Translations
From: David Marr <dgm405@coombs.anu.edu.au>
Date: Aug 2, 2006 7:03 PM
Subject: [Vsg] translations
One of my favorite pastimes in Saigon is browsing the big bookstore on
Nguyen Hue Street. This time, after casing the History shelves (rather
disappointing) and marvelling at the scores of new books on Buddhism, I
gravitated towards the hundreds of translations from English, Chinese and
French. In 1998, Mark Sidel and I published a survey of the outpouring of
social science translations in the early 1990s. Now it would be necessary
to spend months to get one's mind around the sheer quantity and diversity
of translations.
Instead of considering any such repeat performance, I began to peruse
several translation series aimed at a popular audience. For example, there
is a book titled `10 Nha tu tuong lon the gioi' (2003), which has short
chapters on Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel,
Marx, Nietzsche, and Russell. It's significant that only Russell
represents the 20th century thinking, as if everyone else was too hot to
handle. I'd put Weber, Freud, and Gramsci ahead of Russell. There were
other "World's Ten Greatest..." books on kings, generals, explorers,
writers, and artists, and one on women, but by a different publisher.
There is also a series called 'Tu sach danh nhan the gioi', with each
individual getting a book. So far titles have appeared on Confucius, Sima
Qian, Qin Shi Huangdi, Da Vinci, Newton, James Watt, Franklin, Beethoven,
Napoleon, Darwin, Lincoln, the Wright brothers, Einstein, Marie Curie (the
only woman to date), Henry Ford, Picasso, and Gandhi. Why are Gautama
Buddha and Jesus Christ not given books? And why have 20th century
wielders of power like Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao not been included
(yet)? I think both of these series are translated from Chinese, which
opens up other interesting questions.
More ambitiously, the NXB Ly Luan Chinh Tru has published (2005) a
translation of Machiavelli, 'The Prince/Quan Vuong Thuat Tri.' Vu Manh
Hong is translator, but we are not told from what language. In 1946, 'The
Prince' was translated from French and published in Hanoi, but received
very little attention. NXB Ly Luan Chinh Tri also promises Rousseau's
`Social Contract', and Montesquieu's `Spirit of the Law', both of which
were translated and commented upon in the 1920s and 1930s. I also noticed
hefty, expensive translated compendia of the works of Descartes, Kant and
Hegel. Old translations of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin can still be
found in dusty corners, but has anyone in recent decades seen the collected
works of Mao in Vietnamese?
David Marr
From: Sinh Vinh <sinh.vinh@ualberta.ca>
Date: Aug 2, 2006 9:11 PM
Subject: RE: [Vsg] translations
Dear David,
I used to have _Collected Works by Mao Tse-tung_ (4 vol.) in Vietnamese.
Mao's Red Book was also published in Vietnamese. I was impressed by the
quality of The Peking Publishing House.
From: David Marr <dgm405@coombs.anu.edu.au>
Date: Aug 7, 2006 8:27 PM
Subject: RE: [Vsg] translations
Dear Vinh Sinh and all,
A substantial number of Mao's writings and speeches are translated and
published inside Vietnam from the late 1940s, as one can appreciate from
the Thu Vien Quoc Gia catalog. It would be interesting to know when the
first translated books of Mao are shipped in quantity from China to
Vietnam. In 1978 or 1980, I remember seeing hundreds of copies of Mao's
Collected Works stacked in the corner of several libraries in Vietnam. I
was told they had never been distributed, a politically appropriate answer
for the late 1970s and 1980s, but it seems just as likely they had been
collected from bookstores and smaller libraries as Sino-Vietnamese
relations deteriorated. Wish I had scrutinized a couple of copies to see
if they were used or not...