du Ciel et des Étoiles (i)

from astrophysicist Trịnh Xuân Thuận at the University of Virginia

Here is a dictionary in love with heaven and the stars. It is 1 of 11 books by Trinh Xuan Thuan that the Walter Royal Davis library of the University of North Carolina campus at Chapel Hill has collected. The astrophysicist wrote 7 of them himself in French.

Of those, we have 2 translated into English. He wrote at least 3 in English himself, then at least his own contributions as named author to 4 books in cosmology where investigators often share credit. He may be responsible for all the English in a fourth book, a dialogue with a native speaker of French.

But both Thuan and the other man are natural scientists, whose language is English when it isn’t math. Why did he write this one in French? Because that is a language of love, love of encyclopedism, of positivism, where vulgarization is a high calling, where we love our bouquins, our darling books.

Du Ciel and des Étoiles is 1 of 62 Dictionnaires amoureux already published and 3 forthcoming when Plon published this one 13 years ago in 2009. Walter Royal Davis holds 23 of the series today, in 2022. Each is passionant, either utterly absorbing or baffling, opaque, like who other people choose to marry.

An American grandson of a war bride, I want the one about Algeria, the one about De Gaulle, the Resistance, and the one about dictionaries by the man who made the Robert. Those are just the ones I may borrow without charge from the library as I did this one. Of course I found them all following up on an astrophysicist with a Vietnamese name.

One of the adults in my small town growing up was the astro-biophysicist Harold Morowitz. He was the man in the textbooks who zapped chemicals with lightning in his lab to see if he could make precursors to amino acids. Harold was a lot of fun.

He and his wife Lucille dumped the afterbirth of one of his kids, my buddy, on the porch of the OB/GYN who had advised against home birth. Harold showed us kids how rubbing alcohol has no effect on the count of flora and fauna on your skin before getting a shot. Such skepticism was the tone of those days here in the United States of America.

Another adult, in the other town just north of New Haven, was my friend Huynh Sanh Thong. He had thrown out his television when the Marines landed at Da Nang in 1965 then devoted himself to encyclopedic labor, translating bodies of Vietnamese literature into English and publishing a generation of positivist scholars working on the nation of Viet Nam. We made friends around 1990 when he had said goodbye to all that.

Thong was at work on his theory of everything. Harold had been one of the first men or women to build in his head an account of creation from the origin of the universe through humanity, and one of the people who then made it possible for anyone with a pencil and library card to learn that sequence of events. Thong was after rather the origins of thought, language and culture, now a common topic, but at that time a disreputable pursuit in the English-language university.

I don’t think it was an accident that Thong’s fellow anti-colonialist, Tran Duc Thao, also addressed the topic. Just hefting and smelling and flipping through Thuan’s book of love for heaven and the stars it seems likely to me that he puts such as Harold and Thong and Thao together for all to read. Stay tuned.

This was the first Viet Nam letter of 2 so far addressed to du Ciel et des Étoiles by Trịnh Xuân Thuận.

The second addresses the article in his encyclopedia on “Conscience.” That’s French for consciousness, on November 21, 2022.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.