The German Translation by Irene and Franz Faber

Inspired by Hồ Chí Minh’s gift of Truyện Kiều, Franz and Irene Faber spent seven and a half years translating Nguyễn Du’s epic into German. Their Das Mädchen Kiều became a milestone of Vietnamese-German literary exchange, first published in East Germany in 1964 and reissued in 2015 as a bilingual edition.

In 1954, German journalist Franz Faber, then a correspondent for Neues Deutschland, traveled to Vietnam at the invitation of Hồ Chí Minh, shortly after the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ.

According to Faber’s accounts, Hồ Chí Minh presented Franz with Kim Vân Kiều tân truyện – Histoire de Kiều – a bilingual, annotated Vietnamese-French edition (1931/1951) of the Tale of Kiều by Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh.

That encounter sparked a seven-and-a-half-year translation journey by Franz and his wife Irene Faber, a linguist fluent in five languages who began learning Vietnamese from scratch.

Working together, the Fabers created thousands of index cards to capture the poem’s tone, rhythm, and cultural references.

Their verse translation transformed Nguyễn Du’s 3,254 lines into 9,384 German verses.

First published in East Berlin by Rütten & Loening in 1964, Das Mädchen Kiều remains the only complete published German translation of The Tale of Kiều and, according to Dr. Trương Hồng Quang, was the first translation of classical Vietnamese literature published in the GDR.

In 2015, Dr. Trương Hồng Quang and German-Vietnamese visual artist Claudia Borchers reissued the Fabers’ work as a bilingual Vietnamese-German edition. It was published by Thế Giới Verlag, Hanoi, with Borchers’ artwork gracing the cover. Read from one cover, it is in German; turn it over, and it is in Vietnamese.

Das Mädchen Kiêu von Nguyên Du: Das vietnamesische Nationalepos übertragen ins Deutsche von Irene und Franz is available as digital download via online shops and via Claudia Borchers’ website. (Note: the digital edition includes only the German text.)