnam War had tended to be full of romanticisation and stereotyping, and wrote: "The Sorrow of War
soars above all this. ... It moves backwards and forwards in time, and
in and out of despair, dragging you down as the hero-loner leads you
through his private hell in the highlands of Central Vietnam, or pulling
you up when his spirits rise. It is a fine war novel and a marvellous book."[6] The British author-photographer Tim Page and others have compared the novel favorably to Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front.
The British newspaper The Independent judged The Sorrow of War the Best Foreign Book of 1994. The prize money was equally shared by the author, Bao Ninh, the translator, Phan Thanh Hao, and Frank Palmos, the author of the English version for publication.
In 2010, the British Society of Authors listed the translation as one of the Best 50 Translations of the previous century.
References
Nguyễn, Đình-Hoá (Autumn 1995). "The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam by Bao Ninh". World Literature Today. 69 (4): 880–1. doi:10.2307/40151830.
No comments:
Post a Comment