Apologies for the long silence. I think we’ve all been swamped by our respective projects. But…! Exciting news! One of my own recent projects has just gone online: an English translation of Hye-young Pyun’s short story 토끼의 묘.

편혜영 / Hye-young Pyun

This has been in the works for some time, starting with my initial translation of the story for the Seoul Young Writers’ Festival in 2010, all the way up to the final version for Words Without Borders. If you click on both links, you’ll see that the versions are different, right down to the titles. This is because the SYWF version was an early draft done to KLTI specifications (accuracy, accuracy, accuracy), while the WWB version was done to online publishing specifications (5000 words maximum).

For those curious about the math, the original translation was roughly 7500 words long. That means I had to reduce the word count by over 25% for it be publishable. When I’ve told people this, they’ve generally responded with shock. How dare you touch a writer’s story? I wrestled with the question as well and did not enjoy breaking the news to the writer. But in the end, that’s the reality of publishing and the reality of how people read on computer screens. I thought about asking the writer to make cuts to the Korean and resend it to me, but instead I made the cuts myself and sent both versions of the story to WWB, so they could judge which one they wanted to use, and a highlighted version of the Korean to the writer so she could see what I took out.

The ironic thing for me is that I always include a word reduction assignment in my writing classes. This felt like the ultimate test of whether I could follow my own advice. My first step was to go through the story and tighten up every possible phrase and sentence and throw out every unnecessary word. Then I took a look at the overall flow of the story to see if there were places where the pace slowed. I took some big chunks out from the beginning of the story, parts that seemed more expository. Did I make the right choices? Who knows. But feel free to compare and leave a comment, if you feel so motivated.

The title was the biggest struggle for me, and I am still to this moment turning it over and over in my head. The first time I translated the story, I read the title the way most readers encounter it: I read “myo” (묘) as grave. Later, I found an interview with the writer online and consulted with her directly about it. She explained that the title is wordplay. 묘 can be read as both 墓 (grave, tomb) and 卯 (rabbit). The title is intentionally redundant, as it mirrors the way Sino-Korean is read out loud (e.g. “더할 加 가”) and is suggestive of the theme of multiplication within the story: rabbit as in “rabbit” / rabbit rabbit.

I abandoned “grave/tomb” fairly quickly because I felt that it flattened the title out too much, and because the writer herself suggested that she didn’t want it to seem too dark or death-related. I wanted the title to be more of a cypher and to lend itself to the same multiple readings as the Korean. Since I could not reproduce it directly, given the combination of pure and Sino Korean, I went with the equivalent for English, which would have to be Latin.

The first problem I encountered was the sheer number of breeds of rabbits. Was I supposed to stick with an indigenous rabbit? Would Oryctolagus cuniculus really be any friendlier than romanized Korean?

I thump! That's why they call me Oryctolagus cuniculus!

I circled through countless options — including Rabbit Rabbit; Rabbit, Rabbit; Rabbits; and Rabbit — but I kept returning to the Latin, mostly because of the suggestiveness of “cuni.”

I don’t remember now how I found this, but I came across a funny tidbit of Classical trivia. So, “cuniculus” is from the Latin for “burrow” or “underground passage.” Rabbits were given this name because of the burrows they dig. Cuniculus was also the name of the water channels used in ancient Italy. However, the Etruscans also used the word “cuniculus” to refer to the passages carved through stone that led into tombs — passages just big enough for a man to squeeze through.

Totally not suggestive.

Rabbits! Graves! Labyrinthine architectures! It covered all of the ground I wanted to cover with the title and pointed thematically and imagistically to Pyun’s novel, 재와 빨강, which prominently features narrow waterways, small furry creatures, and the twisted maze of urban life.

At the same time, it finally hit me that Oryctolagus cuniculus could be abbreviated to O. cuniculus. Not only did I not need to use such a tongue twister of a title, but it even lent itself to an apostrophic overlap (O, Rabbits!).

As excited as I was by all of this, though, I was still agonizing over how to finalize it. The author had stressed the theme of multiplicity, in that redundant reading of Rabbit Rabbit, so I added a plural onto the title: O. Coniculi. (I had also considered the possibility of “Coniculus Coniculi” in order to mimic how Latin words are memorized by language students, thus mirroring the way hanja is learned in Korea.) Did I make the right choice? Good grief, I have no idea. I just hope that the title minus the long-winded explanation is interesting enough without totally confusing readers.

In the end, what I really learned from all of this as a translator, more than how best to craft a title, is the importance of letting go. The job is done, the text is published, and now I have to take my hands from around its neck and let it breathe.

