March 1998
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Touring Vietnam
by Paul Wright I had the privilege of representing the University Press while touring Vietnam from Jan. 2-19, with a group of American publishers, editors, and writers. We met with our respective colleagues in Vietnam to foster cooperation and cultural interchange. The trip was sponsored by the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences and the Vietnam Writer's Association, and was funded by the Ford Foundation. Other UMass Boston representatives were Kevin Bowen, director of the Joiner Center, and Nguyen Ba Chung, an associate of the Center. Also included were Robert Glassman, a board member of the William Joiner Foundation, and authors Grace Paley and Lady Borton, both of whom have taught at the Joiner Center Writer's Workshops.
Our itinerary included stops in Hanoi, Hué City, Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), and Cantho, in the Mekong River delta.We met with enthusiastic representatives of the publishing industry and writing communities in formal settings, informal assemblies, dinners, social events, and joint poetry readings.
The way had been prepared by the fact that we American publishers, including Viking/Penguin and Curbstone Press, had recently brought out works of contemporary Vietnamese literature in translation and/or books about Vietnam -- both the war and the country. UMass Press, for example had just published A Time Far Past: A Novel of Viet Nam, by Le Luu, co-translated by Bowen, Nguyen, and David Hunt of the History Department, The Women Carry River Water, Poems, by Nguyen Quang Thieu, co-translated by Martha Collins, formerly at UMass Boston, and Earth and Water: Encounters in Viet Nam, by Edith Shillue, of the Center and the Bilingual/ESL Program. Several of the writers and editors we met had already journeyed to the U.S. under the auspices of the Center's reading programs and summer Writer's Workshops.
We found an enormous reservoir of good will toward the Joiner Center, UMass Boston, and the University Press, engendered by ten years of communication and interchange pioneered by the Center. Although memories of the war and traces of the war persist, we found an eagerness to move beyond our tragic mutual history. Contemporary Vietnam is a rapidly modernizing country with a highly literate, energetic, optimistic population. There is tremendous interest in American literature and conditions are in place for a modern, urban literary culture to develop. We discussed training for translators, mutual education about the best writing published in both countries, implementation of the recently signed copyright accord between the two countries, and ways of developing beneficial interchange.
One solution would be more trips in both directions of the type our group took. Now, if we could just do something about the excruciatingly long flight and resultant jet-lag É
Paul Wright is editor of the University of Massachusetts Press.