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Translating
Poetry Brother Anthony A presentation read at the 3rd
Korean Writers Forum in Gyeongju on September 14, 2017. “Translating
Korean poetry into English” will be much more realistic
a topic for 20 minutes. I will try to suggest answers to
the questions: Translate What? Why Translate? And How to
Translate? But what do we mean by “translate”? A poem is
a text written in a particular language. A poem is
usually seen as being a unity of “sound and sense.” The
aspect “sound” is almost always there, even when a poet
is writing poems which are intended to be read silently
with the eyes. Many Korean poets find it difficult to
“perform” their poems aloud at readings and festivals
yet still the text of a poem in Hangeul is essentially
an indication of the poem’s sounds. In this it is
different from a poem in Chinese characters, where
“sense” exists independently of the way the characters
are pronounced; although even with those ideograms, the
rules governing poems in Classical Chinese include
patterns of rhyme. The essential point is that when a
poem is translated into another language, both sound and
sense are going to change, the sounds completely, the
words conveying the sense more or less radically. In
recent years I have quite often spoken about the desire
many Koreans harbor that the translation of a Korean
poem into English should essentially be “the same” poem
as the original. Yet that is not possible. A poem in
English is not, by definition, a Korean poem, even when
a publisher identifies the translated text as still
being “by” the Korean poet. Kim Sowol or Ko Un never
wrote poems in English, “Azaleas” is not the title of a
poem “by” Kim Sowol. . It would really be more correct
always to say: “A translation into English of the Korean
poem xxx by yyy.” I then want to specify that the
creative act by which the original poem came into being
is only parodied by the act by which the translation of
it arises. The original poet had full liberty to write
what s/he wanted to write. The translator who is charged
to produce a “translation” does not have that liberty;
even when following modern trends and aiming to produce
a free “version” rather than a (more or less) precise
equivalent, we are still bound to be limited and
constrained at some point by what is in the original.
The translator is aiming to provide an “adequate
equivalent” of a poem, using another language. The term
“adequate equivalent” comes from a discussion of
translation by Paul Ricoeur. But who will decide if our
translations are “adequate”? Whom must they satisfy? With the English version of Han Kang’s “The
Vegetarian,” we recently saw how rapidly Koreans reach
for the original of a translation and start to look for
“errors.” This automatic tendency to find fault might be
because most dedicated readers of literature in Korea
are engaged in teaching and spend hours correcting their
students’ writing, until it becomes a habit. But it
certainly shows that in Korea there is a very strong
assumption that a translator is obliged to reproduce, if
not the order of the Korean words of a text, at least
the exact “meaning” (“sense”) of the words. Everything
else is a “mistake.” There is little discussion in Korea
of what is meant by a “good translation” because the
“good” quality is considered to lie in the Korean
original, so that an “adequately equivalent” translation
will automatically be “good” if it does not betray the
source text by errors. There are Koreans with severely
limited English who produce translations of poems they
love, convinced that since they understand and love the
original they can automatically produce an acceptable
English equivalent. This brings us to the question of what
poems we will translate, the reasons for a choice that
every translator has to make. For Koreans in general,
the obvious top candidates for translation have long
been the poems which they have learned at school,
considered to be the “masterpieces of Korean poetry.”
This selection, ranging from Kim Sowol and Manhae to Bak
Mok-weol and Seo Jeong-ju, then on to various other
officially approved poets, constitutes the “canon” of
modern Korean poetry. The selection of certain poems for
use in school textbooks was often made on the basis of
their nationalistic value as expressions of
anti-Japanese resistance; otherwise, they were seen as
embodying beauties and humane values that schoolchildren
should learn to respect and follow. Such classroom poems
had of course to be fairly short and simple while the
poets could not be political dissidents, let alone those
who sided with the North. Perhaps because “critical
thinking” was not much taught in Korean schools,
generations of Koreans accepted unquestioningly their
teachers’ assurances that these poems were outstanding
works of poetry, worthy to stand beside anything written
in the outside world. These, it was long thought, were
the poems which would establish the high quality of
Korean poetry if only they were “well” translated.
