Translating Korean Literature: The Reality
A paper given by Brother Anthony (An Sonjae) at The Korean PEN
Center's 3rd International Symposium 'Korean Literature Within World Literature'
held in Seoul in November 1996.
I do not know if I am really qualified to speak on this topic. I have
translated the works of a number of modern Korean writers, but I have not
had much time to read what other people have translated. However, I have
recently had to read and evaluate quite a large number of translations;
this has shown me how hard it is to produce really convincing work. I think
that my own experience helps me to understand why that is.
I often hear it said that many of the translations of Korean literature
published in the past were no good; still, I believe that we should venerate
those who in earlier decades strove to make translations of Korean literature.
They were often inspired by an unselfish love of Korea. We owe them respect
and gratitude.
In recent years, agencies have been set up offering considerable financial
incentives to translators and publishers. Yet money cannot turn poor
translators into good ones, or dull works into interesting ones. We all
know that as a result of the funding available, translations have been
made and published of works that need perhaps not have been translated,
and that were sometimes translated by people who were not well qualified
to translate them. The world remains by and large unimpressed by what it
knows of Korean literature.
The recent announcement by the Ministry of Culture and Sports of an even
larger set of grants for translation, accompanied by conditions so totally
divorced from reality as to be completely unacceptable, risks giving rise
to even more corruption, with poor translations by unqualified individuals
being published by unknown presses, and quickly vanishing into oblivion,
at the Korean tax-payers' expense.
The main questions needing consideration are: which works should
be translated, who should be doing the translation, and who are
they being translated for? This last question should come first,
for it needs particular thought. I would make a clear distinction between
translations made mainly for people interested in Korea and the study of
Korean literature, and translations destined for non-specialist readers.
The Korean Studies audience is very limited but very important, since these
are the people most eager for knowledge of Korean literature. But their
needs are not those of an ordinary reader looking for an interesting book
to read for pleasure in their leisure hours.
People studying Korean literature in the Asian Studies Departments of universities
abroad will be interested in having access to translations of works that
enjoy a high reputation within Korea, whether or not those works appeal
much to general readers abroad. There is a widespread illusion in Korea
that scholars and students involved in Korean Studies do not need translations,
that they can easily read the originals. This is not realistic, unless
they have spent many more years than I have in Korea or have grown up speaking
Korean. While quite a large proportion of the students in Korean Studies
programmes in the United States seem to be ethnic Koreans, elsewhere this
is not the case.
All the major works of older Korean literature as well as historically
significant modern Korean literature need to be available in translation
for students and scholars who are not able to read the originals unaided;
for example, those in Comparative Literature programs, or those specializing
in Chinese or Japanese studies interested in making comparative studies.
Such translations should ideally be published together with the originals,
and should be made with explanatory notes where needed, so as to serve
at the same time as a pedagogical tool, assisting the foreign scholar to
deal more confidently with the original. I think in particular of the great
works of classical Korean history and literature.
One problem facing the literary translator in deciding which works to translate
is the pressure coming from the more official sectors of Korean literary
society to give priority to works that were written several decades ago,
by the writers, already old or dead, admired by the older generation. In
particular, the deep divisions existing within the Korean literary scene
sometimes mean that poor translations of approved writers are funded while
the translation of writers critical of the government and its supporters
are discouraged. The Korean Culture and Arts Foundation refused to support
work on Ko Un only a few years ago.
Part of the difficulty facing members of the international academic community
interested in having access to translations of Korean literature for research
purposes is the lack of any comprehensive bibliography of what has
been translated and where it is available. As we all know, a lot of translations
have been published in the form of anthologies or in journals such as the
Korea Journal. In recent years a number of attempts have been made to compile
lists of what has been published in translation, in various languages.
Without some kind of comprehensive bibliographical guide, or database,
the researchers, would-be translators, and the funding agencies, are unable
to know what translations already exist.
In the 1980s one bibliography was compiled but remained unpublished, all
that remains is a computer printout. That work would have been most valuable,
for it included a listing of the individual poems available in translation.
The only recently published bibliography of English translations of Korean
literature is that very inaccurately made by Professor Park On-za, published
by Hanshin in Seoul. Her list is limited to complete volumes, it does not
include works published in periodicals such as Korea Journal. It contains
nothing published since 1990 and was compiled only on the basis of books
available in major libraries in Seoul, without consultation of the holdings
of SOAS in London, or the major American libraries. It is marred by numerous
errors.
