Nguyễn Ngọc Phách

Throughout his life, Nguyễn Ngọc Phách, has been a journalist, a writer or a teacher. Born in 1933 in Vietnam, Phách started work at 17 as a translator-interpreter but within half a decade, he and his brother Nguyễn Ngọc Linh had launched a publishing house that produced two highly successful magazines. Phách joined the BBC in 1960 and four years later, returned home to work for the London Daily Telegraph, the Saigon Post, and Vietnam Report.

After the fall of South Vietnam, Phách fled to Australia, where he worked as a broadcaster. In 1989, he started a new career at Deakin University, lecturing in Translating and Interpreting.

Over four decades, besides contributing to journals around the world, Phách has authored a few books, including an INFORMATION ALMANAC (1962), a HISTORY OF THE VIETNAMESE PRESS (1971), a detailed REPORT ON THE CPV SIXTH NATIONAL CONGRESS (1987). His translated works are numerous and varied, including inter alia a Vietnamese version of ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell (1960) and A SECTION OF FLOWERS FROM HELL, an English translation  of two dozen poems by Nguyễn Chí Thiện (1996). Eight years later, he published CHỮ NHO & ĐỜI SỐNG MỚI, A 730-page Thesaurus of Sino-Vietnamese expressions and their current usage.

More recently, to mark six decades of Vietnamese Independence and the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, Phách published an annotated translation of TỔ-QUỐC ĂN NĂN, a seminal book by Nguyễn Gia Kiểng that challenges most tenets of Vietnamese culture and calls for pluralist democracy. This book is now available on Amazon.com under the title: WHENCE… WHITHER… VIETNAM?

Phách’s latest book, LIFE IN VIETNAM, is an annotated English version of vè dân-gian - an anonymous, spontaneous form of satirical verses that serves as free speech wherever censorship is a fact of life. It is an attempt to bring the Vox Populi of Vietnam, in all of its passion, iron, risqué humour and derision to English readers. It is also a voice that has too long been silent in official histories, perhaps because the picture sketched by these nameless authors depicts a dark landscape of life after sixty years of Communist-style republicanism and independence, which promised, but did not deliver, liberty and happiness.