Sabine Huynh was born in 1972 in Saigon, Vietnam. In 1976 her family arrived in France, where she grew up before moving to England then to the United States, Israel, Canada and eventually back to Israel, where she has lived since 2010. Naturally, she would be a polyglot, living and working in several languages—French, English, Spanish, Hebrew, Vietnamese.
But it is French where she feels most at home. In 2013, she made her full-length debut with the novel La mer et L’Enfant, published by Editions Galaade. The book gained comparisons to Marguerite Duras as well as Linda Lê, another French writer of Vietnamese origin. It marked an auspicious start to a writing career, and indeed, since then Huynh has published a steady stream of critically acclaimed fiction, poetry, and translations (often from English into French).
In an interview with Christopher Pham, Huynh discusses her beginnings as a writer, the craft of translating, and her latest book, Prendre la mer – 60 sonnets pour les Boat People, a bilingual collection of poems woven from the words of Vietnamese refugees.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Christopher Pham: Can you share a bit about your background and how you became involved in writing and poetry?
Sabine Huynh: I have always written. My childhood was very dark and unhappy, plagued with violence and poverty, so writing and reading helped me to shut the world off and cope. I wrote regularly as a child: poems, stories, plays. I used to make miniature books that I hid in matchboxes. I also kept a diary. I wrote in French, a language I discovered at the age of four. I had wonderful primary school teachers and a stellar 5th grade teacher, who gave me encouraging feedback on my writing and allowed me to stay in the classroom at recess and write instead of going out to the playground. Some of my stuff got published in the school’s newspaper, which made me particularly happy because I knew that all profit from the sales went to UNICEF for building a well in Bangladesh.
When I moved to London at the beginning of the nineties, I started writing poetry in English. I then continued writing exclusively in English for the next ten years or so. While living in the United States, I got my first poem published in The Dudley Review, an annual literary journal showcasing writing and artwork by Harvard University graduate students. That was in the year 2000.
CP: What inspired you to pursue a career as a writer and translator?
SH: Nothing really “inspired” me. It was always in me. I wanted to be a writer since I was a child. I guess I understood at a very early age the paramount importance of books. I remember dreaming of living by myself in a big house with a typewriter, lots of cats, and a swimming pool. That was my picture of a perfect life.
As for translating, I started translating for a living when I was in college. Because I had to pay my own way through high school, college, and university, I was always juggling part-time jobs. One of them was translating. My very first translation job consisted in translating technical manuals from French to Italian. I didn’t own a computer then, so I used the Macs of the university computer lab. I worked as a technical, and sometimes administrative, legal and scientific translator for many years. I was also a waitress, a barmaid, a model, a shop assistant, a teacher.
I started translating literary works about twenty years ago, while I was still in academia, and decided that’s what I should focus on from then on, literary translation, because I was tired of feeling scattered. I aimed at a more harmonious life, evolving around a core made of literature, poetry and writing.
CP: How has your multicultural background influenced your work?
A life of exile makes you grow up in this very interesting space that is between languages, which in turn makes you understand that all the languages you think you speak actually spring up from that space—and which language is the most “in-between” than the language of poetry?
CP: You write in multiple languages. How do you decide which language to write in for a particular piece?
I write mostly in French and in English nowadays, although I used to write a bit of poetry in Spanish too, but my knowledge of the languages that are less relevant to my current life has eroded. As for Vietnamese, after I devoted ten years to learning it, and after I managed to learn it well enough in order to translate a short children’s book from Hebrew to Vietnamese (the book even got published in Vietnam), I totally forgot it. I have some kind of mental block with that language. It’s a pity, but it’s the way things are. I try to write in Hebrew sometimes, but although I speak it fluently, I’m still too shy to feel free enough in order to express myself creatively in it.
As you very well know, language is culture and as such, it shapes the way we perceive the world. I think we have different personalities in different languages, each language expands our selves. I don’t decide in which language to write, it’s the way I feel and the topic I want to deal with that pick the language for me.
In any case, even if you know many languages, at the end of the day, only a couple are really relevant to your current life, and therefore the closest to your current self, and therefore the most apt to expressing what is necessary for you to express right now.
CP: What are some of the biggest challenges you face when translating poetry compared to prose?
Translating poetry is very time consuming, which is, of course, wonderful, since it’s an art that has the ability to expand time. But it’s also quite challenging, since you usually have tight deadlines. With poetry, I can linger on the same poem or even line for many hours, many days sometimes; whereas translating prose feels more like long distance running to me. So, there’s something more comfortable about translating prose than poetry: with prose, once you’ve settled into the pace that is right for you, you’re good to sail; translating poetry feels more like river rock hopping: it’s slippery, risky, but also more exciting, to me at least.
CP: Can you talk about a specific work that was particularly challenging to translate and why?
Basically, each work presented major translation challenges: sometimes it had to do with voice, or with the topic, or with form. For instance, Diane Seuss’s frank sonnets is a collection of tightly packed sonnets with long lines, and the main challenge I encountered while turning them into 14-line French poems was the expansion. When translating from English to French, the rate of expansion can be as high as 25%.
When I translated the poems that Holocaust survivor Uri Orlev wrote in the Bergen Belsen concentration camp when he was 12 years old, finding the right voice and tone was very challenging. Moreover, his poems were rhyming and I took it upon myself to translate the rhymes. I thought I just could not dismiss rhymes that were painstakingly created by a Jewish boy held in a Nazi concentration camp, since they probably meant so much to him—they were necessary to his survival—therefore, it was necessary to preserve them.
