Updates...

Some Notes about the Academic Silliness

1> Somewhere in the WayBack Machine I'm sure I mentioned that I've found new stories by my lovely author. But I've also found a book called 미주문학 (America's Literature) that has a 56 page article on my main man. The thing is in Korean, which has already caused me to spend about a half an hour struggling with Korean names, words, the way they list things, and all of the "markers" Korean uses to denote role in sentences and... and.... I translated one sentence.. kind of. ;-)

I spent some time with my tutor working on this and I hope it will eventually go faster.

2>The lovely tutor has also tracked down what is supposed to be a 60 page collection of The Author's notes on his own writing. 60 pages each of the English and Korean version. Man, I'm salivating about getting my hands on that baby...

Then, I just sent off to the BKF my second iteration of edits on the Camel Pouch story he is turning in to the Korean Language Translastion Institute for their annual competition. It is due August 31 and I just feel that this one has a better chance than last year's. Lots of slogging ahead, but time and will to do it.

3> Last weekend's trip up to Itaewon did result in my grabbing two key books for my MCTA presentation. I really should blog the pictures of that trip since the OAF and I had some pleasant surprises all around.

Anyway, it all seems like progress, albeit in small ways. ;-)

Translation Problems?

An interesting article at the Korea Times (which the OAF spotted this week) about a recent decline in translation quality. The article attributes this decline to several things including:

"a lack of historical background knowledge or poor Korean language skills ...many have a problem in remaining loyal to the original text, which fails to revive the literary beauty and meaning,''

and

"the mistranslations were a result of an editor's mistake and a translator's expediency. "

Of course I think the BKF and I as a team solve these problems since he has good knowledge of Korean and its literature and his focus has always been on translating the meaning and combined effect of passages rather than strictly literal translation on a line-to-line level. The fact that I work directly with him, and often at exactly the same time, also substantially reduces the likelihood of editor-induced error.

As to the "translator's expediency?"

Further deponent says not! ;-)

Call the Ewhaaaaambulance...

And then, suddenly, it all fell apart.... When I returned from my lovely vacation (pictures of which are to follow) I had a phone call from the BKF telling me I needed to call him immediately. As I had sent him an IM full of fear and loathing on Friday and had no response, I already sensed something was up...

As it turns out, the suspicion I had voiced that the BKF and I were not minimally qualified to apply for the grant as solo interpreters also somehow applied to Ewha College and, with time running out towards the deadline someone at The Academy of Korean Studies informed Ewha that they were institutionally unqualified to apply for the grant.

This is the story we were told. The real story will remain as remote and hidden as the Han cultural heart, and I will never know it.

This sudden halt is not a tragedy on several levels.

• The BKF's heart was never that deeply into this and I also found the work tedious. A few translations perhaps, but three years was going to be a grind.

• Just the translation of this work has been incredibly useful for my upcoming conference paper. "Yi Saeng Peers Over the Wall" is the very first piece of Korean fiction and can thus be fairly said to be sui generis in one sense, but also archetypal in a more important way. And YSPOTW is rife with themes and plotlines of diaspora and return (heck, I might even nick that line for my conference paper) and thus will provide a lovely historical and literary background and echo for my argument.

• Similarly, having translated all the poems in YSPOTW, I know have a much better idea of what Korean poetry is about, and this will help me greatly in at least one of the pieces of literature I am reviewing for Acta Koreana.

• It was was just plain cool to do.

• Lurking out there like a vast subterranean follower of Cthulhu, there is the very Korean issue of face and obligation. The work I have done here should have certainly increased my balance on the credit side of these things. This would be an incredibly rude thing to say aloud to a Korean, but it is nonetheless true and when I tote up all the cool shit that went on around this (now) clusterfuck, that may be the most important thing that happened.

Monday, the day after this news, the book of Korean Poetry came and it was a slender enough volume that I could take it to a bar with the Master's Thesis from which it derived, and in the time it takes the Tennessee Titans to beat the living crap out of the wretched New Orleans Saints I could read and compare all the duplicate poems (73 out of 90) as well as make more notes on this review. I now have 4 pages of notes (not counting marginalia in the book) and will let it sit for a week or so. When the time to write comes, the writing should come easily (although just saying that is putting the worst kind of hex on things!).