Koreans could not understand that the outside world
might not be much impressed by 진
달래꽃 or 님의 침묵 and the rest, no matter how they were
translated. Here I want to recall the lack of any
common measure between the poetry available in English
and that available in Korean. The living canon of poetry
in English begins with the Anglo-Saxon “Exeter Book”
(“The Wanderer” etc) of the 10th century,
passes through Chaucer and Shakespeare, the Metaphysical
poets, the Romantics of the early 19th
century before branching into the poetry produced in
England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, North America, the
Caribbean, Australia and India . . . . Moreover, a poet
writing in English would until recently at least be more
or less familiar with Homer, Virgil, Dante, Goethe and
much of the literature of Italy, France and Germany. The
same could be said of most European writers. Then, too,
each country in the West has had a rich and varied
production of poetry throughout the 20th and
into the present century, and it is “on the shoulders of
all these giants” that their poets who are writing today
stand, and their readers too. Harold Bloom wrote about
“anxiety of influence” as he pointed out the challenge
facing each young writer setting out to establish a new,
unique voice capable of commanding attention and gaining
an audience amidst such an overwhelming cloud of august
predecessors. At the same time, in recent years, readers
of poetry in the West have turned their attention to the
vast quantities of poetry and fiction being written
today all across the world beyond the “western” cultural
sphere. The most effective way in which contemporary
Korean poetry can become known beyond the
Korean-speaking world is for it to become a dynamic part
of what the English-speaking literary world calls “world
literature.” The world’s poetry in English translation
is found in many literary journals, especially in such
dedicated publications as “Asymptote,” “Modern Poetry in
Translation” and “Words Without Borders.” Full
collections are also published by many major publishers.
These all reflect a desire to hear the voices of people
confronted with life’s challenges in a multitude of
different places and situations. One of the most
important factors here is to find poets who speak of
what it is to be human in terms that transcend national
and linguistic boundaries, and whose poems can remain
alive in translation, deprived of their original
language and national context. It is a vital part of
today’s world culture that these voices are often female
voices. I want to mention here particular
difficulties facing me as a translator of Korean poetry.
They come from the fact of having lived completely in
Korea for nearly forty years. I left England fifty years
ago. Koreans tell me sometimes that I am “more Korean
than many Koreans.” I have experienced Korean history
from the inside since May 1980, I know quite a lot about
the earlier history of Korea, I can understand and at
least to some extent feel what I call the “korean-ness”
of Korean poetry, the way it echoes the painful history
out of which it has grown. Now that history is largely
unknown in the outside world, whether it be the
humiliation of the Japanese annexation or the tragedy of
division or the traumas caused by industrialization and
urbanization. The poetry resulting from that history has
to be explained, as I did in the introductions to Shin
Gyeong-nim’s “Nong-mu” or Ko Un’s “Maninbo” poems about
the Korean War. However, that is not my main difficulty.
Rather it is the way in which my native England, Europe
or the West are now in some ways foreign to me. I have
not kept up in my daily life with social, cultural
changes; I do not speak the language of contemporary
critical literary discourse; I do not have any
widespread network of literary friends, though I am
lucky to know quite a few significant individuals. As a
result I am not sure of recognizing the Korean poets who
might interest the outside world, and I do not have
access to major publishers in order to promote them and
get them published, have them invited to literary
festivals etc. I am not part of cultural life “over
there” in the way (say) Deborah Smith or Don Mee Choi
are. In practical terms, this is significant because of
the importance of personal relations in western literary
circles, where everyone knows everyone. Again, it is not
because Korean readers and critics admire a poet that he
or she will find a wide readership once translated and
published. Much depends on finding advocates in the
target countries, professional readers of world
literature who find something of interest in this or
that younger, innovative Korean writer and talk
enthusiastically about that writer to publishers and
critics. It may even be a writer who does not enjoy a
very high reputation inside Korea, such as Han Kang or
Hye-young Pyun; in poetry, the focus on Kim Hyesoon can
seem surprising when we think of all the other fine
women poets writing in Korea, but it proves very
frustrating to try to promote them, since she is firmly
established as the “token” Korean woman poet of her
generation and there is not much room for anyone else. Having said that, I have to mention the
other side of the coin. Korean writers do not, I
believe, have enough access to vivid, convincing Korean
translations of the work of today’s young writers across
the globe. The translation of foreign poetry into Korean
is especially problematic, I think, especially poetry by
younger writers who do not figure in the curriculum of
Korean departments of English. The periodical “Asia”
offers some such writing in translation but I am not
sure that it is widely read, or that the quality of its
translations into Korean will be convincing. Few Koreans
are familiar with the little-known countries in which so
much fine writing is being produced, or with the many
languages being used in them. Last year, “Words Without
Borders” published a list of 31 volumes of poetry and
fiction by (contemporary) women available in English
translation, from Croatian, Norwegian, Lebanese,
Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic . . . the only
Korean work was, of course, “The Vegetarian.” Related to what I have just been saying is
the troublesome question of how a poem should be
translated. I have already mentioned the Koreans’
impulse to check any translation for its accuracy, its
“faithfulness” to the original. They expect a translated
poem (or novel) to say what the original says, in as
nearly as possible the same way, without additions or
omissions. That is far from being the method of
translation encouraged in the West, where “creative
rewriting” is thought to be essential for a work to be
made accessible (the negative term would be
“domesticated”) in its new country of adoption. As I
have already said, Korean writers do not usually model
themselves on the writing being produced elsewhere,
their models are Korean, even if sometimes they refer to
non-Korean figures, such as Sylvia Plath or Frida Kahlo.