Phew.

I’ve been learning that lesson in other ways, as well, namely with my first forays into translation for commercial publishing. Titles are a tricky business because at the same time that they are an intimate part of the overall work, they are also regarded as a form of advertising. Will this title induce a reader to pick up this book? Will it help them to make that purchase? Will it coax open their wallet?

A number of Korean books in translation have had title changes. My own recent project, Shin Kyung-sook’s book, was changed. The original Korean, literally translated, is “Somewhere A Telephone Rings For Me,” but the new title is “I’ll Be Right There.”

What is significant about this is that the decisions are not being made by writers or translators. They are being made by agents and publishers, based on what they think will grab readers’ attention. On the one hand, this makes me anxious. It means less creative control. On the other hand, I find it immensely freeing. You mean I don’t have to come up with a good title? And I won’t be to blame for it?? Fantastic.

So there are gains and losses. My question these days is whether putting a commercially appealing title on a book that may not be commercial fiction is a good strategy. Will it skew readers’ expectations and cause them to be disappointed with the book in a different way? Does it take too much control away from the writers themselves?

Needless to say, this is in no way unique to Korean literature in translation, but it is a significant question given the tendency in Korea to treat written texts as if they are inviolable.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the story.

At first I was skeptical. A lecture by an American who’d mastered Japanese and was writing novels in Japanese. His name was Ian Hideo Levy (b. 1950). I had homework. It was a Thursday. It had been a long week.

But boy am I glad I went – even though it was just for an hour.

He’d been immersed in Japanese for decades, reading and writing only Japanese. It felt much more natural for him to speak Japanese at lectures, he said, but he chose to speak English. He spoke it beautifully, mostly without referring to his notes. He paced, gesticulated. Sometimes he’d trip over a word, or there would be stoppage in his throat, an English word trying to make its way out.

He used to be a translator of Japanese literature. For many years, he stuck with translation only before a Japanese writer, Kenji Nakagami said to him — after drinking with Levy till six o’clock in the morning, “Join us.” Don’t just translate, Kenji was saying. Start writing in Japanese.

He told a useful story, one I knew I could use in this blog, about the problem of translating plural and singular out of Japanese into English. The same problem exists for Korean. He spoke of the expression “新宿の光” how he’d always thought of it as “Lights of Shinjuku.” He said it wasn’t until he saw the nine thousand or so signboards illuminating the night, bleeding into one another, that the 光 did not refer to many lights, but one innumerable, indivisible thing.

As if that wasn’t good enough, he went on to say this about literature. First he reminded us of the commonplace that we often hear about translations – that good translations should have a sense of being its own original. He turned it around to say that all good literature in these times – no matter where it is set, no matter who it’s about – should have some sense of being a translation, a sense of a way of communicating, a way of feeling, a way of being that has been lost in the final product.

He talked about zainichi writer Yi Yang-ji (Yangji Lee/이양지/李良枝) who wrote in Japanese. One of the themes that zainichi writers explores is the idea of going back. Right now Korea is divided, but the idea is that they will return from Japan once the Koreas have unified. Zanichi (在日/재일) is interestingly untranslatable. Literally, it means “residing in Japan” and refers only to ethnic Koreans. In an English article in Japan Times, he said that Yi had been described as a “South Korean writer residing in Japan” which reminds you of a bestselling writer from Pusan taking some time off in Japan and writing.

He talked about Yi, as a young zainichi woman, going to Korea as a foreign student to reconnect with her Korean heritage. She realizes that she cannot accept the langauge. There is a split between 母語 (mother tongue) and 国語 (national language). She talks about 言葉の杖 (언어의 지팡이) which Levy translated as the “cane” or “staff” of language. Every morning she would wake up and wonder to herself — should she reach for the “아” or the “あ”?

He told a story about how he got a call from a woman who sounded very young, like a freshman in university. The voice said “This is Yi Yang-ji.”

It said, “I read your novel, Levy-san. It was wonderful. Keep working hard.”

You could tell how much this meant to Levy, even as he described the exchange for us. A zainichi writer 先輩/선배 who wrote in Japanese, cheering on her an American writer 後輩후배 writing in Japanese.

He asked her if she could consider herself 韓国系日本人/한국계일본인/Korean-Japanese. She said that was such an American question. She said that is not how identity works, that it is not some social contract.

A few days later, he saw the headline, “Korean writer dead.” He pictured an old male
writer, a Nobel Prize contender perhaps, having passed away in Seoul, wearing hanbok.

They were talking about Yi.