By Brother Anthony (An Sonjae)
Sogang University, Seoul
Works of literature
are, presumably, always written as exercises in communication; yet the
communication is always more or less limited. The words a writer uses and the
attitudes to life a work expresses may already raise barriers to communication
with readers in the writer's own land and culture. More obviously, the
diversity of languages means that people will have little or no access to works
written elsewhere in the world unless a translator intervenes. Speaking as a
literary translator, I want to outline some individual responses of Americans
to the poet Ko Un, and some of the
problems and pleasures that I think non-Korean readers may find in approaching
his works. I am not sure where this will bring us, but I hope that it will be
an interesting journey.
Ko Un was born in
1933, which means that today he is nearer 70 than 60. Yet he is full of energy
and publishes several new books every year. He is surely Korea's most prolific
writer and he himself cannot say
for sure how many books he has published in all. He guesses that it must be
about 120, volumes of many different kinds of poetry, epic, narrative, and
lyric, as well as novels, plays, essays, and translations from classical
Chinese.
In recent years he
has made journeys to many parts of the world, including Australia, the
Netherlands, Mexico... He returned early this year (2000) from a year spent in
the United States, in the course of which he lectured regularly on Korean
literature at Harvard and Stanford Universities, and gave dozens of other
lectures and readings of his own work all over the country. He reckons he made
nearly 50 flights during the year, crisscrossing the United States and Canada
in all directions. His audiences were composed of people from many American ethnic groups. He was also able to
spend time with many of North America's most important poets, including Robert
Hass, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder...
He made a deep
impression wherever he went, especially when he was reading his poems in the
husky, tense, dramatic manner he favors. It seemed to make little or no
difference that most of his audience could not understand a word he was saying.
He speaks little or no English but time after time a deep communication was
established before anyone read an English translation or summary or translation
of what he had been saying. After the drama of his own performance, the
translations usually sounded rather flat, I fear.
Ko Un's ability to
communicate beyond language is a gift that other Korean writers can only envy
him for. There are some people who do not seem to need words in order to
communicate, it is part of their charisma. By contrast, it is sometimes almost
impossible for people who speak the same language and know each other very well
indeed to establish any kind of meaningful communication, as parents and
teen-aged children regularly discover. There are many barriers to communication
and many are the arts by which people have tried to overcome them. In the case
of Ko Un, who cannot be every day giving readings, there is an urgent need to
make translations of his work available. In bringing Ko Un's writings to a
world audience, I am acting to
make cross-cultural communication possible in one particular case.
Since many, even in
Korea, are not familiar with Ko Un's life story, it may be good to begin with a
summary of it, since that in turn may help to pinpoint some of the difficulties
we encounter in translating his writings. He was born in 1933 and grew up in
Kunsan, a town on the west coast of North Cholla Province. Echoes of his
childhood experiences in the Korea of the1930s and 1940s can be found in the
earlier volumes of the great series known as Maninbo, of which 15
volumes have so far appeared. The traditional life of the farming villages, the
intense awareness of extended family relationships, the poverty and the high
level of infant mortality all make this a world far removed even from modern
Korea, and very unfamiliar to non-Korean readers. Readers are expected to know
that when Ko Un was a child, Korea was under Japanese rule, anjd to know what
that signifies for Koreans still today.
In 1950, war broke
out and Ko Un was caught up in almost unimaginably painful situations, which
were in strong contradiction with the warm human community he had grown up in,
as Koreans slaughtered each other mercilessly. As a child, Ko Un had been something
of a prodigy, learning classical Chinese at an early age with great facility,
and encountering the world of poetry in 1945 through the chance discovery of a
book of poems written by a famous leper-poet. His sensitivity was not that of
an ordinary 18-year-old and he experienced a deep crisis when confronted with
the reality of human wickedness and cruelty.
This might have
destroyed him completely but instead he took the step, which many may find hard
to understand, of becoming a Buddhist monk, leaving the world at a time when
the world was a very ugly place. His great intellectual skills meant that he
rapidly became known and was given important positions but more important to Ko
Un were his experience of life on the road as he accompanied his master, the
famous monk Hyobong, on endless journeys around the ravaged country.