The result is, inevitably, a considerable gap between
the way a Korean poet writes and an English-language
poet who is exposed to influences from a number of
different sources, and who belongs consciously to a
cosmopolitan community in which national identity is
hardly a consideration. As a result, a closely
translated Korean poem will often sound unfamiliar and
disconcerting. Once I allowed a North American living in
San Francisco to edit the style and flow of some poems
by Ko Un I had struggled to translate “accurately.” Ko
Un’s wife objected strongly: “You make him sound like a
beat poet!” That was the whole point, but for her that
was unacceptable because he was a Korean poet, not a
wild hippy. She wanted him to sound Korean in English.
On the other hand, American translators of Korean
fiction who translate colloquial Korean as mid-western
Yankee dialect can certainly be blamed for confusing the
cultural codes. The issue of what voice a translated
poem should be using is not as challenging as a novel
with page after page of freewheeling dialogue, perhaps.
But at a deeper level, there is the fact that the voice
of a Korean poet will not sound like the voice of a
British or American poet, because they respond to
experiences in very different ways. They do not speak of
life in the same way. The flow of images and emotions is
different, even the tone of voice, but above all, when I
read (say) Jane Hirshfield or Carol Ann Duffy, I am
confronted with forms of humor which I simply do not
find in Korean writing. Western poets are often really
funny and they expect their audience at readings to
laugh loudly; poetry is a branch of the entertainment
industry, while older Korean poets are still reading in
sobbing, sentimental voices to a backing of soulful
violin music. I believe that many Koreans respond
positively to my translations because I remain as close
as I can to the original sense, while managing to
produce a reasonably poetic flow of sounds and rhythms,
so that my translations “work” when read aloud in
English. I think that is a reasonable way of translating
Korean poetry and I could not work in any other way. I
always try to find someone who can check my translations
for mistakes. Korean is such a difficult language and I
have not mastered it fully enough yet! I lack the brash
self-confidence of translator-poets who reckon they can
do what they want with a poem because they know better
than the original poet what he should have said. I hope
that my way of “conservative’ translation is an
expression of respect toward the Korean poet who knew
what s/he wanted to say and how it should be said. But
in England I know there are translation workshops where
that is completely overturned and the participants are
encouraged to rewrite works quite radically without any
reference to the original, “improving on it.” There are
many awards for literature in translation where the
“accuracy” of the translation, its respect for the
original, is not even a question or a factor in judging.
All that counts is that a version of a text has been
published and has been found interesting. Korean poetry is unlike western poetry, I
would say, because its models and conventions are
different. Many poets admired in the West today speak in
very personal voices, talking about their fragilities
and failures humbly and often lightly, without
dramatizing. I read many younger Korean poets where the
poem is less intensely personal, more a verbal exercise
in how to be poetic without having anything much to say.
I do not think that such poetry can be translated
convincingly, even Koreans wonder what it means.
“Confessional” poetry should be just that, honest and
sincere without sentimentality. Ko Un’s “Maninbo” is not
difficult to read in translation because the poems evoke
easily recognizable life-stories; Jeong Ho-seung’s poems
offer little nuggets of universal wisdom and yearning in
the face of separation and loss. Kim Seung-Hee writes
feminist poems of great power, and more “concrete”
linguistic poems which defy precise translation. Ko
Hyeong-ryeol invites his readers to ponder the line
dividing illusion and reality. Lee Si-young evokes the
distance between past and present; Kim Soo-bok equally
explores memories. Etc etc. For a translator, the
biggest challenge is to ensure that each translated poem
speaks in its own distinctive voice, the right voice for
that poem, and somehow avoids sounding like any other
poem. Each poem has its own value, its own identity,
whether in Korean or in translation; to transmit that
poem beyond the limits of national frontiers and
national languages
is the translator’s essential task. |