Impossible Transfer

Early this year I completed a translation of Kim Myung-hwa’s play The Birthday Party. It appears that there will be a reading of the work in translation at Prelude ‘09, which is set to unfold from Sept. 30th to Oct. 3rd.

Summary: The Birthday Party is about a married woman who’s preparing a celebration for her child’s first birthday–a very big deal in Korean culture–but she’s sick of being a mother and a wife. Her husband’s an adjunct, makes little money and has lofty thoughts that go nowhere. His friends are invited to the party, but all of them are pathetic/cruel/petty in their own ways. Then the woman’s college fling (who happens to be female) pays a visit, and the proverbial shit hits the fan…

SPOTLIGHT: KOREA

2-4pm | Elebash Hall

PRELUDE 09 continues to look beyond New York with its international SPOTLIGHT series. SPOTLIGHT: KOREA will showcase the work of contemporary Korean theater artists, in collaboration with New York directors. Prelude welcomes Seoul-based company Wuturi Players and Marion Schoevaert, and will present excerpts of HongDonggi by playwright Kim Kwang Lim (dir. Steven Rattazzi), The Material Man by celebrated Korean poet Hwang Ji Woo (dir. Allison Troupe-Jensen), and The Birthday Party by Kim Myung Hwa (dir. Esther Chae). Plus, a special Workshop on Korean Mask and Dance Theatre.

September 24th, 2009 | Author: JW | Tags: Birthday party, Dol-nal, Kim Myung-hwa, Korean plays, readings | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

For a while now, I’ve been meaning to post on various things, like the many things I learned at a recent translation workshop, or delightful new things I’ve thought deep thoughts about. But when I sat down to write those things, I wrote these things instead. Slightly angry things. Slightly ranting and raving things. I hope you don’t mind.

I believe in the power of revision. I believe in the value of revisiting a draft, seeing it through new eyes, and coaxing it towards becoming the best version of itself. I put my faith in this process, even when it means that days pass where I only change a single word, then change it back again. I throw my lot in with those who insist that writing is rewriting. And having spent over five years as a freelance editor turned translator, I gladly preach the virtues of paying for a qualified proofreader.

Lately, though, I’d like to know, when is enough enough? When do I get to say: I am done fiddling!

In spring of 2008, I began translating a story as a group project for a translation class. There were seven of us in the group, plus the teacher, plus the other seven people in the class who were working on a separate story. During the class, we worked in groups to create a heavily negotiated draft. Afterward, I was assigned to revise the story and prepare it for publication. The revised version was read by a cross-reader, after which I revised it again. That version was read by an editor. I revised it again. Then the magazine changed editors, and it was read again, revised again. Each stage of revision entailed multiple revisions, multiple days of reading and rereading, tinkering and re-tinkering. Some weeks ago, I sent in my final version and washed my hands of it, finally.

But while the final version was being prepared for printing, the file was sent to me, again. By another editor. The same organization that is publishing the magazine is also putting together an anthology. Now there are more comments. More revisions to be made.

As of now, anywhere between twelve to twenty people, including me, have read this story and its translation and commented on it, fiddled and highlighted, made lengthy notes in the margins. Of the most recent set of comments, many have sent me back to discussions that I had with the first editor and even further back to ones I had in class back in the spring of 2008. Would you be shocked if I told you that I threw the print-out of the story, with margin comments, so hard at the floor that it’s as badly wrinkled as if I had crumpled it with both hands?

At what point do I say cease and desist with the editing? At what point can this story just be done? Is it enough that, in its current state, it “sounds great”? Does it also have to be accurate to the last letter, regardless of the fact that parts of the original story toe (and sometimes stamp) the line of untranslatability? Would it be quicker if I just stepped out of the Matrix briefly and downloaded the author’s brain into my own so I could translate the damn thing all over again with pinpoint lexical accuracy?

I am so done with this story. I am so done with this story.

Ahem. Thank you for reading.

September 15th, 2009 | Author: Sora Kim-Russell | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (2)

Tomorrow is Saturday. Tomorrow is a day of destiny.

Tonight, the cries of Allah-o Akbar are heard louder and louder than the nights before.

Where is this place? Where is this place where every door is closed? Where is this place where people are simply calling God? Where is this place where the sound of Allah-o Akbar gets louder and louder?

