Translating Classics?

An interesting but slightly off-base article the other day in the Korea Herald. It focuses on the need for an increase in the amount of Korean literature translated but, perversely, it focuses on classical literature. Perhaps the main ideas can be demonstrated in the following two quotes.

History shows that translations played a major role during cultural renaissances in various countries. According to Italian philosopher, astronomer and mathematician Giordano Bruno, all of the sciences originated from translations. In 18th-century Europe, translators were considered artists who possessed the moral responsibilities of both writers and readers, while during the 19th century translators were known as “creative geniuses.”

“In Western countries, they taught translation as a form of mediation, and so they taught Greek and Latin simultaneously,” Do-ol said. “That resulted in an enormous amount of energy coming from English literature.”

The problem is that this is looking at previous models - kind of the "classical education" model and this is pretty much a ship that has sailed. Continuing along this line is likely to result in the translation of more "Straight to the Asian Studies Library" works.

siiiiiigh?

Rodney Dangerfield and Literature

Some Prof from Hankuk argues that:

The relatively low status of language specialists in Korea has had significant ― and readily observed ― consequences in everyday life.

and those consequences are bad.

I have to say he does a pretty good job of light Korean-baiting both by explicitly comparing Korea to Japan's relative success and arguing that one of the bad consequences is that Korea is handicapped in the race for the Nobel Prize in Literature (a recurring motif for Korean literateurs).

An amusing interview with Kim Young-ha

This is from KBS global, and it claims to be only a few days old, but it still has him living in Seoul and not Brooklyn and his own website seems pretty clear he's in the US...

The interview is primarily interesting because the interviewer is laying it on with the proverbial trowel, and the translation is so .. uh... idiosyncratic .... that it is in that weird spot between hysterical and painful:

As a writer who secured his world view, I will prove that the universal matter is the most world-beater. I will reward my readers with a new novel based on a profound and fresh technique without relying on the advantage of the Orientalism.

Sure buddy, now put down the soju bottle and get some rest. ;-)

Why South Koreans should be careful deciding what Literature is Translated

This article from "Sound and Sight" in 2005 reveals that:

If there is one piece of South Korean literature that should be translated into other languages, it has to be Pak Kyong-ni's novel cycle "Land" (book review here). That's the result of a survey conducted in South Korea a few years ago.

This doesn't sound insensible on the fact of it, until the article goes on to reveal:

"Land" ... (is) ... a national epic of almost overwhelming magnitude: the Korean original comprises 21 volumes and tells of the great revolutions in Korean society in the first half of the 20th century. Japanese, Europeans and Americans all forced their way into the country, putting an end to its isolation. ... In the entire epic, more than 700 characters are introduced, 150 of which are central figures. The demise of tradition, the annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910, the collaboration with colonial rulers and the resistance against them are all reflected in the lives of these characters, each possessing his or her own personality, experiential horizon, and views. "Land" is a Korean masterpiece, which Pak Kyong-ni worked on for 25 years.

This is exactly the kind of thing that should NEVER be translated into English unless by an obsessed student of Korean Literature/Culture who understands that he is only translating for a handful of similar obsessives who will read the work once, then return it to its dusty library shelf (perhaps "shelves" in the case of this voluminous work). Translating a work like this, insanely complicated and long, is a manifestation of what Charles La Shure calls "cultural evangelism" as opposed to what translation should (largely at least) do, which is "literary evangelism."

"Land" is a social history primer which the author admits is "of almost overwhelming magnitude" and thus unlikely to be read for the mere reading of the thing. The desire to translate such a book is actually the desire to translate a culture; to say, "look, this is Korea and this is who we are and how we bot there."

In no way do I mean to say that this message is not a proper function of literature, rather I'm saying there are more succinct, portable (21 volumes!), and friendly (150 main characters? This makes Russian literature seem downright accessible) ways to accomplish the same thing. Even "Three Generations" by Yom Sang-seop, which arguably sets itself the same task as "Land," is only 476 pages - a reader could consider carrying "Three Generations" around without risking some sort of spinal cord injury!

Please -- in translation pick works that are of average length and interesting for literary reasons and not cultural ones. When Star-Trek days are here, and all literature can be translated instantaneously by a "Universal Translator" (So, that picture to the right is not some kind of nasty electronic novelty, ok?) we can work on 21-volume sets. For now can we translate things that we think readers will look at?

The rest of the article discusses translations into German. This is useful to see what has not yet been translated into English, but not much more for an English reader.

