Last year, AJAR Press released https://everything.is, a bilingual poetry collection authored by Anglophone Singaporean writer Samuel Caleb Wee and translated into Vietnamese by Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng. The collaboration, writes the Hanoi-based small press, “can be read as a poetics of spacelessness intercoursing with place. Conceptual explorations of the textual and linguistic dimensionality of the internet are punctuated with personal disclosures of a lyric mouth’s located happenings. The Vietnamese of Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng adds complex translational layers to Samuel Caleb Wee’s transnational (Singaporean) voice, allowing for playfully serious and seriously playful interrogations of opacity and transparency that condition another way toward meaning inside modern existence.”
In this discussion with Nazry Bahrawi, Wee and Nguyễn-Hoàng discuss the complexities of translation, multi-lingual writing, and more.
Read an excerpt from https://everything.is here.
Nazry Bahrawi: Let’s start with a question for the both of you: the cover, or the covers. Contrary to the oft-cited phrase “don’t judge a book by its cover,” I believe readers are drawn by covers. Scholars have called it the “peritext,” materials that make up the book but not part of the primary text. Now, this cover is two-sided, and differently designed. Take us through your thoughts about why they are what they are.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng: Sam was the one who carefully picked the images for the covers, so I’ll let him take this question. I’d just say that I like how the featured artworks were made by a friend of Sam’s. Friendship’s closeness is present. I also like that the works come from a series called “The Bored Child.” Poetry, among other games, can be a nice childish way of combating boredom.
Samuel Caleb Wee: I love that we’re starting our conversation here, at the threshold(s) of the text, and that Quyen describes poetry as a way of reclaiming that child-like fight against boredom. “The Bored Child” is a series of photographs made by my friend Romane Bladou of her own 3D printed sculptures, and I love the multiple crossings between intent, design, materiality, and mediatization involved in those images. Romane is a brilliant interdisciplinary artist whom I met in Vancouver, Canada, and we used to get together on weekends in a small group to play writing games, so I’m glad those moments of play percolated into this book.
Early into writing this collection, I knew that despite—or perhaps because of—its abstract post-Internet themes, this needed to be a print book fully conscious of its material life. I also enjoy how the two covers turns us away from conventional understandings of origins, endings, and authorial centres. In several of the poems I actively grapple with the place of lyric vocality—what does it mean to say “I” in a confessional self-disclosure, in a conceptual melange, or in ventriloquised soliloquys? It wasn’t really until I held the published book that I realised that the opposite of self isn’t no-self, but collaboration. It’s like a half-image that only becomes legible when you hold it up to a mirror. In that sense, Quyên’s translation and AJAR’s editorial attention didn’t just adapt a self-contained manuscript, but completed its formal and thematic movement, which added an immensely meaningful grace note for me.
NB: This is for Samuel. I half expected this book to be full of programming codes given its title “https://everything.is.” I see very little of that. Could you explain this disjuncture to us?
SCW: A useful distinction might be to say that this isn’t a book written about the Internet, but through it. It is perhaps a snapshot, an ephemeral ethnography of what it was like to be a social human person on the Internet towards the end of the 2010s: the solipsistic silos we increasingly found ourselves in; the absurd ability of Millennials and Gen Zs to maniacally meme their way from one unprecedented political event to another, and the occasional (vanishingly rare) moments of authentic connection and disclosure. I have a memory of a middle-aged boss of mine once shaking his head at social media, saying he couldn’t understand why the youth were sharing their entire lives with the world on public platforms. But of course, poets invented oversharing.
NB: A question for Quyên. There are specificities to the text that are mired in the Singapore context. For instance, the poem “Nanyang Technological University Semester I Examination 2014-2015 HZ9201-Creative Writing (Poetry)” gestures to the education system of a nation of overachievers, a nation that believes that the university is more vocational than the means to self-discovery. How does your work in this collection make you understand Singapore? How do you “translate” cultural specificity?
QNH: I grew up in a country that probably aspires to be Singapore-like, so that helps my understanding a little. On the other hand, much of Sam’s poetry seems specific to his mind, which is larger, more complicated, more unexpected than the merely professional atmosphere of his nation. I don’t think I ever fully understood or adequately translated this Samuel-specific language, but I blindly tried anyway.
