Workshop “Kafka in Vietnam and Asia”

Attending the workshop were Mr. Lukas Musil (Deputy Head of the Embassy of the Czech Republic), Ms. Yvonne Zaugg (Cultural Counselor, Embassy of the Swiss Confederation), Prof. Dr. Nguyen Van Kim (Party Secretary, Vice Principal of the school) and literary researchers from universities and research institutes across the country.

In his opening speech at the conference, Prof. Dr. Nguyen Van Kim emphasized that the school's mission of training and researching social sciences requires lecturers to understand the influence of writer Kafka on world literature. Kafka's works are considered to be highly predictive of human events, as well as providing universal laws of the political and social world, common points appearing in every country.

Kafka accidentally became an existentialist writer, in terms of art and prose poetics in particular, he found himself in expressionism. It is the way of thinking, perspective, and expression of expressionism that has helped readers over the past century realize the absurd truths of life: the disappearance and abandonment of people, the anxiety of fate, the cases of extrajudicial murder, the distant, inaccessible castles of power that weigh down every human life... "Therefore, today's seminar will contribute to clarifying the life, career, ideology as well as the influence of writer Kafka on Asian literature in general and Vietnamese literature in particular" - Prof. Dr. Nguyen Van Kim shared.

Prof. Dr. Nguyen Van Kim (Vice Principal of the School) delivered the opening speech at the Workshop.

In his introductory report at the plenary session, Associate Professor Dr. Pham Xuan Thach (Head of the Faculty of Literature) suggested the main issues discussed in the conference. Accordingly, since the 1980s, Vietnamese people have been exposed to a number of F. Kafka's short stories through the translations of Doan Tu Hien and Duong Tat Tu from Czech and Russian. During the period from 1954 to 1975, Kafka was translated in South Vietnam and through very special ways, those translations continued to circulate unofficially throughout Vietnam after 1975. In Vietnam, Kafka's readers were almost limited to the university and writer circles. In the research circle, to serve the university circle, Kafka's reception was carried out in two areas: in translation and in research. Kafka's unique art makes it very difficult to classify him into any ideology. If we call Kafka a realist writer, then with his life devoted to the realization of absurdities, with his "bitter humor" technique, we can call his realism a "harsh realism".

In his speech at the conference, Mr. Lukas Musil (Deputy Head of the Embassy of the Czech Republic) expressed his surprise that up to 30 of Kafka's works were translated into Vietnamese: "This proves that Kafka is no longer unfamiliar to the Vietnamese public and research on the influence of Kafka's literature on Vietnam is becoming more and more necessary."

“How was Kafka translated? How did the elite and readers receive his novels? What marks did he leave on the works of the most important writers of contemporary Vietnamese literature? We want to tell the story of the adventure in Vietnam of the literary prophet of our time, the initiator of the literature of the absurd, and thereby illuminate the hidden parts of the literary contact between Vietnamese literature and world literature in the early stages of contemporary Vietnamese literature,” said Associate Professor Dr. Pham Xuan Thach.

Ms. Yvonne Zaugg (Cultural Counselor of the Swiss Federal Embassy) expressed her joy at being present at the Workshop to discuss with researchers the achievements of writer Kafka - the writer considered to be the most influential in the 20th century.

Commenting on Kafka's influence on the public in the 20th century, Professor Le Huy Bac (Hanoi Pedagogical University) commented: “Kafka is present as an inevitable part of human spiritual life. He appeared in the most unexpected places and situations. What he wrote, although not grand and full of morality, still attracts readers in the aspect that makes up Kafka's identity and genius: the very human absurd sadness. For that reason, humanity increasingly realizes that Kafka's essence is dense in life. People breathe Kafka's atmosphere to the point of seeming to forget that it is a product of Kafka. As a genius, Kafka has truly changed the way people read and perceive, even the way they live.”

Associate Professor, Dr. Pham Xuan Thach (Head of the Faculty of Literature, University of Social Sciences and Humanities) reported the introduction to the plenary session.