KLN

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Quis ipsum suspendisse

Writer's Notes

[Draft I] Writer-Translators on Their Craft — Bae Suah

This section features five respected writer-translators who reminisce, reflect, and ruminate on their experiences of writing and translating. Their opinions correspond, but also refract from each other to varying degrees given their unique, personal backgrounds. The section features their abridged answers.—Ed. How did you first get into translation and was there a specific opportunity that motivated you to get into it? I remember very clearly what led me to translation: my study of German. I was in Berlin at the time. I went to Germany with no ostensible purpose, as I hadn’t gone there to study, work, or learn the language; instead I yearned to spend a year doing absolutely nothing, to be in a place where no one knew me, to not work, and to not speak. I’d gone in search of a world without language, and in Berlin I found it. I had brought a big box full of Korean books to read, which took all of two months to go through. Then a vast emptiness set in. Only two languages existed for me in the world then, as they do now: everyday language that’s as vital to us as water or air, and literary language, which can only be accessed if one desires it. As time passed, I increasingly thirsted for the latter. I tired of walking past bookshops and only ever catching glimpses of German titles in their windows. That’s when something I hadn’t anticipated or expected even after arriving in the country first occurred to me: the thought that I might learn German simply in order to read. To learn it as a high school student might learn Esperanto—that was precisely the idea. This notion took me by surprise. I had never, in all my life, done anything with the focused intensity that people call diligence or dedication, nor held a fervent life goal in my heart. Everything that occurred to me, from my birth to my becoming a writer, had been happenstance, and I reveled in such chance encounters. Of course, when this thought came to me that early November afternoon, as I stood outside a bookshop in a Berlin street already grown dim with the encroaching German winter, it was as a spontaneous impulse and not some avid goal or persistent desire; even so, having nothing else to do in that moment, I decided to act on the impulse. From the start, my idea was that I would enter this language solely through books—through literature. So despite my rudimentary understanding of the most basic grammar, I ran into the bookshop, giddy with excitement, and picked out a book I believed—erroneously—I would immediately set to reading. The book was Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig. I chose it as the title and author were familiar to me in spite of my general ignorance of German literature, and because I had read it before in Korean; and though this had been years ago, I hoped my rereading of the book in German would be made more manageable by that fact. This hope was soon dashed. As I read I had to look up nearly every word except perhaps the articles in a dictionary, and still there wasn’t a single sentence in the book that failed to shock and astound me. I read every sentence and understood nothing, and in this way I was able to understand what wasn’t being said by the sentences without having read a single sentence. That book was a door. The very first door I encountered in a world of vernacular silence, which I’d entered through the erasure of my natural language; a door that led me back inside language, albeit language not as a means of conversation and communication but as a door in and of itself. I believed I had come upon my own method of reading certain types of books. Casting reading with the dictionary aside, I was attempting to read as translation. That was my first act of translation. And translation itself has since become another way of reading for me, in the way recitation has. These days I continue to translate writing I prefer or have an affinity for just so I can read it (differently), and I also translate the occasional poem. This is translation for myself, effectively. When we speak of “style,” we often think of it as the representative element of a text that displays the writer’s signature personality, but in the case of translation, the text may inevitably have to be adjusted at times to fit linguistic norms and conventions in the target language. This is sometimes referred to as “the betrayal of translation.” Have you ever agonized over this issue? It’s not exactly a problem of style, but there is something I’ve had to think through. The majority of my translations are of fiction, and in novels how the characters address one another, especially when honorifics are involved, can sway the overall impression of a work. Watching a French film on a flight recently, I found myself gagging at the Korean subtitles and had to stop watching. In the scene a woman is smoking and talking to a man roughly the same age as her, but the subtitles have the woman addressing the man as doryeonnim, a term of address that is used specifically by women when speaking to or of their husband’s younger, unmarried brother, and in which the woman is explicitly “lowering” herself out of deference to a male family member. In the actual conversation, the characters of course address each other by name. 　　Korean speech levels and honorifics are so complicated it’s difficult to set clear rules about their use, and unless you are an expert in the matter, being a linguist or an editor, for instance, they can be quite unfathomable. While in Switzerland, I met a Swiss linguist who remarked that Korean has one of the trickiest system of polite speech in the world, and said this was why (though he spoke no Korean) he had chosen to specialize in it. Then there’s the fact that this system very often reflects values that are regressive, so that actual use of and opinions about continued usage of honorifics vary from person to person. Not to mention how this habitual deferring and being deferred to by various means of polite speech tends to decide hierarchies between people, if only on the level of language. (An example would be how, previously, Korean translations of conversations between spouses would have the wife naturally speaking up to the husband and the husband speaking down to the wife.) But of course in the German source text there is no such language hierarchy, meaning the translator has to write this into the translation. Korean translators have to determine for themselves whether and when to employ polite forms of speech and honorifics in dialogues and sentences, which would fall under the category of translating the unspoken. 　　I had to find solutions to this myself while translating Hermann Hesse’s Narziß und Goldmund (Narcissus and Goldmund). Certain elements of the novel make it tricky to apply Korean forms of address, and the amount of dialogue between the two central characters was significant. The novel is set in what seems medieval times, though the exact period is unspecified. Narziß and Goldmund meet as (assistant) teacher and student at a Catholic cloister school, and become intimate friends. So I wasn’t sure what degree of politeness I should use in rendering their dialogue. Another issue was how to translate the dialogue between Goldmund and the various women (of different statuses and circumstances) he meets. For instance, when the student Goldmund leaves the school and has a chance physical encounter with the wandering Lise, should these two converse in polite form or informal form? If at first meeting they were to use the polite form, should they continue to do so even after having slept together? When Goldmund falls in love with the daughter of a knight, which polite form should these two people of different social rank use when speaking to each other? Should that form be historically accurate or should it reflect modern usage? Or should the emphasis perhaps be on what readers today would find most natural and easy to read? These were some of the questions I had to answer. But of course the choices I made regarding forms of speech only reflect one of many possible ways to translate this novel. 　　The use of honorifics in translation tends to reflect the general values or conventions of the target culture, in this case Korean culture, but I would like to address a somewhat different aspect. In translation there are several areas where the translator’s individual ethics and beliefs can play a significant role, and the use of polite forms of speech and how one chooses to translate a certain word are, I would say, determined by the individuality of the translator. It goes without saying that translation is an act that can be open to active intervention by the translator. I want to highlight this because translated language, and in particular the translated language of literary works (which encompasses not just diction, but voice, tone, manner of speech, and attitude), is necessarily influenced by the language of Korean literature, and will itself in time suffuse the language of Korean literature. How do you select the authors or works you translate? As I see it, choosing what to translate is the moment a translation begins. So for me, asking how is the translation? is fundamentally the same as asking what is it a translation of? 　　Having said that, when I first started, I had no specific criteria for selecting what to translate. I knew nothing about German writers and literature then, and lacked the knowledge to even select a work. Not only that, I was not at all—and am still not—someone who translates because they are proficient in a language. I dived into translation headfirst, and so in the beginning I failed to choose the right translation projects. As with writing, translation was a slow, roundabout process for me. It took a long time for me to reach a point where I could decide what to translate, and be satisfied with that decision. 　　Though I still have a strong desire to translate work I’ve discovered myself, I’ve also been fortunate in having editors who have recommended wonderful and captivating authors to me, authors whose work I then went on to translate. These include Fernando Pessoa’s Livro do Desassossego (The Book of Disquiet), W. G. Sebald’s Schwindel. Gefühle (Vertigo), Robert Walser’s Der Spaziergang (The Walk), and Peter Handke’s Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire (The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire). Pessoa, Sebald, and Walser are all writers I came to know in Germany and then subsequently, almost as if by fate, was asked to translate by Korean publishers. The work I encounter through editors’ recommendations tend to be of world-famous writers, and here I have an advantage in that I can ride on the coattails of these by all accounts excellent and famous authors; still, the translations I’m fondest of and prefer are of relatively unknown writers and works (at least in Korea) that I somehow came across, and went on to introduce to editors and eventually to translate and publish. The Iranian writer Sadegh Hedayat’s Boof-e koor (The Blind Owl), the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s A paixão segundo G.H. (The Passion According to G.H.), for instance, and most recently the Swiss writer of Romanian origin I’m set to translate, Aglaja Veteranyi. 　　The most important element for me in selecting what to translate is whether or not the language of the original chimes with my translated language. Because I seek out literature that is unfamiliar, new, minor, I try to avoid work that has strong popular appeal or is fashionable or has a universal style. I prioritize my own pleasure in the writing as its potential translator. Writing that makes the translator’s heart beat faster to the extent she has to pause in her translation, unable to progress any further from fevered excitement, having become entirely, unseeingly enthralled (quite literally)—this is the kind of work I like to translate. I am the antithesis of the translator as researcher, who analyses the text with measured composure, and of whom there seem to be a fair number among the truly excellent translators). 　　The sentences I prefer in the original tend to be uncomplicated yet difficult to render distinctly in Korean, simultaneously simple and ambiguous, avant-garde and beautiful. These are sentences that will always be translated differently from one person to the next according to their idiosyncratic language, and this for me is a joy, a challenge, and a pleasure. That there is pleasure in translation is, after all, why I translate. Another criterion is that the work must be something I would want to read in Korean. This is another important reason I translate. If I read a work in German first and it makes me shiver, that frisson arises from an intense desire to read the work in Korean. Do you think your creative writing impacts your translation or vice versa? If so, in what ways does one influence the other? (In terms of word choice, expressions, sentence structure, narrative structure, way of thinking, and so on.) As someone who writes and translates, I think they are both one and separate in that one influences the other. I find with time that I experience the divide between the two a lot less acutely. So it’s difficult to say what precedes the other in exerting influence. When I started translating, the Korean publishing world viewed translation a little differently than it does now. I remember an editor telling me that a good translator shouldn’t have style, i.e., their own, and must act as a clear panel of glass that allows the original work to pass through. I didn’t have a single published translation yet, but I did have hopes of doing so, and found the editor’s words disconcerting and disappointing. As I understood it, the editor, realizing my wish to translate, seemed to be hinting that a writer like myself wasn’t suited to translation. What I think now is this: No translator can be without style. It’s only that their style is lesser known (than that of a writer). Style is one’s preferred language, and translation after all is the act of preferring (favoring, choosing) within the bounds permitted by the source text. 　　Since I started translating I have come to understand writing as a process of translation, of transporting what is nonverbal into the verbal, into words. This understanding has freed up my writing. And through mistranslations which are bound to occur now and then, creativity can forge a new, unexpected path, in the way mutations can present radical change. 　　Anyone who writes yearns to experience freedom through and from language, while yearning to be free of it. Which is why they destroy, expand, transplant, embrace, and experiment. They take their writing far into the distance, they bring it back, they observe how the language shifts and changes as though it had substance, then they plant this in their own soil. This is one of the ways in which they translate. To translate literature from another language, it must be necessary to fully understand not just the literary language but also the vernacular language and cultural context. Could you share your own efforts in this regard? There’s actually not a lot I can do in that regard. I began translating not long after I first started learning German, and I had almost no points of contact with Germany or its culture in my personal life. When I returned to Korea, there was zero opportunity to speak or to hear German. So I did the only thing I could do by myself, which was to read as much literature as possible in German. I wanted to know the German of writers rather than nonwriters, and written rather than spoken German. 　　Because I learned German not through speech but through writing, this language remains a primarily textual language for me. When I was in Germany, I enjoyed listening to radio dramas at bedtime more than I did conversing with other people. I didn’t understand everything, but what I enjoyed, I think, was listening to the cadences of dialogue, enunciation, voice, and the different ways the actors controlled their emotion as they spoke. I still prefer audio plays to the easily accessible audiobooks. Even when I can’t follow the plot or what is being said, I find the recitation and enunciation of the actors combined with auditory presentation itself stimulating. 　　It’s become something of a routine for me to travel to Germany when I write. I intend to escape speech and seclude myself in writing, but an unintended consequence is that it’s prompted me to gain some perspective on the local culture. When I am in Germany, I stay at a cottage near Berlin, hardly venturing out and spending most of my time writing or, occasionally, gardening; even so, swapping locations does alter the language environment. The rare times I visit a cafe, I listen to people place their orders. Even the simplest order of half a loaf of rye bread, a cheese sandwich, or a cup of coffee can be so particular to the speaker, I find it thrilling. 　　More recently, I had the opportunity to recite a German literary text and realized that there was a way to familiarize oneself with a language through recitation. The recitation was for a German art film, and came about because the role required someone who spoke German with a foreign accent. (I don’t think the German audience would have understood every word of what I recited in the film). This experience prompted my more recent forays into recitations and reading performances in Korea. 　　An Italian friend I know in Germany, who happens to be a theater actor, told me that memorizing dialogue and reciting lines on stage helped her in becoming better acquainted with the language. Translated by Emily Yae Won

