Huzzah! The new issue of Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture is out, with special features on South Korean science fiction and Hong Gildong. The translations include stories by Kim Kyung-uk, Kim Jung-Hyuk, Park Min-gyu, Bae Myung Hoon, Han Yujoo, Koh Jongsok, and Seo Hajin.
Full table of contents and info here.
Thanks Dafna!
New old stuff from the inimitable Brother Anthony:
Seoul Selection have just published “Eerie Tales from Old Korea” a collection of Korean ghost stories originally translated and published 100 years ago by Homer B. Hulbert and James S. Gale, that I have selected and published to celebrate the 150th birthdays of Gale and Hulbert. Happy Birthdays, both, and thanks to Seoul Selection. I just hope they sell well and people enjoy them.
And the description from Seoul Selection:
Homer B. Hulbert and James S. Gale, two of the most famous North American missionaries to come to Korea in the 1880s, were very fond of ghost stories, but for years the Korean scholars they met swore that no such stories existed in Korea. Eventually, they discovered that Korea, too, had a plentiful supply of ghosts and spirits, celebrated in many eerie tales. However, because the stories had seemed too frivolous or were connected with shamanism and Buddhism, the scholars had been ashamed to talk about them.
A main source of these stories were collections of yadam. These were a form of short tale, especially popular in the Joseon period. Whereas Confucian classics were the gateway to officialdom, yadam offered an escape valve, dealing with things much closer to daily life. The stories told there were about individuals who were not always admirable paragons of Confucian virtue; rather, they were often artful dodgers who managed to escape from tricky situations; survive traps; deal with ghosts, spirits, and nine-tailed foxes; and even get rich in the process.
As we celebrate the one hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Hulbert and Gale, the present selection of Korean ghost stories—nostalgic for their echoes of the lost world of old Korea and its many ghosts—is offered for the pleasure of readers in the twenty-first century, one hundred years after their original publication.
Apparently, Dan Brown’s latest novel Inferno took eleven translators to an underground “bunker” near Milan to translate nonstop for three months. There’s a joke about some monkeys and typewriters (all chain smoking and drinking coffee in my mind’s eye) in there somewhere, but…
From Publishing Perspectives:
Dante himself would have been impressed. For nearly two months, 11 people were kept tucked away in an underground “bunker” near Milan, Italy, (actually a windowless high-security basement at the Milan headquarters of Mondadori, Italy’s largest publishing company, owned by Silvio Burlusconi) where they worked seven days a week until at least 8pm each night; all to translate Dan Brown’s new book, Inferno, into French, German, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, and Portuguese in preparation for its multi-nation simultaneous release on its publication date of May 14.
Here’s a news clip about it, complete with porno-background music (is the news site owned by Berlusconi too?). Dan Brown, iI girone dei traduttori: ”Noi, chiusi nel bunker” – Repubblica Tv – la Repubblica.it (mostly in English, with the Italians unsubtitled as it’s from an Italian news source). Once they get past the sensationalist parts about describing the bunkers, it’s pretty interesting to hear the translators describing their respective approaches to translation, like the one who says he never reads a novel he’s translating beforehand, so he can experience the book as a first time reader would.
I’m also impressed/surprised about the move towards the multinational simultaneous launch of the book, à la blockbuster movies and such. I guess blockbusters are blockbusters regardless of medium these days.
Thanks for the story, Stephen!
Interesting article on how Murakami’s novel was translated.
When translating 1Q84 and other Murakami works, do you feel any obligation to be respectful of the voice and feel of Jay Rubin’s and Alfred Birnbaum’s translations? Do you feel that you all are creating Murakami’s English oeuvre, and that it ought to feel unified, or are you more focused on each book in isolation?
I admire Jay’s and Alfred’s translations, but I just do my own thing, my own take on what Murakami should sound like in English. We each have our own styles–Jay, for instance, tending to use fewer contractions than I do. I’m the only one of the three Murakami translators who’s worked with the other two translators on projects. When Alfred and I did Underground, and Jay and I did Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, we didn’t try to intentionally create anything unified, but with 1Q84 the editor, at least, did try to smooth out any major differences, which makes sense since it’s a single novel. Because my portion of the novel came last, the editor had by then decided how to handle certain stylistic points, so I went along with them. (Thus, to get back to the earlier point, my part has fewer contractions than I usually use.)