Ko Un's character
is intense, uncompromising, he is easily driven to emotional extremes and he
soon began to react against what he felt was the excessively formal religiosity
of many monks. The reader of his work has therefore to follow him through
shadows cast by intense despair. He felt obliged to stop living as a monk and
in 1960 he became a teacher in Cheju Island. For ten years he lived as a
bohemian nihilist while Korea was brought toward its modern industrial
development under the increasingly fierce dictatorship of Park Chung-hee. The
climax came in 1970 when Ko Un went up into the hills behind Seoul and drank
poison. He should have died but was found and brought down to hospital.
His life was saved
at the opportune moment, for the declaration of the Yushin reforms in 1972, by
which Park Chung-hee became president for life and abolished all democratic
institutions, sparked strong protests among writers and intellectuals as well
as among the students who have always acted as Korea's conscience. In the years
of demonstrations that followed, Ko Un's voice rang out and he became the
recognized spokesman of the 'dissident' artists and writers opposed to the Park
regime. He was often arrested and is today hard of hearing from beatings he
received then.
When Chun Doo-hwan
rose to power in 1980, Ko Un was arrested along with Kim Dae-jung and many of
Korea's major 'dissidents' and he spent months in prison. It was there, as he
faced the possibility of arbitrary execution, that he formed the project of
writing poems in commemoration or celebration of every person he had ever
encountered. No one, he reckoned, should ever be simply forgotten, since every
life has immense value and is equally precious as historical record. This was
the origin of the poems in the Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives) series. Soon
after he was freed he married and in 1985 a daughter was born. He went to live
in Ansong, two hours from Seoul. He began a new life as a householder, husband,
and father, while continuing to play a leading role in the struggle for
democracy and for a socially committed literature.
There are people
who say that a poet's life has nothing to do with the poems he or she writes
but that is hardly tenable. It is a theory that considers poetry uniquely from
a formal standpoint and excludes every aspect of personal, social, or
historical context. Every word Ko Un writes is rooted in and informed by the
experience of life I have just outlined. It is inconceivable that a man with
such a life-story should not write poems deeply marked by it. He has a very
intense sense of history, and of his writing as a mirror of Korean history.
On the other hand,
his life story cannot tell us anything about the quality of Ko Un's writing. He
has always been such a controversial figure, from the moment his first book of
poems was published and he renounced his life as a Buddhist monk, that in Korea
evaluation of his work cannot be
separated from responses to his life and social options. In particular, the
Korean literary establishment has for a long time been divided about the
general question of the social responsibilities of the writer. Many noted
writers avoided trouble under dictatorship by refraining from commenting on
social issues, writing poetry of intense self-centeredness, private ponderings
full of abstruse symbolism, uniquely concerned with cultivating aesthetic
dimensions.
Ko Un and many
others chose not to follow them but instead defied censorship to write and
speak out. For many years Ko Un could not get a passport. He was blacklisted as
a dangerously subversive dissident. Because the military regimes claimed to
represent true Korean democracy, any one who criticized them was by definition taking
sides with the Communist enemy in the North! Older literary critics are often
still unwilling to admit the value or interest of Ko Un's writing. They have
grown up with fixed ideas about what constitutes literary excellence and he
does not fit in.
The topic of this
paper is one I have explored in various ways in other papers and it can perhaps
best be encapsuled in a question: What meaning can modern Korean literature
have for people who have not experienced Korean history? Within any literary work we find not
only the writer but also an implied audience. A Korean writer is not, usually,
consciously writing for a uniquely Korean readership, but writers inevitably
assume a certain shared level of experience in their readers. This is
reflected, most obviously, in the many things that are taken for granted, that
are not explained or mentioned explicitly.
The most familiar
example of the difficulty that arises is the question of the division of Korea.
A vast quantity of prose and poetry has been written in Korea on the theme of
'division' and such writings are a recognized category of modern Korean
literature. The pain of the violent separation of families, the exclusion from
the land of their birth of the millions who fled southward before and during the
Korean war, the resulting sense of alienation from full national identity and
the paralysis of vital aspects of Korean history, as well as the resulting
lop-sided cultural changes related to industrialization and westernization in
the south... all these topics and the related pain need no explanation in
Korea, but they are a life-experience that is hardly conceivable to someone who
has never left the peace of, say, rural Vermont or of Kyoto.
Ko Un's poetry is
not, usually, overtly political. He is not an explicitly protesting poet, as
others have been. Neither is he a 'worker poet' like Park No-hae. Almost the
only poems that directly refer to political events are those few he wrote after
the massacres in Kwangju in 1980. But that only makes the question more
complex. Why, people might ask, does he write as he does? Why are there so few
directly "social" poems and so many really rather difficult ones?