by Bae Suah
Musings

The Ghost of the Author

I have only translated living authors, a circumstance owing to my being drawn to contemporary literature—as vain as it might sound, I want to participate in the dissemination of the stories and voices of my lifetime, to partake in the artistic production of the Thailand I was born into. For each book I have translated, I have always had the author to consult, even to befriend. I have double-checked with them my understanding of certain phrases, asked them about minutiae like the exact color (blue can become tricky moving between Thai and English) or collar style of a shirt mentioned in passing, traded a multitude of emails, texts and phone calls with them, shared meals (and, lately, my vaccination status) with them. In other words, their existence as living human beings who begot the original works is something I experience as part of my reality as a person and as a translator. Yet, somehow, I remain preoccupied with “The Death of the Author,” that Roland Barthes essay I read over two decades ago as a college coed. I found myself formulating thoughts through it and discussing it in my last pitch, as I did in my first. It’s true, my initial encounter with the essay precipitated something like an epiphany: Barthes’s words opened up the possibility of reading, and, for me, they gave literary criticism its raison d’être. Post-college, though, many years passed where that piece of literary theory lay dormant in my brain, only to return with renewed vigor when I took up translation. Prabda Yoon’s story collection The Sad Part Was was the first book I ever pitched. In presenting the collection, I discussed at length how the stories in it insist on exposing themselves as texts (“[I]t is language which speaks, not the author,” writes Barthes) and are eager to discredit the Author, via metafiction and other devices, thereby giving the reader the pride of place as the maker of meaning. Given Yoon’s influences during the years when he wrote the book, reading his early work through a post-structuralist lens is definitely not farfetched, and I did not expect the essay’s death grip on me to continue. Except it did. A few months ago, I wrote a synopsis for Saneh Sangsuk’s novel Jao Garagade (English title to be determined), and before I knew it, I had resorted to Barthes again, to explain the significance of the book’s anticolonial narrative structure, which aims to re-elevate the oral tradition of storytelling in the face of the novel’s dominance, the novel being a form imported into Thailand from the West.1 Garagade, in being made up of oral tales within a tale (some of them doubly contained), all either passed down or being passed down in the narrative present, inherently questions the idea of unitary authorship, harking back to a time before the myth of the Author took hold of our imagination. In many ways, Garagade and The Sad Part Was couldn’t be more different: the former is a tale set in a western Thai village in the 1960s and in the jungle that it used to be at the turn of the twentieth century, a tale that (in one of its many strata) mourns the loss of natural resources and hence mourns the lifestyle of the past, while the latter is an unapologetically urban set of stories that speaks to the Bangkok of the turn of the millennium, each using narrative forms reflecting their own substance. Why, then, did I feel so compelled to seek a “Death of the Author” reading in each of them? Even Barthes himself later questioned his own wisdom, as Kate Briggs, the translator of his Preparation of the Novel, tried to warn me when I was her student. For a long time, I put off reading the tiny sections in Preparation called “Return of the Author” and “Return to Biography” that she had pointed me to, fearing they would cause the foundation of my literary worldview to crumble. Although in the dreaded snippets Barthes goes so far as to describe his change of heart as an “about-face,” I hung onto the phrases where he humbly refrains from being prescriptive (“For me (once again, I’m not sure if I have the right to generalize) . . .”), and anyway, before taking the plunge into reading those two extracts, I had pre-consoled myself by reasoning: regardless of what he asserts therein, “The Death of the Author,” the text, has long been out there, severed from its Author, and need not be discounted merely because the same man who wrote it might later in his life wish to disavow it—He is dead. It is easy to understand why a translator who has spent years buying completely into the idea of the Author’s death being a precondition for reading would find that death likewise is a precondition for translating. As translators, we are readers first, even if we have the privilege of making our interpretation of the text less fleeting by documenting it in print. For a time, we get to be the “place where [the text’s] multiplicity is focused,” as Barthes says about the reader in his seminal essay. For a time, we get to play the writer reincarnated—a writer even more literally “imitat[ing] a gesture that is always anterior”—and doesn’t reincarnation always presuppose death? Later on, if we are lucky, we will die in many other people else’s hands or on their screens. Yet it’s not so simple: I’m haunted by the Author’s ghost. One basic task translators often do is write biographies in the target language for their authors. This exercise, at minimum, will require the translator to do some fact-checking, more likely also a bit of research, meaning engaging with the author’s life story is inevitable. This level of engagement—still conceiving of the author in the third person (the “external author . . . just the He,” as Barthes puts it in Preparation)—holds true regardless of whether the possibility to meet the writer in the flesh exists or not. But especially when we translate living authors, we potentially have some degree ofaccess to their I, to the “writer’s interiority,” “the recourse to [which],” Barthes had once suggested, was “pure superstition.” In such a scenario, the temptation, accompanied, even, by a sense of duty, to tap into that interiority is overwhelming. That is, the specter of the Author feels all the more present when the unabstracted version of the author is a living person only a phone call or an email away. These musings are in no way meant to negate the wisdom of consulting the author. But as translators, we spend many, many hours alone, with our computer in front of us and the original text off to one side (too often always the same side of the desk, however orthopedically ill-advised). Translation decisions are made constantly, consciously, unconsciously, and I can’t help but yearn for a blessing from the Author’s ghost to read the text, remake the text. The psychological balancing act of the need to assert my own construction of the text while respecting the ghost of the Author has left me fixated with scouring the text itself for clues that it—and maybe its Maker, too—also subscribes to the principles put forth in “The Death of the Author,” that it—and maybe its Maker, too—is telling me, Go on, translate the text. Go on, give it another life. Mui Poopoksakul 1 Thai literature professor Saowanit Chunlawong discusses this aspect of the novel in her article “The Implication of Tale-Telling in the Archaic Love Story of Karaked,” available at: http://daen-aran-saengthong.blogspot.com/2012/01/implication-of-tale-telling-in-archaic.html (in Thai), concluding that Sangsuk suggests the novel is a continuation of oral storytelling. Mui Poopoksakul is a lawyer-turned-translator with a special interest in contemporary Thai literature. Her translations include three story collections: The Sad Part Was and Moving Parts, both by Prabda Yoon, and Arid Dreams by Duanwad Pimwana. She is also the translator of Pimwana’s novel Bright. Currently, she is translating a novel by Saneh Sangsuk. A native of Bangkok who spent two decades in the US, she now lives in Berlin, Germany.

by Mui Poopoksakul
Writer's Notes

[Draft I] Writer-Translators on Their Craft — Lee Juhye

This section features five respected writer-translators who reminisce, reflect, and ruminate on their experiences of writing and translating. Their opinions correspond, but also refract from each other to varying degrees given their unique, personal backgrounds. The section features their abridged answers.—Ed. How did you first get into translation/creative writing and was there a specific opportunity that motivated you to get into it? Unexpectedly, this question took me back to a time in my early childhood before I began school. My father and I were walking one day, just the two of us, down a country road. A field so green as to dazzle the eye stretched all around, and in the middle stood a white sign covered in large Chinese characters. I hadn’t yet mastered the Korean alphabet, which we learn first, but a familiar Chinese character on the sign caught my eye for some reason. I gestured to the sign and announced, “That’s the character for jade!” My father raised his voice an octave and sang my praises. His eyes glowed with love and admiration. At that moment, the rice leaves all around glittered with dewdrops. The air seemed to vibrate with laughter. Perhaps I was experiencing the thrill of decoding for the first time, like the child who has learned to read street signs for whom familiar streets are no longer the same. Things that rest outside conscious perception because we’re ignorant of them flood into our awareness when we gain knowledge, and this is how humans grow. Language is the starting point for this process. So, confronted with this single character in an unexpected time and space, I experienced the thrill of decoding and became fascinated by the world of decoding and meaning. 　　To go back and answer your question, I first became interested in English to Korean translation while teaching English at a high school in my mid-twenties. One of my students said he wanted to go weekend sightseeing in Seoul and asked for tips on places to see and how to ride the subway. Isn’t that cute? I encouraged him, going so far as to draw diagrams in his notebook. When I met him a week later, he’d visited a large bookstore in Gwanghwamun and picked up a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five as a present for me. He must have thought I’d like an English book since I was an English teacher, but he was wrong. I did read it, though, and was transfixed by it. I was drawn to the famous sentence “So it goes,” which appears as many as 169 times in the story. Without being conscious of it, I wondered how best to translate this sentence and stay true to its meaning. I even looked into how other translators had rendered it. Before long, I was translating the whole book into Korean in my spare time. Even though no one had solicited this work and I was its only reader, I found the work of refining the text and fine-tuning the sentences, changing them this way and that, quite fascinating. This amounted to my first full-fledged translation. When we speak of “style,” we often think of it as the representative element of a text that displays the writer’s signature personality, but in the case of translation, at times the text may inevitably have to be adjusted to fit linguistic norms and conventions in the target language. This sometimes referred to as “the betrayal of translation.” Have you ever agonized over this issue? To give my own spin on the famous phrase “translation is treason,” I think translation is the act of jumping into an existing relationship and turning it into a three-way, risking censure. Limits inherent to the author-reader-translator relationship inevitably lead to difficulty. The translator is commonly compared to a bridge or a scale, but considering that a fair and just translation can never exist, then the translator is but a shaky scale or suspension bridge. A perfectly horizontal scale does not exist, and a scale that tips sharply in the direction of the author or reader is of no use. Since I’m human and not an impartial scale, I tip towards the reader if I come across an unforthcoming sentence. I want to provide a helpful interpretation. The translated version then becomes long and strained, or worse, unnecessary annotations are furnished, and the bell starts tolling for me, warning of failure. Then days of work must be deleted before it’s too late. 　　The more creative the writer, the more glaring the failure of the translator. If the writer exercises his or her intellect by using neologisms or wordplay, the translator cries tears of despair. If you ask me to translate in a neat ordered way something that has meaning simply by its destruction of order, then despite myself, I cry, “You must be kidding!” How many times has an aesthetics of destruction in the source language ended up a sorry mess in the target language? Not long ago, I translated a part of Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Comedian as the Letter C.” The word “nincompated” was not in the dictionary. This seemingly plausible word is actually a neologism combining the words “nincompoop” and “pate.” When put together, these childish-sounding words seem quite camouflaged within the longer, elegant term. In these cases, is it possible to translate the original meaning and the writer’s intent? I confess that I failed and was only clumsily able to patch something together. Could you, as a translator, compare the works of authors you enjoy translating and the tendencies of your own creative work? Somehow I ended up translating a few books in succession by P. D. James, the so-called queen of British crime fiction—two of her Cordelia Gray books along with her only work of science fiction. Born Phyllis Dorothy James, she took her pen name to avoid being looked down on as a female author in the society of the time, and although she was late starting her career, she wrote steadily into her nineties. For these reasons, I both identified with her and admired her immensely. About An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, she said, “I wanted to have a young heroine of courage and intelligence who faces the problems of life with a determination to be successful in a job which everyone else thinks she won’t be able to do.” It touched my heart to discover that a middle-aged writer successful in her career not only intended to write a book as a gift to young women, but she actually did it. Also, her sole work of science fiction, The Children of Men, takes place in a dystopian world where people have lost the ability to reproduce, but the writer does not lose hope for humanity even in this atmosphere of gloom and despair. She draws the world dark as if sunken in a deep pit, but does not deny the possibility of light shining in at some point, and her hope is grounded in her belief in the power of human goodness. The struggle for positivity is apparent in her writing, and I want to write with this orientation, too. I don’t want to depict a “this is why” world but an “even so, but nevertheless” world. In addition, that James wrote An Unsuitable Job for a Woman at the age of fifty-two and The Children of Men at seventy-two gives me great comfort and encouragement because I started writing novels at a later age as well. Whenever I panic that the time has passed for me to be writing, I think of her and regain control over my thoughts. I tell myself to do the things that I can do in the here and now—read, write, translate, do the things I like steadily each day, every day. Nothing is stronger than the simple force of doing something every day. Do you think your creative writing impacts your translation or vice versa? If so, in what ways does one influence the other? (In terms of word choice, expressions, sentence structure, narrative structure, way of thinking, and so on.) Perhaps at an unconscious level my writing and translation influence each other, but consciously, I try to keep them apart. Ultimately, both kinds of work involve command of Korean, don’t they? This means that I’m more careful not to leave my personal mark on a work when translating than when writing. Once I was laboring to translate a favorite author’s favorite work. I fell in love with it at a glance. But an acquaintance of mine who has read much of my writing saw the translation and said it read like one of my novels. Hearing this, I felt as if I’d been struck. I’d been too greedy. I thought I’d put all my love into the work, but I ended up sullying it with my fingerprints. Since then, I’ve been careful to maintain distance from a work I’m translating. But of course, even so, I always strive to use pure Korean rather than Sino-Korean language, and find equivalents for adjectives and adverbs rather than omit them. These are habits based on my personal preference. I also think it’s important to adjust the flow so that a Korean speaker will have a sense of the original rhythm when reading the translated sentences. One gauge of readability is that the sentences join together naturally when read aloud. 　　As for the influence of translation on writing fiction, at times I doubt whether I can really write sentences of my own after living a life of translating other writers. I write fiction today, and I can’t afford to miss out on the spirit of the times, or lose my sense of belonging to this generation or my grasp of contemporary writing style, but when translating the text of other writers, especially those deceased, I’m sometimes anxious as to whether I’m letting go of these things. Of course, the universality of literature transcends time, but my identity as a person writing Korean fiction in Korean society is something that I must not forgo when I write. For this reason, I fear that my identity as a novelist will be compromised if I’m immersed in a translation for a long time. Writers are translators and translators are writers. They write about the world and translate the world for readers. It takes agility to cross over many worlds; doing so likely fosters a unique identity all its own. In your opinion, are there are any differences between the “Me before writing,” the “writing Me,” the “Me before translating,” the “translating Me,” and the “Me writing and translating”? As mentioned above, I consciously try to keep my identities as a translator and a writer distinct. I even think of my identities as a homemaker and a parent as separate. I hope this doesn’t come across sounding like pseudoscience, but I also feel that extended periods of translating and of fiction writing activate different areas of the brain. This means that I find the moment of switching from one to the other very difficult. At these times, I make quite a fuss rearranging my desk, changing my brand of tea, and trying out different workspaces. This is somewhat peripheral to the question, however. The processes of the two kinds of work and the attitudes that accompany them are quite different. Should I compare the different kinds of writer’s block as an example? In translation, I get writer’s block when I absolutely cannot understand a sentence. It’s the feeling of coming up against a cliff or a rocky crag amidst the overall consistency of the work. At times like this, I take a deep breath, pause the ticking clock, and take time to grapple with the sentence, one on one. This fight may fade to nothing in a few hours, or it may take days. The important thing is that the fight be resolved at some point. And then, after a moment, when I’m breathing evenly, I can pass on to the next sentence that awaits. The sublime proverb “As you sow, so shall you reap” applies to translation, even if a fear of translating something incorrectly always lurks somewhere in the background. I’m deeply reassured to know that a path will reopen once I have overcome my writer’s block, and that I’ll come to a definite end point. In this sense, translation is not solitary work. I have text to guide me more accurately than any map, and I’m always aware of the readers, my companions. Also, translation can be classified as traditional labor in that it requires steady effort and physical exertion as well as a fixed amount of time. Indeed, it is for these simple and honest qualities that I like it. 　　On the other hand, creative writing is a very lonely endeavor. It’s like walking along a trail without a map, or rather, making the trail as I walk. I must push through on my own power if I’m blocked, and after I’ve come through a difficult passage, the next sentence is not automatically there waiting. A trail forms wherever I go. It is lonely and dreary. In fact, I need not push through a blocked section at all. I can leave the trail and take a detour, or abandon the journey altogether. Who knows? That’s how easy it is to deceive oneself in this job. Just as it is easy to go back and give up, it is also easy to soldier on to one’s ruin. It is a very cruel land, and there’s no solid rear guard to back one up like there is in translation. Simple and honest hard work is not always the solution to problems in this field. In conclusion, I like myself as a translator, but pity myself as a writer. Translated by Kari Schenk

