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| Mr. Buu Y (second from left) and the late musician Trinh Cong Son (far right). Photo: A personal archive of translator Buu Y |
Full of concerns
Translator Buu Y is a man of many concerns - a term that he himself uses. And, one of his greatest concerns is the unfulfilled wish of his close friend, the late musician Trinh Cong Son, to build a “chapel of love” in Hue during his lifetime.
He recalls that while still alive, Trinh Cong Son dreamed of building in Hue a “chapel of love” filled with sounds, images, and mementos associated with his work - a place for lovers to visit, and a place of prayer for young people whose love had met with difficulties. The house would serve as a meeting point for couples to nurture and mend their love, and a space for young men and women of all generations, from Hue and beyond, to gather and connect.
Trinh Cong Son shared this wish with friends and city leaders, all of whom expressed enthusiastic support. From around the early 2000s, Hue’s city leaders at the time accompanied the late musician to scout locations for the chapel. Many sites were considered, from areas close to Thien Mu Pagoda, Thien An Hill, Le Duan Street, the former offices of Song Huong Magazine on Le Loi Street, a riverside park along the Huong River near the foot of Truong Tien Bridge, to an ownerless house at Dap Da Bridge.
However, for various reasons, the chapel remained a dream. Even after Trinh Cong Son passed away in 2001, Buu Y and his friends campaigned to build Trinh Cong Son memorial house in Hue; yet that, too, never came to reality.
It was only recently, following an arts program held to mark the musician’s 87th birthday, that Buu Y himself was the first to announce that in 2026, the late musician’s family will build a museum bearing the name Trinh Cong Son on Kim Son Hill of Thuy Xuan Ward, Hue City. The museum will include a memorial area, an exhibition space for artifacts tied to his life and compositions, a venue for musical performances, and a garden of love displaying sculptures of Trinh Cong Son alongside the celebrated singers who were part of his life. “So from now on, the greatest concern weighing on me - about my friend’s chapel of love - is about to be lifted,” said he.
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| Portrait of Buu Y (Painting by the late artist Dinh Cuong) |
Beautiful words
The translator and writer Buu Y, whose full name is Nguyen Phuoc Buu Y, is 89 years old this year and a great-great-grandson of the poet Tuy Ly Vuong. He studied French in Hue and once served as Head of the Department of French, Foreign Languages Faculty at Hue University of Education. He has been active across many fields — teaching, arts research, writing, and translation, particularly of French documents and literature. In 2015, France awarded him the Order of Academic Palms for his outstanding contributions to French culture and literature from before 1975 to the present.
Anyone who has read his Vietnamese translations of French literature - among them The Diary of Anne Frank (published by An Tiem, 1963), The Little Prince, Platero and I - or his trilogy of original works published together a decade ago: Nước chảy qua cầu (Water flows under the bridge), Ngày tháng thênh thang (Days of open wandering), and Tâm tình với Trịnh Công Sơn (Intimate conversations with Trinh Cong Son) - will immediately recognize the richness of his Vietnamese prose. His most recent publications include three works originally translated before 1975, reintroduced by Phanbook in partnership with the Cultural and Literary Publishing House in entirely new editions: Đứa con đi hoang trở về (The prodigal son returns), Vỡ mộng (Disillusionment), and Thư gửi một con tin (Letter to a hostage). Whether translating or writing his own work, Buu Y’s Vietnamese is consistently rich and distinctively beautiful, ornate, refined, and shaped by deliberate, carefully filtered word choices. Together with contemporaries such as Trinh Cong Son, Hoang Phu Ngoc Tuong, and Thai Kim Lan, each in their own way, they form a generation of Hue people defined by the luminous quality of their language.
Yet there is no escaping concern. For the luminous beauty in Buu Y’s words also springs from another, ever-present concern within him. He shares that “before or after 1975, whether translating, writing, or lecturing in the classroom, I have always been someone who worries deeply about culture - in its highest and most beautiful sense.” He added that even before 1975, when choosing which French and foreign literary works to translate into Vietnamese, his first criterion was always the cultural content and humanistic values of the work - only then did the author’s name matter.
“Every time I sit down before a translation, no one pushes me, but I always think I have a responsibility to care for the young generations of this country - to help cultivate souls that can be moved by beauty,” says Buu Y. He once recalled his delight upon reading an interview in which the southern writer Nguyen Ngoc Tu from Ca Mau said that one of the works that left the deepest impression on her life was Platero and I by Juan Ramón Jiménez, in Bửu Y’s translation. “That is one example showing that the books I have translated have had a positive influence on younger readers. They felt moved and touched reading the classic foreign literary works I chose to introduce - and so my concern found its mooring,” said he with a smile.
His concern - that attitude of care toward culture - is a deeply distinctive part of who Buu Y is, running alongside his translations and his writings. In Buu Y, words always carry responsibility, and concern is not a burden to weigh the heart down, but a way of keeping oneself from being apathetic to beauty and to people. And so what he creates, what he does - though quietly - continues to resonate, far and long.