NB: Samuel, as an extension to my question to Quyen, has your work in https://everything.is change your relationship or perspective about “home” wherever that is?
SCW:
SPACEMAN ONE, STARING AT EARTH: Wait… home… is where the hurt is?
SPACEMAN TWO, HOLDING A GUN TO SPACEMAN ONE: Always has been.
NB: I get the sense that this work is personal. Samuel, the poem “Ai Pia Jia E Ya” is dedicated to your grandparents, Ma Ma and Gong Gong. Could you speak to the personal/public dynamics and in this poem, and the collection as a whole?
Quyên, how do you as a translator work through and interpret the parts of the collection drawn from lived experiences that aren’t yours?
SCW: “Ai Pia Jia E Ya/The Marlboro Man” started out life as two different dramatic monologues written from my grandparents’ perspectives—the first title is taken from an old Hokkien song from the 80s that espouses certain folk values about perseverance and suffering. Aptly, even when my grandmother was no longer verbal from her Alzheimers, that song persevered in her mind and she could still sing all the words. “The Marlboro Man” picks up from “Two Socks” as a poem about that strangled fear of intimacy men in my family have, and the attempts nonetheless: I won’t tell you I love you, but I will buy you cigarettes. Sometime in the second draft the two poems drifted and mingled into one.
The larger arc of the book traces a movement from the more experimental and opaque poems towards the direct address: I wanted it to be like listening to a vinyl record, with the A-side all glitchy industrial beats before you flip it over for the B-side of acoustic ballads. It’s really an odd album of poems, and I’m grateful the AJAR editors and Quyên read it with such patience and attention.
QNH: Perhaps all of literature is made of lived experiences that aren’t mine. Reading—and translating as a form of close, enduring reading—teaches me to be patient, and exhilarated, when facing all these rhythms that seem foreign to me.
NB: I’d like to ask you both to respond to another type of dynamic that I note in this collection. It is one that I wrestle with myself in my own work: namely, between theory and practice, the academia and the public. This collection can be said to embrace what Mikhail Bakthin calls “heteroglossia” or the presence of linguistic diversity in a single text. That’s an example of theory at work. Samuel, we know that you’ve officially studied literature to the doctoral level. How does your academic pursuit influence your writing in this collection? Quyen, you’re also a humanities student pursuing art history at the PhD level. How does your own academic work and encounter with abstract theories help you in translating Samuel’s poems?
QNH: I suspect that the editors at AJAR Press gave me the gift of translating Sam’s collection because they thought I was into theory. I’m embarrassed that I’d given them this false impression. This was way before I started graduate school. Now that I am in the middle of my PhD road, I’ve realized I have little in common with academic spaces and theoretical language. Sam’s collection is lovely because it often lols at the academe’s discursive absurdity; it lols at itself. I think the university would be livelier if it knew how to laugh at itself more often.
SCW: I’m glad you were the one to translate this collection, Quyên, and lol-ing at the academe’s discursive absurdity is exactly right! I’ve heard poet friends talk about their love affairs with language before—my own relationship with language is better described as an anxiously attached situationship, and that’s on being an academic. Many of these poems were written before I started my PhD, so there’s perhaps a graduate student’s irreverence for theory. At the same time, a constant awareness for what a deconstructing critic might say is not necessarily the healthiest internal monologue for writing poetry. It’s a balancing act: the academic life has also given me a richer sense of my context in the world, deepened my ethics, and allowed me to get up close to several writers I deeply admire. My hope is to keep learning as much I can while maintaining a healthy perspective on the academy’s absurdity.
NB: One cannot speak of a poetry collection that’s translated without touching on languages. Samuel, you’ve invoked other than English scripts in “Everything Is, Pt, II” and “The Dandelions of Diaspora.” You’ve also used the word “Bismillah.” Tell us why you’ve decided to incorporate multiple languages. With the invocation of Bismillah, for instance, have you had any thoughts about negative reception?