Maybe a Little Self-Serving, But a Good Question

Is asked here in the Korea Times. Will Kern asks when the KLTI runs their annual translation contest.

Why is drama not considered a suitable category for the translation award? Why are there categories for novels, novellas, short stories, and poetry but not one for drama?

This is just another form of the question that many of us have about why the KLTI picks the (generally uninspiring) works that it chooses to translate.

Of course old Will is also publicizing his own play with his contact info at the bottom:

His play ``Mothers and Tigers'' premiered at the Seoul Arts Center in December. He can be reached at will@willkern.com.

I would know nothing of such shameless self-promotion!

Improved in Translation?

You rarely see this claim, and it is a very narrow one, but in Choi Yearn-hong's review of Poetess Moon Chung-hee’s 'Woman on Terrace,' he claims that one line in the English translation is "better" (if funnier means better) than in the original

‘The distortion of a text,’ Freud (not writing about translation) says in Moses and Monotheism, ‘is not unlike a murder. The difficulty lies not in the execution of the deed but in doing away with the traces.’ In this case, it seems that the traces are advantageous.

Also, I suppose, this is support of the contention that translation is an art, or at least a craft, and not a mathematical process of creating equivalency.

Hatred, Rage, and Aunt Suni

I suppose it is a general credit to the level of translation of Korean literature into English that I have read quite a few works and have just now come upon my second example of atrocious translation.

This case is particularly unfortunate as the story is a classic one – Both classically Korean in that it involves the psychic amputation of part of a people (Dae Han Min Guk is a principle evoked, in this work, to justify the mass murder of Koreans) and also classically global in that it explores the contexts and mechanisms by which massacres become an almost inevitable outcome of political warfare (both intellectual and physical).

The work is Hyun Ki Young’s Aunt Suni, and it is a testament to the story that if a reader perseveres through the bad translation, internal inconsistency, and horrifying typography, that reader is rewarded with a glimpse of Korean history with international meaning and better, is privy to the kinds of psychological accommodations and examinations that follow tragedy.

The story is brilliant on a technical level. The narrator is putatively coming back to Jeju (from Seoul) to attend the funeral rites of his grandfather.

When he arrives he discovers he is also “attending” the death of his Aunt Suni.

As we hear Aunt Suni’s horrific story, we realize that she, tragic, insane, a suicide, is a mangled relic and symbol of historical crimes. She returns, some 30 years later, to commit suicide in the killing field from which she once, ‘luckily,’ escaped.

Suni’s story is revealed in a series of conversations between her one-time confederates, and by structuring the story this way, Hyun allows the multiple narrators to also inject their understandings of the mechanisms of the tragedy as well as of the multiple approaches to the understanding of and/or forgetting of it. Hyun weaves a clever mix of showing and telling in which each 'speaker' reveals some aspect or interpretation of the time, the crime, and the aftermath.

A sub plot brings Aunt Suni to Seoul and here, in the smallest things – accent, rice consumption, burned fish – Hyun reveal Aunt Suni’s psychic trauma. The rest is well-written exposition presented as discussion.

Where the original writing can be discerned, it is brilliant. The narrator muses, as he returns to Jeju, that a 50 minute flight seems too quick a return to a land he has left some 8 years ago and constructs a powerful fantasy of how his return should have been affected.

When he lands, we see why he might well have wanted his journey extended and his destination avoided. Where the bones of plot and the muscles and ligaments of story-telling can be perceived, Hyun’s strength as a writer shines through.

There is a powerful story here.

Unfortunately that story is buried under poor translation. The name of the story is rendered three different ways. Phrases with no English meaning crop up. At one point Aunt Suni “picks a crow” with someone, and later a family is “slain to death.” Each apostrophe is followed by an extra space, and that same extra space regularly shows up between words. Personal pronouns are used without antecedent; articles are used randomly, and modifying clauses are place with daring disregard for the words they are supposed to modify. Grammatical errors are everywhere (e.g. “My hometown was something I had shun from”).

This is an extremely difficult book to read.

The translator, who I will not name, thanks two English speakers for proofreading the text.

If I had not read those lines I would have strongly argued that no native speaker of English had seen this work prior to its publication. The translator was done no favors by his English speaking… well.. the correct word is “accomplices.”

This bothers me because, as I mentioned, Hyun has (to the extent a reader can play literary archeologist and see past the wreckage left to view) done a brilliant job of creating a blessed (survives the massacre) and doomed (in some ways does not survive the massacre) character in Aunt Suni. Aunt Suni’s story is compelling enough that, after cursing the translation out, I ran to the internet to find the historical background of the Jeju revolt. It is a tangled and horrible story and wikipedia has an adequate summary of it.

