Why is the Vietnamese translation of The Communist Manifesto so boring?

Last semester, a friend of mine invited me to give a lecture on the Industrial Revolution in her class on “World Civilizations,” at Hanoi University’s Faculty of International Studies. I’m not sure if she knew what she or her students were in for. In addition to questioning how she was teaching “World Civilizations” as a story of the ineluctable and natural rise of the “West,” and deconstructing the conventional depiction of the Industrial Revolution as flowing from the combination of technology and free markets (i.e. why the “West” is so great and everyone else sucks), I also had her students read that great theorist of the Industrial Revolution, Karl Marx. Blame my twisted sense of humor, but I do find it curious that Vietnamese university students, who’ve spent hundreds of hours learning about Marxism and Scientific Socialism, have almost never read anything written by Marx himself. So I chose some excerpts from the Communist Manifesto, printed them in both English and Vietnamese, and gave them to the students (both versions available from www.marxists.org).

This was the first time I’d read a translation of Marx in Vietnamese, and I was struck by how bland it was. Granted, the English version wasn’t written by Marx himself, but it was translated with the help of Engels, so I have to assume it captures the flavor of Marx’s original German. And for me, at least, that flavor is pretty damn good, combining powerful images with incisive critique in prose that verges on poetry. I mean, how can you not be struck by something like “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” But compare it with the Vietnamese. “Tất cả những quan hệ xã hội cứng đờ và hoen rỉ, với cả tràng những quan niệm và tư tưởng vốn được tôn sùng từ nghìn năm đi kèm những quan hệ ấy, đều đang tiêu tan; những quan hệ xã hội thay thế những quan hệ đó chưa kịp cứng lại thì đã già cỗi ngay. Tất cả những gì mang tính đẳng cấp và trí tuệ đều tiêu tan như mây khói; tất cả những gì là thiêng liêng đều bị ô uế, và rốt cuộc, mỗi người đều buộc phải nhìn những điều kiện sinh hoạt của họ và những quan hệ giữa họ với nhau bằng con mắt tỉnh táo.” Call me crazy, but I don’t hear the music anymore.

It’s not just me: the students agreed that while the Vietnamese version was ho-hum, the English version was, well, surprisingly cool, and surprisingly relevant to their own experience of “Development.” Why is this? Is it really impossible to translate the meaning and the poetry at the same time? Or does somebody out there want to put Vietnamese to sleep before they can begin to understand the power of Marx’s ideas? I don’t know, but I can only conclude that the first generation of Vietnamese Communists was reading their Marx in French, German, or Russian. Because if they were reading it in Vietnamese, they would have dozed right through the Revolution.