Page 357
From Trinh's
Naked SpacesLiving Is Round
(1985).
of the conventional representations of particular indigenous societies,
Surname Viêt Given Name Nam
focuses more fully on the issue of translation: the translation of experiences in one culture into the verbal and visual languages of other cultures, and the "translation" of people from one nation to another. Again, Trinh refuses to participate in the conventional tendency to try to simplify and "clarify" complex cultural experiences for the film audience. During the first half of
Surname Viêt Given Name Nam,
a series of women discuss what, at first, most viewers probably assume are the women's own experiences in postwar Communist Vietnam. They speak in heavily accented English that intermittently is translated into superimposed printed text. Rather than simply clarifying the speakers' comments, however, the superimposed words suggest how translations tend to impede our willingness to actually listen to accented spoken English: we read the translation and cease listening to the people. The implications of this tendency are confirmed by the frequent disparities between what we hear and what we read: the very act of "translation," Trinh demonstrates, subverts our willingness to develop an ability to hear the expressions of people whose cultural difference is encoded in their accents.
During the second half of
Surname Viêt Given Name Nam,
we discover that the women interviewed in the first half are not current residents of Vietnam, but have been translated to the United States where