by Lee Juhye
Writer's Notes

[Draft I] Writer-Translators on Their Craft — Bora Chung

This section features five respected writer-translators who reminisce, reflect, and ruminate on their experiences of writing and translating. Their opinions correspond, but also refract from each other to varying degrees given their unique, personal backgrounds. The section features their abridged answers.—Ed. Do you believe that the order in which you took up writing and translation has influenced you? If so, why might that be? If having my name published officially as the author or translator of record is the basis by which I can determine which came first, I would say that writing came first. I first began writing in 1998, when I was still in college. I received the affirmation I needed to turn to creative writing as a career when I received an award from a writing contest that was hosted by my school. Translation came about two years later, in 2000. At the time, I co-translated together with a friend of mine from school. Our first translation was of a work originally published in English (Tolerance by Hendrik Willem Van Loon), but now I work more on Russian and Polish fiction, which I majored in. 　　But come to think of it, I’ve been translating since I was in junior high and high school. When I was in junior high, I used to practice translating to study English, and in high school, I turned to translating because I wanted to learn French better, which I was taking as a second foreign language. I practiced by translating my favorite foreign works into Korean. I still remember vividly how much fun I had translating the plays of Oscar Wilde. On the other hand, I don’t believe I had much fun translating French literature although I adored the language. I think this was a huge reason I decided to change majors in college. 　　I didn’t learn writing from anyone. Writing can bring me so much joy, but sometimes I still feel like I’m walking through a haze. Although, I suspect I would still feel like I’m walking in a haze even if I had studied writing in earnest. In any case, that was how I felt when I first started writing and that’s how I feel now. However, with translations, I feel much more comfortable with the fact that I’m working on existing works by authors of much renown and expertise—works that have been time-tested and guaranteed for their quality. Furthermore, the fact that I can look up the dictionary for the meanings of the words and expressions found in these works also gives me a sense of security. When you’re writing and you get stuck in a rut, you have to wait, sometimes for an improbably long time, for inspiration to strike again. With translation, if I run into a problem, I need only identify the source of the problem, do my research, and pick up where I left off. Translation seems to provide more certainty in that sense, compared to creative writing. 　　This is why I make a conscious effort to observe and accept the worldview, the expressive ways, and the thinking of the authors whom I translate. The worlds they lived in and the world that I live in are very different; this is why there’s a limit to simply copying or mimicking the elements or plots the authors have used. This means I won’t risk falling into the danger of plagiarism anytime soon which also brings me a measure of comfort. As I’m translating the ways the authors have introduced various characters into their stories, their linguistic characteristics, and their unique descriptions, I absorb all of these things, both consciously and unconsciously. When a work is especially difficult to translate, that means I have to think harder and dig deeper. In that sense, I’m influenced by the literature during the translating process. When deciding whom I want to translate, I tend to choose authors whom I admire, both in the sense of who they are as a person and in how they describe the world. When we speak of “style,” we often think of it as the representative element of a text that displays the writer’s signature personality, but in the case of translation, the text may inevitably have to be adjusted at times to fit linguistic norms and conventions in the target language. This is sometimes referred to as “the betrayal of translation.” Have you ever agonized over this? This is something that has always been an issue for me. I believe I will wrestle with this dilemma for as long as I’m working as a translator. After translating the Hendrik Willem Van Loon work that I mentioned before, the second work that I translated was Sklepy cynamonowe (The Street of Crocodiles), 1934, and Sanatorium pod klepsydrą (Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass), 1937, by the Polish author Bruno Schulz (1892–1942). Schulz lived a life of poverty and misfortune, and as he was Jewish, he was shot and killed by the Gestapo during the Second World War. Schulz was an amazingly gifted painter and novelist. In translating his work, I realized that he was not someone who constituted a narrative along traditional plotlines but that he was first and foremost a painter who used language as yet another medium to express his art. This made things rather challenging for me. I’m a person who understands the world through words and text; my way of seeing the world is completely different from someone like Schulz, who saw the world in colors, lines, sides, images, and even moving images. I attempted to translate Schulz’s sentences into Korean, but this resulted in sentences that were completely incomprehensible according to the norms and customs of the Korean language. 　　Schulz had the tendency of describing images and scenes using an endless stream of relative pronouns (with a typical sentence running on for five to eight lines; translating Schulz was such a painful exercise that I actually stopped to count how long the sentences were). Because of this, I couldn’t translate the sentences in their original order; rather, I had to translate the sentences in reverse order, from the back to the front, in order for all the connections to make sense. In some cases, I had to chop up the sentences and later reconstitute them. I loved reading Schulz and regularly became awestruck by his genius with each page of his that I translated, but at the same time, I wondered whether I had been too arrogant to think I could translate his works or worse, whether I could do his works justice. The Schulz anthology was first published in a set of two volumes in 2003; ten years later, in 2013, Eulyoo Publishing published the complete works again as a single volume. During that time, I had to edit the translations extensively to the point that it felt as if I were retranslating them all over again. Even now, though, I’m still haunted by the fear that I butchered his works. I’m truly, deeply sorry to Bruno Schulz. 　　Translating The Foundation Pit (1930) written by the Russian author Andrei Platonov (1899–1951), was also a demanding exercise. Platonov is another very eccentric author in a way that is different from Schulz. He uses more traditional sentences (both in terms of length and in their grammatical sense), but his sentences are difficult to understand. 　　For instance, take the sentence “they were all born without any skin.” I interpreted this sentence to describe the babies that were born to malnourished mothers during the famines of the Communist Revolution and the resulting civil war. These emaciated babies came out red and tiny, looking as if they had no epidermis but just a hypodermis or a deeper layer of skin underneath their wrinkly exterior. However, it was impossible to convey this meaning to the readers in an intuitive way without adding some sort of footnotes or additional explanations from my end. 　　Platonov would often employ these turns of phrase. He had a unique point of view that he reflected in his writings. The influence of the writers and philosophers who impacted him was very evident in his writings as well. However, the world Platonov experienced, from the Communist Revolution, civil war, the early social transformations during the Soviet era, all the way to the oppression under Stalin, was far removed from the lives experienced by the general readership in Korea. If the translator were to provide further explanations on the ideas of the different Russian philosophers who influenced Platonov, that would only serve to exhaust the reader. That’s why with Platonov, rather than worrying about the norms and customs of the language, I was more concerned with whether or not I had the ability to fully translate the ideas that the author wanted to get across. 　　I have many more of these episodes that have accumulated over the last twenty years of my translating career. As a translator, I believe these concerns are valid and a way to honor the translator. There is no such thing as a perfect translation and in the process of translation, some meanings and nuances are bound to get lost. This means that I will forever be tormented in my work. But I can’t stop doing what I do. The world is full of amazing works of literature that are too beautiful to ignore. What do you consider to be the attraction or appeal of the source language that you translate from, and/or of the fiction written in that language? The Russian language has a very difficult, complex grammar structure. And Polish happens to be seven times more complicated than Russian. They’re both Slavic languages, with the unique grammatical characteristics that Slavic languages have, along with the particular thinking and worldview that are embedded in their context. After I entered graduate school, I found myself having to study Russian, Polish, and Old Church Slavic at the same time. This was incredibly difficult, but the exercise also taught me to better understand the perspectives and systems through which the Slavs see the world. This understanding came as an awakening of sorts. In fact, it changed my life. Although I may not have been as fluent in Russian or Polish as a native speaker and ended up making mistakes, I had a good understanding of the fundamental systems behind the language. This meant that I could at least share in the Slavic perspectives and ways of comprehending the world. The syntax of the Slavic languages is admittedly complicated, but so is the world we live in. In some sense, the Slavic syntax can actually bring some sort of order to the world, a way of categorizing and explaining the complexities around us. This is precisely why I love Slavic languages. Since the Slavic peoples share fundamentally similar syntax and semantics, once you are well enough versed in Russian and Polish, then you can also have a basic understanding of an adjacent language such as Ukrainian, which is grammatically similar and spoken in a country that is geographically close to the other countries. It almost feels as if the Slavic-speaking regions are one community; if you know one Slavic language, it could be your gateway to their world. 　　With literature, it’s a little different. Russian literature can be categorized into pre- and post- revolution era literature (the 1905 Revolution and the Communist Revolution), in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I particularly enjoy twentieth-century Revolution-era works and the literature of early Soviet Russia. The writings are bold and confident, with an audacity that only people who are certain in their belief that they have changed the world with their bare hands can have. The Communist Revolution was the first and only massive social experiment of its kind done in human history. Only twentieth-century Soviet literature can provide such a reading experience. However, there was also the shock that came with the realization that the Revolution, which was believed to usher in a completely new era, ended in a bloodbath, as well as the fear and despair that became widespread with the start of Stalin’s violent oppressions and crackdowns. This experience is also something that can only be found in early Soviet-era literature. No other country or era has this literary tradition, one where soaring hopes for a new utopia and the despair of a coming dystopia are juxtaposed in the same timeframe. 　　Poland was also impacted by the Communist Revolution, because the 1918 Revolution brought down the Russian Empire, bringing an end to Russian colonialism and as a result, newfound independence to the state of Poland. In fact, after the First World War ended in 1919, Poland enjoyed the most liberated, dynamic period in its history. The twenty years leading up to the Second World War in 1939, is referred to as the “inter-war period” in Polish history. Bruno Schulz, Witold Gombrowicz, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, and other such giants of Polish literature all hailed from this era. Inter-war Polish literature is very experimental, unique, and captivating. Since their language is more linguistically complicated than say, Russian, Polish writers seemed to write from a more heightened, interesting artistic frenzy; they unleashed their creative fury in their works. I love that distinctive sense of madness found in inter-war era Polish literature. How do you select the authors or works you translate? I tend to choose authors or works that are loved and appreciated in their home countries but have yet to be discovered by Korean readers. In terms of genre, I’m drawn to utopian/dystopian literature. Sometimes, I make suggestions to my publisher about certain works that I believe will have some commercial appeal. The Foundation Pit by Platonov was one such case, as well as Wyjście z cienia (Coming Out of the Shadow) by the Polish SF writer Janusz Zajdel (1938–1985). 　　Because Russia and Poland both experienced Communism in the twentieth century, Korea effectively had no exchange with these countries for a long time due to ideological differences. There are still many great authors who haven’t been discovered by Korean readers. Russia and Poland both produced many compelling writers and works in the early twentieth century, during a time when Korea was under Japanese colonial rule and therefore stripped of all diplomatic rights. Later, due to the Korean War, Korea cut off all ties with the Communist bloc. This blocked any and all cultural exchange between Korea and Eastern Europe including Poland. This year, Russia and Korea are celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the establishment of bilateral diplomatic ties, which has led to many online commemorative events. However, it’s unfortunate that Korea doesn’t seem to have the same level of interest for Polish literature. Polish culture and the arts are very different from the Asian cultural tradition and also quite removed from the Western European or even the US and UK cultures which Koreans are relatively more familiar with. Therefore, Polish culture can come as a refreshing shock to many Koreans. I’m glad that more Polish literature has been introduced to Korean readers following the 2018 Nobel Prize win of Olga Tokarczuk. The SF writer Stanisław Lem (1921–2006) is also an amazing author who has penned many fabulous works, and yet he isn’t well known in Korea. The few works of his that have been translated have all gone out of print. 　　Meanwhile in Russia, when Stalin’s suppressions began in earnest, the regime confiscated the publications of dissident authors or banned them from publishing anything. Many of these works were buried somewhere deep in the KGB archives and forgotten long after Stalin and the authors died. Some of Platonov’s works were seized by the KGB as well and left buried for nearly fifty years until they were re-discovered in the 2000s. The SF writer Ivan Yefremov (1908–1972), was highly recognized by academia, the Soviet regime, and his readers for being a superb geologist and adherent of Communism, but after his death, the KGB broke into his home and confiscated all his writings. Since then, he was all but erased from the annals of Russian literature. No one knows why. Some other authors, such as the brothers Arkady (1925–1991) and Boris (1933–2012) Strugatsky, were both popular not just in Russia but globally, with many quality works under their belt. And yet, they haven’t been properly introduced to Korean readers. I suspect this could be because they only wrote genre fiction as science fiction writers, and therefore were relegated to a niche category. There are so many interesting Russian and Polish works that are fun and commercial with high artistic merit. If these are not published in Korea simply because they are works in genre fiction or popular fiction, that would be a huge loss for the Korean publishing industry and for our cultural community as well. Writers are translators and translators are writers. They write about the world and translate the world for readers. It takes agility to cross over many worlds; doing so likely fosters a unique identity all its own. In your opinion, are there any differences between the “Me before writing,” the “writing Me,” the “Me before translating,” the “translating Me,” and the “Me writing and translating”? I don’t remember much about myself in the days before I began writing or translating, as that was such a long time ago. There are times when I’m not engaged in creative writing, but I consider myself to be constantly in translating mode. 　　When I’m writing, I would say that the stories come to me, almost like they are little gifts, rather than that I write the stories myself. All I’m doing is simply transferring these gifts that I’ve received into text form. This is why I believe creative writing requires a very agile sensibility, physical strength, and, above all, time. When I’m feeling tired or pressed for time, I can’t find the energy to listen calmly to the story that is beckoning me, much less put it down in writing. The busier I am the harder writing becomes. Sometimes, when this busy period goes on for too long, I become fearful that I may never be able to write again. And yet, stories still find a way to reach me. I’m very grateful for that. 　　Sometimes, when I show my Korean editors my writing, they respond by saying, “This Korean doesn’t feel natural,” or “I don’t understand this sentence.” Because I’ve seen similar sentences in Russian or Polish, I sometimes find myself employing a similar construct in the Korean language. This doesn’t mean to say that I memorize certain sentences or expressions and repurpose them; rather, I reflect the Russian syntax or Polish syntax in the Korean sentences. When my editors see that, they find it interesting and sometimes bizarre. They suggest I change those expressions since they will seem foreign to Korean readers. But I ask them to leave the sentences as they are, because it was my intention to jolt the reader. As Viktor Shklovsky once said, art exists to stop or slow our automated processes of thinking and make it seem foreign once more. To reach that end, the language used in culture and the arts must be sufficiently “bent,” unlike the language used in our everyday lives. (I love Shklovsky by the way. Three cheers for Russian formalism.) 　　My identity as a translator and my identity as a writer are connected organically. I’m always translating. Even now, I should really be going through the edits of my translation, but I’m taking a break to answer this list of questions as it looked more interesting. My editor would no doubt be sorry to hear this. 　　Because I have been teaching Russian language, literature, and culture for over ten years, I tend to read a lot of papers and dissertations on Russian literature. In many cases, I find myself translating these papers into Korean to use as teaching material. When I was in graduate school in the US, I was trained to do my own translations of the original works, rather than use the translations of others when coming up with class materials or writing my own dissertation (for copyright issues). To attract the attention of my students of Russian language or culture, I read Russian newspapers to them or translate/summarize certain articles to be shared in class. 　　I also like to summarize and translate key current events stories coming out of Russia, such as news on Russia’s development of the world’s first COVID-19 vaccine, news of other drugs in the pipeline, the pandemic situation in Russia, and the armed conflict or disputes in neighboring countries, and share the links of those news articles on my social media for the benefit of my friends. When the recent poisoning of the Russian democracy activist Alexei Navalny was reported in the Korean media, I shared links of those stories on my social media. On seeing those pictures of Navalny, my Russian friend inquired what the posts were about, so I translated those Korean news stories into Russian for her. I follow the pages of feminist groups in Poland to stay on top of Polish social events and the reactions from the feminist community in that country. When I see interesting Polish news articles, I share their links on my social media together with a brief translation of the news article. In Korea, the most recent feminist issues were the unconstitutionality ruling by the Constitutional Court on the abortion ban and the revisions to the Mother and Child Health Act. It was Polish women who organized the “Black Protest” to demand that the legalization of abortion and women’s rights be placed on the political agenda. I myself have participated in the Black Protests held in Korea as well as the protests calling for the lifting of the abortion ban. Whenever I see relevant news on the pages of the Polish feminist groups that I follow, I translate those findings to share with my friends, so that we can all see the conversations that progressive Polish citizens are having. 　　To me, translation is my foremost avenue of learning what people are going through and what they’re thinking in the countries and cultures that I love, and sharing those findings with the people around me. When authors who are smarter and more knowledgeable about the world than I am put down their thoughts in rich, thought-provoking language, then I can share that knowledge with others through the art of translation. Translating is a way of expanding my own world. That is why these perspectives are often clearly reflected in my own writing. Translated by Amber Hyun Jung Kim

