Vietnam publisher struggles to issue Western classics focus 09/16/2010

Vietnam publisher struggles to issue Western classics

focus

09/16/2010
HANOI — The title of French author Alexis de Tocqueville’s seminal work, Democracy in America, was not well received by authorities in communist Vietnam, so it appeared under another name.

When Hanoi’s Knowledge Publishing House issued the work three years ago there was no reference to democracy in the title, which became Governance of the American People.

Censorship in the one-party state is only one of many challenges faced by the publisher, which aims to translate key works of Western philosophy, political thought and social science.

It also faces a shortage of translators able to handle the great works of Western thought, as well as a lack of readers.

“Because of war, and problems bequeathed by history, Vietnamese education happened with a near-total absence of universal values contained in the classics,” says Chu Hao, 70, editor and director of the publishing house.

“What one could learn was limited to what was contained in the manuals of Marxism-Leninism,” he says. “Even today, philosophy, especially the history of philosophy, is foreign to Vietnamese students.”.... MORE

Source:  The Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20100916com3.html