This was the part of the interview that struck me the most, due to my current translation of Shin Kyung-sook’s I’ll Be Right There. One of the first questions I asked when I was offered the assignment was whether Shin’s agents wanted me to echo Chi-young Kim’s translation style or to just do my own thing. A translation carries the burden of representing a writer’s voice, and whatever hits the marketplace first could theoretically be setting the tone for that writer and establishing readers’ expectations. I wondered whether readers would understand the difference between the original writer and what we translators bring to the mix. In this case, her agents emphasized that I should just do my own thing and not worry about referring to pre-existing translations.
I do enjoy reading other translators’ work, though, especially if they’ve worked on the same authors as me. In translation, there’s always more than one solution and rarely a “right answer,” so it’s useful to see what other people come up with. But I still wonder whether readers are ever puzzled by the differences they come across in translation. I know that with poetry translation, I’m quick to favor certain translators over others and have in the past specifically not purchased books because they weren’t done by a particular translator. But maybe the differences are more apparent in verse than in prose since word choices way more heavily there.
Jay Rubin, in Making Sense of Japanese, broaches the stereotype that Japanese is more imprecise and mysterious than English.
There’s a generalization out there that Japanese is somehow imprecise or vague compared to English. I don’t buy it. Japanese communicate as well as anyone, and a writer like Murakami—though the overall atmosphere of his work may be dreamlike or surreal at times—lays out his ideas clearly.
Is there a Western language that’s at all analogous in structure and cadence? German, in that the verbs come at the end?
It’s unlike any other language I’ve studied, and I’ve studied Russian, Chinese, French, and German. With Japanese verbs coming at the end I sometimes feel that translating Japanese into English is like giving away the punch line.
This was another part of the interview that I thought was also relevant to Korean-to-English translation. I’ve also heard Korean described as vague or as relying heavily on context and reading between the lines. But what I’ve found in teaching K-E translation, and especially teaching close reading techniques to translators, is that the exact same issue arises with English. Things that are stated in plain and exacting language in Korean will be vague and figurative in English; and things that are clear in English will be vague in Korean. One small example is transition words. Korean prose uses a ton of transition words for textual clarity that can simply be eliminated in English. But when you have students who have been trained on a word-for-word translation model, it can be very difficult to get them to see that not every word equals a word. Sometimes a word in Korean equals a silence in English. Or a semicolon. Or a dash.
The punch line issue is one I personally wrestle with. I want so much to preserve that ta-da! moment, but more often than not you wind up with odd inverted sentences that do exactly the opposite of what you want them to do — lose the reader rather than pull them in closer. I find I spend a lot of time in class talking about how to create focus and emphasis in an English sentence. Our students tend to fall back on overusing “just” and “even” and other added words that clog up and slow down the sentence.
I could also add something here about irony and the myth that Koreans are never sarcastic, but that’s another story.
An article in the Dong-a Ilbo yesterday touts Korean literature as the next “‘hallyu’ boom”… in Japan. If my experiences in academia are any indication, there has been more interest in Korean literature on that side of the East/Sea/of Japan, but it’s hard to talk about a “boom” of any kind of literature these days.
Dong-a’s evidence: Han Kang’s The Vegetarian was well reviewed by a Waseda professor in the Asahi Shimbun, sold out its first run and is heading into a second printing, and Shin Kyung-sook’s Please Look After Mom is expected to do well based on its success in English-language countries and Europe. Interesting that that’s what they think it’ll take for PLAM to make it in Japan. Says a representative from the BC (literary) Agency:
“If the novel was exported directly to the Japanese market, it would not gain notable influence. But since the received a good response in the West, it will gain popularity in Japan as well.”
Hm… As Prof. Choi Mi-kyung, winner of the 2011 KLTI Translation Award, pointedly reminded everyone, there are other target languages for Korean literature than English. And literary critics do have more clout in Japan than, say, in the U.S. — let’s see what gets in there next.
(Thanks to Jun Yoo for the link)
It’s been a while since I’ve posted one of these, but lunch looked pretty good today at husband’s office cafeteria:
I’m surprised GT came up with “prison” for 콩밥 (rice with beans) because it’s a euphemism for “serving time,” but I would not be surprised to find an actual Bureau of Squid somewhere nearby, and am very concerned about the Jeyuk crisis simmered Night, which is how I’ve been feeling in this hothothot Seoul summer. I have no words for eggs and vegetables, though.