After digging through the story and the history, I have a feeling that Hyun’s story, retranslated, or merely edited, would be an outstanding read.

For now, it is so difficult to navigate the text, just as text, that I wouldn’t pass this book along to anyone.

The good news is that my research turned up another book, apparently not available in Korea, titled “Dead Silence” which is 8 short stories about the Jeju imbroglio. And Amazon has it. ;-)

Hybridity and translation styles

Some notes I wrote up on multiple translations of Buckwheat Season - The quotes were translated by my supervisor and I wrote the notes up from the perspective of an English reader, so that she could use my input in a presentation.

As I looked over multiple translations, notably of Buckwheat Season (by Yi Hyo-Sok and the original translation is available for pdf download here) and Kapitan Ri/The Constant Doctor (by Chon Kwangyong with Kapitan Ri available for pdf download here ), I thought that I could see three broad strands of translation.

I have, somewhat arbitrarily, named these translation styles Traditional, Modern and Hybrid. As I looked at these two stories I also noted that they are different types of stories. Buckwheat Season is a traditional Korean tale, rooted in specifically Korean environments and rhythms. Kapitan Ri/The Constant Doctor, on the other hand, while set in a Korean environment, is in fact the very modern story of a “company” man who is intent on getting ahead at all costs. As I thought more about this, it became clear in my head that there is a relationship between what type of stories are being translated and how they should be translated.

First, let’s take a look at the three styles of translation. The following grid pulls some illustrative quotes from Buckwheat Season:


What does this chart reveal of the styles?

The Traditional style is the oldest and it owes some of its features to the fact that it was the pioneering step of translation. It features peculiar word choices and a written style that seems somewhat borrowed from English colonial literature. It is florid and very expressive (it has the highest number of adjectives and features more complex sentences with more clauses) It also has the widest internal stylistic variances. This is predictable as it is embryonic translation, and as Stephen J. Gould has demonstrated in “Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin” systems tend to have their widest variances at their outsets. In terms of Buckwheat Season the first translation style has the fussy vocabulary and structure that one might expect from an Englishman speaking in colonial days. A phrase like “dissolute fellow,” “good scolding. “fated from birth,” or “admonition serves as a remedy” sound like some late-Victorian letter from an upset father to a reprobate son. It is also sometimes too literal – a non idiomatic translation like “as nondescript as you are” or the “Whenever ….. Five Days” locution. These are tendencies I associate with early translation of Korean literature. It is much more formal as well, as evidenced by the continued use of full names far into the story.

The second style, the Modern one, is characterized by extreme brevity of sentence and paragraph, but still has some anachronistic vocabulary (greenhorn?) for that tone. It is substantially less colorful (as assessed by adjective usage). Also, it reads, and this might be completely coincidental, as though the author had read both previous translations, and defaulted to them in some cases. It also seems more active (sometimes merely by beginning a passage with spoken words and not refection) and sometimes seems to have some of the color leached out of it.

This leaching/simplification can come at a cost, as the following excerpts demonstrate


The “Modern” version, by simplifying the initial phrase to colloquial English actually eliminates the elements of class-standing that are implicit in the first two texts and completely representative of Korean thought in Buckwheat Season. In this case the modern style strips Buckwheat Season of that thing that makes it interesting – its essential Koreanness. The Hybrid translation re-instates this Korean cultural content, but frees us from difficult phrasing such as the odd (to modern eyes) phrasal structure of the concluding sentence of the Traditional translation, as well as its clumsy double-negative.

Jeong-Heyong Shin, in “The Trap of History” assesses Buckwheat Season as a bit boring:

What is the primary action of the story? We modern individuals who have lost our mythic memory cannot help but wonder, for it is difficult to find intense and dramatic events in the story. There are no violent fights or deaths, no initiations, no recognitions, and no difficulties to overcome. Furthermore, the story is replete with stock situations and characters. On the surface level, the plot of "The Buckwheat Season" is so weak that to some readers it may seem to lack sufficient motifs and conflicts

But, Shin goes on to argue:

Hue, an itinerant vendor traveling around traditional Korean marketplaces, represents several complex aspects of the Korean mythic self that live deep in the Korean collective unconscious. Hue's life in the story compellingly tells of the moral and aesthetic values the Korean people have long created and of the ideals, wishes, and dreams the Korean people have long cherished. Hue is a Korean mythic hero who has created values and dreams in the Korean peninsula.

