Traces

Author: André Nayer
Translator (English): Harry Aveling
Translator (Vietnamese): Châu Diên Pham Toàn
Pages: 118
Year of Publication: 2022
Price: Rs 500 / €10
ISBN:
978-81-958199-7-3 (9788195819973)

About the Author
André Nayer was born in Jadotville/Likasi, Congo RDC, the son of a Belgian mother, Blanche Janssens, and an Indian father, Santokh Singh Nayer (born in Mombasa, Kenya), grandson of Gurdit Singh Nayer (born in Lahore, Punjab).

His work has covered diverse roles, from years spent at Law School to jurist, researcher, Director of the Centre de Recherche et Prospective en droit social (CeRP), Professor at Free University of Brussels (ULB), and Vice-Rector and General Commissioner at ULB. He has authored several works and his book Les inspections sociales en Belgique received the Maurice Van der Rest Prize (Fédération des Enterprises en Belgique) and the Alice Seghers Prize (Law Faculty ULB).

He was awarded the medal for “Significant Contributions to Education” by the National Economics University (NEU), Hanoi. He has taught and been a keynote speaker in Africa, Asia (particularly in Vietnam), Canada and Europe.

He is also a poet, his poems are where his Indian, European, and African origins come together.

About the Translators

Harry Aveling has taught in Australia (Monash and Murdoch Universities), Malaysia (University of Science of Malaysia, Penang), Indonesia (University of Indonesia, Jakarta), Vietnam (University of Social Sciences and Humanities, HCMC) and the United States of America (Ohio University, Athens and the University of Maryland, College Park). A benefit of his wandering scholar status is that he has established an international reputation as a gifted and wide-ranging translator and literary critic. He has translated extensively from Indonesian, Malay and Francophone Vietnamese literatures; he has also co-translated from Hindi and Vietnamese. His most recent publications include Hikayat Seri Rama: The Malay Ramayana, published by Writers Workshop, India, in 2020, and Perspectives: Essays on Translation and Literature of the Malay World, published by National University of Malaysia Press, 2020.

Châu Diên (birth name: Phạm Toàn) was born in 1932 and passed away in 2019. His works of fiction include Golden Spider (short stories, Thanh Nien, 1962), Someone from Dreamy River (novel, Vietnam Writers Association, 2004) and Seventy-three Stone Mortars (short stories, Vietnam Writers Association, 2006). He translated Victor Hugo’s Ninety-three (Van Hoc, 1981, 1987), Carlos Goldoni’s The Mistress of The Inn (Van Hoc, 1983) and Saint-Exupéry’s Night Flight (Van Hoc, 1986, 2008) and The Little Prince (Dong Tay and Lao Dong, 2008). He was best known for his innovative Vietnamese Language books, a collection of 36 volumes for six grades of the Vietnam primary education system.

About the Book
In her foreword to the book, Nguyễn Bảo Chân writes:

“Some years ago, André told me that he would love to have a poetry collection published. I suggested that it should be a bilingual book, in French and English, because the English translations would make his poetry better known worldwide. André absolutely agreed with me. He said he needed a good translator, but he did not know anyone well enough to work with. At that very moment, I thought of Harry Aveling, an Australian professor of linguistics, who is a well-known translator of quite a few literary books into English from French, Hindi, Indonesian and Malay. Harry Aveling was also the editor of my bilingual poetry books, Thorns in Dreams and Shadows of My Mind. He revised my English versions in those books… Last year, I was happy to introduce the author to the translator. André Nayer and Harry Aveling haven’t ever met each other in person. They have communicated through phone calls, messages, emails, to discuss the poems, to make them smooth and clear in English. After almost one year of hard working, the translations of Traces have been done, finally.

I am enchanted by the beautiful English translations. Amazingly, these “traces” lead me to step into the higher and the deeper layers of André’s heaven and earth. As André wrote: “Impalpables/ le ciel/ la terre/ et aussi l’ensemble,/ entre” – “So fine/ heaven/ and earth/ everything between,/ enter in”, I myself now come together with him, together with both of them, the author and the translator.”

Contents
31 poems in French on the verso side with their English translations on the recto pages, and 13 poems translated into Vietnamese.