by Bora Chung
Writer's Notes

[Draft I] Writer-Translators on Their Craft — Choe Yun

This section features five respected writer-translators who reminisce, reflect, and ruminate on their experiences of writing and translating. Their opinions correspond, but also refract from each other to varying degrees given their unique, personal backgrounds. The section features their abridged answers.—Ed. What came first for you: writing or translation? Though I read a lot of foreign literature translated into Korean during my middle and high school years, writing my own works was first. When I was fifteen, I published my first story in the school journal. Though my memory is a bit hazy, during winter break in my third year of middle school, I observed a group of aspiring painters at an atelier I was attending to learn drawing and wrote a piece titled “Ruptures” on their growing pains. Although this was when I was still young, before I officially debuted, I was overwhelmed with the happiness of completing a work as I finished the manuscript and sent it to the editors. That’s how I discovered the allure of writing. A few friends and I voluntarily created a literature club called “Pine and Bamboo” (a metaphor symbolizing our unchanging friendship), asking a visiting philosophy lecturer to be our faculty advisor, and I remember we held a kind of showcase for selected works. During high school, when things were financially difficult, I gave my friends short stories or plays that I’d written instead of presents for their birthdays. 　　It was only later that I was awakened to translation. At the time, it seemed like the trend was to read foreign literature in their original languages. We learned English as our primary foreign language and French or German as the secondary one in high school. Somehow, I discovered some foreign-language books in the library and after reading them in their original language, I started to translate into Korean parts I was uncertain about in order to more fully understand them, or paragraphs that moved me. That’s likely how I discovered the joys of translation. In high school, I attempted to translate parts of James Joyce’s Dubliners and Albert Camus’ Betwixt and Between, and struggled a great deal. Looking back on it now, they were difficult-to-translate works and I’d tackled them without knowing their particular beauty. I remember being filled with pride that I’d partially translated a foreign work into Korean. Back then, I was slightly crazed about literature, so I’d charge full-force at anything related to language. After I entered college, I began reading the foreign texts listed on various course syllabi, and I think reading foreign literature and literary theory frequently demanded a kind of fundamental training in translation. What do you consider to be the attraction or appeal of the source language that you translate from, and/or of the fiction written in that language? French became my primary foreign language when I decided to study abroad in France, but my thoughts on French language and literature are also connected to why I chose France to study abroad in the first place. When I was in college, it was an extremely dark political time in Korean history. Throughout my four years there, the college would shut down for at least one semester without exception because of the student protests. After I graduated from the Korean Language and Literature Department and entered graduate school, I started thinking about studying abroad, and rather than the United States, which I was already more or less familiar with, I was interested in the ancient European civilizations. And so, there are two reasons as to why I chose France, and thus started translating Korean literature into French. 　　First, to those that were college students in the 1970s in the midst of Korea’s bleak political circumstances, it felt like the disposition of literary research was somehow lacking, that it needed a scientific methodology. And then we found structuralism, something that wasn’t well-known to us in those days. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Anthropologie structurale and Tristes tropiques opened my eyes. Even though I didn’t entirely agree with structuralism’s views on literature, I felt as though it confronted the primitive fundamentals in a scientific manner. I also encountered Roland Barthes’s writings. I ended up writing my thesis on these topics, and these intellectual interests originated from the representative texts of structuralism which were of course written in French. 　　Second, I remember how reading works by French writers resolved many of the deficiencies in Korean literature at the time, which felt stifling for the students who had an endless affection for Korean literature. For a young female literature student in those days, French literature, simultaneously sensuous yet rational, seemed to possess many things lacking in Korean literature, which had been deemed “hard-shelled literature” due to its Confucian and patriarchal nature, and it felt like being able to breathe again. Moreover, it seemed liberated in that it represented reality in experimental and diverse ways, and I naturally became deeply involved in French literature. 　　While I didn’t know very many languages, the general assumption that French was superior in representing human interiority and the depths of the world also decisively influenced my choice in French as my second language. When I left to study abroad, I only packed two books: an unabridged Korean dictionary and a copy of an indirect translation of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. How do you select the authors or works you translate? My primary criteria in choosing what to translate are the work’s literary merits and whether it demonstrates modern Korean reality in a sensitive and complex way. I tried to introduce a diverse array of authors and works that proved Korean literature was thriving to French readers who basically knew nothing about Korean literature back then. But before giving these reasons, I need to explain the context. 　　In the 1980s, when I was living in France, the extent to which the average French person knew about Korea was the war and the ensuing division. Korean literature was virtually unknown to the general French reader. As I was repeatedly asked where Korea was, I made a promise to myself: If I became fluent in French, I would devote ten years of my life to introducing Korean literature to French readers. I kept that promise. I started the Korean Literature Series with Actes Sud, and over a period of ten years, I translated and published around twenty works of Korean literature. The support provided first by the Korea Arts & Culture Education Service, and then the Literature Translation Institute of Korea after its establishment, in translating and publishing was a crucial element in continuing the Korean Literature Series. Until then, Korean literature had only been published by university presses in France and even this was rare, so it failed to garner a readership. Having decided to devote ten years of my life, time that could not be easily overlooked, I believed that Korean literature had to go beyond university presses and encounter general readers to become properly known. In this manner, I found a publisher that was open to foreign literature. Professor Raymond Jean, who was my advisor at the time, connected me with Actes Sud, a publisher that had built their reputation through their publications of translations. 　　Though I don’t know if things have greatly changed since then or if there is a diverse readership now, in the 1990s when the Korean Literature Series was first published, Asian literature was carefully selected and read by readers looking for something other than the Western literature they already knew. Within this context, I selected works according to author, theme, and literary tendencies after discussions with the publisher. To translate literature from another language, it must be necessary to fully understand not just the literary language but also the vernacular language and cultural context. Could you share your own efforts in this regard? Several years ago, when I was invited to speak at the American Literary Translators Association’s conference, I spoke about translation as “cultural representation”—about translation that revealed the borders between cultures, and translation as an activity that simultaneously erased borders as they revealed them. Literary translation and the problems it poses are all problems of language and culture. Thus, translation becomes a language problem, but because the solution to this problem ultimately becomes an issue of how to represent and make readers of the target language understand another culture, I believe that cultural understanding is absolutely necessary. 　　Whichever way you look at it, the translator must fulfill the role of explaining their own culture to a foreign one, as in literary activities of all genres. With regard to the question, I would like to talk about the issues surrounding two kinds of translation that appear in literary translation. 　　One is a translation that treats the source language’s culture as possibly strange and unsettling to the target language’s readers, and thus erases the unique cultural and linguistic characteristics of the source language—that is, the diverse boundaries between cultures—in order to make it as close as possible to the target language. As it undergoes the dramatic processes of conflicts, fusion, selective exclusion, and connections within the indigenous literary traditions of each country, translation has further developed by planting a foreign culture within a different one. Translation is inherently an activity that is based on cultural exchange and intimacy. And yet exchange and intimacy with a different culture must be distinguished from the problem of “annexion” (annexation) in which one language (culture) absorbs the particularities of another language (culture) through translation. The most representative example of translation that erases borders is what Antoine Berman deemed “annexion” (annexation). That is, a translation that strives to erase cultural boundaries created by the innate characteristics of a certain literature by aiming at “considerate accommodation,” and driven mainly by communication—with the purpose of helping new readers smoothly comprehend an unfamiliar and uneasy foreign culture. Within a translation process that is motivated primarily by facilitating understanding, a work can even be deliberately adapted or edited. 　　The second stance believes the linguistic and cultural particularities of one culture should not be reflected literally but rather that translation should illuminate the complex identity of the source language’s literature by mobilizing all the techniques and insights of translation to reveal these unique characteristics in the target language. This kind of translation preserves the deep and profound relations between two cultures, and I believe it is necessary in forming true readers. While there are numerous schools of translation thought according to the translator, I’m personally on the side of preferring translations that honestly and sensitively convey cultural differences. After all, we have to know the differences between one another in order to someday be rid of them. In particular, Paul Ricoeur’s question on the universal and homogeneous environment of globalization continues to animate those interested in translation. Asking how to preserve ancient civilizations while simultaneously participating in a universal one, how to return to our fundamental origins while remaining modern, Ricoeur once interrogated the problem of differentiation between cultures in the era of globalization. In my opinion, this question provides an important perspective that presses us to remember that translation is a cultural activity, surpassing sheer linguistics. Have you ever run up against a wall or felt a huge gap when trying to familiarize yourself with the target culture or its vernacular language? Or on the contrary, have you experienced an unexpected closeness or familiarity? Truthfully, as someone who has only concentrated on translating Korean literature into French, any “walls” or “distance” that I experienced were related to French culture and as a result, didn’t seem like serious issues. This is because my experience studying abroad, my duties teaching French literature as a professor, are rooted in the position of observing France’s changing reality with a steadfast interest—just as I do with Korea’s own cultural changes. While it’s not an example entirely relevant to the question, this doesn’t mean that I never experienced any interesting “walls.” In fact, it was through translation that I fully realized that Korea’s literary customs are unique. For instance, even though France has quarterly literary magazines, they rarely serialize entire novels. Because South Korean authors collect their serializations in literary magazines and later publish them as novels, there are occasionally portions of the work that are repetitive explanations in order to remind the readers of the entire work’s contents during serialization, which the translator has to later rearrange after discussions with the author. Yet this rhetorical repetition is not considered a “stylistic weakness” or “flaw to be avoided” in Korean literature, as it would be in French literature. When translating Korean literature into French, a French editor could see such examples and underline them all in red. Here, one cannot accept all the revisions indicated in red. If repetition, or enumeration, can be considered one of Korean literature’s distinct characteristics, there are an infinite number of translation techniques and methods that will preserve the traces of these characteristics while still ensuring that it doesn’t become a stylistic or literary flaw. 　　Interestingly enough, all the talented translators that I’ve met tend to believe that there is no translation problem that is impossible to solve. They believe (albeit with slight differences) that as long as one has time and love for the languages and cultures of the source and target languages, all translation problems can be resolved, and I’m inclined to agree with their opinion. Translated by Rachel Min Park