The answer would
probably have to be the obvious one : because that's the kind of poet (or
writer) Ko Un is. Take it or leave it. And that is the kind of writing that I
have been trying to translate into English for the past ten years or so, having
chosen to take it rather than leave it. I always work in tandem with Professor
Kim Young-Moo of Seoul National University, so in what follows I will often
refer to 'we' since this is a shared project.
First, we published
in 1993 in the Cornell East Asia Series, a selection taken from all the poems
Ko Un had published before 1990, The Sound of my Waves. Then we published
with Parallax Press (Berkeley) a volume of 108 Zen Poems to which the
publishers gave the title Beyond Self. In the meantime we had translated
Ko Un's Buddhist novel, Hwaom-kyong. It has not yet been published. In
the following years we prepared translations of 180 poems taken from the first
10 volumes of the Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives) series. They, too, are
still unpublished. At the moment we are completing the translation of a
selection of poems from the volumes Ko Un has published since 1990.
I have already said
that Ko Un is becoming a well-known literary figure in the United States, as
well as elsewhere, thanks to his visits and the direct impact of his presence.
Yet he cannot express himself directly in English and must always depend on an
interpreter, except for the communication that passes directly, without words,
by intuition and mutual sympathy. In any case, his poetry is written in Korean
and must be translated. How to translate it is our great challenge. Once it has
been translated, it has to be read and appreciated. That is where
cross-cultural communication occurs.
I have implied that
a major obstacle to reading Korean poetry lies in the very particular
historical context in which it originates and to which it relates in often
indirect ways. Yet on reflection, I do not believe that that is such a very
great problem. Even non-Koreans seem able to understand the poem in which Ko Un
tells of his childhood ambition to be emperor of Japan.
Headmaster Abe
Headmaster Abe
Sudomu, from Japan:
a fearsome man, with
his round glasses,
fiery-hot like
hottest red peppers.
When he came walking
clip-clop down the hallway
with the clacking
sound of his slippers
cut out of a pair of
old boots,
he cast a deathly
hush over every class.
In my second year
during ethics class
he asked us what we
hoped to become in the future.
Kids replied:
I want to be a
general in the Imperial Army!
I want to become an
admiral!
I want to become
another Yamamoto Isoroko!
I want to become a
nursing orderly!
I want to become a
mechanic in a plane factory
and
make planes
to defeat the
American and British devils!
Then Headmaster Abe
asked me to reply.
I leaped to my feet:
I want to become the
Emperor!
Those words were no
sooner spoken
than a thunderbolt
fell from the blue above:
You have formally
blasphemed the venerable name
of his Imperial
Majesty. You are expelled this instant!
On hearing that, I
collapsed into my seat.
But the form-master
pleaded,
my father put on
clean clothes and came and pleaded,
and by the skin of
my teeth, instead of expulsion,
I was punished by
being sent to spend a few months
sorting through a
stack of rotten barley
that stood in the
school grounds,
separating out the
still useable grains.
I was imprisoned
every day in a stench of decay
and there, under
scorching sun and in beating rain,
I realized I was all
alone in the world.
Soon after those
three months of punishment were over,
during ethics class Headmaster Abe said:
We're winning, we're winning, we're
winning!
Once the great Japanese army has won the
war, in the future
you peninsula people will go to Manchuria,
go to China,
and take important positions in government
offices!
That's what he said.
Then a B-29
appeared,
and as the silver 4-engined plane passed
overhead
our Headmaster cried out in a big voice:
They're devils! That's the enemy! he cried
fearlessly.
But his shoulders drooped.
His shout died away into a solitary mutter.
August 15 came. Liberation.
He left for Japan in tears.
Such a story is not
so hard to understand, the poems of Ten Thousand Lives are probably the
easiest for non-Korean readers. The main level of cultural difficulty in them
are the references to aspects of traditional Korean life unfamiliar in other
cultures, the sliding fretwork doors, the hot floors, the kimch'i and makkolli,
the red pepper paste and the names of people. A matter for footnotes and
intuition, not more. Robert Hass, the former American Poet Laureate, wrote of
the Ten Thousand Lives poems in the Washington Post: "they
are remarkably rich. Anecdotal, demotic, full of the details of people's lives,
they're not like anything else I've come across in Korean poetry." (Washington
Post, "The Poet's Voice" Sunday, January 4, 1998)
They are not like
anything else in Ko Un's poetry, either. The selected poems translated in The
Sound of my Waves are arranged in chronological order, and some of the
early poems are of a much more challenging kind :
Spring rain
On your sleeping silence, wave,
spring rain falls and dies.