SCW: I feel like a key part of growing up Singaporean means accepting that your tongue will always be thoroughly forked through with other languages—my own mouth shapeshifts about five times a day, depending on the room. I’ve also never been comfortable with writing strictly in the Anglophone, and wary of campaigns to police or purify language to a single standard, which always seem tied up in class and racial hierarchies and the erasure of vernaculars…
At the same time, I don’t mean to claim I have a right to all the languages of the Singaporean soundscape. As a Singaporean Chinese man, the languages I feel most comfortable deforming and manipulating in this book are the ones kin-tied to my mouth: English, Mandarin, and Hokkien. Other languages like Bahasa or Tamil appear more in the text as kith, as grazing encounters, the ventriloquised voices of family members. In the poem you’ve mentioned, “If I Say, Bismillah,” I can understand why my invocation of the word as an unbeliever might rankle for some. My hope is that the poem’s form helps those readers negotiate past my unauthorized use of the holy word. The title attaches the invocation of God to the conditional “if,” and in many ways, it’s a poem that lives in a subjunctive mood—language borrowed from the what-ifs and never-weres, which is my best way of writing respectfully about a loss of culture and memory that was not mine. The poem was inspired by my grandmother, who was born Muslim Chinese, a fact I’ve variously forgotten and re-discovered in different eras of my life. Towards the end of hers, as her Alzheimer’s became absolute, the Mandarin we spoke together in also began to degenerate into looping, rhythmic scraps of Hokkien and Malay. In those years I had a painful sense that what was flaking away for her was not only language in the abstract, as a skin through which to touch the world and hold her lived past, but also the very boundaries between languages themselves, so that I experienced the failure of her body also as a failure of translation.
NB: Quyên, the North and South Vietnamese register and/or dialects have a history to them that’s fraught because of the American War in Vietnam. I’ve learnt that some Vietnamese heritage students in America don’t take too well to learning their mother tongue from a northern Vietnamese instructor because they don’t want to speak like a Communist. Does this history show up at all in translating Samuel’s poems? If so, how do you deal with it?
QNH: I speak the Hanoian tongue, which is the most “proper” or most vexing of Northern Vietnamese dialects, depending on who you ask. There are, however, many ways of uttering Northern Vietnameses. Even among Hanoians, there are thousands of ways of speaking. My North Vietnamese articulations don’t necessarily mean I speak like a Marxist, though I can see how it can be perceived that way. As you mentioned, this has to do with our long history of war and more war. As Sam puts it, home is where the hurt is. I’m still learning to live with the hurt, both mine and not. Anyhow, the problem, or potential, of my breed of Vietnamese is that it’s the Vietnamese of a Vietnamese-forgetting, semi-English-speaking quasi-hermit. It’s often clumsy and jagged, but for those looking for something other than correct, “authentic” Vietnamese, perhaps my kind of tiếng Việt can be an amusing thing for them to briefly snack on. I think Samuel’s multi-tongued English and my half-born, half-retiring Vietnamese together make a rather peculiar delicacy.
SCW: Quyên, If you don’t mind, I have a few more questions for you which arose out of the process of this conversation, and also the months of working with you! Some of my favourite moments during the process of co-creating this bilingual beauty with you came at the start, when you asked me a series of questions about the “range of meaning” around my puns and made-up words. It was a wonderfully intimate gift to be read so closely and attendingly, and I was struck by what seemed to be your generous ethics of textual encounter: reading with curious clarity, but also offering a capaciousness/accepting the capriciousness of poetry. I want to ask here about your own journey as a translator, whether you have codified for yourself certain values regarding your process, or whether you find yourself re-negotiating these values with each new project. Are there translators into Vietnamese you look up to who have greatly influenced your work? Do you draw influence from translators who also operate in languages outside of English/Vietnamese?
QNH: I remember those email threads, fondly. You were so patient with my avalanche of questions. Your responses showed me that poetry can hug both capaciousness and capriciousness into its heart, can radiate both ardency and absurdity, with the energy of a smile. Another lovely thing you did throughout our process was centering the translator’s presence in the collection. It’s a gift to encounter humans sensitive to the motions of translation, both textual and energetic. I could also tell that you genuinely love collaborations, not just with the translator, but with the editors, with your friend who provided the artwork for the book covers, with our publicity manager, with all your interlocutors who have made this collection flower the way it does. Your generosity is a skillfulness that I deeply admire.
