Ngân Xuyên

Phạm Xuân Nguyên (born 15 May 1958), better known by his pen name Ngân Xuyên, is a Vietnamese writer and literary translator.

Personal life and career Phạm Xuân Nguyên was born in Nghệ An Province. He studied Russian as his foreign language in high school, and continued learning it as a student in the literature department of the University of Hanoi (Trường Đại học Tổng hợp Hà Nội, now part of the Vietnam National University, Hanoi). He interrupted his university studies to serve in the People's Army of Vietnam from 1978 to 1982, and was stationed in Ho Chi Minh City. During that period, he began teaching himself French, and had his first translations of French poetry published in the newspaper Tiền Phong. He was first exposed to the works of Milan Kundera in their Russian translations in the Union of Russian Writers journal Foreign Literature («Иностранная литература»), and himself translated Immortality (which was originally in Czech) into Vietnamese from the Russian version. The title is a reference to the character Thị Nở in Nam Cao's 1941 short story Chí Phèo, a woman who is well known for her unattractive appearance. Nhà văn như Thị Nở is a collection of essays of literary criticism, discussing fifty-one Vietnamese writers including Nam Trân, Thế Lữ, Hải Triều, Hoài Thanh, Nguyễn Tuân, Trương Tửu, Bích Khê, Xuân Diệu, Tố Hữu, Nguyễn Huy Tưởng, Nguyễn Hữu Đang, Hoàng Cầm, Trần Dần, Lê Đạt, Phùng Quán, Bùi Ngọc Tấn, Nguyễn Xuân Khánh, Dương Tường, Bảo Ninh, Nguyễn Quang Lập, and Vi Thùy Linh. Nguyên stated that it took him so long to come out with the book because he was too lazy to collect his previous essays and edit them into a coherent whole; in particular, he mentioned the World Cup season as one of the various reasons for his delays in submitting the final version to the publisher Nhã Nam for printing. 2000: Nerves and Senses (Steve Parker) 2001: Testaments Betrayed (, Milan Kundera) 2001: An Idea for Seven Million (, ) 2002: Dinosaur (David B. Norman and Angela Milner) 2004: The Fifth Mountain (Paulo Coelho) 2004: Interpreter of Maladies (Jhumpa Lahiri) 2006: Introducing Kierkegaard (Oscar Zárate and Dave Robinson) 2008: Sputnik Sweetheart (Haruki Murakami) 2008: The Postmodern Condition (Jean-François Lyotard) 2012: The Lady, or the Tiger? (Frank Stockton) 2013: Literature and Evil (La Littérature et le Mal, Georges Bataille)