Basically, you have a story that is interesting to the extent that it can successfully communicate essential Korean meanings. Using the modern translation approach strips this out of the text in the service of, maybe, increased readability.

Consider another problem:


Again, here, the earlier translation styles are more suited to the story. At the risk of Orientalization, the Traditional style uses a parental phrase (admonition/remedy) and Korean metaphor (unlicked cub). This reflects traditional power relationships in Korea as well as using the most colorful metaphor. The modern translation matches the even least dynamic remedy (remedy>dose>medicine) with its mismatched partner “greenhorn.” Finally, the hybrid style lessens this impact (dose of) and pairs this with “young people.”

Consider another instance:



The modern translation is entirely inner-directed. Cho “could not bring himself to,” while Ho feigns indifference. This translation substantially weakens the sense of the Tradional translation which possesses a certain fatalism – that these personal paths, like the paths between towns, are the paths that Cho and Ho must follow and, like the universe, must repeat and repeat, one yin to the other’s constant yang. The Hybrid translation, similar to the Traditional one, focuses on personal responsibility or duty (“he couldn’t very well tell Ho he was sick of the story”) while simplifying the vocabulary (“sick of” for “weariness” and “innocently started” for “feigning indifference.)

Finally, consider



Again, the traditional is dense and includes Korean content (festivals and a wine house). The Modern reduces the detail of the Traditional courtyard to “littered” (and in doing so makes the text seem as though it refers to garbage, not a cluttered geography) and uses the word “tavern,” a translation which is far more western (and therefore suggestive of “bar” – which is the wrong word) than “drinking house” or “wine house.”

This examination brings us to the hybrid style, which attempts to rein in some of the wider variances of the idiosyncratic style, but it still includes translations that attempt to hew close to cultural realities and avoid the cultural lobotomies characteristic of the modern style. The hybrid is often characterized by slightly shorter sentences, but it is just about as descriptive (as assessed by use of adjectives) as the Traditional style, and it is more expressive in containing and transmitting cultural content.

What does this all add up to? The Hybrid style, being a somewhat dialectical offspring of the Traditional and Modern styles, seems to be a safe middle of the road approach, which avoids, on one side the Scylla of over-ornamentation and possible incomprehensibility, and also avoids on the other side, the Charybdis of flat, boring, de-culturated text. Still, the fact that it is a hybrid suggests that translators be ignorant of the other styles at their own risks. Certainly, it seems likely that some stories will need to get off the dead-center of Hybrid translation, and thus a translator should have all three styles in his toolbox.

Further, this analysis implies that translators should approach the translation of a particular work only after understanding what kind of a work it is. Essentially, a “one-size-fits-all” approach to translation style will not fit. Perhaps an artistic metaphor might be useful. I may be a very skilled cubist painter, but if someone asks me to draw a sketch of Caravagio’s Ascension (or, translate it, in a visual way) I will not do a good job if I render Caravagio’s romantic and light-based art into black dots. Similarly, if a translator comes across a particularly Baroque piece of Korean literature, it is time for them to reach back to Traditional translation and describe every curlicue and instance of chiaroscuro.

A Nice Article About Different Translation Styles

In the New York Times (I chopped a couple of paragraphs from the end here). It discusses, though not quite directly, the role that translation has in how a work is received.

There must have been occasional intervals, during the decade-long siege of Troy, when the Greek commander, Agamemnon, suffered pangs of self-pity. But for Agamemnon, in retrospect, the Trojan War (still, after all these millenniums, the most potent symbol we have for a seemingly endless conflict) was a cakewalk. His real problems began only after he returned home to his wife, Clytemnestra, who dispatched him almost before he’d had time to change his sandals.

If this seems a somewhat flippant account of Agamemnon’s tragedy, as immortalized by Aeschylus in his “Oresteia” trilogy (458 B.C.), it is in keeping with the tone of Anne Carson’s new translation. Her Agamemnon is brash and slangy. When I was an undergraduate in the 1970s, the standard translation was Richmond Lattimore’s, published in 1953. Lattimore had labored mightily — perhaps too mightily — in pursuit of grandeur, achieved chiefly through high diction and a studious English reconstitution of Greek meters. Here, in a typical passage, the Chorus asks Clytemnestra about her husband’s possible return:

Is it some grace — or otherwise — that you have heard
to make you sacrifice at messages of good hope?
I should be glad to hear, but must not blame your silence.

And this is Carson’s rendering of the same passage:

So you got good news?
You’re optimistic?
Tell me, unless you don’t want to.