I also finished "Three Generations" by Yom Sang-seop .

This book began just horribly, in a storm of Korean social structure and trite political posturing that would make any reader from the US grind their teeth in frustration. In fact the BKF is Anglicized enough that this happened to him. He handed me the book with the "bad news/good news" explanation, "I started this book, but by the time I got fifty pages in, I realised it was the kind of book you should read."

Nice, buddy!

But as it went the social structure became part of the novel and the trite political posturing (and otherwise somewhat cardboard characterizations at the outset) became something like two obvious black lines standing up on either end of a canvas - the framework for a clever, subtle and always changing representation of a bamboo grove. Yom's characters grew and changed throughout the book and at the end there were no easy solutions. The end was even something of a cliffhanger. I may just write a review of this thing for the hell of it, to fix its meaning in my head.

Anyway, all of this also helped to blunt whatever kind of blow the loss of the potential Ewha gig might have been. It was never in our hands, I suppose, so we never lost it.

On to the next motel!

Just Me and the BKF vs. The Pansies at Harvard...

Spent another long slog with the BKF this weekend. Friday night in a hotel where we worked from about 5:45 to 10:00 on a new piece that the Koreans had sent him. I had been unaware this had been landing because, well.. no one had warned us. BKF opened his mail when he got to my hotel and there the thing was. Not only there, but in the extremely “only freaking Koreans use it” .hwp format. Which there is really no way to open in the rest of the world. This was unfortunate, because BKF and I were, just at that time, in the rest of the world.

Finally we made phone contact with our person at the Korean University and a .doc version was sent. We also discovered something we should have thought of – we aren’t just going to be in a “reputation qeueue” with Korean Universities, but with international ones as well. Our Korean contact named a few schools who were expected to apply – BKF and I quickly ran over who was a shoo-in – Harvard, UCLA, Berkeley, probably someone in England (does Oxford have such a program?). In the end we figured that the 10 slots would probably be split about evenly between Korean and international universities. We still think our Uni has a chance, it is very prestigious, but it is intimidating to think of actual “scholars” working on this project. It makes the amount of time BKF and I can currently apply to translation, and our poor research resources (Google, Empas, and Naver) seem woefully inadequate. Then there is the additional fact that neither BKF or I are technically qualified for the positions we will fill. I imagine there will be some “putative” experts and we will be ghostwriting. This would be an issue with me if it meant my name would not go on the published work. We’ll have to wait and see.

LOL. Look at that! I just jumped from “we can’t get the job” to “I’ll quit if I don’t have it my own way!”

The new translation was an academic cover letter for our piece. It drove BKF crazy because it was repetitive and academic in that “go over every point three times and dig out significance” way. We had also been told that the thing was “two pages” when it turned out to be almost 1,600 words when “turned into” English. Thankfully it did not include any footnotes. BKF alternated between translation, drinking beer, and swearing and flailing his arms in the air when he got to a point that he felt had been adequately covered three times before. We called it an evening and decided that if I could I would get another night at the hotel, since working there was substantially quieter than working at his house, with the chillun and the family there.

The rest was ESPN and one more beer, ;-)

"Make Mistakes All Shiny, New"

Which I am pleased to say is yet another "phrase not found on Google." And also a dim remembrance of some poem I writ back in the undergraduate days (aah, the best 25 years of my life!) which had something like...

"We do the things we always do,
And make mistakes, all shiny, new..."

which for some reason resonates with me as I re-read Harlan Ellison's anthology "Dangerous Visions" which holds up reasonably well for a volume intended to push the boundaries way back when it was published in 1967 or so..... those boundaries have been pretty well exploded, so anything that holds up in that regard must have been some pretty solid writing to begin with

But as I read "Dangerous Visions" and contemplate Korea, translations, leaving the highest paying job I will likely ever have, and the likelihood that the Patriots will win the super bowl (asterisk baby!) I come across a lovely little quote..

