A Spanish translation of Truyen Kieu (Tale of Kieu) at Xuan Thu bookstore in downtown Ho Chi Minh City.

A meeting portends exciting happenings for Vietnamese literature, but it’s no time to get carried away.

With blessings from the highest authority in the country, the association will organize a major national conference to promote Vietnamese literature abroad.

This is a much more ambitious undertaking than a similar event organized seven years ago that gathered around 16 foreign guests and cost a few hundred million dong.

The six-day conference next January envisages 300 foreign translators, publishers and others interested in Vietnamese literature, from 38 countries as well as an exhibition at the National Library in Hanoi showcasing Vietnamese works that have been translated into foreign languages and vice versa.

“I estimate only 50 foreign guests will actually attend, but that would be good enough for a start,” said Hoang Thuy Toan, a veteran translator in charge of the exhibition.

More than two decades into the nation’s shift to a market-based economy, the association feels it is high time that Vietnamese literature has a larger presence in the international market.

It is not that local literature has been languishing in obscurity.

In its heyday, the Soviet Union did a systematic job of introducing Vietnamese writers. Local works translated into Russian ranged from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of copies.

Classical works such as Ho Chi Minh’s Prison Diary, Nam Cao’s Chi Pheo and To Hoai’s The Adventures of a Cricket had been translated from Russian into many other languages.

Over the past two decades, several countries including the US, the Republic of Korea, Sweden and Japan have also started translating works of Vietnamese authors. A few, especially Bao Ninh and Nguyen Huy Thiep, have attained more popularity worldwide than the rest.

Yet, all things considered, Vietnamese literature isn’t as well known as it merits.

For instance, in the US, the country with the highest number of guests (26) invited to the conference, American poet Bruce Weigl said the market could easily absorb many more Vietnamese titles.

Proponents believe Vietnamese literature’s international standing shouldn’t be left to individual and spontaneous efforts that have characterized post-USSR translations, or what literary critic Pham Xuan Nguyen called “mere border trade.”

There may be other reasons explaining why local literature is little known worldwide, such as the still restricted local publishing market. “But the most important one is that we don’t know how to introduce ourselves,” said Nguyen, also vice president of the Hanoi Writers Association.

This time around, the Writers Association aims to set that right with as thorough an introduction as they can pull off.

Association chairman, poet Nguyen Huu Thinh, recently told t