Defenders of Carson’s approach might point out that her plainspoken delivery has the advantage of sounding like something someone might actually say. Certainly, it’s hard to imagine anybody (anybody, that is, whose existence extends beyond the enchanted, concentric rings of a theater) talking as Lattimore’s characters talk. The play opens with a night watchman, lamenting the unchanging dreariness of his task. Here is Lattimore:

I ask the gods some respite from the weariness
of this watchtime measured by years I lie awake
elbowed upon the Atreidae’s roof dogwise to mark
the grand processionals of all the stars of night. . . .

What’s lost in this combination of metrical mellifluousness and clunkiness (elbowed dogwise?) is any sense of genuine exasperation. Here is Carson, where impatience emerges like a jab in the ribs:

Gods! Free me from this grind!
It’s one long year I’m lying here watching waiting watching waiting —
propped on the roof of Atreus, chin on my paws like a dog.
I’ve peered at the congregation of the nightly stars. . . .

Any attempt, like Lattimore’s, at steadily elevated diction runs the risk of windy bombast. But there’s a hazard, too, to what Carson is doing: the possibility of a fatal diminishment. As soon as characters in a Greek tragedy look merely life-size, any distinction between the soaring and the sordid tends to collapse. Agamemnon is a principal in the larger tale of the House of Atreus, which encompasses adultery, boastful murder, madness, cannibalized children, matricide — mere grisly grist for the tabloids, if it isn’t the stuff of immortal literature.

Confronting these two polar versions of Agamemnon, a reader may search out a middle terrain, like that presented by Robert Lowell, whose respectful streamlining of Lattimore appeared in 1978. Here is Lowell’s opening of Aeschylus’ trilogy:

I’ve lain here a year,
crouching like a dog on one elbow,
and begged the gods to end my watch.
I’ve watched the stars. . . .

And the Chorus’s inquiry about Agamemnon’s return:

Have you heard good news, or is it only
hope that makes you light the altars?
We would gladly hear you, but accept your silence.

Lowell’s vision of Agamemnon the man (described in a stage note as “kindly yet terrifying, a natural ruler, very practiced and alert at it, yet invincibly and almost willfully blinded to his danger”) feels consistent with the clipped yet graceful, brisk cadences of his translation. Each character is doubly enclosed, within a web of words and the larger web of fate, and yet language and destiny feel like complementary aspects of a single reality.

This was what I failed to find, to my frustration, in Carson’s translations: a feeling of a composite whole. There are moments when her diction stoops so low I had trouble remembering I was dealing with men godlike in their splendor, as when her Agamemnon announces: “Count no man happy until he dies happy. / If I keep this rule, I’ll be okay.” (Lattimore’s kingly king seems much more satisfying: “Call that man only blest / who has in sweet tranquillity brought his life to close.”)

Carson’s choice of diction presents many puzzles. Why does Clytemnestra’s lover seem to quote Scripture? Why, if speakability is Carson’s aim, would she have one of her characters declare, “Look at him, look how he drips unhealth — shudder object!” Why would Helen be referred to — distractingly, jarringly — as a “weapon of mass destruction”?

Similar vagaries of pitch arise through Carson’s decision to replicate Aeschylean word-coinages, where two words are compounded into one. Some of these prove quite effective (“a certain manminded woman,” “Time stood like a deathmaster over me”), but others sound whimsical and look cumbersome (“griefremembering,” “allenveloping”). Unfortunately, in our time (the ancient Greeks were spared some indignities), such coinages smack both of Madison Avenue and a blog-clogged cyberspace in which most punctuation has been sucked into a black hole. When Carson has Clytemnestra declare, “Make his path crimsoncovered! purplepaved! redsaturated!” the reader naturally replies, “Fuhgeddaboutit.”

Bad Translation?

This week I had intended to review “A Toy City” by Lee Dong-ha. It is an interesting short story, a novella really, with several clever twists on more “traditional” narratives of the cost of post-war social change. But as I read through “A Toy Story” I became increasingly preoccupied with questions of its translation quality. I was encountering something that I hadn’t expected to come across in a translation commissioned by The Korean Portable Library and also something that I hadn’t expected to identify quite so easily – a bad translation. In this post I’m not discussing these issues with specific regard to “A Toy Story,” That will come next week. But the questions that arose in my mind, as I attempted to judge the translation quality, deserve some attention.

