The Tale of Kieu has been translated into more than 20 languages.
According to the (incomplete) records of Associate Professor, Dr. Doan Le Giang, The Tale of Kieu has been translated into "more than 20 languages with over 60 different translations".
The workshop “Nguyen Du and theoretical issues of Vietnamese medieval literature and art” organized by the National Studies Center on October 24 once again affirmed the position of poet Nguyen Du in Vietnamese medieval literature, with great contributions to language and literary style.
In particular, an important part of the conference was to review the translations of the Tale of Kieu into foreign languages. Translator Nguyen Minh Hoang cited data from Professor Nguyen Van Hoan's directory, saying that the Tale of Kieu has been translated into 16 languages, "from English, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Korean to other languages that we never expected such as Greek, Mongolian, Arabic... These translations amount to 48 copies."
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However, according to the (incomplete) records of Associate Professor, Dr. Doan Le Giang, The Tale of Kieu has been translated into "more than 20 languages with over 60 different translations".
More valuable, Mr. Nguyen Minh Hoang has taken the time to read and compare the English and French translations of The Tale of Kieu to make initial comments on the places "worth discussing again".
In particular, during the process of re-examining the versions of The Tale of Kieu, translator Nguyen Minh Hoang also realized that there was an English version (by Michael Counsell) that had translated the original Tale of Kieu so far that "right from the opening sentences, if translated as in this book, even Nguyen Du would have difficulty recognizing that those were his own sentences of "A Hundred Years in the Human Realm".
Regarding the cases of translating Tale of Kieu into Japanese, Associate Professor, Dr. Doan Le Giang provided more important information, such as the first case of translating Tale of Kieu into Japanese by translator Komatsu Kiyoshi in 1942. From 1975 to now, every 10 years or so, there is a version of Tale of Kieu translated into Japanese.
In total, there have been five Japanese versions of The Tale of Kieu published to date. The latest version is by Sato Seiji and Kuroda Yoshiko (published in 2005), which includes a short article about The Tale of Kieu by poet Kuroda Yoshiko titled The World of Oaths, which according to Associate Professor Doan Le Giang is an interesting discovery: the characters in The Tale of Kieu are associated with oaths, bad people also swear and good people also swear, making the oaths intertwined with each person's life, creating a special world.
According to VOV.VN