CP: Your work often explores themes of identity and belonging. How do these themes manifest in your writing? How has your work helped you navigate the world as a Vietnamese diasporic writer?
I think that my work explores more specifically the challenges of multiple identities, and the fact of never belonging anywhere, which is not unknown to diasporic people. But better than “exploring” that, my work makes do with that and explores the possibility of writing with that. I like the word “diaspora” very much, especially since it actually refers to the dispersion of the Jews, it refers to the Jews living outside Israel, while I’m not Jewish and live in Israel.
I reckon that diasporic writers, no matter what their origins are, are lucky. They hold several advantages: they can never be reduced to one identity or culture, they are always on the outside of things, or between them, in that “in-between” space I was referring to earlier, which grants them with solitude (I enjoy solitude, solitude is important for writing) but also with distance and with a kind of offbeat view of the world. They are naturally “original” or “special.” The question is to know what to do with this “originality,” how not to waste it, how to channel it into your writing and your creativity.
Having said that, I don’t see myself as a “Vietnamese diasporic writer,” just as a writer who writes between cultures and languages, and as a person who knows what being exiled means.
CP: With Prendre la mer – 60 sonnets pour les Boat People, I noticed a lot of refugee aesthetics (e.g., boat, water and land imagery, themes of fragmentation as seen by the general form of this work, etc.). You also bring a lot of Vietnamese culture, life, and history that confronts colonialism and imperialism as seen with some of the violent depiction of the war that you go into. One of them I believe you delved into was the picture of the girl in napalm or Phan Thị Kim Phúc. That is to say, from these observations being made, I’m interested as a diasporic writer, how you came to put together this work. Especially as someone who hasn’t experienced Vietnamese culture, it is always a matter of interpolating what could’ve been or what living in Vietnam would be like. I’m curious to how you came to writing about this in your work since I know there were sonnets that talked about Vietnamese culture but also being an outsider because of the exodus.
Thank you for such interesting insights and questions. I will try to provide in-depth answers.
I think I should start by stressing two important points. Firstly, this book was meant to honour the stories of escape and survival that were shared with me by thirty members of the Vietnamese community of Ottawa while I was doing postdoctoral research at the University of Ottawa. And secondly, this book is an artwork and therefore the “Vietnam” that appears in it is fragmented (thank you for using that word) because it’s a mixture or a patchwork, a collage made of different Vietnams: a fantasized Vietnam that has grown in my mind over the years, my interpretation of the Vietnam where I was born and where my parents lived and that no longer exists, and the Vietnam I was told about in various books, including the novels of Marguerite Duras, Nguyen Du’s Tale of Kiêu, and Vietnamese proverb books. Thus, the “Vietnam” that you find in my book is multi-faceted, imaginary, and a result of my own creation.
At the end of the day, the fact that I did not experience Vietnamese culture and did not live in Vietnam doesn’t really matter as far as the book is concerned, since strictly speaking the book is not and was never meant to be about Vietnam: it’s about the experience of fleeing and being exiled from your country, and particularly as Vietnamese Boat People, and it’s about writing about traumatic and unspeakable things and about how poetry can help us with that.
CP: As a diasporic writer, what do you hope people take from your work? What was the intent of writing these sonnets?
I don’t know. That’s a difficult question because I never really think, while I’m writing, of things such as reception, readers, message. I guess I intended to give something that I saw as valuable enough back to the Vietnamese community of Ottawa because without the stories and knowledge that its members shared with me, this book would not exist. I wanted to give back what was given to me, what was lent to me: the stories of the Vietnamese Boat People. And it should be noted that the stories they shared with me, they had not necessarily shared them with their children, for some. I believe they kept quiet out of sadness, modesty, and discretion, but also for fear of disturbing, of shocking, and maybe because they didn’t want to appear as “different.” They did not want to make a fuss, so within the family they tiptoed around the topic of their harrowing escape from Vietnam and were basically voiceless, silent.
Yet, their testimonies were powerful and important, their stories were both unique and universal, and they had to be preserved for future generations. As the recipient, it was my duty to lend them my voice. So, all in all, maybe the most significant thing about these sonnets is that they may be able to help with transgenerational transmission and perhaps to help ward off transgenerational trauma.
But I’m saying this very cautiously, since I’m not a psychologist and have no knowledge in psychology. All I know is that poetry is powerful, it is healing, it can help process traumatic experiences, and it can do a lot of good by helping us make better sense of the world, of our place in it, and of who we are.
Christopher Pham (he/they) is the Executive Assistant for the Diasporic Vietnamese Artist Network (DVAN). A student, writer, poet, artist, organizer, and activist, their work centers on reclaiming and reimagining diasporic connections shaped by loss and inscrutability. Christopher’s writing has appeared in the University of Colorado Honors Journal, and they are finishing their Bachelor of Arts in English Literature with minors in Ethnic Studies and Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Sabine Huynh is a poet, writer and literary translator who holds a PhD in linguistics. Her translation of Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic won her France’s 2022 Alain Bosquet Poetry Award. Her poetry collections include Kvar lo (2016), which won the 2017 CoPo Poetry Prize; Parler peau (2019), published in English under the title Speaking Skin (2024); the bilingual French‑English collection Sonnets pour les/for the Boat People (2024); and Herbyers (2024). Her first novel, La Mer et l’enfant (2013), was a finalist for the 2013 Chambery’s First Novel Festival Award and for the 2014 Emmanuel-Roblès Award. Her second novel, Elvis à la radio (2022), won the 2023 Jean-Jacques Rousseau Prize for Autobiography, and the 2023 “Des racines et des mots” Prize for Exile Literature. She is currently working on a new poetry collection and on her third novel.