As my suspicions I was reading a poor translation mounted, I began to feel uneasy on at least two related levels. The first level is most obvious. How can a reader who is not fluent in the source language of a text presume to feel qualified to judge its translation quality? Michael Cunningham poses the problem, “how can we possibly decide, unless we are fluent in both languages … (what is) … faithful to the author’s intent?” What gives me the right to judge a translation on any level? The second level is a related one – why, if the writing in the translation is bad, is this necessarily the translator’s problem? Perhaps the translation is accurate and it merely reflects some flaw, or flaws, in the original writing which, of course, I cannot detect.

The reductive nature of the first question is obvious upon reflection: The act of review implies judgment and to discard that right is to discard the notion of review or criticism. In fact, really, the act of reading implies criticism (or chasing meaning, somehow) I found myself nodding my head in agreement when I read Michael Venuti who noted that ALL readers necessarily do this kind of critical processing when addressing any kind of translated text, and at the most casual levels, at that. Readers, and therefore reviewers who are a sub-class of ‘reader’, routinely sort through translations to assess and even assert their meanings, particularly when these meanings are multiple or opaque. Venuti notes the sign in the dry-cleaner’s window that demands that the reader, “drop your trousers here for best result.” He argues that any reader immediately and automatically judges the translation quality of the work and, pursuant to that, assesses the form and possible meanings against each other. Then, one hopes, the reader constructs an accurate analysis, both of the skill of the translator and the (possible) meanings of the source text. If the reader assesses the translation to be good, he takes the text at face value and attempts to understand it; if not, he rearranges and re-assigns forms to the translated work in an effort to establish, or create textual meaning. The result of this process is a reader who routinely and automatically attempts to create an accurate analysis, both of the skill of the translator and the (possible) meanings of the source text.

In something as complicated as a literary work, of course, the problems are more thorny and the assessment of translation more difficult. Based on the analysis above, I think it is fair to argue that all readings of translation include a strong critical component and that the task of the reviewer is to assure, as much as is possible, that he or she applies this critical analysis with as much precision, care, and background as is possible to bring to bear. I’m not much interested in the theories of literature translation in these cases. I’m generally opposed to literary and translation ‘theory’ as currently understood and applied (a blog entry for another day) in the service of confusion, and in this case I am focusing on what I would call the ‘common analysis’ that all readers do. In this I observe Anne Milan Appel’s distinction “between literary analysis based on critical theory and reviews aimed at the general public.” Since these twain rarely meet, I don’t feel there is much danger in putting literary translation theoretical approaches aside here.The other non-theoretical point to be made is that judgment of the translation really depends upon the reader and client’s (that is, the person who commissioned the translation) perspective. As a result of the fact that readers and clients are varied, all that matters is, as Douglas Robinson notes, “that the translation be reliable in more or less the way s/he (the reader or client, ed.) expects (sometimes unconsciously): accurate or effective or some combination of the two; painfully literal or easily readable in the target language or somewhere in the middle; reliable for her or his specific purposes.”

The implications of this are obvious, a translation that is “good” for one, may be bad for another, but if one is reviewing translated literature aimed at the general reading public, the measure of the translation’s quality is how well it appeals to them by fulfilling the requirements of the commissioner of the translation, whether that “commissioner” is someone writing the check for a translation, or seen as the reading public in general. This seems to strongly imply that a reviewer’s job is not traduced by the fact that s/he doesn’t know the first language and also that his/her task includes considering the role of translation in the goodness or badness of a translated literary work.

The subsidiary problem for a mono-lingual reviewer is integrally related to the first. Even if the translation clearly is “bad” it is difficult to assign the reason for this. When I, or any reader, damn a translation for being poor, I may well be damning the translator for their accuracy and skill. It is perfectly acceptable, though not required, that a translator approach a work with an eye for stylistic fidelity. If the source text includes poor metaphors, clumsy sentence structure, pointless diversions, bad word choices, etc., then the “ faithful” translator will likely reproduce these structures in the target language. In this case, I suppose, lacking access to understanding of the source text, the only possible approach is drawn from academic writing, the tactic of hedging. This sounds a bit sketchy, but is accepted academic procedure. ;-) The simple version here is that as a reviewer, you should be clear when you think you are judging the translator and when you think you are judging the work. You may be wrong, but at least the reader of the review will understand what is being analysed. Appel (I think), approvingly cites Matt King’s work when he writes, “as rendered by translator Howard Goldblatt, Mo’s prose is often pastoral and guttural, evoking a Manichean world of human ugliness and redemptive natural beauty.” Here we have a reviewer explicitly marking where he believes the translator has added to the work, and in what way. It is certainly possible that Goldblatt is only accurately translating Mo, but in a world in which there may be multiple translations, Goldblatt is explaining the virtues of this one.