The romanization of the untranslated words, however, is curious. I wonder if “it” is translating the words based on prior examples of romanized Korean words, or if it has an algorithm for romanizing words it can’t translate? If the former, it says a lot about the approach taken towards translating words for Korean foods or objects that don’t have counterparts in the target languages. Translators, how often do you romanize instead of trying to translate? This is not a value judgement. I think there are pros and cons to both methods, and the words ultimately sound foreign whether translated or romanized precisely because they don’t have easy correlates.
The question of whether to translate descriptively or to introduce the native term is often a tough call in the name of readability and pedagogy, especially when introducing new objects or concepts. “Tofu,” is part of the English lexicon now, but I imagine it was initially introduced as “Japanese bean curd.” I have seen “bean curd” used in translations of Asian literature as well as in original work in English dealing with Asia, but at this point the foodstuff is ubiquitous in the U.S., and is in English language dictionaries (both the American Heritage and the OED cite 1880 as the first English usage of “tofu”). The food item appears on menus in Korean and Chinese restaurants alternately as bean curd and tofu, but rarely as “doobu” or “doufu,” their counterparts. The same can be said for a number of Chinese and Japanese words that have become naturalized in the English lexicon, but have cognates in other Asian languages: futon, Zen, congee, mochi, feng shui, to name a few. Of course, this has to do with when and how the items and concepts were introduced to the target language (English) and how they were popularized. The U.S. government (military) had a vested interest in promoting (or rehabilitating, as one scholar I know is currently researching) Japanese culture after WWII, and the media coverage of the new Japan introduced these items and concepts to the American public and language (just do a search on “Japanese culture” in Time magazine between 1945 and 1970 for a quick glance at the changing perceptions of Japan, Asia, and the introduction of Japanese aesthetics and culture, like this article covering an exhibition of Ukiyoe at Chicago’s Art Institute in 1955 — note the title “Out of the Floating World,” which already suggests some familiarity with Japanese art).
But I digress. Seriously.
An alarming number of translations of Korean children’s books (well, three that I’ve seen but that’s already alarming to me) use “corn cakes” for 떡 (ttuk), for what reason I can’t imagine, since it’s made with rice flour, but I assume the translators thought there was some folk correlation between corn cakes and ttuk. I find this to be a disservice to the reader because it makes false analogies between cultures, but I understand the difficulty, especially in children’s books, of conveying the right nuance in your translation. So…once again, translating is hard and there’s no one way to do it. Is that my conclusion to every post on translation? Sheesh.
Now, off to find that surrey prison. Tracking down a moving target is always hard.
Sorry for the short notice, but going on today at COEX in Seoul:
More on this to come…
Shin reads Maslin's Review over tea at Lincoln Center Plaza’s Avery Fisher Hall
This is Part 2 of an interview I conducted in late March, right when Please Look After Mom was released in the U.S. (Apologies for the late, late post!)
For Part 1 of the interview, click here.
SOV: Most readers have been talking about mojeong (maternal love) as the primary theme of your novel. As I was reading some of the blurbs for your book, novelist Gary Shteyngart—I’m a fan of his work—said something that struck me. He brings up another theme that’s more historical—about the tragedy that often accompanies migration from the countryside to the city. That flow isn’t limited to Korea. The center/periphery relationship can be Seoul/countryside, but also, U.S./Korea, for example.
I think this theme is hugely important, especially in the context of your novel’s own “migration” from Korea to the United States.
KS: That’s right. People move around for education, for example; it’s just how things are today. Now that I’ve come to the United State, I see that people do the same thing here. (Laughs) We’re constantly leaving where we are for something better, to achieve something. This brings alienation—the differences in environment, for example, between Seoul and the countryside. But this applies to the U.S. as well. In trying to gain something, you also lose something. But of course, something can be gained as well. This is true for Korea and for the United States. For example, you (referring to interviewer) – you were born somewhere else, and now here you are, in New York. This seems like a common story today.
As for the question of “center,” yes, most characters in my novel do not originate from the center. They started in the periphery, as outsiders, and worked their way to the center.
SOV: The second daughter also has an American-born son. When you wrote this book, you had no idea that it would be translated into English.
