The best way to criticize an imperfect translator is not to shoot, then bury him in a picturesque forest, but to do a better translation. Doing this, you'll make the flawed, offensive translation, which you've sucked on and tweaked only slightly, disappear forever from the face of this earth.

The many resistances in the source poem force the translator to compensate and invent, enriching the language he is translating into.

Vietnamese poet/critic Trịnh Thanh Thủy: “Influenced by the peculiarities of foreign languages and cultures, Vietnamese texts written overseas do not lose their strengths but gain new dimensions through awakened, previously latent capabilities.”

In both cases, you have one culture or language trying to accommodate another. This meeting point, this border, this collision of avant-gardes, is where the new, improvised and unexpected can happen.

I’m not a translator so much as a tightrope walker between two unreliable dictionaries.

It's not entirely true that translation is just thin jism on a moonless night, eggdrop soup minus the egg, or a thin man chasing a fat man's shadow.

Pound always took tremendous liberty with his translations. At the opposite end, you have Clayton Eshleman, who takes great pain to bring back these foreign objects whole, even effacing himself in the process. His inventions, interventions and style still exist, I'm sure, but he always strives to make his English “gown” hug the alien body as tightly as possible, unlike too many reckless translators out there.

Influenced by people who did "versions," my first translation attempts were very freewheeling. Luckily, none of these were ever published. Although "to bring back these foreign objects whole" can only be an unachievable ideal, or a fiction, it is still a worthwhile objective. If you settle for the loose gown from the beginning, you won't get any body parts at all.

I remember reading a Pound translation of an Oscar Milosz poem where he deleted at least 10 lines from the French original. Pound may have gotten the poem's essence, likely improved on it, but I cringe at the man's chutzpah. But we're talking about Pound, of course, so all's well that ends, well, in Saint Elizabeth. As for Clayton Eshleman, his edition of Vallejo's posthumous poems must be my favorite poetry book of all time.

The worst translators are parasites and conmen, the best ones are parasites and pimps. I tend to think of myself as an honest and totally selfless charity worker.

Even more than "rendition," "translate" as a verb is already problematic since it can be a substitute for any other. This morning, I translated a croissant and a cup of watery, overly-sweet coffee. Suddenly translated from my job, my wife and I will have to translate ourselves to another exburb. Most translations are sad, mechanical and soporific, but not the three times I did it with you. ("For love is but a skein unwound/Between the dark and dawn"--Yeats. Each time I remember these lines, I want to translate "dark" into "dusk.") Boy, did our skeins translate!

In summation: I cannot talk about things, a catnip or a dog, with the confidence that they will still exist in the world by the end of my sentence. (Such is progress.) Further, my modest and improbable vocabulary is always compromised (and perhaps sanctioned) by an unbridgeable gap between the source of words and their promiscuity. Immortality is always slander, agreed, and yet translation is everyone’s best bet for immortality.

Phạm Duy Tốn, Phạm Quỳnh and Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh in Paris, 1922

The French conquered Saigon in 1859, Hanoi in 1883. In 1915, they abolished the mandarinate exam. (The last one was notable for graduating two brothers, 19-year-old Ngô Thúc Định and 16-year-old Ngô Trọng Nhạ, my maternal great grandfather and great granduncle.) During the first decades of the 20th century, Vietnam went through many other seismic changes, abetted in part by a handful of super translators, none greater than Phạm Quỳnh (1892?-1945) and Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh (1882–1936).

One of the defining figures of Vietnamese literature, Phạm Quỳnh helped to modernize the language, encouraged the writing of short stories and novels, and the anthologizing of folk poetry. Admiring the logic and clarity of Western thinking, he felt that Vietnamese needed to learn from it, but that they also needed to identify and protect their distintiveness. In 1922, he wrote about Vietnamese folk poetry, ca dao: "Even though our oral literature has not been recorded in any book, I will insist that it is a very rich one, richer, perhaps, than any other country. [The more illiterate a population, the richer the oral tradition--L. Dinh.] Although it is not without its crudeness, this oral literature is also profoundly resonant; one can say that the wisdom, morals, and aesthetics of our common folks are all contained within these idioms." In short, don't be half-Westernized and half-Vietnamese, one must become an Uber-Westernized Uber-Vietnamese. Warning Vietnamese writers against composing in French, Phạm Quỳnh wrote: "In borrowing someone's language, you are also borrowing his ideas, literary techniques--even his emotions and customs." After centuries of writing in Chinese, the Vietnamese had produced no Li Po, he pointed out, and writing in French, it is unlikely that they will ever produce a Victor Hugo or a Anatole France. After reading a story in French, Phạm Quỳnh suggested as an exercise, Try retelling it to one's wife in Vietnamese.

