This week, another in our series of Conversations with Translators. And with my guest Tim Allen, we move for the first time (at last) beyond European languages. I’m always interested in stories of how translations come about, because chance so often plays a much bigger part than design. So it was with Tim, visiting Asia for the first time twenty years ago as part of his job, knowing no Vietnamese, but hearing from everyone he met about this book, The Song of Kieu, the national epic, part of the cultural lifeblood.
He bought a bilingual edition of the poem from a street vendor, and that was the beginning of his fascination with the language and the text that has just culminated in his translation appearing in Penguin Classics. Along the way were his efforts to grapple with the Vietnamese language and find the right form in contemporary English for this 200-year-old text that was itself a reworking of an older Chinese version.
There was also a literary prize for his work-in-progress, a retreat in a Scottish castle that enabled Tim to focus on his translation, and, he told me after the interview, a period when the translation looked like it would languish forever in his attic alongside the Christmas decorations until Penguin editor Henry Eliot got in touch out of the blue.
Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong has called Tim’s version of The Song of Kieu
an essential book for anyone invested, not only in Vietnamese literature, but the historic power of the national epic. Tim Allen’s new translation offers clean fluidity while honouring the original’s varied rhythms and jagged lyricism. A luminous feat.
I’d second that. And in case your initial reaction to the label ‘national epic’ is rather like mine, ‘well, that sounds rather worthy and dull and not something I’d read for pleasure’, be reassured. The Song of Kieu is nothing like that. It’s fast-paced, almost cinematic in its switches of tempo and tone and focus, it’s lyrical and dramatic by turn. Open it almost anywhere, and you’ll be drawn in.
In the interview we discuss, inter al, the challenge of learning Vietnam, the background to The Song of Kieu, why Tim calls his version a ‘reworking’ rather than a translation, and how he responded in particular to the many evocations of the natural world in the poem.