Her initial research listed 22 mixed anthologies, 81 volumes of poetry,
only 4 volumes of drama, 118 volumes of fiction, and 25 volumes of essays,
a total of only 250 volumes. She is now including in her listings the collection
of some 600 volumes and works of Korean literature in English translation
made by Dr Horace Underwood over the last thirty years.
Her work will be superseded by that now being done at Harvard by Frank
Hoffman and his colleagues, who are compiling a Korean Studies bibliographical
database for publication in CD-Rom format. This database will include as
far as possible everything published in all areas of Korean Studies, including
translations of literature, in all languages using the Roman alphabet.
As of October 1996, it has 100,000 titles. This is very good news for any
one needing to do research on Korean Studies materials.
Of course, a lot of works of Korean literature written in past decades
are now of purely historical significance; to have a translation of them
can be important for specialists, but even a less-than-perfect translation
will serve to give an idea of their contents. No one will ever re- translate
them or re-publish them, since the potential readership is very limited.
Here we touch on a major difficulty, as we turn to the question of translations
for a wider readership. Western readers in general read mainly for
pleasure. They have a very wide choice of books available, written
in English or translated from all over the world, poetry, fiction, and
non- fiction. I am not sure that modern Korean fiction is going
to mean very much to many of them. It is often set in or just after the
Korean War. Or it evokes the painful events of more recent Korean history,
the move to modern city life, for example, or Kwangju. Such works, evoking
experiences of suffering, death, and survival, are very highly admired
in Korea, for obvious and perfectly valid reasons, and they probably represent
the bulk of what has been translated.
However, we must not forget that Korean values and expectations regarding
literature, like the Korean experience of history, are different from those
of Britain or America. This is what gives Korean literary works their distinctive
"Korean" character and it can be part of what makes them interesting;
only quite a large number of these works are not very "entertaining"
in the western sense. This is not perhaps the kind of fiction that will
appeal to general readers in Europe or the States. Plot development is
often limited, the psychology stereotyped, and the narrative slow-moving.
In addition, the characters' psychology and the local settings would need
far more explanation and development than they usually get.
The same holds for poetry. If a lot of contemporary Korean poetry offers
little to interest the English or American reader, part of the reason may
be that most modern Korean poetry seems to have no relationship with the
kind of poetry being written in today's outside world. Korean poets have
no access to it, because contemporary poets from abroad are not being invited
to Korea and their work is not being translated into Korean. From an outsider's
point of view, the poetry at present being written and published in Korea
by "recognized poets" and their young imitators mostly seems
old-fashioned and conventional, there is almost no wit, no bite, or sparkle,
or striking originality.
If more Korean professors in English Departments here would provide Korea's
readers and writers with good, creative translations of recent, really
contemporary English and American poetry, works published in the
last five years, that is, they would deserve our thanks. Then again, if
most modern Korean poetry being translated today fails to find any significant
number of readers abroad, that is also in part because it is often translated
by people who have not read any contemporary English poetry and have no
sense of how to write it.
This is related to a grave flaw in Korean academic culture: the systematic
undervaluing of translation as a scholarly activity in Korea. We
all know that the art of translating western literature is highly esteemed
in Japan. One of the major points in the Meiji reforms was to encourage
good translations of the great works written in the West and as a result,
until today, the work of translating is considered to be a major part of
a scholar's professional activity.
In Korea translation has very largely been left to publishers in search
of easy money. We all know that they have commonly given the texts of works
they want translated to their unemployed friends, as a way of helping them.
When academics have been asked to translate, they have farmed the work
out by chapters to their students or younger colleagues. Many of the great
works of world literature have still to be translated into Korean, while
almost no one is interested in contemporary writing, until the writer
receives the Nobel Prize, when the translation has to be done in two weeks.
The best way for Korean poetry to become part of world poetry is for Korean
poets to read good translations of what other countries' poets are writing,
then start travelling, participate in poetry events, meet foreign poets,
read to them and hear them read, talk together. Few poets apart from Ko
Un are at present doing this. One sign that today's Korean poetry is out
of touch with international currents is the almost complete absence
of "performance poetry" in Korea; the printed page remains
the only medium and if poetry-readings are held at all, they usually involve
soulful lamentations or ranting. Quite frankly, there are few other countries
where weeping is considered a normal and desirable response to literature.
The most important form of world literature today is fiction, and similar
problems appear. This year is the Year of Literature, one hundred Koreans
living overseas having some relationship with things literary were invited
to Korea for several days; participants in today's Conference have been
invited, but otherwise not a single foreign writer has been invited,
with the exception of Nobel Prize winners, who are too busy to come. Korean
writers need to be given much more exposure to what kinds of fiction are
being written across the world today, perhaps not so much in America or
Western Europe as in other places with post-colonial legacies similar to
Korea's.