Pham Quỳnh translated tirelessly from Maupassant, Pierre Loti, and Alfred de Vigny, among many others. He wanted to have his Trojan Horse and eat it too. He wrote travel pieces, scholarly articles and books about Voltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Descartes and Confucius... He ridiculed men into cutting their hair short, begged women to not sleep in the kitchen, even if it was the warmest nook in the house. His considerable political engagement brought about his demise, however. Advocating gradual Vietnamese independence within the French union, he worked with Bảo Đại, the figurehead emperor. Quỳnh's compromised stance towards the Colonialists, his lack of militancy, is revealed in this famous saying: "As long as [Nguyễn Du's epic poem] Kim Van Kieu remains, our language remains, our nation remains." He equated great poetry with language, with nationhood, all else is Bushism. On August 23, 1945, he was captured by the Việt Minh, the Communist-dominated guerrila group supported by the O.S.S. (precursor to the C.I.A.) in W.W.II, along with Ngô Đình Khôi (brother of Ngô Đình Diệm, future president of South Vietnam) and his son. All three were killed on September 6, 1945. Although I wasn't within earshot, I'm convinced Phạm Quỳnh's last words were "At least I translated." His body was only found 11 years later, in Hắc Thú [Black Beast] forest, near Huế.

***

A year ago, I received an email from Nguyễn Hồng Phúc, the Paris-based great grandson of Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh, translator of La Fontaine, Molière, Hugo, Jonathan Swift, Alexandre Dumas and many others. Phúc told me he had set up a website dedicated to his famous progenitor. Perusing it, I found a letter written by Vĩnh to his French wife, Suzanne, the last she would receive from him. Using the letterhead of l’Annam Nouveau, the Hanoi newspaper he edited, it was actually sent from Laos, where he had gone on a gold-digging expedition to pay off debts. I've heard of writers being destitute every which way imaginable, eating from a garbage can, living in a pigsty, etc, but I've never ran across another who prospected for gold to become solvent. Written in French, the letter was translated into Vietnamese by Phúc. I translate from the Vietnamese:

Vang Salouang 24/4/1936

My dearest!

I have just returned to this place, after a strenuous week in the jungle without water, without edible plants and also without wild animals, next to a polluted stream with its long-stagnant water.

It's as hot as a furnace here, yesterday it was 40°C [104°F] inside our hut. This morning until 8 O'clock it was 18°C [64°F]. Now at 10:30 it's already 38°C [100°F] , after lunch it will probably be 40° or 41°C again [105°F].

This morning Monsieur Clémenti's feet are huge from swelling.

Had he not been ill, we would have gone to Ban Kang. This is our last trip up the Ségui River, before returning to Hanoi. My dysentery disappeared as soon as I stepped out of that thick and suffocating jungle [...]

Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh spoke too early, since he would die soon from dysentery. Although a massive banyan tree blocked my view, I swear his last words were "At least I translated."

Next, I will translate you into you.

Have you been translated lately?

How long has it been since you've been translated?

When was the last time you were translated?

How much long, length of time, since the last time you were translated by someone, a person, human being, biped, other yourself?

Take a deep breath. Are you translatable?

Scholars agree that this translation is more reliable, more accurate, more true than the original.

He translates by looking up each word, including "a" and "the."

That's no mirror, dude, it's a translation.

Two unique translations, side by side, both useless.

I translate so much, I don't even know I’m translating. Am I translating?

Sorry to be translating again. Now you translate, I insist.

I translate everything, Greek, dolphins, paperweights, the city of Philadelphia.

The only thing I can't translate is squirrel. Squirrel syntax and slang crash my hard drive.

Poetry is the illicit booty gained through the strenuous or glib art of translation. I got it right, finally. (I just translated that from squirrel.)

Translation is in fact the engine of much of the world's poetry.

Without translation, poetry would be reduced to a few ballads sung by your upstairs neighbor, on his balcony, at 3AM.

We must localize our poetry production, to reduce our self-destructive addiction to translation.

Translation, like jazz, is a form of revenge.

Translation, like jazz, is a tool of imperialism.

Translation, like jazz, is an improvised explosive device.

I cannot mistranslate. I don't even know how.

He thinks it's a virtue to translate away from the original.

My translation is way longer and way bigger than yours.

"Two faces that are alike, although neither of them excites laughter by itself, make us laugh when together, on account of their likeness."--Pascal