by Choe Yun
Writer's Notes

[Draft I] Writer-Translators on Their Craft — Park Hyunju

This section features five respected writer-translators who reminisce, reflect, and ruminate on their experiences of writing and translating. Their opinions correspond, but also refract from each other to varying degrees given their unique, personal backgrounds. The section features their abridged answers.—Ed. What came first for you: writing or translation? If the order in which one takes up writing and translation has at all to be considered, I would say that nobody starts with translation, strictly speaking. If you narrowly define translation as converting one language into another, it is something that occurs after the act of writing, and if you define it more broadly as converting one mode of expression to a different mode of expression, then translation is an action that is inherent in the process of writing. There are many people who are born into multilingual environments, and from a young age when they start learning to write, they may write in two languages at once, but I believe this also falls under writing. 　　The question of which comes first, writing or translation, is most often not a question of cognition but rather a perspective on career path. That is to say, it is a question of representation, such as if you first published your own book before translating. I recently participated in a panel discussion at the 2020 Seoul International Book Fair. And because the subject of the talk was “The Present and Future of (Korean) Mystery Novels,” I couldn’t help but make my remarks from the perspective of a writer. However, when communicating with the people in charge of programming, they usually called me “beonyeokga-nim” or “Ms./Madam Translator,” and even in the final copy of the script I received, my co-presenter was listed as “author” and I was listed as “translator.” I found this fascinating. It’s possible that I have made more of a name for myself with the public as a translator, and from that perspective the organizers might have believed it was more appropriate to call me a translator rather than an author. But I have an identity as an author who has released two novels and two essay collections. It is an identity that is not easily separated. That is to say, this question I’m answering right now gives the impression that it is possible for my translator-self and my writer-self to be separately drawn out at different points in time. But for one person, can translation and writing really exist as chronologically linear events? I don’t think so. As soon as humans picked up written language, the act of writing began, and when that written language gains another mode of expression translation naturally follows and from that point on, narrators of all languages come to handle translation and writing simultaneously. When we speak of “style,” we often think of it as the representative element of a text that displays the writer’s signature personality, but in the case of translation, at times the text may inevitably have to be adjusted to fit linguistic norms and conventions in the target language. This sometimes referred to as “the betrayal of translation.” Have you ever agonized over this issue? When we talk about “style,” it can, of course, be referring to the literary choices and linguistic patterns unique to a particular writer, but it is also a reflection of the culture and society in which the writer lives. A translator must not only consider this, but also has the difficult job of considering the culture and society the reader is part of as well. 　　From this point, a translator must then be capable of separating out and considering all of the elements used to craft a style. Generally, when we speak of stylistics, we must take into account that there are elements of an individual’s idiosyncratic expressions, and sociolinguistic issues which reflect the structure of society at large. All of these disparate elements are joined together to create a sentence, but it means that there are many aspects which must be considered at the same time. I’m of the opinion that we must work to save any particular aspect of a text that can be thought of as a personal quirk or characteristic. There are authors who may be writing an essay, but have attempted a haiku-like writing style, or authors who try out lists of incomplete sentences. In those cases, I believe that a translator should attempt to keep these formal elements when expressed in the target language. There are also instances where an internal linguistics dictate a sociolinguistic issue, and when those occur, I consider the source text’s structure as much as possible. I also try to stick closest to the level of the source text when approaching issues with complex or expert terminology. In cases of formal discourse, I try my best to find the corresponding form for each language. When confronted with the issue of the frequency of a term, I turn to the corpus and search for a term that has a comparable frequency. 　　However, there are times, when faced with changes in the historical climate or ideological issues, when changes to the text are demanded. This is mostly relating to issues of political correctness. Even if the term was considered innocuous at the time the text was written, I will discuss the term or phrase in question with the editor and make appropriate changes. If what is written, for example, misogynistic language, language that is cruel to children, disparaging terms for other societies and cultures, etc., is not strictly necessary for the establishment of a character within the context of a text, I will debate whether or not to remove it. Could you, as a translator, compare the works of authors you enjoy translating and the tendencies of your own creative work? As a translator, I do not have a particular author that I care for more than the others. Because a translator is also, first, a reader, I could perhaps divide the works I’ve translated by how they have been literarily esteemed, but I generally like all the books I’ve worked on and rate them highly. This is because if I feel like a work isn’t literary enough, isn’t worth introducing to the readers, or doesn’t interest me in any way, I wouldn’t be translating it in the first place. And I don’t see any point in comparing those authors’ work with my own. I have translated a wide spectrum of works, and it would be hard to place them in a single category. There are authors, like Raymond Chandler, Truman Capote, or Michael Ondaatje, to whom style is a crucial part of the work, but even they cannot be lumped together. As a translator and a reader, I like to read different types of work and I believe that even if it may not match my individual preferences, I may still enjoy it. 　　Even if there are authors that I like, it is no mean feat to copy them or chase after that style. This is not simply just a matter of taste, but a matter of ability as well. 　　But if we talk about my own writing, there is a consistent flow that can be said to be my authorial inclination because of the kind of stories I strive to tell. Up until now, the stories that I have written have mostly been grounded in human goodness that hides behind evil and a belief that people can change. Even so, I do not believe that my authorial-self is complete, and therefore I don’t know what I may write or what inclinations I may develop in the future. In creative work and in translation work, no one is at a standstill. Do you think your creative writing impacts your translation or vice versa? If so, in what ways does one influence the other? (In terms of word choice, expressions, sentence structure, narrative structure, way of thinking, and so on.) It is certain that any experiences a person has in their life will influence those other experiences. And in the case of language, each level (diction, syntax, discourse) cannot be clearly separated from the other, and language and thought are inextricably related. If I had to pick a difference between being a translator and any other job, it is that as a translator you must maintain an awareness of a multilingual consciousness. That is to say, metalinguistic sensitivity is an essential quality for a translator to have, and it is those thought processes which will be reflected in writing as well. 　　I’m not sure if this is related to my experiences as a translator, but even when I’m writing novels, I have it in the back of my mind that my readers might not solely be Korean speakers. Of course, because I write in Korean, readers who can speak Korean will read them, but I write with the thought that my work may one day be translated and introduced to people belonging to another culture. Therefore, although something may be effective in one culture, I would like to avoid the possibility that it may be unsettling or wrong in another cultural context. I’m of the mindset that it is necessary to consider what you might call “global standards”—even at the risk of this term containing Eurocentric undertones. 　　Even though that is may be the case, I’m not saying that we should give up on having a culturally specific perspective or structures particular to the Korean language. Although I believe that when ambiguous language or cultural metaphors are used as a basis for literary works it may be difficult for a non-Korean speaker to understand, I don’t believe that this should place any limits or restrictions on creative work. Translation can widen our literary prospects, and if some day my work may be read by a member of a different language group or culture, I hope that they too will be able to engage in new experiences. Writers are translators and translators are writers. They write about the world and translate the world for readers. It takes agility to cross over many worlds; doing so likely fosters a unique identity all its own. In your opinion, are there are any differences between the “Me before writing,” the “writing Me,” the “Me before translating,” the “translating Me,” and the “Me writing and translating”? To repeat what I said before, I do not believe that there are any clear distinctions within the self. I started writing from a very young age. I awoke to writing around the age of three or four, and I have, of course, very little memories from before that. After that point, I would make my own stories by copying the plots of fairy tales, and I even wrote romance stories in my diary. The only difference is that I never let a single other person read them, and never published them. Once my eyes were opened to another language, translation became one part studying, and one part linguistic life at the same time. I would write down the lyrics of pop songs that left deep impressions on me on the front pages of my math reference book and try translating them. Of course, this only means that it didn’t follow a strictly commercial definition of translation. The only “Me before writing” or “Me before translating” would be a prelinguistic “Me.” Could I possibly remember the “me” of such a young age? I must have memories from before I acquired language, but they amount to nothing more than indistinct fragments spread out against the plain of my consciousness. A human of language can carry out a multitude of functions through that language. Writing and translating may be my professions, but the work I do also includes writing criticism, non-literary texts, and public speaking. All of these professions are carried out through language. That being said I have never felt the need to divide myself into a “translating Me,” a “writing Me,” a “critiquing Me,” or a “lecturing Me.” Many people may think that writing and translating are two separate processes. And looking at it from a professional perspective that may appear to be the case. However, when looked at as linguistic actions, they cannot be so easily separated. All humans acutely sense the world from within language. The only differences are the means and methods of expressions used by each person. Translated by Victoria Caudle

