While listening to the song Vô Thường by Karik and Orange, I remembered a conversation I once had with my sophomore year roommate. This roommate once walked past me as I was watching an Asian tv series with subtitles on. Being curious, she stopped and watched with me for a bit. Her comment afterwards was that she couldn't get into the show because "nobody talks like that in real life." At the time I was really confused as to what she meant because of course people talk like that; if they didn't, why would anyone watch the show? But while I was listening to this song and thinking about the words they used, I could sort of understand what she meant. A lot of Vietnamese literature, music, and even just regular daily conversations can be really poetic for lack of a better description. In this song, the lyricist chose to use more archaic sounding words. For example, "Từ bằng hữu, đến nhân tình," which can be translated to "from friends to lovers," except in super old historical terms. To a native listener, this choice added depth to the lyric's message—sounding incredibly beautiful and not at all odd. However, in English it would be like if you were listening to a pop song and the lyrics were Prince Henry's monologue from Shakespeare. I'm exaggerating a little, but you get the point. Even daily dialogue in Vietnamese can be like this. This is partly because of how many reduplicative words there are in common language use. Reduplicative words are usually used to (de)emphasize the adjective or to support the root words' meaning. An example of this is "lặng lẽ," (meaning quiet to the point of forsaken loneliness) which was also used in the song.
I personally really like this song because of how elegantly the lyricists combined historical and modern words to convey a bone-deep loneliness. However, this also makes it harder for the song's message to be conveyed in other languages.
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