It is a rare pleasure when scholars have access to scarce, new, high-quality translations of primary source documents. Anh Q. Tran's study of Tam Giáo Chư Vọng (Errors of the Three Religions—or—Errors), a never-before-published, eighteenth-century Vietnamese Hán Nôm manuscript, began with a research method familiar to historians: tracing sources. Tran wanted to trace the lineage of another well-known work, the Conference of the Four Religions. Part of the Conference was likely sourced from the Opusculum de Sectis apud Sinenses et Tunkinenses (1750, A Small Treatise on the Sects among the Chinese and Tonkinese). The Opusculum itself had three sources: the Dị Đoan Chi Giáo (The Teaching of the Heterodoxy), the Đại Học Chi Đạo (The Way of Great Learning), and a third text that had gone missing. Based on an affinity between the contents of the Errors and the Opusculum, Tran suggests that Errors may well indeed be this missing text (Tran, pp. xiii–xiv). The manuscript could be considered a view of eighteenth-century religions in northern Vietnam, although filtered through the lens of the Italian missionaries who were the authors of the manuscripts (Tran, p. xv).

Although they provide helpful hints about the nature of the way that Vietnamese religions were practiced in the eighteenth century, the reading of the texts should come with two clear caveats. The first is that the texts were more of a reflection on “Tonkinese” religions than those in the total umbrella of contemporary religions of Vietnam. Indeed, although it is a prime example of a substantial contribution to a well-developed field, this is a study specific to the practices of the greater Red River Delta region. The three religions, or tam giáo as they are known in Vietnamese—as a collective assessment of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism—did become popular in other parts of what is now Vietnam by the eighteenth century. However, “Vietnamese religions” is not the scope of Gods, Heroes, and Ancestors, despite Tran's occasional tendency to refer to data presented in a somewhat holistic fashion throughout. The second caveat, which Tran duly mentions in the preface, is that this snapshot is “not a survey of Vietnamese religions in general, but rather a Christian presentation of the ‘errors’ (chư vọng) of the tam giáo in eighteenth-century Tonkin” (Tran, p. xv).

With these caveats in mind, the text is delightful. Tran's masterful translation and analysis brings to life the Errors in a fashion that is positively enjoyable to read. Tran approaches the original text empathetically, which allows for a much more lively reading of the material. Although readers’ reactions to the characters of the translation could vary depending on their sense of humor, there are many points where it is easy to imagine the interactions within playing out on a stage in a theater stuffed to the brim, and the audience roaring with laughter.

Tran's study places the explanation of the context of Errors first, which is a more typical approach for works of translation with a definite purpose. In the first part of Gods, Heroes, and Ancestors, Tran develops a detailed description of the Catholic mission in Tonkin during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, situating the work of French, Italian, and Portuguese missionaries in the Red River Delta region. This context is critical because it informs readers about the nature of the composition and general argumentation to Christian apologist texts.

The third chapter is perhaps the most debatable. Tran provides an excellent overview of the traditional religious practices in Vietnam, specific to the Vietnamese population, without considering the influences of non-Vietnamese minority groups on these practices, which were already apparent in central and south-central regions of Vietnam during the period under question. These studies have already been well detailed by scholars working in the field of Vietnamese studies, including an excellent, inclusive study of Đạo Mẫu goddess worship, which was only published recently in Vietnamese.Footnote ¹ The chapter could have either taken a more inclusive stance toward Vietnamese religions with greater attention to regional variance, or employed a more specific framing, indicating that these are only the Vietnamese religious practices relevant to eighteenth-century Tonkin, to avoid misleading readers who might be less familiar with Vietnamese studies.

Minor critiques aside, the third chapter of Gods, Heroes, and Ancestors provides a phenomenal overview of Vietnamese religious practices and would be a useful introduction for teaching purposes. What is most interesting in this chapter, however, is the way that Tran successfully begins to interlay the explanation of Vietnamese religious practices relevant to the study of Errors with the actual refutations of these practices by Christian authors, an approach that is repeated in the fourth chapter on filial piety and ancestor worship. The last chapter of part one clarifies the theological message of the text, as well as its legacy.

The most significant value of this study, however, is the second part of the book, wherein Tran's talent as a translator shines. The original author of Errors broke the text into three simple sections, with one each on Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. The position of the author of Errors is provocative, in that it becomes clear through reading through the dialogues that it was a strategy to draw upon Confucian critiques of specific practices of Buddhism and Daoism to establish a preference for rational argumentation and refutation of popular religious practices. In the end, it is clear that Gods, Heroes, and Ancestors is a stunning contribution to the studies of Christianity in Asia, Vietnamese history, and Vietnamese religion. To have readily available, readable, and such delightful translations of primary sources such as Errors is a contribution for which the field of Vietnamese studies will remain indebted to Tran for years to come.