by Park Hyunju
Writer's Notes

[Draft II] The Law of Translated Lines — by Sora Kim-Russell

What goes into writing a book and translating it? A writer and translator reveal their behind-the-scenes experiences from both sides of their computer screens.—Ed. The Law of Lines (Arcade, 2020) How to Translate Pyun Hye-young First, you have to hear voices. Within the opening pages of the book, the story should start to narrate itself to you, the characters should start walking around inside your head. You have no idea what’s going to happen, but something has begun, with you in it. Next, panic. Because she almost always slips in some maddeningly difficult wordplay that almost entirely doesn’t work in English no matter how feverishly you tilt and shake the page. Then, reassure yourself that, no matter how challenging her wordplay gets, you usually manage to find a solution, even if it basically amounts to saying, Dear Reader, here comes some wordplay. Ideally, you should be moving from the big picture (plot, character, voice) down to the smaller items (word choices, tricky sentences), but with Pyun you find yourself swimming in words for a while. Remind yourself that you will find a solution for them now only to have to change all of it again in the future (read: five minutes before the book is about to go to press) when you will have a sudden epiphany. Fun! That problem shelved, you move on to panicking about her use of narrative distance. Pyun is notoriously tricky to translate because her narrators maintain a distance from the characters that is third-person omniscient—if said omniscient being low-key hated everyone and everything with a kind of cool, sociopathic reserve. She writes about contagion, rot, corruption. Things that lose their form and ooze. But her prose is controlled and reserved, as if the narrator is watching everything fall apart from above, from some sort of sterile observation deck. This gives her prose a flat affect, and it is very, very tempting to stuff it full of more words and to string her knife-chopped sentences together to make it all warm and smooth. But that’s not her, nor is it you. Do you translate stories, or do you translate stories by very particular authors? When you get lost here, go back to the voices in your head. Let them guide you. Women in Translation The Law of Lines was an interesting change from City of Ash and Red and The Hole, which focused on the plights of two rather toxic men. It was tempting to sympathize with those men simply because they were the protagonists, but they were so shady! In Lines, the main characters are all women. Almost all. Can’t forget Su-ho. This book felt warmer to me, and I wondered if that was why. Or maybe it was because all of the main characters were victims and thus more sympathetic? In The Hole, Oghi was a victim who turned out to be something of a villain. In Lines, Se-oh wants to be a vigilante but may have misidentified her villain. If I were to assign an essay based on this book, the topic question would be: Who are the true villains in this novel? Wrestling with Titles One of the biggest challenges of translating Pyun Hye-young is the pressure of coming up with a title before I’ve finished translating the book. If I had it my way, the title would always be the very last thing I come up with. Realistically though, you need at least a good working title to get the publicity machine rolling. Pyun’s titles very often contain hidden meanings. With Seon-ui beopchik, I immediately read it as the law of lines, like the law of gravity, or the law of entropy. It had a clean, mathematical sound to it. What do lines do? But then I thought better of it and asked the author. I’d fallen into this trap before with “Tokki-ui myo,” which looks like you’ll be reading about a leporine burial site, only to learn she meant ÙÖ, i.e., “myo as in rabbit.” Which isn’t to say that it can’t also mean a grave or a tomb. But that meaning is meant to be buried (har har). In my own translation of the title, I went with “O. Cuniculus,” the Latin name for one common species of rabbit. I lucked out, as “cuniculus” comes from a Latin word meaning “a small conduit or burrow, as an underground drain or rabbit hole; or a low tunnel, as to a burial chamber” (emphasis mine). When this kind of serendipity occurs, one must run many, many victory laps around one’s neighborhood. The Hole also contained a double meaning. Literal, physical holes appear throughout the book, but hol- is also a Korean prefix meaning alone or widowed, like Oghi and his mother-in-law. Likewise, in City of Ash and Red, the mystery character’s name Mol means “to not exist.” The name of the character that the protagonist is so desperate to find is a cipher, a clue to the reader that he can never be found. I considered translating the name using a Latin equivalent, like Nil, but the editor voted for keeping the Korean. Pyun, too, wanted the character’s name to sonically echo the word “mall,” as in shopping mall. When I asked Pyun about the seon in Seon-ui beopchik, she explained that it had multiple meanings: lines, good/opposite of evil, interconnectedness. The editor, agent and I racked our brains for something that might convey all three dimensions of significance. “The Golden Rule” was a promising suggestion made by the editor, but the sales team said no. I suggested anything starting with “The Geometry of —” but the sales team said it sounded too much like nonfiction. Variations on Good or Goodness were deemed too abstract. Ultimately, the sales team turned down so many of our suggestions that we just kept returning to “The Law of Lines.” And in the end, it did seem the most fitting. Lines abound throughout the novel. Points, lines, planes. Triangles, pyramids. Gas lines. Hierarchies. Crossed paths. And other dangerous lines, like those that shouldn’t be crossed. The law of lines was abstract, but it also felt like the title of a hypothesis whose proof was laid out in the novel. Playing Possum “She’s not a very Korean writer, is she? Who lives in a townhouse? That’s not a Korean-style house.” “On page 86, you used the idiom, ‘to play possum,’ but possums aren’t native to Korea. What did the original say?” These are interesting questions I’ve fielded from readers in the past year. What makes a novel Korean? Are some Korean writers more Korean than others? Should translations of Korean books only contain that which can be found in Korea? Is “piece of cake” acceptable, thanks to Paris Baguette, while “playing possum” is verboten? Pyun is Korean and writes in Korean, but does that necessarily mean her work must represent Korea? Arguably, the most “Korean” thing about her work is the wordplay, because it is so inseparable from the language. (Though with hole/hol, she used a bilingual pun, so even there it can’t be called specifically Korean.) Foreign elements appear in her work because those things are familiar to her domestic readers—even townhouses, which do exist here but perhaps only for a certain class or lifestyle. Meanwhile, her foreign readers sometimes remark that her books could have been set in their country instead. When I shared the question about Pyun’s “Koreanness” with Jenny Wang Medina, a friend and scholar of Korean literature, she asked, “Why is it Pyun’s responsibility to ‘represent Korea’ at all?” It’s a good point. Her job is to be a writer, not a national brand ambassador. If her work is not bound by cultural purity, should translations of her work be? At the same time, maybe it is weird for a Korean character to talk about possums. When I looked up the line from the original again, I remembered why I had translated it that way. The original sentence read like a Korean explanation of the American idiom. I thought it might be too tedious for readers if I spelled it all out in English. Also, I thought “playing possum” suited the scene better. But I know this question will stay with me for a while, and the next time around maybe I won’t include a non-indigenous animal. (Unless you count that possum who lives in a café in Seoul . . .) And Speaking of “Purity” As far as I can tell from my critics, I am always either too literal or too liberal, usually within the same book. Why did I translate this word this way and not that way? Why didn’t I make this writer sound more like that other writer? Why didn’t I include the characters’ titles, and why did I spell the author’s name like that? (Hint: I didn’t. The author did. It’s their name.) If it’s not already obvious, I gave up on trying to please everyone a long time ago. In fact, I’m not sure I ever tried. My fidelity is to the text-in-translation and what it’s telling me to do. In that respect, it’s not so different from writing. I don’t know of many writers who write in order to please readers. Editors, maybe. But even then, not without a fight. I think we’re all just trying to satisfy the voice of the book, of the characters, of the prose that demands to be brought to life in some such a way, and you simply do the best you can to not ruin it. ₩₩₩ Is it true that Pyun Hye-young’s stories could take place anywhere? Yes and no. There is still a “Korean-ness”—if by that we mean the specific textures of daily life taking place at a particular location and moment in history—that must be contended with. In The Law of Lines, I fretted over small details, like how Ki-jeong wears slippers at work, or how to explain the different types of banks where one might apply for loans, or what that exposed gas line next to the kitchen stove looks like. Not to mention the pyramid scheme itself. There’s nothing inherently Korean about multilevel marketing schemes. They’re found everywhere; only the particulars vary. The one in the book happened to be based on an actual and very predatory multilevel marketing scheme from about ten years back in which college students were lured in by desperate friends or misleading job ads, coerced into taking out loans to fund their entry into the scheme, and physically trapped inside “dorms” with dozens of other victims where they were all but starved and prevented from escaping. Is this, then, a problem of tradition? Or is it a permutation of capitalism? Some readers might interpret The Law of Lines as a takedown of Confucianism, but if anything, it’s a portrayal of how traditional relationships that were once informed by Confucianism are being overturned by the pressure to make money. If this were truly a Confucian book, then presumably Ki-jeong would be a wise, caring teacher whose students respect her—or conversely a domineering taskmaster whose students fear her (depending on your take on Confucianism). But instead, she views teaching as a job she’s stuck in, compares her students to vermin, and ends up framed by a wealthy student for a petty crime. Su-ho longs for any job that isn’t manual labor while wishing his mother were dead and his burden of filial piety gone. College students sell out their friends for a vague promise of wealth. The pyramid is a metaphor for what capitalism, not Confucianism, demands of us: make a profit no matter what, even if it means selling off your dearest relationships. Houses and Homes The first line of The Law of Lines was the last line that I changed. Specifically, I changed “the house” to “their house,” because I remembered at the last second how jip conveys both a physical house and an emotional home, whereas Cartesian English separates them. I hoped that little change would warm the story up, if only by a degree. The most touching scene for me in Lines was when Se-oh tries to sleep in her and her father’s burned-out house. The description of the ruined house was reminiscent of other things Pyun has written, in which “home” is a treacherous thing. The characters in Lines struggle to feel at home anywhere. Se-oh thinks she has been successfully hiding in the wreck without anyone’s knowledge, but the night she decides to leave, she realizes that her neighbors have known all along and have been doing little things (collecting her mail for her, not letting their kids run wild through the ruins, etc.) to help her stay. She ends up in a low-rent gosiwon, having realized all too late that home was not just a point in space but the daily life she’d shared with her father. Su-ho, too, is facing the loss of his house/home to urban redevelopment, a scheme which overwhelmingly favors the rich and injures the poor. He didn’t think he could sink any lower than the current rundown apartment he shares with his mother, but now he is faced with the same fate as his debt-ridden clients. For him, the lesson of home comes too late. What Happens After We Die? “I know the ones who love us will miss us.”– Keanu Reeves The biggest mystery to me in The Law of Lines was the story of Ha-jeong, Ki-jeong’s half-sister by her father’s mistress. I felt a whole-body ache when I learned her back story and imagined what it would be like for a child to lose her mother (for reasons never explained) and have to grow up in a house where she is unwanted and unloved. Ki-jeong’s mother went through the motions of raising Ha-jeong, but without love Ha-jeong was not much better off than a weed growing in a garden. By the end, Ki-jeong realizes that investigating her sister’s final days was the wrong response to her death. Too late, she understands that to love someone is to miss them when they’re gone, and that she owed her sister love. People like to ask me: of all the books you’ve translated, which was your favorite? I answer them honestly when I say that I cannot pick a favorite. What might elicit an answer, though, is if they were to ask instead which books continue to haunt me long after the work is done. Writer Pyun Hye-young (left) & Translator Sora Kim-Russell (right)