I wait every night to see if the sounds will get louder and whether the number increases. It shakes me. I wonder if God is shaken.

Where is this place that where so many innocent people are entrapped? Where is this place where no one comes to our aid? Where is this place that only with our silence we are sending our voices to the world? Where is this place that the young shed blood and then people go and pray — standing on that same blood and pray. Where is this place where the citizens are called vagrants?

Where is this place? You want me to tell you? This place is Iran. The homeland of you and me.
This place is Iran.

June 20th, 2009 | Author: JW | Tags: Iran, Poem, Protests | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Over the past months, President Lee Myung-bak’s administration has been purging the cultural sector of “leftist” leadership, motivated by what some have been calling political careerism and market-oriented populism. Among those dismissed are Kim Yoon-su, director of National Museum of Contemporary Art, Kim Jeong-heon, chairman of the Arts Council Korea (ARKO), and Hwang Ji-woo, president of the Korea National University of Arts (KNUA).

As a response, 188 Korean authors signed a petition on June 9th, formally censuring President Lee’s administration. This is part of an ongoing trend in South Korea, where professors, religious leaders and artists are making their own “state of the nation” addresses.

Regarding the ARKO & KNUA restructuring, the authors wrote,

한국문화예술위원회, 한국예술종합학교 사태는 이 정부가 시대착오적인 색깔론과 천박한 관료주의로 문화예술의 토대를 위협하고 있음을 극명하게 보여주었다. 전직 대통령을 겨냥한 사상 최악의 표적수사와 비열한 여론몰이는 그를 벼랑에서 투신하게 하였다. 민주주의의 가치는 매장되었다.

ARKO & KNUA debacle has clearly shown us how the very foundation of this country’s art and culture is being endangered by the administration’s anachronistic political logic and half-baked bureaucracy. The worst politically targeted investigation of an ex-President in our history drove him to throw himself off a cliff. The value of democracy has been buried.

이 모든 일에 적극 가담한 정치검찰과 수구언론을 우리는 민주주의의 조종(弔鐘)을 울린 종지기들로 고발한다. 살아있는 권력에는 굴종하고 죽은 권력에는 군림하면서 영혼을 팔고 정의를 내던진 정치검찰들, 증오와 저주의 저널리즘으로 민주화의 역사를 모독하고 민주주의의 가치들을 조롱하는 수구언론에 우리는 분노한다.

We accuse these politically-motivated & conspiratory prosecutors and the conservative media for ringing the funeral bells of our democracy. We are outraged by the prosecutors who kneel before those in office, rule over those no longer in power, prosecutors who have sold their souls and discarded any sense of justice. We are outraged by the conservative media that insult our history of democratization and make a mockery of democratic values with their malicious journalism.

June 16th, 2009 | Author: admin | Tags: ARKO, Authors, Hwang Ji-woo, KNUA, Lee Myung-bak, Petition | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Novelist Uzma Aslam Khan has a compelling piece in How They See Us: Writers from Around the Globe Refect on America, edited by James Atlas, called “Flagging Multiculturalism: How American Insularity Morally Justifies Itself.”

Khan shows how the appetite for victim narratives in American publishing works hand-in-hand with the program of multiculturalism, to imbue American citizens with a sense of “victimhood” that, in turn, protects them from any real sense of blame and accountability in the current global world order. American multiculturalism is an ideology that encourages minority citizens to learn about the history of oppression that marks that identity group. What’s insidious about this project is that, while it empowers minority groups to battle the powers-that-be within the state formation, it also paradoxically imbues them with a sense of victimhood that’s not commensurate to the radical injustice unfolding on a global scale. It’s also triumphalist within a nationalist framework (after all, it’s the American value of tolerance that allowed for this kind of redemption via self-discovery), so it is self-congratulatory in a way that makes one feel grateful and blessed to be American, while “coolly consuming far more than their share of the world’s natural resources with complete impunity.”

A culture of victimhood, Khan goes on to say, is “America’s immunity from blame. It is a moral defense shield.”