The discovery and encouragement of Korean writers that can interest readers
in the outside world cannot safely be made by Korean critics applying
their Korean criteria of what ought to be admired. This underlies the failure
of the funding activities of agencies such as KCAF or Daesan, where the
decisions are made by committees composed entirely of senior Korean academics
and critics, whose first consideration is the response of Korean readers
to the original work.
It is the major international literary publishers who are best equipped
to judge if a work is capable of pleasing a large audience in America or
Europe; such publishers will never take a title unless they are convinced
of its quality, and their decision will not be influenced by the offer
of publishing subsidies; they cannot be bought. Once they are committed
to a work, they will do all that they can to ensure its commercial and
critical success.
When Yi Munyol's "The Poet" was published last year by the Harvill
Press, England's most reputed publishers of translated fiction, they freely
chose the title after a survey of what Korean works were likely to interest
their readers. They were looking for works with literary depth and plot
complexity sufficient to transcend purely national dimensions, and
able to stand beside the work of the world's great masters. Then they began
to search for a translator. They were at no point influenced by offers
of support from any foundation, although they realized that there was little
likelihood that the book would become a best-seller. They simply felt that
their list was incomplete without at least one major Korean author.
Of course, there are examples that go in another direction. Most of my
translations have been published by Forest Books, a publisher that can
only be called a "small press" although their books are
well printed and distributed. They have specialized in publishing translations
of poetry and drama that big publishers were not interested in, because
of their lack of potential readership. Everyone in Britain now knows the
name of Forest Books, because when this year's Nobel Prize for Literature
was announced, it was found that they were the only publishers who had
thought it worthwhile publishing English translations of the elderly Polish
poet in question! They had to print 10,000 copies over the weekend to satisfy
impatient readers.
Finally, who should be doing the translation? I want to stress three points:
first, as a general rule, the translation of Korean literature should be
done by people whose native tongue is the target-language,
not Korean. Second, their work should be checked for errors in their
understanding of the Korean by a Korean with an excellent command of English,
and who admires the work being translated. Third, there are no perfect,
definitive translations, translators should be humble about their own work
and generous about the work of others.
Translations have to satisfy two radically different conditions. They have
to remain faithful to their original, and at the same time they
have to be written in a convincing literary style of language. I
believe that only a born "native speaker" has access to the variety
of alternatives of constructions and vocabulary that allow them to make
a natural, fully convincing literary transla- tion. Satisfying translations
cannot normally be made by a Korean doing a rough draft, with a native
speaker merely brought in to polish and check afterwards. In such cases
an initial translation is already formed and the polishing process only
takes the translation farther away from the original without adding any
quality other than grammatical accuracy.
I am deeply disturbed by translators whose work is published under their
name alone, and who in a note express thanks "to the many friends
and colleagues" (at times named but often unnamed) who "read
my draft versions and offered invaluable comments and help". I consider
this to be an irresponsible way of proceeding, because there cannot be
a consistent relation between the original and the translation if all kinds
of different corrections are accepted.
That there always needs to be a co-translator ought to be obvious, given
the great difference between Korean and English and the difficulties that
ensue. The names of translator and co-translator should be mentioned
together on the title page, as a matter of simple honesty. In particular,
it is very galling for a non Korean who has spent many hours trying to
make something of a Korean colleague's rough draft to find their name relegated
to a casual note of thanks. In this age of huge subsidies and translation
prizes, the percentage of the collaboration needs to be be established
in exact figures, too. It might be added that unless they are themselves
great experts, people setting out to translate works of older Korean literature
such as hansi are in particular need of much skilled guidance from specialists.
Today, in various countries we are seeing the emergence of ethnic Korean
literature written in English, and of translations made by ethnic Koreans
who are native-speakers of English, of writers who seem to them to be worth
translating. Their perceptions are those of their own country and culture,
not of South or North Korean cultural authorities. The publication of a
review like the award-winning first number of Muae last year, or the acclaim
given to Lee Chang- rae's "Native Speaker" does more to enhance
the world's perception of literature related to Korea than any of our translations.
If a Korean is going to gain a universal reputation and maybe one day win
the Nobel Prize, that writer needs to have been recognized, known, and
regularly published abroad for twenty years. The writer has to be
a good friend and colleague of writers and critics in many countries, at
ease in speaking English and perhaps another language; if possible they
should have an agent abroad, and a regular publisher. The money now being
wasted on translation-pushing would be better spent on giving unconditional
travel grants to promising, original young writers. They are the future
of Korean literature, at home and abroad.