Seems to me most bad things happen within a man's pattern... he gets out of phase and there's a whole row of stones ahead of him laid exactly where each and every one of them will crack him... What he should do is head upstream. It might be unknown territory, and there might be dangers, but... theres' a who row of absolutely certain, absolutely planned agonies he is just not going to have to suffer.

Really. Why keep going on the same path that's busting your ass in predictable ways? It's a failure of imagination.

There are so many novel ways to get broken down and why wouldn't you prefer that, or the possibility that a non-predictable path, a tangent, might spin you off of your absolutely predictable agonies? There will be many paths not taken, but if you (by which I mean "I" since this is all about me.. me.. ME!) stick moronically to one yer a .. yer a .. oh .. a moronic stick!

(that's some mighty fine logickin'!)

Off to see BKF tomorrow about a cover letter, some translation, and where the future is....

The Occidentalist

I spend much of the day today with the BKF working on issues of translation. Although he had marked yesterday and today out for translation he did nothing yesterday. He explains that 'translation is more efficient' when it is the two of us.

So we grind through the remainder of the text - pretty easy actually.. perhaps 10 pages or so in 3 hours. Primarily him reading, scrunching up his lips, and then translating aloud. I type and correct the obvious Koreanisms and suggest "real English" versions of what he is saying on the rare occasions he doesn't come up with them (e.g., He still says "10's of" something when he knows gawdamn well it's "dozens" in English). Sometimes we struggle around issues of word meaning between cultures and how to translate folks wisdom (the old, "beating around the bush" versus "licking the outside of the watermelon" thing).

We also go over the translations from "prose" to "poetry" in the poems. I tell him my LS has contributed one stanza and he is amused. She calls and leaves me a message about a couplet during our translation session, but in this case I like my version better.

It's mine.

That's why! Yeah sure.. but watch me leave a troublesome verse here before this is all over! ;-)

I read my versions of the poetry and it reveals a few misunderstandings which we clear up pretty quickly. In addition we have translated a few new poems (most of which I have got rough poetic translations on already).

Then, bastid that he is, he reveals we "only" have 10 pages of footnotes left to translate.

Degree of difficulty?

We need Hangeul, Chinese character, and English phonetic versions of each bit of text we are discussing. Then we can get about to translating the interpretive bit. It is an epic clusterfuck.

I nearly have all the breath out of the bastard's lungs, and my thumbs completely through his trachea when JAE wanders in and calmly announces that her water has broken.

She is unaturally calm. The BAG, who has been out getting her oil changed (yeah .. in the car wiseguys!) returns and she has also bought presents for all of us while she was waiting.

• BAG dispenses gifts
• JAE continues to leak
• JAE gets BAG some delicious Key Lime Cheesecake which BAG settles in on.
  
• JAE drinks milk and has an apple because "I should eat light food since I'm just going to throw it up anyway"
• BKF collects things
• Korean Nuclear Family (in town for the birth) inexplicably is not going to the hospital and invites me to stay with them for "drinks and beef" (that is probably an exact translation). I demure, just because I am that way.
  
• After the car is loaded BKF remembers a two-page business proposal (a friend's) that he would like me to look at. We leave JAE outside and go in and fire up the laptop and work on it as JAE waits outside.
  
• All suddenly realize that with BKF and JAE leaving, the visiting dad will need to be in charge of driving the family, so there is an ad hoc, "this is the car and this is how you drive it" lesson.
• BKF and JAE drive into street and then decide to check vehicle for necessities (primarily camera, and all I'm saying is it's a freaking birth and if I wanted to see that obvious and easy 'miracle' I'd be on Animal Channel) and block traffic for about 5 minutes.

To say the seen was surreal would be.. well, so real it would belong to Sir Real.

And I still have a few problematic verses (though new problems will be revealed if BKF and I have any time to get together before the Friday deadline - and we'd better) including the following that I leave for my LPS (there... Lovely Political Sister.. she is now yclept). This is one where I don't have all the words yet, so questions of beat and rhyme are premature.

Still, most of the others are not only done, but now in some kind of "ameter."