Khan also points out that the most popular stories from the Islamic world have to do with testimonies of Muslim women who write of the horrors of living in the Islamic world. These texts are particularly attractive for American consumers, allowing them to feel both the terror of seeing a “backward” civilization in action (verifying all their worst fears) and also provides the emancipation-narrative with which to justify the ongoing war. As Khan writes, “It reinforces fear of them and redeems trust in us.” A particularly egregious example of this rescue-mentality is on full display in the following anecdote:

…this form of group emancipation therapy occurred a few months before 9/11, when Eve Ensler invited Zoya, a representative of Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, to Madison Square Garden in New York… After the play, Opra Winfrey read Ensler’s poem, “Under the Burqa.” For dramatic effect, Zoya was made to appear under a shuttlecock burqua. Oprah recited: “Imagine a huge dark piece of cloth/hung over your entire body/like you were a shameful statue….” All the lights were switched off but for one. This fell on Zoya, who, per her orders, walked slowly up on the stage. Then, at last, Oprah lifted the burqa off. The crowd leaped to their feet, applauding merrily.

What does this have to do with translation?? In September of 2002, in response to a Harper’s article written by Edward Said, one reader pointed out, as proof against Islamic backwardness, “The entire Arab world, with the population of 280 million, translates only about 330 books per year.” According to Khan, two months later, another reader responded to that reader, saying, “Here in the United States, at the cosmopolitan heart of the universe, with a population of 285 million and a publishing industry that churns out well over 100,000 books per year, we publish–well, what do you know–about 330 books in translation per year.”

We talk a lot about freedom of press in this country, yet it never ceases to astonish me how ideologically in tow the publishing industry is–always under the banner of free-market capitalism (”we just give people what they want”)–to state-sponsored narratives.

June 12th, 2009 | Author: admin | Tags: 3%, Edward Said, Eve Ensler, James Atlas, Multiculturalism, Oprah, Uzma Aslam Khan | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Gitte recommended Shim’s work, so I went ahead and translated a couple of his poems from his collection 슬픔이 없는 십오 초 (Fifteen Seconds Without Sorrow).

나를 환멸로 이끄는 것들 / 심보선

태양
오른쪽
레몬 향기
상념 없는 산책
죽은 개 옆에 산 개
노루귀 꽃이 빠진 식물도감
종교 서적의 마지막 문장
느린 화면 속의 죽음
예술가의 박식함
불계不計 패
변덕쟁이들
회고전들
인용과 각주
어제의 통화 내용
부르주아 대가족
불어의 R 발음
모교의 정문
옛 애인들 (가나다 순)
컨선턴터의 고객 개념
칸트의 물物 자체
물 자체라는 말 자체
라벤더 향기
아래쪽
토성

Things Drawing Me Towards Disillusion

sun
to the right
smell of lemon
a walk lacking ideas & musings
a live dog next to a dead dog
book of plants without Hepatica Asiatica
the last sentence of a religious text
death inside a slow motion scene
an artist’s erudition
defeat by a wide margin
those fickle bastards
autobiographies
quotes & footnotes
the phone conversation from the day before
large bourgois family
prouncing the French r
the main gate of your alma mater
ex-girlfriends (in alphabetical order)
a consultant’s customer relations
Kant’s thing-in-itself
the expression ‘thing-in-itself’ itself
fragrance of lavender
downward
Saturn

종교에 관하여 / 심보선

1
세기말을 지나 휘황한 봄날이다
귀를 틀어막은 청소부가 실패한 비유들을 쓸어 담고 있는데
꽃가루들은 사방에서 속수무책으로 흩날린다
눈물을 획책하고 있는 저 미세한 말씀들, 지금은
알레르기가 종교를 능가하는 시대라서
파멸과 구원이 참으로 용이해졌다

2 
소식이라도 한번 주지 그랬니
난 너무 외로워서 아무 병에라도 전염되었으면 하다가
어제는 느즈막이 강변에 나가 놀다 들어왔다
니가 돌려보낸 편지봉투 속에 편지지처럼
잘게 찢긴 달빛들이 물결 위로 흐르고
밤하늘에 빼곡하게 뜬 별자리들
그 하나하나에 일일이 귀의하고 싶더라
너를 잊기 위해 나 그간 여러번 개종하였다

3
아침에 가출한 탕아가
저녁밥 먹으려고 귀가하고 있다
방랑의 증거로 꽃가루를 온몸에 묻히고
사막에 나가면 눈이 너무 따금거려요, 아버지
얘야, 거긴 사막이 아니라 그냥 공원 놀이터란다
어쨌든 내일 나가면 다시는 돌아오지 않겠어요
필요한 것은 단단한 다짐이 아니라 신용카드 몇 장