If Tran's study is a more typical approach to the scholarly study of translated Hán Nôm texts, with an explanation in the fore, followed by translation and annotation for reference, editors Pascal Bordeaux and Olivier Tessier have produced a study with as broad an audience as possible by bringing the translation to the fore. They set out to provide their readership with an illuminated manuscript of the blind poet Nguyễn Đình Chiểu's impressive nineteenth-century Lục Vân Tiên composition, which would have naturally had to have been composed at first through pure oral recitation and memorization, only later to be written down with the aid of others. Through combining Vietnamese, French, and English versions of the text, in addition to providing glossy, high-quality prints of the original, vibrant, illuminated Hán Nôm manuscript, Bordeaux and Tessier created the potential to reach potential audiences that could range from schoolchildren to college students across the Vietnamese, Francophone, and Anglophone worlds. This incredible feat is even more of a scholarly accomplishment given the presentation of the second volume of the collection, which offers detailed historical contextualization of scholarly studies of the blind poet, Nguyễn Đình Chiểu's epic narrative in verse, meticulous descriptions of the contents of the panels, and a helpful appendix with a vocabulary list of old southern dialect terms no longer in use—which the editors chose to keep in the text—and their more standard contemporary equivalents. There are also fascinating, panel-by-panel annotations of translated terms and choices made for them, as well as contextualization of references within the text. Indeed, if scholars are interested in a rich primary source to assign to students, which is both accessible and enjoyable, Lục Vân Tiên is that text.

Placed in conversation, Tran's study of Tam Giáo Chư Vọng (Errors) and Bordeaux and Tessier's study of Lục Vân Tiên are a demonstration of the recent achievements of scholars in the field of classical Vietnamese studies, an oft-overlooked intersection of East and Southeast Asian studies, within the broader context of Asian studies. Both works confirm that, even in the twenty-first century, after decades upon decades of devoted work and research, it is still possible for scholars to happen upon critical texts that have never been translated for a broader audience and are worthy of publication. They are pinnacle examples of successful approaches to translation, one with a stronger emphasis on historicization and contextualization, and the other with a stronger emphasis on the reading of the text itself.

Both works are phenomenal examples of meticulous study, and perhaps it is even the more mundane choices in translation that might bring to light some of the questions that scholars face when they examine these texts. In the first example, consider the term đánh cầu—which would be almost certainly be translated as “badminton” in contemporary language, although Tran opted for “cricket” in the text (Tran, p. 198). In the second example, miến Nam would most often be translated as “southern” in English, but Bordeaux and Tessier seem to have opted for “South” in the text (Bordeaux and Tessier, p. 2:61). The problem in the first case is that neither cricket nor badminton, as contemporary readers would understand them, existed before the nineteenth century, and therefore could not have been the sport in reference. Instead, jeu de volant or the English “battledore and shuttlecock” might have been a more literal translation. In the second case, the choice between “South Vietnam,” “south Vietnam,” and “southern Vietnam,” might be more subtle for English readers, although the former does seem to reinforce the idea that the later division at the 17th parallel had some historic-cum-cultural precedent. Indeed it may have, but “southern” would have been a better choice, for the sake of accuracy. In the first example, the question is, do mundanities matter in the effort of scholarly translation? The question for the second example is, at what point do deeply politicized language choices of the past transform into mundanities?

Detail-driven questions of translation are of interest to field experts, for whom there are no mundanities, and therefore, Tran's and Bordeaux and Tessier's studies will find an appreciative audience among those most familiar with Vietnamese studies and those who are interested in musing over these considerations. However, the field also rarely benefits from the vital translations of such previously inaccessible texts as Errors and Lục Vân Tiên, which indeed have the potential to reach much broader audiences now, with thanks to the collective efforts of these scholars. With this in mind, these studies indeed contribute toward the effort of promoting the understanding of the history of Vietnamese religions to a much broader audience in the fields of Asian history, Asian religions, studies of Christianity in Asia (in the case of Tran's book), as well as even much broader, popular audiences (in the case of Bordeaux and Tessier's work). Finally, their contributions represent crucial works on the forefront of a revival of the vibrancy of studies of rare manuscripts in Southeast Asia.