Venuti describes translation as “an attempt to compensate for an irreparable loss by controlling an exorbitant gain,” and this description seems intuitively proper to me. Why is this description of translation important for a review of translation? Because I would say that it is the reviewers job to assess how well a translator has minimized the irreparable loss and to what extent they have controlled the exorbitant gain (the nicest phrase for “made up shit” I’ve ever heard!) in order to do so. Part of this is guesswork, of course, but part of this depends upon approach, what I might call rubric and the rest depends upon experience.

I hate to pull what I affectionately call a James Turnbull, but with this post already approaching 1300 words and my kids calling (wait! I have no kids!). I think that I won’t go into rubrics and experience quite yet. Also, to be honest, I’ve come across a brilliant (and brilliantly self-serving) article by Ross King that I want to think about while it still interests me.

In any case, the arguments I’ve gone over, above, lead me to a provisional conclusion that I was, of course, certain to come to by nature of my own self-service: That is that not only is it appropriate for a reviewer of translated literature to consider the translator as he considers translated literature, but that it would be a disservice not to. Even if the reviewer, presumably serving as winnowing agent for potential readers, is absolutely incorrect in assessing the role of the translator; even if the reviewer does not hedge his comments and analysis; even if the reviewer staggers under some intellectual or theoretical baggage that makes their review suspect; even if all this is true, as a reviewer it is his/her job to explain the text as he or she saw it and as he or she thinks this is, or is not, important to other potential readers.

Then, of course, the critical task continues, but in a different arena – potential readers must assess the usefulness of the reviewer. ;-)

Why the US makes it even harder for Korean (or any) translations

A great article here that covers the institutional fears and minsunderstandings caused by the way US publishers approach translated (or the possibility of them) works.

The article can be nutshelled (yeah, I made that word up) in this observation:

By and large, the American publishers spend most of the week in Hall 8, the
enormous exhibit space where English-language publishers hold court.

This article is also amusing because even as it discusses all the obstacles that US publishers throw up, it generally refers to these obstacles with reference to European authors and translations. A representative quote names Europe and then refers vaquely to other literary countries which reside, next to dragons, on the edges of literary maps :

To help spur more translations, government-sponsored cultural agencies in
Europe and elsewhere subsidize — or fully cover — the cost of translating books
into English.

To be fair Korea is mentioned once on the second page.

Still, it is worth pointing out that while Korea may not routinely be producing brilliant translations, may lack marketing skills for what they do translate, and might translate works that are not of optimal interest to the West, there is also quite a great deal of insularity, bordering on xenophobia, on the other side of the equation.

From Powder to Powder by Kim Hun

From Powder to Powder by Kim Hun
Land of Exile
East Gate
Armonk, New York

Many Korean short stories are about cycles. Sometimes this is the traditional (historical) Korean cycle of separation, diaspora and return, and sometimes the cycle is a far less optimistic one. Such is the case in Kim Hun’s “From Powder to Powder” which hammers a semi-cyclical message home with bleak nihilism, leavened by flashes of alarming humor. The clever title evokes the Biblical phrase on cycles, “from dust to dust,” while also describing the equipoise of the tale – a man positioned between the death and incineration (creating the first powder) of his wife, and his career marketing beauty products (the second powder). As the story works towards it’s dusty ending, it becomes clear that while some cycles are inevitable, hope of return is vain.

In the main plot, physical and emotional exile reaches everywhere into life, even into souls. At the same time a sub-plot focused on advertising products to women brings unexpected levity. The story begins as the conventional (if that is fair) deathwatch of the wife of an advertising executive. Here Kim uses stark, brutal terms to describe how this cycle ends, “the flesh around her vulva had wasted away as well … the outer lips of her vagina blackened and stuck together like two pieces of charred meat. I couldn’t believe that out daughter had been born from that place.” Kim’s vision of “the circle of life” is decidedly not that from “The Lion King,” and by focusing on the mother’s reproductive organs and the daughter’s life, Kim strongly suggests we all be aware what awaits the daughter as well. Later, Kim has a doctor make the argument explicit: “The life-force can’t be adulterated; it can’t be transformed. And the impossibility of transformation is what defines the phenomenon of life.”

This goes beyond mere stoicism.