Nhã Thuyên, who translates into Vietnamese, and Kaitlin Rees, who translates Nhã Thuyên into English, are among the writer-translators I cherish most. I love how their minds sizzle with this attunement to translation’s openings and abysses.
SCW: I really enjoyed a particular exchange we had around a poem in the manuscript called “The Body,” where I ventriloquised the voice of a Hokkien-speaking grumpy elder. I’m intensely curious about how you translated the more Singapore-specific relational dynamics in poems such as these into a Vietnamese social context! In those instances, did you opt to preserve the “intrusive” quality of the Hokkien, or did you find a colloquial/vernacular equivalent in Vietnamese? I’m fascinated by what you said earlier about the myriad varieties and registers that exist in Northern Vietnamese, and am now wondering what textures you wove into your translation to match my tangled multilingual yarnball!
QNH: “The Body” was a delightfully thorny one to translate. I don’t think I translated it into any “Vietnamese social context”… I barely translated into my inchoate, schizophrenic Vietnamese. But again, I blindly tried. The attempt, of course, is imperfect; I’m curious how other Vietnamese speakers—Northern, Central, Southern, diasporic or unidentifiable—would have translated this poem. Since I had no irascible Hokkien-speaking elder, or the Vietnamese equivalent, in me to naturally channel onto the page, I could only improvise. References to the Abrahamic religions, with their vernacular Singaporean inflections, didn’t travel seamlessly into my Vietnamese; so the textures around these topologies in the translation are uneven, craggy. But some of the Singlish grammars walked quite easefully into informal Vietnamese. So amidst the striated, ragged terrains, there’s occasional smoothness. If I were to do this translation again, I’d try making my literary Northern Vietnamese a little less arabesque, a little crankier, obscener. In any case, your yarn ball would likely continue to become even more tangled in my translation, but perhaps translation does that sometimes. It exacerbates the entanglement.
SCW: Finally, I’m still in awe of the direction you took with translating “Everything Is, Part II”, where the typically overlooked space of superscript becomes an important poetic signifier. In the English half of the manuscript, this poem is perhaps where the semantic entropy of my collection reaches its peak. In your Vietnamese text, I encounter instead a fascinating complex interplay/contest between a re-interrupting English and your tiếng Việt as those languages shuffle between superscript and normal type. I personally love this moment because it draws attention to the material book as an insistently bilingual artifact. Could you speak a bit about the thought process behind these choices? How frustrating was it (really!!) trying to translate my nonsensical coinages?
QNH: In my mind, the superscripts emanate something like an exponentiation. A pseudo-mathematics: English raised to the power of Vietnamese. It’s also visually fun to have disparate Vietnamese words function as a hat perching atop a series of English “nonsensical coinages” as you put it. The madness is multiplied.
The superscript elevates the base of English to the power of tiếng Việt, but your poem itself also tumbles, I feel, in a sort of sinking motion. A mouth is gurgling its last words before getting devoured by the water of entropic language. A mouth submerged, confused. Dropping into a deluge of bubbles.
After this scene of bilingual escalation and wreckage, (y)our vinyl record flips into its ballad mode, its love-song mode. Life begins again.
Nazry Bahrawi is an Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian Literature and Culture at the University of Washington in Seattle whose literary translations include Lost Nostalgia (Ethos, 2017), a short story collection by Mohamed Latiff Mohamed. Most recently, he edited and translated Singa-Pura-Pura: Malay Speculative Fiction from Singapore (Ethos, 2021).
Samuel Caleb Wee is an Assistant Professor of English at Nanyang Technological University whose creative work has appeared in publications such as Esquire, QLRS, and OF ZOOS. He previously co-edited this is how you walk on the moon (Ethos Books, 2016), an anthology of experimental short fiction. https://everything.is is his first book of poetry.
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng is a writer-translator living in Vietnam. Her recent translations include Chronicles of a Village (Yale University Press, a novel by Nguyễn Thanh Hiện) and https://everything.is/ (AJAR Press, a poetry collection by Samuel Caleb Wee). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Modern Poetry in Translation, Jacket2 and other venues.