4 
꽃가루처럼 산산이 부서져 흩날리는 생의 신비여
십자가 위에서 으아, 기지개 피는 낙담한 신성이여
이제 내 몸엔 구석구석마다 가지각색의 영혼들이 깃들어 있다
다들 사소해서 다들 무고하다

On Religion 

1.
It’s a splendid spring day, the last century gone.
An earplugged janitor sweeps up the failed metaphors,
as the pollen scatters in every direction, utterly helpless,
such fine words scheming to bring tears. In this era,
when an allergy can trump religion,
ruin and redemption aren’t hard to come by.

2.
You should’ve at least called
I was so lonely, I thought I would rather be ill
with some disease, but yesterday, as it grew late, I went down
to the river to play. The moonlight floated over the current
like the finely torn pages of your letter in that envelope you
sent back, and I wanted to devote myself to each and every
constellation packing the night sky. I underwent many
conversions in those days, so that I might forget you.

3.
The runaway child libertine
is returning home for supper,
covered head to toe in pollen, as proof of his wanderings.
Out in the desert, Father, your eyes sting mercilessly.
That was no desert, child. It was just the park playground.
Tomorrow, when I go, I shall never return.
What you need isn’t resolve but a pocketful of credit cards.

4.
O mystery of life, dashed to little bits
and scattered like pollen,  
O disheartened god, stretching yourself
awake on the cross,
souls of every shape and color have nestled into my body,
its every nook and cranny,
and they are all too small for blame. 

Shim Bo-sun was born in Seoul and attended Seoul National University and received a Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University. He debuted in Shinchunmunye (신춘문예) with his poem 풍경 in 1994.

June 9th, 2009 | Author: JW | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (3)

I’ve begun reading David Damrosch’s book What Is World Literature?, which makes the argument that “world literature is not an infinite, ungraspable canon of works but rather a mode of circulation and of reading, a mode that is as applicable to individual works as to bodies of material.” So world literature isn’t a list of discrete texts that keeps accumulating but the way certain works are passed around, modified, appropriated, enhanced, valorized, cheapened as they transfer out of their locale of origin, by the publishing apparatus, the academy, the cultural establishment, the reading public, etc. What Damrosch hopes to do by using exemplary cases (e.g. Goethe, Kafka, Wodehouse, Ishiguro, etc.) is “to clarify the ways in which works of world literature can best be read.”

One reason I’m reading this book is that I’m in the middle of reacting against (admittedly in way that’s more emotional than intellectually rigorous) a general complacency in the literary culture in New York City. The assumption, I think, is that American literature is automatically  world literature, because United States is an economic & military superpower, and in a very real sense, everywhere. Everything that happens in America, on TV, on the silver screen, and in print, is news fit for global consumption. Venuti has already argued that the publishing trade imbalance (more English-text books being translated into other languages for global consumption than other way around) is a form of literary xenophobia, which is a mere step away from saying we (i.e. the literary men & women) are implicated in producing cultural artifacts under a nationalist rubric. And since English is an imperial language, still the biggest game in town, and as Helen DeWitt reminds us, “a language of forgetting,” writing in English–producing brain-sizzling sentences, or knock-your-socks off metaphors, or whatever it is that we do–implicates us in that process.

Now, check out this awesome quote by a leading French critic, Philarete Euphemon Chasles, who lectured in 1835:

France is the most sensitive of all countries… She is sleepless and restless country that vibrates with all impressions and that palpitates and grows enthusiastic for the maddest and the noblest ones; a country which loves to seduce and be seduced, to receive and communicate sensation, to be excited by what charms it, and to propagate the emotion it receives… She is the center, but the center of sensitivity; she directs civilization, less perhaps by opening up the route to the people who border her than by going forward herself with a giddy and contagious passion. What Europe is to the rest of the world, France is to Europe; everything reverberates towards her, everything ends with her.

I would not say this is the situation in American publishing today, but there are some disturbing echoes, I think. Damrosch says, for instance, “she will go out for a mad fling when and where she pleases, but foreigners should not expect to move in with her.” In America’s case, I would argue that foreign literary texts may move in only if they’re already cast in Euro-American standards. And if the foreigner happens to be an immigrant writing in English, so much the better.

