Hanoi at Midnight: Stories
Contributor(s): Ninh, Bao (Author) , Ha, Quan Manh (Translator) , Tran, Cab (Translator)
Texas Tech University Press: 2024
Paperback: New
9781682832028
The first English translation of several short stories by Bao Ninh, arguably the most famous writer in Vietnam.
Breaking a thirty-year silence, Bảo Ninh has permitted at last the publication of a new work in English. Ninh is perhaps Vietnam's foremost chronicler of the war, which he joined at age 17. Bringing to life the full range of his inventive and poetic language, Quan Manh Ha and Cab Tran are granting to English readers Bảo Ninh's first book-length work since The Sorrow of War, which catapulted him to fame and which was banned in Vietnam until 2006. In Hà Nội at Midnight, ten stories are appearing in the West for the first time.
Juxtaposed with tranquility and geniality are abandoned landscapes and defoliated forests. Polluted rivers and streams, the war-torn sky, pungent air filled with the stench of decomposing human corpses, and the deafening roar of helicopters and bombers hovering in the gloom dominate the settings of Bảo Ninh's stories.
Intertwined with these horrific images are human tears shed during farewell ceremonies, when recruits are separated from their loved ones, when parents live in anxiety and hope while their children are fighting in remote regions, and when soldiers bury their comrades and burden themselves with the fallen's unfulfilled wishes. Hà Nội at Midnight delineates the complex outpourings of war and the way it remakes human relationships.
Contributor Bios:
Bảo Ninh, Vietnam's most internationally renowned writer, is known primarily for his novel The Sorrow of War (1994), which has been translated into several languages and published in more than twenty countries, winning numerous international awards.
Quan Manh Ha is professor of American Literature at the University of Montana. His research interests include multiethnic US literatures, Vietnam War literature, and literary translation. He is the translator of Other Moons: Vietnamese Stories of the American War and Its Aftermath and Luminous Nights: Pioneering Vietnamese Short Stories.
Cab Tran was born in Vietnam and emigrated to the United States with his parents during the diaspora. He holds an MFA from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers' Program. His fiction has appeared in Vagabond: Bulgaria's English Monthly and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, Oregon