Note On The Translators

Cari Coe is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at UCLA. She lived in Vietnam over the years 1997-2000, teaching English at the University of Pedagogy in Hue and working as an Education Advisor at the Institute of International Education in Hanoi.  While she studies the political economy of agrarian reform professionally, she has always loved the arts in Vietnam and enjoys translating literature in her spare time.

Linh Dinh was born in Saigon in 1963 and came to the United States in 1975.  A Pew Fellowship in the Arts took him back to Viet Nam in 1994, where he later returned to live two years before two more years in Italy with the International Parliament of Writers.  He has returned to his home base of Philadelphia, from where he travels to read and teach around the United States.  The poet is now preparing to spend academic year 2005-6 on a fellowship in England.

Linh Dinh made a name for himself as an English-language poet in the worlds of independent publishing in the United States before joining in the transnational world of Vietnamese-language poetry on the Web.  He translates in both directions, beginning ten years ago with Vietnamese fiction into English and now continuing with American poetry into Vietnamese.  He has as well established himself as a trade fiction author with two books of short stories from Seven Stories, the only corporate New York literary publishing house still controlled by an individual publisher, Dan Simon.

Simon first brought out Linh Dinh’s anthology of translations, Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Viet Nam (Seven Stories, 1996).  The collections of short stories are Fake House (Seven Stories, 2000) and Blood and Soap (Seven Stories, 2004). 

His Three Vietnamese Poets (Tinfish, 2002) presents the Nguyen Quoc Chanh poems here on the Viet Nam Literature Project site, as well as selections from Phan Nhien Hao and Van Cam Hai.  The text of the book may be downloaded from www.tinfishpress.com/vietnamese.pdf.

Susan Schultz, the Hawaii-based publisher of Tinfish, wrote an excellent critical introduction to the work of Linh Dinh whose argument is suggestive for the translator’s affinity to the work of Nguyen Quoc Chanh.  “Most Beautiful Words: Linh Dinh’s Poetics of Disgust” first appeared in the British journal The Paper, Issue 8 (September 2004) and is now available at the website of Jacket, http://jacketmagazine.com/27/schu-linh.html.

For the poetry in English, see Drunkard Boxing (Singing Horse Press, 1998), A Small Triumph Over Lassitude (Leroy, 2001), All Around What Empties Out (Subpress, 2003) and use a search engine to locate Linh Dinh’s widespread publications in on-line journals as well as in print anthologies.  For the poetry in Vietnamese, including translations from U.S. poets, consult the Australia-based website  www.tienve.com and look for “Dinh Linh.”

Mong-Lan is an English-language poet, writer, and visual artist.  Born in Saigon, she came to the U.S. at a young age with her family after the political upheaval in 1975. Besides English and Vietnamese, Mong-Lan speaks fluently and can read and write also in Spanish and French.  She speaks Japanese on an intermediate level and is working on a few other languages. 

She received her Masters of Fine Arts in poetry from the University of Arizona and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in poetry at Stanford University.  Her first book of poems, Song of the Cicadas, won the Juniper Prize and was published by University of Massachusetts Press in 2001.  Why is the Edge Always Windy? is forthcoming from Tupelo Press later in 2005.  Her poems have been included in The Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and in over 50 other leading American literary magazines and anthologies.  In academic year 2002-2003, she was in Vietnam on a Fulbright Grant.

Mong-Lan has exhibited her visual art in galleries in the San Franciso Bay Area, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and most recently at the Dallas Museum of Art.  Her own website, www.monglan.com, is the best portal to a widespread presence in print and on the Web in all of her media.

A photograph of both Mong-Lan and Linh Dinh relaxing in a group with Nguyen Quoc Chanh is available on Mong-Lan’s website, at www.monglan.com/photos.htm.