I am also hoping that the book will be useful for helping me to think critically about the role we play in this “circulation” process. Damrosch writes, “works by non-Western authors or by provincial or subordinate Western writers are always particularly liable to be assimilated to the immediate interests and agendas of those who edit, translate and interpret them.” The publishing history he gives of Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe is very illuminating to that end (e.g. at one point, the title of the book was called Conversations with Eckermann, to erroneously present Goethe as the organizing force behind the book).

I also realize that I need to be thinking more critically about the role English plays in the network of world literature. For example, if you’re a Korean writer, the force of English can feel almost entirely imperialistic. On the other hand, Damrosch describes the situation in India quite differently. There you have English 1) as the language of the British literature that featured so prominently in colonial Indian education, 2) as the worldwide phenomenon of contemporary global English, and 3) as Indo-English, with its ambiguous status somewhere between a foreign and a native language. What Damrosch says about the inherently comparative nature of Indian literatures (quoting Amiya Dev) is even more interesting: “India’s twenty-two principal literary languages themselves form a plenum comparable to that of European literature, and the different Indian literatures are always strongly colored by the other languages in use arond them.” 

May 29th, 2009 | Author: JW | Tags: Amiya Dev, bernhard, Bolano, Damrosch, English hegemony, Goethe, Murakami, world literature | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

I recently began translating a novel by Chun Myung-gwan (천명관) called Whale (고래). While reading the author interview at the back of the book, I came across the following excerpt and had to smile.

그런데 제가 처음으로 소설이 우리의 인생과 관련이 있구나 하고 뚜렷하게 느낀 작가는 존 업다이크입니다. 사실 <<달려라 토끼>> 같은 얘기가 그다지 흥미로운 얘기도 아니고 그야말로 지지부진한 얘기면서 정서적으로나 지리적으로 우리와 멀리 떨어져있는 것 같은데도 그 징그러울 정도로 세밀한 묘사나 생생한 대사들이 저는 흥미로웠습니다.

The first time it really hit me that novels had anything to do with our lives was when I read John Updike. It’s not like Rabbit Run has the most interesting plot. In fact, it’s kind of tedious and it seems so removed from us geographically as well as in terms of sensibility, but I enjoyed the vivid dialogue and the descriptions that were almost repulsively detailed. [my emphasis]

It’s nice to know that those aspects of Updike’s fiction survive the Korean translations, though, I must say, whoever did the dialogue must’ve done a good job because 1) it’s really tough translating dialogue to begin with 2) I don’t think of dialogue as one of Updike’s strengths. Anyway my friends know how I used to crush on Updike hard when I was in college. I used to think, “If a WASP from rural Pennsylvania writing in the 50’s can speak so powerfully to a Korean-born kid who grew up in Northeast Philly during the 90’s, then he must be good.” Well, I don’t really feel that way anymore (not exactly), but wow, did it make me wonder when I read that Chun was into Updike too.

In the interview, Chun goes on to say that after Updike he went on to enjoy writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Vonnegut, Kosinski, Irving, Carver…

May 22nd, 2009 | Author: JW | Tags: Chun Myung-gwan, John Updike, Rabbit Run, Whale | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

I’m reading a book by Jung Yi-hyun called 달콤한 나의 도시, which, from what I can tell, is Korean chick-lit novel (the tagline: Will love come at age 30?) I must say that I am completely hooked. Keep in mind that the copy of the book I’m reading–see the cover on the right–is about 2 x 3 inches (a gift copy that comes with the actual book) so I probably look ridiculous reading it on the Metro (but whatever, it’s totally worth it).

I just got to the “morning after” scene after a 원나잇 (one night stand) when they can’t figure out whether to use 존댓말 or 반말, and the dialogue goes,

“아니. 나 혼자 가도 돼요. 택시 차면 금방인데 뭘.”

“그래도 같이 가요. 집이 어디라 그랬더라?”

“진짜 괜찮다니까. 시간이 일러서. 강변불북로 타면 30분도 안걸려요.”

I’m curious about how other translators would deal with this in English (if they were opting NOT to ignore the 존댓말). Anyone care to take a stab? **Note: Foreignizing translations welcome!

April 12th, 2009 | Author: JW | Tags: challenge, 반말, 존댓말 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (2)