Translator Anh Hoa: “Reading requires a great deal of faith”

How can we distinguish the author’s own excitement in the original language so that we can translate it and express it in our mother tongue without mistaking it for our own excitement (as a reader, reading is a necessary task before translating)?

To translate, in many ways, is to live within that overwhelm: the distance between languages, between texts, between worlds. One is constantly suspended between the flicker of insight gained through reading, and the helplessness that follows in trying to recreate that insight in another language.

Thanks to technology, anyone can now read almost any text without relying on the traditional gatekeeper—the translator. Yet it is precisely because we have moved beyond literacy campaigns and mass education drives that both reading and translation now have the chance to return to their essence.

In the preface, George Eliot describes history as an experiment in combining substances across Time. The idea originates from Spinoza, whom Eliot herself had translated into English. Perhaps, during that process, I had already begun to see people in that way, though I didn’t yet have the language for it. To come across a book that articulates the idea with such intellectual and emotional depth was thrilling. Dorothea, for instance, is a substance capable of reaching a terrifying heat and melting, while her younger sister Celia, is not. In the same moment of blushing, Dorothea radiates like the sun, while Celia merely flushes. Eliot constructed a remarkably precise and coherent system of words for different substances, and my task was to find an equivalent system in Vietnamese. Unlike casual reading, translating demands that one first approach a text as structure. I had to ask how the author built that world, and whether some form of equivalence could be created between the two languages to mirror it.

This may well be the beginning of lifelong unease. Nguyen Van Vinh’s translation of Kieu, for example, became a life spent revising, rethinking, returning.

In 1913, when the work was published in Indochina Magazine, the line “A Hundred Years in the Human Realm” was rendered as “Dans les cents ans qui constituent la durée limitée de la vie humaine.” Later, in book form, it was revised to “Cent années, dans cette limite de notre vie humaine.” The word limite—meaning boundary—carries a broader sense in the latter version. It does not merely denote time (the span from birth to death), but also space (the human world, set apart from other realms). This, for Nguyen Van Vinh, was the essence of “realm”. A realm is a limit; without limits, nothing can exist. And so, to move from “durée limitée” to “limite”—that can take a lifetime. Sometimes, a single word is enough for people to recognise each other.

Can we say that in addition to finding ways to express the meaning of words, we also have to do the work of finding a place for the words? Like how to lay out a manuscript?

This can be done if the text is a masterpiece, a work that has reached a point of perfection where every word is already in its rightful place. That, one might say, is the ideal approach to translation. But to pursue it unrelentingly is to risk driving oneself to the edge. Imagine a landscape: sometimes you must walk slowly, taking in each stone; sometimes you fly above it; at other times, you close your eyes and pass quickly, only to return later, gradually.

With Henry James, for instance, I began with The Portrait of a Lady, because the point of reference was Middlemarch (Portrait being, in some ways, a rewriting of the Middlemarch narrative). It wasn’t until later, especially while translating Daisy Miller, that I fully grasped how much Italy shaped the emotional landscape of James’s characters. It was something I hadn’t quite noticed when working on Middlemarch. The things worth seeing are always layered, always demanding that we look again.

Personally, I feel that FORMApubli does more than publish books—it offers a way of reading, a system in itself. This becomes evident through its curated “Issues” and the titles within each one, as well as the accompanying articles on “Text”, where analysis and discussion continue to unfold. Is this idea of extended reading what FORMA ultimately seeks to foster? A tradition in the making?

You see, reading, including translation, is an act rooted in trust. Nothing is handed to you directly. When something is revealed, it often comes after considerable effort, and once you grasp it, you may find there’s no need to speak of it further. A publisher truly committed to that spirit must often say no to things that might otherwise make their work more convenient.

I like to think of FORMA’s readers—and I count myself among them—as correspondents. A book is born from an uncontainable experience, from the impossibility of capturing that experience fully. And the reader, in turn, is capable of touching that same feeling, as the book begins to stir, becoming a mirror for memories, desires, wounds, ecstasies the reader may never have known they carried. Not every reading reaches that depth, of course, but when it does, the book becomes a space of magical correspondence. It is an ancient form of intellectual engagement, and I believe this is where the true purpose of publishing lies: in sustaining that form. Hence the name FORMApubli.

FORMA speaks to form, but also to formation: self-education, self-shaping. Publi shares roots with “publish”, “public”, and so on. Together, they suggest a community of correspondence born from the act of reading.

Over time, I began to understand that the “FORMA community” isn’t simply made up of those who purchase or even read the books. There’s a spirit, and there are those who recognise it, who receive it; but no one, not even the person who gives it a name, owns it. It’s not a closed group with membership or privilege. It is made up of those who still believe.

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“Self-shaping” thus becomes a correspondence community. Or is the structured, reflective reading you describe something missing from today’s reading culture? Especially when the publishing world is largely driven by trends in global literature? To put it plainly, does the spirit of systematic reading now seem absent?