Kim injects humor in two set pieces, one describing the narrator’s bladder being drained and the other discussing strategies for marketing cosmetics to women. At a board meeting Director O muses, about a vaginal cleanser, that, “it worked well enough, except that it failed to remove all of the menstrual flow and had side effects, such as inflammation and a burning sensation in the vaginal wall. And there were cases in which the jelly was contaminated with urine and found its way deep inside the vagina, where it turned into a foul-smelling discharge.’ (321) Later, another director discusses the vagina, “So each one is different – well, even if they are, how can we manufacture something for each and every one? Here we are with a wide-open market and it’s hard to get in the door.” This is not only amusing for its semi-askew metaphorical content, but also evidence of the cleverness of the translation (by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton) which allows bawdy double-entendres to come shining through. It also makes me wish I could read Korean, so I could judge how close to the original thoughts, these metaphors are. In any case, they read splendidly in English and there is certainly at least one good academic paper waiting to be written about this stories/ obsession with the female vagina, but that won’t be the one I’m doing here. ;-)

As his wife dies and in the aftermath of her death, the executive focuses on his infatuation with Ch’u Únju, another employee of the company. The death scenes are harrowing, but the conclusion of the story is even more harrowing. The executive attends his wife’s cremation and the theme of cycles and alienation is mechanical and explicit as he watches:

A display:

Incineration 121: Will the bereaved please come to the observation room to receive the ashes.
Incineration 122: Cycle to end 130 PM
Incineration 123 Cycle to end 1:40 PM

(p. 337)

Finally, it ends, “we saw the red display above the door to the incinerator: end of cycle.”

After the death of the narrator’s wife, a series of unexpected but not unlikely events result in the narrator severing all personal connections. Ch’u Únju is let go by the company and by that time the narrator is removed from concern for her. More shockingly he takes Pori (named for the Buddhist term for “supremely enlightened), his wife’s healthy dog, in to be euthanized on the basis that he will not be able to care for it and “My wife wanted it to be reborn as a human next time around.” (p. 339) Kim stresses the venality of this: Not only was the dog his wife’s “first thought” after her tumor-induced headache attacks, but the dog is a full-blooded Jindo, the national dog of Korea.

Finally, the narrator has disposed of his wife, his ‘dearly beloved’ Ch’u Únju has gone to the United States, and the dog Pori has been sent to join his mistress. The narrator concludes with a passage that can be read as a threat, a Buddhist promise of nirvana, or simple banal evil. “That night, for the first time in a long while, I slept deeply, ever so deeply, my awareness dissipating into nothingness” (p. 339).

Korea Needs More Translators

From this morning's electronic Korea Times:

Literary Professor Kim Joo-youn said Korea badly needs a growing pool of professional translators to have local literature better known worldwide.

He made the remark in a Korea Times interview Thursday after being named the director of the Korea Literature Translation Institute (KLTI) under the Ministry of Culture.

The director said his main focus will be directed toward fostering and increasing professional translators who can make Korean literature better appreciated outside Korea.

``The problem does not lie in the quality of our literary output. Rather, it is in the way our literature is translated,’’ said Kim.

``Judging from my professional experience, the value and quality of Korean literature is on par with works produced in the West. A woeful lack of adequate translation is the main reason our literature has failed to draw the attention befitting its status.’’

The poor quality of literary translations has been well documented in various news reports and surveys. According to a 2007 KLTI study of translated versions of 41 Korean novels, more than half of them revealed significant shortcomings in translating hard facts, let alone conveying the true literary essence of the work, which is why nurturing a new generation of translators with the necessary language skills and literary sensitivity will be the top priority during his three-year tenure.

``For a relatively unknown country like Korea, the government’s involvement in promoting Korean literature overseas is necessary. My long-term goal is to cultivate an environment conducive to nurturing translators of literature equipped with not only an excellent command of foreign languages but a profound knowledge of and passion for Korean literature.’’ Kim said.

Kim remembers his frustration at a conference in Berlin in the summer of 2008. ``I proposed a presentation of Korean writers to a German colleague at the ‘Berlin House of Literature.’ However, they rejected my proposal, citing inadequate translation and difficulty in understanding Korean literature,’’ he said.

The KLTI was established in 1996 with the mission to support scholars, writers, and translators whose works revolves around the internationalization of Korean literature. With Kim as its new director, it is also expected to place more importance on promoting exchanges between Korean and overseas writers through residency programs and lectures.

Another key initiative on Kim’s agenda is to motivate overseas scholars to disseminate Korean culture. ``The number of universities abroad with a department of Korean Studies has been consistently rising, especially in China, where about 80 universities teach Korean language and literature. We will try to encourage schools to incorporate more Korea-specific programs.’’

Kim has been a professor of German literature at Sookmyung Women’s University for nearly 30 years. His publications and critical essays have gained nationwide recognition.

jhdo@koreatimes.co.kr