A: No not at all. But that is the reality these days. Many of the younger generation of Koreans, they can find ways to live a few years abroad without too much difficulty. Whether it’s because of work, or college, or it’s for some other personal reasons, to learn something. It’s not entirely uncommon for Koreans to have American-born children these days. Even in New York, you’ll hear a lot of Korean on the street. That was really surprising to me. New York for me, it’s not like Europe—there’s something about the atmosphere that reminds me of Seoul. There’s a similarity, not in the older buildings, of course. But it can be really uncanny at times… So many different ethnicities live here and the culture is so diverse. Even in my case, I feel like I’ve come here as another person. It’s been a good experience. Because I always have my desk to return to.
SOV: Because your desk is your home.
KS: (Laughs) Yes, my desk is my home.
SOV: Writers are lucky, I think.
KS: (Laughs)
SOV: I was reading a customer review on Amazon.com, and one reader said, “I liked everything but I really wanted to know what happened to Mom in the end.” The reader seemed frustrated. I suppose wherever you go, you’ll find readers who need to have closure, who want something certain in the end?
KS: Sure.
SOV: Then someone else wrote a reply to the comment and explained the ending.
KS: Really?
SOV: That the chapter from Mom’s point-of-view is coming “from beyond.” And the original commenter wrote back, “Oh really? Is that what happened? It makes sense now.” I think that’s one possible interpretation. My interpretation has been – taking into account your earlier work like Solitary Room – on one hand you seem to be telling stories of forgotten people – the lower-class or people who are invisible to society; on the other hand, your work seems to confront the problem of representation in general, the inherent impossibility of speaking for those who are voiceless. Some readers, I think, read your works too transparently, to simply accept your descriptions and think, “So this is how they live.”
I feel that your work often has that additional, complicating layer, which suggests that we shouldn’t believe everything that is here, that there are things that cannot be known. The impossibility of testimony seems like an important theme for you.
KS: I think that’s spot on.
SOV: Even Mom’s first-person testimony is kind of contradictory, since she is illiterate and it is written…
KS: Sure. That’s why a part of me felt, as I was writing this, that it wasn’t me who was writing it, that my mother had taken my hand in hers to help me write it. Someone once asked me, if writers’ works are like their children, what kind of child is Please Look After Mom to me? And I wanted to say that I felt like I was the book’s child, not the other way around.
I am always plagued with the feeling that what I am seeing and feeling is not everything. There’s something impossible to capture there. But there’s also the feeling of wanting to get as close as possible to that impossible thing, and that’s the experiment of language I’m engaged in. It’s really hard to say. There’s always a remainder there. I like things to be interpreted in more than one way. If ten people read something I wrote, I want ten different takes; I want diverse readings.
As for the “Mom” section. The question is understandable. Even in Korea, I would receive questions about why I didn’t let Mom be found in the end, why I chose to leave the readers hanging. I don’t think it would’ve made sense to have Mom be found. That would’ve been something out of a TV drama. It’s not important in this novel whether Mom is actually discovered. What’s important is the process of finding, in “the absence” of this fictional Mom, “the presence” of our real Mom. So it’s important that Mom stays missing. “It’s been nine months since Mom’s gone missing.” This is what the last chapter says. It’s not over. We don’t know whether Mom is alive or not. I had to create a point-of-view for Mom that would bridge the gap between this world and the next, because we don’t know what happened to her.
In a way, the question of whether she is found or not lies in the heart of the reader. And maybe there is something fundamentally maternal or “Mom-like” in all of us, that allows us to rear a small life, to pour our effort into making the world better for its sake. I wonder if the symbol of this Mom-ness might not be found within the self, so that I may be like a mother to you, or you to me, so that the mother-child relationship can be imagined within all sorts of social relationships. This seems to provide hope in these difficult times, when everything is bcoming rational, and everyone is obsessed with progress, with moving ahead. Maybe this idea of “advancement” shouldn’t be everything when it comes to being human. Maybe we can turn our attention to what is fundamental, to our point of origin. Maybe our task is to rediscover the thing that“Mom” had cultivated for us, for us to reclaim it in some way.
SOV: If you could mention a few writers you admire, or enjoy reading?
As a young writer, Shin admired Oh Jung-hee's work. (Note: Oh's novella Bird was translated into English by SOV's own kokkiri)
KS: Foreign writers?
SOV: Korean or non-Korean, whichever you prefer.
KS: For the most part, I’m a fan of individual works rather than writers. (Laughs) But of the older generation of Korean writers, I like Oh Jung-hee and Park Wan-seo. I was very influenced by them and enjoyed their works greatly when I was younger. I really loved much of the Korean literature I encountered while I was studying creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.
