09/07/2024
Forum of Vietnamese Culture/ Diễn Đàn Văn hóa Việt Nam, No. 10
Topic: “Uprooted: Drifting with and Moving Inward to Poetics of Vietnamese
Utterances”
Speaker: Nhã Thuyên, Hanoi
The Department of Southeast Asian Studies, Profile: Vietnamese Studies, University
of Hamburg, together with the Hamburger Gesellschaft für Vietnamistik e.V.,
cordialles invites to a talk by the poet and translator Nhã Thuyên, Hanoi, who is
currently a DAAD Artist-in-Residence in Germany.
The talk will be introduced and chaired by Professor Thomas Engelbert.
Date: Friday, July 12, 2024
Time: 16:00 - 18:00 h CEST
Place: AAI, Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1 (OST), R. 120
About the speaker:
Nhã Thuyên anchors herself to Hanoi, Vietnam, and totters between languages. She has authored several books in Vietnamese and/or in English translations, including viết (writing) (2008), rìa vực (edge of the abyss) (2011), từ thở, những người lạ (words breathe, creatures of elsewhere) (2015), bất\ \tuẫn: những hiện diện [tự-] vắng trong thơ Việt (un\ \martyred: [self-]vanishing presences in Vietnamese poetry) (2019). Translations of her poetry and writing appear in some journals including Asymptote, Cordite Review, The Margins, Words Without Border, the Lifted Brow, Jacket2, Gulf
Coast, The Kenyon Review and some other places. Her next book of poetry vị nước (taste of water) is forthcoming. She has been unearthing her notebooks and rubbing her words in Berlin as a 2023 DAAD’s Artists-in-Berlin fellow, and learning to quietly speak up with care.
The discussion centers around the questions of the politics and the poetics of the marginalized in Vietnamese literature, with an attempt at understanding Vietnamese literature in its plural and fragmented entity, historically and culturally. The research approaches this literature, especially poetry as a specific concern, of the writers who hold onto writing in Vietnamese far from home but have not yet been fairly recognized as a contribution to Vietnamese literature as a whole, and of the writers who remain in Vietnam with a very limited readership. Where do the writers belong? In what way can we practically bring together all the writers into a shared house of Vietnamese literature and language? What are and have been the major issues of these literatures in the past and what are the possible literary responsibilities for a Vietnamese writer/literary scholar in the present? And in the end, what does it mean to be a Vietnamese writer (and why should we ask this question)? This project proposes a voyage “moving outward” (researching the politics and poetics of the writers overseas), and in tandem, “returning inward” (attuning to the politics and poetics of the poets who stay in Vietnam), accompanying and being accompanied by the drifting poetics of the Vietnamese language.