Consider the two dominant formulas in book marketing today: what I call the KOL model and the message-delivery model. Books are bought because they’re endorsed by a celebrity, or because they promise to meet a specific need, be it knowledge, healing, aesthetics, identity, or values such as feminism or tradition. These approaches are very effective at reaching broad audiences, but they often overlook what I believe is the heart of reading: that sense of speechlessness, of being carried into the unknown, the unknowable. And yet, that absence is telling. The most valuable things, after all, tend to remain invisible.

Take our publication of The Business of Living by Cesare Pavese. We could easily have leaned into the sensationalism of his suicide to create a hook for marketing. But we didn’t. Instead, we asked questions about his literary journey, and connected him with writers such as Natalia Ginzburg, Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante, and Primo Levi. An entire Italian literary landscape quietly revealed itself. The beauty was that nothing was planned. One person read and translated the text, shared it on Văn Bản; another, inspired, continued the thread. It felt like a symphony emerging from the act of reading where intensity and contemplation go hand in hand, and where each participant exists both in solitude and in communion.

This form of correspondence doesn’t arise from the name. It was always there, a quiet, beautiful tradition. Giving it a name is simply a promise to honour it.

Is that tradition clearly demonstrated in the way writers look at each other through FORMA’s texts? For example, Henry James reading Middlemarch and similar cases? Is the presentation of such “evidence” intended to prove the existence of a correspondence community of readers?

Regarding writers observing one another, I was once translating a Naipaul novel and came across his essay on Joseph Conrad, written exactly fifty years after Conrad’s death. In many respects, Naipaul was very close to Conrad, and that closeness was both uncomfortable and hard to confront. At the age of ten, Naipaul had read a story by Conrad. That encounter left a wound he could only face after many years and numerous returns. Translating Conrad, a writer I initially struggled with as well, and then Naipaul, I suddenly realised that what Naipaul wrote about Conrad that year—about melancholy tinged with lucidity, about having no stable ground to start from—was also a prophecy for himself. Nearly fifteen years later, Naipaul published a story that seemed to arise from his vision of a world “continually creating and destroying itself”, a vision Conrad was the first to perceive.

A similar example: the young Henry James read Middlemarch and said it had reached the limits of the old English novel, and that having seen this so clearly, there was only one option left, to find a way to surpass it. The challenge only holds meaning if it feels insurmountable, a shadow looming on the horizon. People usually avoid mentioning those who are so close to them that their entire existence becomes a futile repetition of that other figure. Yet literature as an attempt to understand and faithfully represent human experience must confront this directly. Writing may begin spontaneously, but sooner or later it becomes impossible to ignore the shadows that haunt one’s work.

That moment of recognition, which also happens in reading, I often think of as the end of innocence. It was only when I began translating Naipaul that I suddenly realised I had read him long ago: a book called A Bend in the River. At the time, I paid no attention to the author, translator, or publisher. I was a child, staying at a friend’s house for a few days. I read the book because it was there, like reading a piece of newspaper wrapped in sticky rice. I read it all, found it interesting, and forgot it. That kind of reading is difficult now. Once curiosity and searching begin, you also risk getting lost in the maze of connections you have created. It can be exhausting. But there is also joy.

FORMAPubli’s approach shapes a form of systematic reading. Organically, FORMA’s books offer a sense of “collection”, a pleasure linked to ownership. Is this a privilege only available to paper books?

I believe there is a pleasure in the physical book, partly a very human illusion of possession, which is fundamentally healthy. The wonderful thing is that we always have chances to realise how mistaken we are, that the book or the person we thought we held so firmly in our hands, we actually know very little about. There are many books in my room I have neither read nor intend to read, but I know them simply because they are there. Sometimes I lie on the floor and feel them giggling at me.

On the other hand, a beautifully written book, neatly laid out, designed, printed and finished, is a beautiful thing, one of the few that can still teach us about care. Nguyen Tuan once wrote a story about a kind of paper that makes people feel alive; in summer, the paper feels cool to the touch, and in winter, warm, as if it breathes. True beauty creates order: those who believe their writing unworthy do not have the heart to press the paper, while vulgar hands dare not touch it.

The physical book, though mass-produced like any other commodity, still bears the mark of a soulful object. It pains us to see them sold cheaply or used as mere props in photo backdrops. It delights us to watch them age and soften with time, worn by countless readings like a beloved old friend.

At FORMA, we maintain a one-price policy. The cover price fairly reflects the efforts of all involved and remains affordable for the average reader. It is better to grind books into pulp for recycling than to cheapen them by slashing prices or producing inferior editions. Yet we are always on the lookout for donors, often ordinary readers. We do not always find the right match, but when we do, it brings incomparable joy.

Anh Hoa, is creating a FORMA readership community, a correspondence community, a form of struggle for reading, or an achievement for you, as one of FORMAPubli’s contributors?

I like to think we are fighting for something. At first, we had to name it, but over time, that became less necessary. Once a common rhythm is found, things flow as if naturally. And sometimes, when I hear someone say they have begun reading again after years of neglect, or found a new direction thanks to FORMA, it makes me happy. Though not as nervous as when we first started.

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