The night dark in the water may soar up
but by the spring rain on your sleeping
water
wave
far away by that rain's power
far away rocks are turned to spring.
Above this water where we two lie sleeping
a rocky mass looms, all silence.
But still the spring rain falls and dies.
With
poems like this, the most important quality demanded of the reader is a
familiarity with modern poetry, a readiness to allow images to work without a
given framework by which to interpret them. Ko Un's early work is closer to the
general run of modern Korean poetry in that respect, with a strong note of
melancholy and a fondness for puzzling riddles. The poetic effect is often
dependant on the use of unexpected words and images, or seemingly irrational
relations.
Read in chronological sequence, the evolution
of certain themes and characteristics of Ko Un's work soon becomes clear, and
as Ruth Welte wrote recently: "The political poems seem richer in meaning
if the reader has a knowledge of Korea's difficult modern history, but each
poem also stands alone as
statement on the movements of political systems and the damages that
they can cause. Ko Un's poems grow gradually more political but retain their
deep stillness. Even the most politically specific poems have a timeless
feel." (The Chicago Maroon, November 9, 1999). One of the most
famous of Ko Un's "political poems" is "Arrows" :
Transformed into
arrows
let's all go, body
and soul!
Piercing the air
let's go, body and
soul,
with no way of
return,
transfixed there,
rotting with the
pain of striking home,
never to return.
One last breath!
Now, let's quit the string,
throwing away like
rags
all we've had for
decades
all we've enjoyed
for decades
all we've piled up
for decades,
happiness,
the lot.
Transformed into
arrows
let's all go, body
and soul!
The air is shouting!
Piercing the air
let's go, body and
soul!
In dark daylight the
target is rushing towards us.
Finally, as the
target topples
in
a shower of blood,
let's all just once
as arrows
bleed.
Never to return!
Never to return!
Hail, arrows, our
nation's arrows!
Hail, Warriors!
Spirits of the fallen!
Recent Korean
history has been blood-stained and the memory of those who have died for
freedom, democracy, and reunification is regularly celebrated. Yet theirs' is
in some ways an ambiguous martyrdom, it would have been so much better if they
had not died, so young. Ko Un's poem expresses the feelings of many who took
part in the demonstrations of the 1970s and 1980s at which it was often read.
It may not communicate so well with people living in non-heroic situations of
established democracy, although they ought to realize that there are many
struggles demanding of them a similar level of commitment, sacrifice, and hope.
Often they do not realize it and need Ko Un's voice to wake them up.
While he was a
monk, Ko Un underwent training in what the English language calls Zen,
following the Japanese. In fact he plunged into the most demanding and
potentially dangerous form of Zen with such abandon that it caused him a severe
psychic trauma. In any case, Ko Un is deeply influenced by the challenge to
normal rational discourse and logic that is found in the Zen use of language. A
certain kind of Zen aestheticism is familiar to many today in America and
Europe, again mostly identified with things Japanese. Korean monastic Zen is
altogether a tougher thing, I would say, and Ko Un's Zen poems are surely far
more challenging than anything else he wrote, both to translate and to read.
In 1991, Allen
Ginsberg was in Seoul for a rather boringly official poetry conference. He
escaped one evening and was brought to a secret location where Ko Un and he
were supposed to meet and give a joint reading to a select audience. A famous
Anglican priest had visited North Korea and had been sentenced to prison on his
return. It was then, as usual, a fraught time in Korean politics and I am told
that Ko Un, filled with a passion for the reunification of Korea, read and
spoke at such length that Allen Ginsberg was quite forgotten about, sitting
silent in his corner. I was therefore rather relieved when Allen Ginsberg
accepted to write a magnificent Preface to our translations of Ko Un's Zen
poems, only published after his death. Again, the personal encounter and Ko
Un's charisma clearly made a great difference.
Even Ginsberg, very
familiar with the Zen tradition, had to struggle with the poems of a collection
which have the simple Korean title Muonya? "What's that?" --
the essential Zen challenge to any idea that you know anything about anything.
