Bùi Viêt Hoa 1994

Bùi Viêt Hoa, a Vietnamese student who had done really well in the English language entrance exams in 1980, was sent to study in Hungary as part of the cooperation between communistic countries at that time. Young Hoa, who had begun her university studies in Debrecen transferred two years later to the University of Budapest and, as it happens, she soon chose the Finnish language as her minor subject.

Besides the language, Bùi Viêt Hoa wanted to study the national epic of the Finnish people. At first, she did this, for the most part, in Hungarian. Ten years after Hoa had left Vietnam, she finished a first version of a translation of the Kalevala in Vietnamese. It was published four years later, in 1994.

Hoa emphasises that the personal supervision she got from István Rácz and the Hungarian translation of the Kalevala made the first phase of translating the Kalevala into Vietnamese easier. Hoa reminisces the work method from almost twenty years ago:

“He knew what kind of work that was waiting for me so he immediately offered to help me and we met at least twice a week at the Alvar Aalto café where we spent almost the whole morning. First, I read something from the Kalevala for him in Finnish, then in Hungarian. After that he explained it to me in Hungarian. It was easiest to do this in this way, since Hungarian was our mutual language. This was in a way a practice for doing the actual translation. Rácz compared the Hungarian translations and gave me alternatives as to how I may translate a specific word or sentence. I wrote the sentences word-by-word in Vietnamese, slowly at first, but later on it went better.”

Hoa promised to translate the Kalevala in 1986, but first she needed to go to the villages of poetry in White Karelia that Elias Lönnrot had described in his travelogues. She also hoped that she would be able to visit Kalmosaari in Latvajärvi where the poetic singer Arhippa Perttunen was buried. Markku Nieminen from Juminkeko, the information centre dedicated to the Kalevala and the Karelian culture – at this point of time the centre was called Kuhmon kulttuurikornitsa – fulfilled Hoa’s wishes in the autumn of 1989.

Flexible Vietnamese

The challenges with translating an epic in poetic form word-by-word were intensified by the strange words that deviate from today’s language, that would be translated into a modern Vietnamese word. The work by Aimo Turunen, Kalevalan sanat (in English: The words in the Kalevala), helped Hoa to understand the meanings of the words and as a language professional, Hoa also found the flexibility of the Vietnamese language.

Although an end rhyme is a fairly common phenomenon in Vietnamese poetry, when it came to the Kalevala, the alliteration was easier adapted to the one syllable Vietnamese language than the end rhyme. Each pitch of a sound gives the word a new meaning. According to the tonal system there are six different pitches in the Vietnamese language and the effects of these have to be considered.

The black and white illustrations of the Kalevala were made by Lương Xuân Đoàn. When the book was finished, it was chosen as the best translated book of the year. There were 1200 copies of the book printed in Vietnam and almost one thousand copies had been sold. Now, more than 20 years later, Bùi Viêt Hoa finds things in her translation that could be improved and she is pondering the thought of making a new translation. Hoa thinks that as she now has more life experience and has developed as a translator, this could help her in depicting the Finnish culture even more distinctively.

The epic The children of Mon and Man

Lönnrot was Hoan’s role model, not only when translating the Kalevala, but also later when she wrote the Vietnamese national epic Con cháu Mon Mân (The children of Mon and Man) (2008). The well-known love story of the legends of the people in Viet grew into an epic tale that conveys to the readers how literature regards the birth of the Vietnamese tribes from the first human couple.

Bùi Viêt Hoa says that creating an epic in a country with more than 50 minorities with their own languages and, perhaps, hundreds of oral epic tales, was a more difficult process than it was for Elias Lönnrot.

“I have given the method with which Lönnrot compiled the Kalevala a lot of thought. Lönnrot did not have to translate poems, since they all existed in Finnish and they were from a fairly small region. I collected poetry in different languages from at least 40 different nationalities. Some of these were translated word-by-word into Vietnamese and because of this, I had to change, for example the content of a tale, into a word-by-word poem.”

The living cultural heritage in the mountain areas is closely connected to the status of the Vietnamese minority nationalities and this was, still in the early 21st century, a sensitive topic. Hoa, who did field studies in the region, faced suspicions from the authorities: who is this person who walks around with a recorder and a camera among the minorities and what do these people say to her?

The Children of Mon and Man received mixed reviews in Vietnam. Elias Lönnrot’s method, that Hoa used, was strange for the Vietnamese people. Some of the local researchers thought that a subjective collection process had done the poetic singers wrong. However, the response that Hoa got from the poetic singers was positive and they had liked the fact that Hoa had not taken any fictional liberties.

Hoa had not attempted to deny the subjective nature of her six years long work: “As stated by Lönnrot, you could write at least seven different versions based on the same material. The plot of the epic was, in other words, my creation, I can freely choose what I want to include and what I want to leave out.” Hoa wished that the rich oral heritage of the Vietnamese people and the Vietnamese characteristics would become known also to the rest of the world.

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Pauliina Latvala: ”Oletko jo lukenut Kalevalan? Kääntäjä Bùi Viêt Hoa vietnamilaisen ja suomalaisen kulttuuriperinnön välittäjänä” – Kalevala maailmalla. Helsinki: SKS. 2012.