A great deal of foreign literature has been translated into Korean. I really enjoy Duras. Proust, also, because he is difficult. I enjoyed Russian literature too. As for American literature, I’ve been reading a lot of Paul Auster and Raymond Carver; many of their works have been translated. I have read and enjoyed Toni Morrison too.
SOV: I know that some writers dislike reading works by other writers when they’re in the middle of their own work. Some will say, though, when they get stuck, they’ll take down a volume of Proust and to get themselves unstuck.
KS: When I’m writing I usually do not read other books. I like to listen to music, actually. Rostropovich’s cello performances, for example. I like pieces that help me feel, from time to time, a strange convergence with my work. I listen to pieces without words, because the lyrics can distract me, because I end up thinking too much about them. When I’m not writing, I read more.
When I get stuck with my writing, I often call my mother. She has a lot of stories I can’t hear from anyone else. Because I live in the city, and Mom lives in the countryside. So she sees a lot of things I don’t see anymore, things that transpire in the countryside: what’s growing on the trees, the fields, and what it’s like during harvest time. It’s something I used to see when I was little, so hearing her stories, I can imagine what it’s like. And these details make their way into my work. It’s completely different from the city life I now lead, and so through her stories, these two disparate lives are allowed to meet.
SOV: Thank you for your time, Ms. Shin.
KS: It’s been a pleasure.
Interview translated from the Korean by Jae Won Chung. All mention of the country or polity of “Korea” unless otherwise noted, refers to Republic of Korea/South Korea
Via @kltiopia, a refreshing take on the process of translation in the Guardian by Helen Stevenson, translator of Congolese author Alain Mabanckou’s novel Broken Glass, that reflects on the importance of listening for the rhythm of the text:
The difficulty of translating fiction isn’t finding the correct equivalent for each word. That would be like a pianist reading music and fumbling about for the right note on the keyboard each time: no music would ever be made. It is, as people often say, about finding the voice.
She also obliquely addresses a few other important bits about translation that I think are sometimes downplayed: interaction with the author (when possible), understanding the cultural background of the source text, and how our personal hang-ups or cultural sensitivities about language can hinder our work. All of that can be encapsulated in the final paragraph of the short piece:
Political linguistics – or more exactly anxieties to do with tact – are another matter. At first I worried about how to translate “nègre”, a word Alain’s characters use all the time, often disparagingly. I got so worked up about this word, whose English equivalent was to me so un-useable, that eventually I sent Alain my first email, introducing myself as his English translator and asking him what to do. He must have been surprised to discover his translator had such rudimentary French. “Dear Helen, he wrote, ‘nègre’ means ‘negro’.” That seemed pretty clear, so I stopped worrying about tact.
As a “critic,” I often tell myself and others that I don’t like to ask authors about their work because I think the work speaks for itself, but doing translation reminds me that there are many different levels of interpretation at work while you read. I still think it’s valid as a reader to have your interpretation of the work be at odds with the author’s intention — a work of literature does stand on its own, and a reader’s reaction to a text is something that can’t be controlled by the author and is as much a commentary on the culture that produced it as the text itself. As a translator, though, I think the onus is to convey the author’s intentions as much as possible.
One of the most common responses I get from other grad students when I say I work on contemporary fiction (i.e., with still living authors) is that they much prefer working on authors who can’t respond to their criticism (i.e., dead people). Fair enough. That may be why I put up my front about not wanting to ask authors about their work, but as Stevenson’s story shows, sometimes it’s just a lot easier to go to the source.
Very random bit from Naver dictionary, godsend for Korean-language translators with its aggregated dictionaries (encyclopedia, Korean-English, Korean-Korean, Korean-Japanese, and now the oddly helpful Korean-French) :
aw, you noticed... =^^=
I’m not exactly sure why YBM, fine purveyor of Korean-English dictionaries and English language cram school factories (and artist behind this sentence), decided this is a good sample sentence for 기묘하다 (odd, strange, peculiar), but the entry itself is a good illustration of it.
Speaking of Naver dictionary, whilst translating a particularly dense academic article this week, I discovered this awesome new addition to the Naver arsenal: Naver Terms (용어사전)!
Naver "scholar"?
It’s still in beta, and only in Korean, but from the little playing around I did, it looks fairly promising. You can search, obviously, and it also has lists of terms grouped by academic discipline.
The announcement at the bottom says it was (fittingly) released on 4/19.
Translators of Korean stuff, don’t say I never did anything for you.