Translating them was a challenge too, like writing a Buddhist sutra on a grain
of rice. Most of the poems are only a few words long and highly elusive. As Ginsberg
wrote: "I can't account for them, only half understand their implications
and am attracted by the nubbin of poetry they represent. Hard nuts to crack --
yet many seem immediately nutty & empty at the same time: "before your
mom / your burbling / was there" i.e. Chortling you had before you were
born." Ginsberg was a great
man, and it is very moving to see how deeply he appreciated Ko Un's work :
"Ko Un is a magnificent poet, combination of Buddhist cognoscenti,
passionate political libertarian, and naturalist historian. This little book of
Son (Zen) poems gives a glimpse of the severe humorous discipline beneath the
prolific variety of his forms & subjects."
I believe that the
Zen poems, Beyond Self was the title the publishers gave it, sold
several thousand copies in the first month. Yet they require the reader to let
go of virtually everything :
A single word
Too late.
The world had already heard
my word
before I spoke it.
The worm had heard.
The worm dribbled a cry.
Summer
The sightless sunflower follows the sun.
The sightless moonflower blossoms in
moonlight.
Foolishness.
That's all they know.
Dragonflies fly by day
beetles by night.
A shooting star
Wow! You recognized me.
An autumn night
Daddy
Daddy
A cricket sings.
Ko Un seems to be a
"poets' poet." Reading the Zen poems, Gary Snyder responded with a
poem of his own:
Not just holding his Zen insights
And their miraculous workings tight to
himself,
Not holding back to mystify,
Playful and demotic,
Zen silly, real-life deep,
And a real-world poet!
Ko Un outfoxes the Old Master and the Young
poets both!
Tributes like that
are the greatest reward a translator can receive. It means that communication
has happened, and that the readers felt confident they were reading what the
poet had written and wanted them to read.
A lot is written today about the act of translation and the position of
the translator, but certainly, as far as poetry translation goes, the
translators should leave as little sign of their work as possible. The poet
must speak, not they.
Part of the
effectiveness of Ko Un's Zen poems in English translation must be attributed to
a third member to our team of translators. Effective translations of Korean
poetry into English are rare because there are few translators who are writers
(or even readers) of contemporary English poetry. It constitutes a serious
limitation. We have been fortunate in finding an American poet and writer, Gary
Gach, who is willing to go through our versions of Ko Un's poems, point out
places where the translations fail to communicate, and make suggestions for improvement.
This negotiation
between "literal" translation and "poetic" translation is
an extremely delicate one. George Steiner
quotes Dryden's definition of
"to paraphrase": "to produce the text which the foreign
poet would have written had he been composing in one's own tongue". (After
Babel p.351) All theories of translation and communication derive from
that. Other people are working at the same task to bring Ko Un's work to
readers in French and Spanish; when he goes to Poland this autumn, translations
of some of his most recent poems into Polish will be waiting for him there.
They will be made from English versions we are now working on.
Ko Un has
established his characteristic way of writing poetry, and the works from
collections published in the 1990s that we are at present translating often
show him transforming simple moments of everyday experience into poetry by a
stroke of imagination, the irruption of an unexpected connection. This can be
seen as a deliberate strategy of 'defamiliarization' which means that his
readers can never know what will come next. His recent poems are longer than
the Zen poems but far richer than the quite simple evocative narratives of the Ten
Thousand Lives. An example, chosen at random, might be "One
Apple":
For one month, two months, even three or
four,
a man kept painting an apple.
He kept on painting
while the apple
rotted,
dried up,
until you could no longer tell if it was an
apple or what.
In the end those paintings were no longer
of an apple at all.
Not paintings of apples,
in the end those paintings were of
shrivelled things,
good-for-nothing things,
that's all they were.
But the painter gained strength,
letting him know the world in which he
lived;
he gained strength,
letting him realize that there were details
he could never paint.
He tossed his brush aside.
Darkness arrived,
ruthlessly trampling his paintings.
He took up his brush again,
to paint the darkness.
The apple was no more,
but starting from there
emerged paintings of what's-not-apple.
My intention in
this presentation has been to suggest a few of the challenges that confront the
translator of Korean literature, and the reader of his translations, and to
point hopefully toward Ko Un as an example of the possibility of cross-cultural
communication. With three more volumes still to be published, the Buddhist
novel, the Ten Thousand Lives, and the recent poems, it is still to
early to say that his work, his specific voice, is adequately represented
abroad. A lot of work remains to be done before the world at large is ready to
exclaim, "Ko Un? Ah yes, the Korean writer!" And only time can tell
if the world will ever exclaim, "Ko Un? Ah yes, the great Korean
writer!" We must wait and see.