Via the Viet Nam News Agency, I read that there is Vietnamese science fiction: Sci-fi writer inspires real world thinking, being an interview with Vietnamese SF writer Vu Kim Dung. I don’t think I’d previously been aware of a Vietnamese SF field.
Science fiction has its own large-scale world federation. It has developed rapidly and created many promising authors. In Viet Nam, writers such as Viet Linh, Pham Ngoc Toan, Pham Cao Cung and myself have created science fiction for decades. We have attracted many readers, but so far the genre hasn’t fared well.
I’m curious whether any of these folks made it to the Japanese WorldCon. Any of you met them or know their work?
I often wonder about all the interesting/challenging non-English language SF I’m missing out on. One of my favourite books of recent years was Andreas Eschbach’s ‘The Carpet Makers’…I distinctly remember reading it and thinking something like,’this is the only translated SF title I’ve ever read…’ There simply isn’t enough translating to English happening.
I think there are several reasons for non-English works not being translated into English.
First, the English language writing world is so big that publishers don’t see the need to look outside the English language writing world for books.
Second, translating a book into English is an extra expense. The book has to be very good for most publishers to be willing to pay that extra expense. Going along with the expense is the ‘fun and games’ of getting a good translation.
Third, a non-English language writer may not write in a style (or use themes) that would appeal to the general english language reading audience.
Fourth (going along with the third reason), the publishers may not think the American reading public would read a ‘foreign writer’. I’m not sure this would be true but I’m not a publisher.
Drak Bibliophile
The best SF from the Soviet Union was stunningly good.
I’ve read too little of it, but for just one example, the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic is an utterly amazing book.
I would love to read or even hear about some Vietnamese SF.
Most of Drak’s reasons are right on the mark. My own specialty is translation from East Asian languages, especially Japanese (http://www.kurodahan.com), and before we finally got around to publishing the books ourselves, we tried flogging them to a number of US- and UK-based agents and publishers.
There were a variety of phrasings, but basically they boil down to the reasons Drak suggests…
Translation is generally thought (by publishers, mind you, not necessarily readers) as something to be hidden away in the closet. There are a number of books translated from other languages, and the translator’s name may appear only once in small type, or not at all. Which is strange, considering that the translator is at least as important to the final English as the author. If the English you read is terrible, the book is a discard no matter how good the original may have been in its original language.
We are working on new anthologies of both Japanese and Chinese SF now, although they probably won’t be published for at least another year or two.
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Edward Lipsett
Kurodahan Press
Fukuoka, Japan
I often wonder about all the interesting/challenging non-English language SF I’m missing out on.