by Sora Kim-Russell
Writer's Notes

[Draft II] The Law of Deleted Lines — by Pyun Hye-young

What goes into writing a book and translating it? A writer and translator reveal their behind-the-scenes experiences from both sides of their computer screens.—Ed. Seon-ui beopchik (Munhakdongne, 2015) I don’t know about other writers, but in my case, there are many times when my initial story concept and the story that actually gets written end up being very different. I guess this is because I don’t plan everything fully and in detail before I start. A plot almost never comes to me all at once, and I write taking each step as I go. I’ll begin with a general event, situation, or particular scene and write a novel from there, working at completing it little by little, while actively incorporating the coincidences or impromptu thoughts that come to me in the process. This means that, more often than not, the story or characters from the initial stage of my ideas aren’t fixed, but rather, variable and open to change on a whim. This happened with my novel Seon-ui beopchik [published in English as The Law of Lines—Ed.]. It is the story of a character named Se-oh Yun, who cannot accept her father’s sudden death and vows to carry out revenge on the man she blames for it. Although the basic narrative structure of a “failed revenge story” remained the same, Se-oh’s character and behavior, along with the events of the novel, gradually changed. Se-oh is someone who has spent years not leaving the house because of regret and self-blame over her past choices. She has had absolutely no social interactions, no friendships, and no one to talk to about routine everyday events or to smile at from across a table. The only person Se-oh meets, talks to, and shares meals with is her father. When her father chooses to commit suicide, tormented by the pressure to pay off insurmountable debts, Se-oh loses everything—not only the one person in the world who loved her unconditionally, but also her home, which is destroyed in the fire. Se-oh lives alone for a time in the burned-out house before revenge leads her to venture out. Back when I first imagined the story, I thought that Se-oh would think and act purely with “malice” and “murderous intent.” Thinking up circumstances in which a character faces setbacks because of practical issues was so entertaining and fun that I thought I would have to write a story where Se-oh wavers and then fails. Se-oh thinks long and hard about what weapon to use. It occurs to her that the best weapon would be one that could instantly kill. Just an ordinary twenty-something, the first thing Se-oh thinks of is a hammer: a weapon she can come by most easily. And it’s something she finds—its handle blackened by the flames—in what is left of her home. Let’s assume she causes a fatal injury by attacking her target with the hammer. For that to happen, the best place to strike would be the brain. Of course, she could strike elsewhere. She could go for the chest or back, where a flailing hammer is more likely to hit because of the larger surface area, or the arms and legs which would inevitably stick out in defense during an attack. She could certainly cause some damage, but to inflict a fatal injury, the person wielding the hammer would need to strike from an elevation or at least from a similar height as the target. But Se-oh is a slight woman who isn’t very tall. Su-ho Lee, her target, is a tall and sturdy man. Will she be able to overcome this physical difference to exact her revenge? Even if she swings with all her might, the worst she can do is to send her target to the hospital for a month. In fact, she might only end up causing some bruises, a few burst veins just under the skin. With the physical constraints she has to work with, a hammer is preposterous. After realizing she can kill Su-ho only if she strikes at his brain, Se-oh goes around for some time studying people’s heads. The more she looks at them the more mysterious it is to her that people eat food, go to the toilet, wait for buses, and argue with others out of greed, all with a 1.5-kilogram brain perched atop their bodies, and she begins to think of humans, who can do absolutely nothing without this brain that has a surface area no bigger than a newspaper page, as utterly bizarre. Se-oh was a recluse before this. Having gone through something that hurt people close to her, she became incredibly disappointed in humanity. Afterwards, she lived with such intense malice toward others that it made her twisted inside, and she wondered if living with so much malice made her “evil,” even if she didn’t act upon it. She had no reason or opportunity to think about what people were really like at their core, but because of the hammer, she finally looks closely at people living their everyday lives. Se-oh is fundamentally different to vengeful protagonists you find in genre novels or mainstream films. Unlike those characters who succeed in heroically meting out their revenge,Se-oh can’t spend all day, every day climbing to the top of a mountain and perfecting her martial arts skills in preparation, or meet a talented mentor who will teach her secret techniques; her general stamina and fitness are not outstanding either, and she doesn’t have the resources or connections to hire a contract killer. She’s stuck in a situation where her revenge must be arduous, carried out with no more than her existing strength, using nothing but a weapon she has devised herself. If she had the time, Se-oh could become a kung fu master or bulk up to enact her revenge. But she has to earn at least minimal living expenses just to sustain herself. She is an all too ordinary avenger: someone who can only dream of revenge in quiet moments while working a minimum wage job, someone whose exhaustion is so compounded that she might fall asleep carrying out her revenge because she’s so worn out. If she came into a ton of money, Se-oh could pay a huge sum for a gun on the black market. But even if she did manage to get one, there’s no way this female protagonist who has never handled a firearm or stalked prey would suddenly be able to pull off her plan with sure-fire aim. Se-oh gives up on the hammer and sets her sights on using a knife—the easiest weapon to acquire and wield for this realistic character. She decides to buy a knife in an inconspicuous store, like a department store or one of the kitchen goods wholesalers in Namdaemun Market. She intends to pick out the most ordinary-looking knife she can find. She has used a knife to cut fruit or chop vegetables plenty of times, but now Se-oh has to use one to inflict a fatal injury on Su-ho. To do this, she would of course have to aim for his heart, but that also comes with bodily limitations. Se-oh’s height isn’t advantageous to stabbing a man in the chest, and there is a good chance that she will end up uselessly waving the knife around in the air. If her revenge were to end in attempted murder, her plans would be foiled and she’d wind up on the run. Having given up on using a weapon, Se-oh next considers a deadly fall or poison. She thinks about pushing Su-ho onto the subway tracks, but realizes that this has become impossible since all the subway stations in Seoul have had platform screen doors installed. Poisoning comes with its own set of difficulties. In order to poison someone, you need to have a relationship with them. You can’t just pour a poisoned drink in the hopes that your target will saunter in and take a sip. That would only result in innocent victims. So, in order to be practical to administer, she would have to interact with her target, and that would give rise to the irony of having to befriend her enemy. In the end, almost none of these scenes made it into the actual novel. If I had written them all the way I thought of them when I was coming up with the story, the novel might have become a black comedy. But as I was working through the novel, for some reason, Se-oh gradually started to show herself getting on with life, and after some hesitation, I decided to respect her choice. This meant I had to throw out a lot of the ideas I had before I started to write. What keeps us going? It’s common to tell people who are dejected and in despair that life is still worth living, but what makes this true? There must be various ways for someone who is dejected and despairing to recover their will to live. Of course, things like the anticipation that life will get better, the belief that one will discover some value in life, and the belief in human solidarity all give meaning to life, but it’s also true that the urge to die or faith in malice can make life disappear. Although Se-oh was a weak person, she had the mettle all along to try and get back up any way she could. She had a heart that could accept its own inner workings. I had failed to notice this back when I was first thinking up the story. I realized that Se-oh was not someone who would rehearse murderous moves or lie in wait for a chance to attack her target. Rather, she was a character who, in the end, would put aside her despair little by little and in doing so, recover a motive to keep going, to do her best to live her life. I also realized the strange truth that the will to live and the will to die aren’t always so different. Thinking about it now, it’s clear to me that some novels have much deeper thoughts than their writers, and so they arrive at a point somewhere beyond what their writer could have imagined long before she ever gets there. Translated by Sophie Bowman Writer Pyun Hye-young (left) & Translator Sora Kim-Russell (right)

by Pyun Hye Young
Writer's Notes

[Draft: Writer-Translators on Their Craft]

Copyright ⓒ MY-JA DRAFT to write, to compose This section features five respected writer-translators who reminisce, reflect, and ruminate on their experiences of writing and translating. Their opinions correspond, but also refract from each other to varying degrees given their unique, personal backgrounds. The section features their abridged answers.—Ed. Draft I: Writer-Translators on Their Craft [Draft I] Bae Suah http://kln.or.kr/strings/columnsView.do?bbsIdx=76&searchCategory=WN [Draft I] Bora Chung http://kln.or.kr/strings/columnsView.do?bbsIdx=232&searchCategory=WN [Draft I] Choe Yun http://kln.or.kr/strings/columnsView.do?bbsIdx=231&searchCategory=WN [Draft I] Park Hyunju http://kln.or.kr/strings/columnsView.do?bbsIdx=229&searchCategory=WN [Draft I] Lee Juhye http://kln.or.kr/strings/columnsView.do?bbsIdx=234&searchCategory=WN Draft II: What Goes Into Writing a Book vs Translating It [Draft II] The Law of Deleted Lines – Pyun Hye-young http://kln.or.kr/strings/columnsView.do?bbsIdx=616&searchCategory=WN [Draft II] The Law of Translated Lines – Sora Kim-Russell http://kln.or.kr/strings/columnsView.do?bbsIdx=617&searchCategory=WN

