The Sorrow of War

Original version and English version

Bảo Ninh achieved prominence in Hanoi with the first version of the novel, Thân phận của tình yêu (English: The Destiny of Love), which was published in roneo form (similar to photocopying) before 1990. Soon afterwards Phan Thanh Hao translated it into English and took the manuscript to the British publishers Secker & Warburg. Geoffrey Mulligan, an editor there, commissioned Frank Palmos, an Australian journalist who had reported on the Vietnam War and written about it in his book Ridding the Devils (1990), to write an English version based on the raw translation. Bao Ninh had read Phan Thanh Hao's Vietnamese translation of Ridding the Devils and was willing to accept this arrangement. After several meetings with both the author and the translator, Hao, in Hanoi, and journeys throughout Vietnam to check details, Palmos wrote the English version over seven months. It was published in 1994 under the title The Sorrow of War.

Counterfeits of the English version became widely available in Vietnam, aimed at the tourist trade. Counterfeit sales have reportedly far exceeded sales of the original edition.

The Sorrow of War was not published in Vietnamese, under the title Nỗi buồn chiến tranh, until at least 10 years after its publication in English. It has since been translated into 14 other languages, usually from the English version rather than from the Vietnamese original.

Overview

The Sorrow of War, written in the stream of consciousness style, opens with a depiction of soldiers on a postwar mission to collect the bones of fallen comrades for reburial. Thus begins the non-linear narrative by Kien, a North Vietnamese soldier during the Vietnam War, chronicling his loss of innocence, his love, and his anguish at the memories of war.

Kien rides in the truck searching for the remains of fallen soldiers in the Jungle of Screaming Souls and recalls that this is where the 27th Battalion was eliminated except for him. He then undergoes a series of flashbacks that tie the novel together. The main theme tying these flashbacks together is the love affair between Kien and his childhood sweetheart, Phuong. Kien writes a novel about it, but decides to burn it. Then a mute girl whom Kien has begun seeing when drunk, and has been bouncing his ideas off, obtains the text after he left. Throughout the book, Kien also reflects on the many unacknowledged sacrifices, such as Hoa giving up her life to save Kien and his comrades from American soldiers, and acts of immorality and desecration, such as the objectification and treatment of a dead woman in the airport, that he experienced in the war. The climax of the novel is when Kien reflects on his first personal kill in the novel, which occurs after he witnesses Phuong get raped. The novel ends with a passage by a new narrator, who explains that he has received Kien's novel from the mute girl .

Reception

Michael Fathers of The Independent noted how both American and Vietnamese cultural depictions of the Vietnam War had tended to be full of romanticisation and stereotyping, and wrote: "The Sorrow of War soars above all this. ... It moves backwards and forwards in time, and in and out of despair, dragging you down as the hero-loner leads you through his private hell in the highlands of Central Vietnam, or pulling you up when his spirits rise. It is a fine war novel and a marvellous book."

The British author-photographer Tim Page and others have compared the novel favorably to Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front.

The British newspaper The Independent judged The Sorrow of War the Best Foreign Book of 1994. The prize money was equally shared by the author, Bao Ninh, the translator, Phan Thanh Hao, and Frank Palmos, who prepared the English version for publication.

In 2010, the British Society of Authors listed the translation as one of the Best 50 Translations of the previous century.