This shit better get me paid! ;-)

On the lotus curtain fragrant incense spreads Outside light rain wakes apricot blossoms Under a pavilion awning the bell before dawn wakes a dream Forsythia next to a pond a thrush calls out. A spring day, swallows fattens and I shut myself in Lethargic hands, the golden needle stopped its work Butterflies in pairs waft off from flowers And competes to follow the withering flowers in garden shades Shivery cold permeates into the green skirt Spring breeze cuts through the longing heart Who can understand the emptiness inside? Lovebirds dance in myriad of flowers. The color of spring deepens in Hwangsayang's villa Red and green shimmers on silken window screen The fragrant grass distresses (creates uneasiness)

On the lotus curtain fragrant incense spreads Light rain wakes apricot blossoms in their beds Under a pavilion awning a dream is broken by the pre-dawn bell Forsythia next to a pond, a thrush lets out a trill. A spring day, I shut myself in as swallows gorge Lethargic hands, the golden needle halts its course Butterflies in pairs waft off from blossoms And race withering flowers in shade in the garden Shivery cold permeates into the green skirt Spring breeze slices through the longing heart Who can understand when the inside is empty Lovebirds dance together in flowers aplenty. In Hwangsayang's villa the color of spring is deepening Red and green shimmers on silken window screening The fragrant grass is strange and somehow distressing.

The Fine Art of Translatio..

So me and the BKF are trying to translate some unread Korean classic into English...

Well, sort of.. apparently it has first been translated from Chinese to Korean. Now BKF and I are asked to translate this thing...

First from Korean to English (Him with a bit of me - I'll explain this process later)

and then

From prose to something resembling rhyme (Me with a bit of him)

Oh - and we have to do a literal translation.

Which is ridiculous, since this whole process is already something like the game "telephone" that we played in elementary school, except there are three languages involved. What we have is probably the remotest relation to the original text - we have the ashes of a chicken who was once injected with homeopathic medicine, boiled in a stew and the remnants tossed into the fire. We are asked to maintain the essence of the medicine at the heart of the art.

Consequently we both drink...

I do something like this:

Have I entered the enchanted peach garden? The flowers bloom everywhere. The love I bear is difficult to put to words.

Have I entered the enchanted peach garden? The flowers bloom everywhere. It is difficult to put into words the love I bear.

That's simple enough as the rhyme was actually in the words and not much violence is done to literality.

It gets more complicated.

The power of stroke overflowed And drawn a thousand peaks at the center of a river How magnificent the thirty thousand yard Mountain Bangho is! Mysterious, half of it soars amidst clouds. Several hundreds leagues of terrains stretches vaguely ahead And the blue conch shell of the summit is anchored right before the eyes. Waves of blue ocean hovers above Setting sun returns the memory of the hometown. Melancholic one becomes watching the drawing Like a lone boat on Sosang River Bay in wind and rain.

The power of brushstroke overflowed And drew a thousand peaks at a river's core How magnificent the thirty thousand yard Mountain Bangho Mysterious, half of it soars above the clouds below. Several hundreds leagues of land stretches off to the skies The blue conch shell of the summit is anchored before the eyes. Waves of blue ocean spread like a crown Setting sun returns the memory of the hometown. One becomes melancholic watching the drawing Like a boat on stormy Sosang River Bay, pitching and yawing.

Now the rhymes are beginning to get sketchy although I think the idea is still there..
Oddly (probably not), the biggest problem comes with simple, short sentences full of concrete example.

One of the last verses I am puzzling over is one of the simplest:

Picking up a green apricot and throwing it at a nightingale
In the southern pavilion the wind passes and the passing sun is slow
The lotus leaf spreads fragrance and the pond is filled to the brim with water
In the deep of the blue waves a cormorant bathes.

Of course I'll re-open the Word document and some bit of hideous doggerel will spring to my mind.
I
think we need to turn in two versions, one rhyming and one not. At this precise moment I have little confidence in what I'm cranking out. And imagine my surprise to find the deadline for initial submission is next Friday, not late September as the website indicates.

BKF and Soju will put paid to that sort of defeatism, I imagine!

Next - Why a "Library Book" is like a gravesite... Or, a "Semi-Occidental Incident of Translation"