Poet and translator Duong Tuong. (Photo: YN)
Information from literary critic Pham Xuan Nguyen, translator, poet Duong Tuong passed away at 20:08 on February 24. Mr. Pham Xuan Nguyen received the sad news from the son of translator Duong Tuong. The translator had been weak for many months before due to old age.
Duong Tuong, full name Tran Duong Tuong, was born on August 4, 1932 in Nam Dinh city. In 1944, he went to Hanoi to study 6th grade at Louis Pasteur school. In 1945, he dropped out of school to become a liaison officer in the resistance war against France. In 1949, after joining the army, he became a communications soldier and then became a regimental art officer, starting to write poetry in 1953. At that time, Duong Tuong was 21 years old. After being discharged from the army, he became a reporter and editor at Vietnam News Agency, now Vietnam News Agency.
In the translation world, Duong Tuong has a career spanning about 60 years, parallel to the history of publishing translated literature. He is the author of more than 50 large and small translated works.
In the translation industry, Duong Tuong is respected because he always challenges himself with difficult works, works to his fullest, creates talented translations and preserves the beauty of the Vietnamese language.
The works he chose were all towering mountains that many translators feared. Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov), Anna Karenina (Lev Tolstoy), Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë), Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami), On the Swan Side and In the Shadow of Young Women (Marcel Proust), Death by Oblivion (Louis-Ferdinand Céline)... are all complex works in terms of grammar and language, conveying layers of meaning.
In 2019, when he was old and his eyesight was dim, after releasing the translation of "Cheating", his publishing company held a ceremony for him to "wash his hands and hang up his sword". However, his translation work and love of literature still urged him to continue working. In 2020, he released a reverse translation, translating "The Tale of Kieu" into English.
In addition to his translation career, Duong Tuong is also a poet, most famous for his poem Tinh Khuc 24. Duong Tuong experimented with visual poetry through his work Mat, Ngay va Dan . Duong Tuong's poetic works are highly appreciated. In 2007, the French cultural center in Hanoi , L'Espace, published Luc Giac Song Hong , a bilingual Vietnamese-French collection of poems by Duong Tuong and five other Vietnamese poets. The American publisher Dalkey Archives also asked for permission to use a page from his visual poetry collection Dan to make the cover of the memoir A Sentimental Journey by Viktor Shklovsky, a Russian writer of the same era as Maxim Gorky.
He has published poetry collections such as: Duong Tuong - Poetry ; 36 love poems (poetry - published with Le Dat), Dan (poetry without words); Duong Tuong's Poetry - Mea culpa and others .
Duong Tuong is also the author of the essay Chi tai con chich choe and the memoir Thuyen chuong (under the pen name Nguyen Trinh).
With his contributions, he was honored at translation awards of the Vietnam Writers Association and the Hanoi Writers Association.
(Source: Zing News)
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