by Bae Suah et al.
Musings

Making a Patch of Land for Myself

Most of my translation work has been in poetry and dramaturgy and I’ve always thought that these genres played to my strengths. I’m a chameleon linguist, used to assuming voice, following rhythm and inhabiting character. In poetry and plays, the shape and the sound are intimately related to the sense. How you apprehend the sense of a line in a poem or play is only partly due to its literal meaning; the larger part of the impact it has on you, the reader, or you, the listener, is created by shape and sound. And as sound and shape are interpreted by the senses, by ear and eye, and are subjective, both these genres where I feel most at home are fundamentally unstable and open-ended, needing both a speaker and a listener for their full existence. My translation work has consequently always been in short intense bursts and I thought of myself as a lyric sprinter. So when my friend, the Russian poet Maria Stepanova, asked me to translate her book In Memory of Memory, a prose work of more than four hundred pages, I blanched momentarily. I agreed, of course. I had already translated Maria’s long poems and I knew her voice at its most condensed and ‘slant’. I was her friend, we had spent long hours in conversation, I loved her and I couldn’t refuse her. And perhaps also: I have always believed in fate, allowing myself to be repeatedly blown off-course (if I had even set a course) by projects I knew would bring me to new unimaginable lands. I thought that if I ever came to the end of Maria’s book I would certainly be a different person. In Memory of Memory is a book that slips between genres, at once novel and essay and memoir, with an ‘eye’ for detail and an atmosphere reminiscent of W. G. Sebald. Maria uses the scant information she has about her Jewish-Russian ancestors as a sort of spinal cord running through her expansive text, and accompanies this part-colourised family history with complex reflections on the nature of memory and loss, using examples from literature, film and art. I began working on the book in 2018. After only a very few pages a sort of horrified anxiety gripped me. I am a very concise writer, always pruning back, honing, tapping on metaphors to check their trueness, eliminating them if there is the least hollow echo. In life, Maria was my perfect pair, endlessly thoughtful with a desire to probe and investigate every truth, optimistic, life-loving, generous, operatic in her vision. But in translation every sentence of hers was a tussle – her stereophonic sound and technicolour dazzled me, I couldn’t anticipate the ending of any thought. As she opened up new vistas and landscapes some strange reflex in my unconscious longed for composure and closure. I thought to myself that despite not feeling entirely at home in British intellectual culture, I had inherited the pinched imagination and clipped wings of British empiricism and the thought depressed me. I inched forward. Each sentence required the sort of attention I’d give to a line of poetry, as well as an intense engagement with the material of the argument. The crux of the issue was this: if I followed the line too literally, I couldn’t capture the eloquence and beauty of Maria’s poetic prose, and if I refashioned the line to reflect this beauty then I lost my grasp of the argument. Russian is an inflected language; the endings of words indicate their grammatical relationship to other words. In Russian, it is possible to build an extremely long sentence and to produce a crystallising effect, an accumulating, slowly clarifying line; perhaps akin to turbid water settling to reveal its depths. But the English line doesn’t have the same elasticity. The English words have no inflections, no hidden valencies; only word order holds them in place. English eloquence, at least when I think about it, comes from texture and tautness. I slowly unwound each Russian sentence, I found the surprising ending and laid it on the page and traced my way backwards to the beginning. Then I began to cut it out in its equivalent English fabric. I wanted so badly for the line in English to enter the reader as the Russian entered me, with the same shock, the same swelling of possibilities as the meaning slowly took shape. I almost couldn’t bear the idea that translation would filter the voice of the original, or that like a lock gate it would change the levels of meaning mechanically. It would be an understatement to say that this activity stretched me. I could manage only a few paragraphs a day. In Memory of Memory is intensely visual as befits a work that opens out of evenings spent flicking through family photograph albums. The visual is made literary; each image touches the mental retina and becomes word. Translating the work was an equally visual occupation – I pored over the art works Maria mentioned: Rembrandt’s self-portraits, Charlotte Salomon’s Life? Or Theatre?, Francesca Woodman’s shadowy images and the peculiar and intimate glass-fronted boxes of Joseph Cornell. It is possible to translate the description of an object or an artwork without seeing the original, but it is better to triangulate between the image and the text, to see how the image touches my English retina and what new word it becomes. A certain tone and colour tints the work. Maria’s thoughtful, melancholy, highly poetic gaze is directed at a sepia past, and it attempts to grasp something of that past while at the same time gently mocking this need to grasp and hold, knowing it to be an impossibility. Her lightly ironical tone, never dismissive or undermining, protective of her subject, but altogether free of sentimentality, is contrived from the line and its gradual unfolding. Recreating that precise tonal balance without the possibilities of the syntax was perhaps the hardest part of the translation. I had a playlist of music I listened to as I worked, and I listened repeatedly to the same singers, the same tunes. I didn’t care whether the music was good or bad; the tunes simply induced in me a feeling of anxious love and that nostalgia that rises sharply in the throat. I often listened to music from my teens, and it brought back to me the restlessness and yearning of those years. That flickering nerviness helped me construct a prose of loss and yearning in English, something similar to my half-memories of being in love for the first time in the strange filtered light of the Soviet Union and Cold War Europe. The songs played somewhere beyond my immediate consciousness and gave me a continuous unchanging mood. A digression: I have never asked other translators how music has helped their practice. I once worked on a brutal and dispiriting passage (from a different book) describing the mass executions performed by the Soviet secret police. In order to translate this text, to maintain a moral and emotional balance and produce a text with clarity, I listened compulsively to bland pop music. That is, I didn’t listen to it exactly, but rather, the soothing, pappy background, like trickling water or the tide coming in, cushioned me and allowed me to carry on. When I finished the work, I would find that the same bland music, if I came across it by chance in shops and leisure centres, never failed to remind me of the executioners of the NKVD. One of In Memory of Memory’s legacies for me is its fusion of a Soviet and European past. The family memoirs are unequivocally Russian and Soviet; however, one of the most important of the ancestors is great-grandmother Sarra, who studied in France. References in the book are frequently to Western European and American artists and thinkers as if to prove beyond doubt that the doors of the hortus conclusus of Russian poetry and literature have always stood ajar and the twentieth-century Russian experience was above all a shared human one. Sometimes by translating a book we make a small patch of land for ourselves, the translators who exist between worlds, and this has been such a translation. I have, in translating it, heard my own voice and the voice of my friend, and the new land we have made together in a shared and more expansive literary tradition cannot now be gainsaid. Sasha Dugdale

by Sasha Dugdale
Musings

Make It Make Sense

One of my many lockdown projects, begun in the hope of giving my life some semblance of structure, is regaining my Cantonese. I say “regaining” because my parents tell me I spoke it as a small child (I don’t remember this, though at this point I don’t remember things that happened last week), but lost it when I had to switch to Mandarin for school, Singapore having decided that Mandarin is the only version of Chinese that qualifies for “official language” status. My parents still speak it to each other sometimes, reminding me of a world that is now closed off to me, a niggling voice in my ear. And so I am attempting to find my missing language via an app (not Duolingo, which only has Mandarin, though under the name “Chinese”—as if other Chineses do not exist). Singapore’s reinforcing of Mandarin as a main language has been more or less accepted by the populace, by some more grudgingly than others, but this shift left a mark. In her book Living in the Era of Lee Kuan Yew, Lee Hui Min describes turning on the TV one day in the early eighties, only to find Chow Yun-Fat and Carol Cheng suddenly speaking mellifluous Mandarin, instead of the Cantonese they’d been using just a day before. I think of how wrenching this must have been when I hear Cantonese now, and also Teochew, Hokkien, Hakka, and the other tongues now reduced to the status of mere “dialects,” while also marveling at their persistence, decades after the official policy, and indeed two thousand years after the First Emperor imposed his language across the whole of the newly unified (aka conquered) China. (Apart from English and Mandarin, Singapore’s official languages also include Malay and Tamil, which I hope to someday learn. All four languages intermingle to an extent—the Singaporean Chinese word for “market” is “basha,” which comes from the Malay “pasar,” which in turn has the same root as “bazaar.”) This language story comes from my upbringing and background, but I daresay all languages and places have one as complex, and many individuals too. Language is a messy business, which is what makes the business of literary translation so endlessly fascinating and impossible. A common misunderstanding about translation is that languages map neatly onto each other, and that translation is simply a matter of bringing each word across a boundary, with perhaps some light rearranging or choosing of synonyms. The gaps are actually far vaster than that. There are, for instance, no tenses in Chinese, so when bringing a text into English, there is immediately the choice of whether to use the past (more conventional), the present (more propulsive), or a mixture of the two (if the story takes place in more than one time period, say). A straightforward transfer is not possible; a decision has to be made, and this decision will be determined by the translator’s point of view—where, as they say, one is coming from. The act of translation lends itself to a variety of metaphors, among which the bridge is one of the most persistent: the translator as a bridge between one language and another, between cultures and places. This never felt right to me, having grown up somewhere that already contained many languages and cultures, and somewhat adrift ever since—for me, there is no clear “here” and “there.” And even if there were, isn’t this image somewhat imperialist? A place that was hitherto closed off to you is abruptly rendered accessible, and you are free to stroll right in. It makes more sense to me to think of literary translation as an act of artistic creation—with the translator at the intersection of the original and new text, interpreting it as an actor does the lines of a play. Give a hundred different translators the same poem, and you’d get a hundred very different translations, because everyone brings their subjectivity to the task, which is as it should be. The best translations come when the artistry of the translator engages with the artistry of the author in thoughtful, exciting ways, producing work of merit in its own right, not a pale imitation. This may all seem a bit like insider baseball—does it really matter how we choose to think of the translation process? Well, yes, because the way we understand the process affects the way we go about it. Languages are not coherent, contained entities, and translation is therefore not merely a matter of moving content from Box A to Box B. One frequently encounters the pernicious idea, from readers, reviewers and, sadly, even some translators, that the main criterion in literary translation is “accuracy,” “fidelity,” or whatever we’re calling it today. Of course everyone is free to take whatever they like as the center of their translation practice or reading, I just question, given the tangles that languages get themselves into, whether such a thing is possible at all. For myself, I traffic in effect—the reader’s response being the only measurable outcome of a text. “This phrase evokes a certain feeling in me when I read it in Chinese; what form of words elicits the same emotion in English?” “This sentence has a certain resonance for the Chinese reader, what is necessary to make it chime with the English reader in the same way?” (And yes, by “the Chinese reader” and “the English reader” I do often mean myself; I am the only reader whose brain I have access to.) This is a different type of fidelity, a sort of faithfulness to particular elements of a text, the ones that feel most important in the rendering, rather than the mere surfaces of the words. Sometimes this means not translating—I may end up, for instance, using the word “hutong” throughout a translation, because the English word “alleyway” conjures up something far removed from the reality of a Beijing hutong, which to my mind justifies the importation. (You will also notice I have not italicized “hutong,” because please let’s not go down the road of deciding which words are “foreign” and which aren’t.) Perhaps this is idiosyncratic to me, in that my multilingual, peripatetic life has given me particular associations with these words that others may not have—and I’m certainly not saying that my choices are the right ones, only that they’re right for me. Translators aren’t just observers of language, but active users—perhaps the most active—which means we have the power to shape language too, in however small a way is within our power. If the English language at my disposal does not contain what I need to re-fashion the world I am translating from, it is a simple act of magic to invent it. Rather than bend myself and the text into an existing lexicon, I would rather expand this lexicon. The English language, after all, is marvelously flexible and accumulative, and will stretch if you need it to. I choose to center subjectivity rather than pretend to neutrality, because the viewpoint I inhabit is the only one I have. Like writers, translators have distinctive voices; some may be more adept at shaping or manipulating them than others, just as some actors are more transformative than others—but it’s important to recognize that the raw material we are working with is our perspectives, our experiences, our idiolects, our voices, and that these are the means through which we interpret the translated text. This is also why it’s necessary to have translators from a range of backgrounds and experiences in the profession—it’s not just a matter of justice or fairness, of giving everyone a fair shot (though this is, of course, vital), but also to ensure a diversity of viewpoints and ways of working, which can only enrich the community as a whole. Languages are messy because people are complicated—and it’s near impossible to truly understand the human beings in our own household, or even ourselves, let alone people using different words than the ones we know. And yet, we try. As translators, we pick our way through the mess of language, seeking connections and correspondences where they can be made, finding equivalencies or ingenious alternatives if not. Acknowledging this messiness seems more productive to me than pretending it is somehow possible to be objective, to stand completely outside both ourselves and the text. Relearning Cantonese is my way of re-connecting with a part of my brain that I’ve lost touch with, and also of increasing the mess, throwing yet another ingredient into my already multiple sense of self, to see how that affects my way of working. What previously unheard echoes will become audible to me? I can’t wait to find out. The myth of meaning being “lost in translation” only makes sense if you think of words as discrete units of sense, rather than the closest approximation we have to pinning down the seething chaos we carry around inside ourselves. It is not the text that is lost in translation, but the translator—and that’s a good thing. By allowing ourselves to become lost, and embracing the possibilities of confusion, we hopefully achieve the state of freedom in which creativity can take place, and find our way to where we need to be. Jeremy Tiang

by Jeremy Tiang
Musings

Translation as Pretence and Performance

Translation is an activity to which we are so accustomed that we often forget and lose sight of some of its most essential and integral characteristics, one of which is its undoubted artificiality, the inescapable fact that it is a pretence, a sham, an act. Faced with a text by Dickens or Flaubert (for example) in Spanish, our innocent or naïve response is to believe – as we do – that it was actually written by Dickens or Flaubert and that we are reading their actual words. Common sense alone will tell us that this is quite impossible: not only could Dickens never have expressed himself in that language, he could never have expressed himself in that way; he would never have used certain words that appear in the text and which are only conceivable in Spanish, nor would he have written certain sentences using a syntactic construction unique to Spanish and unimaginable in English, nor employed idioms and turns of phrase he couldn’t possibly know and which, even if he had, it would never have occurred to him to use, because they form part of a language and a system of thought different from those inhabited by him and his prose. To believe that what we are reading in Spanish continues to be the work of Dickens is, when you think about it and seen from a rigorously theoretical perspective, arrant nonsense. And yet this, in practice, is what people do believe – or, rather, they behave as if they did – and it’s undeniable that the work in question does continue to belong – if it belongs to anyone – more to the English novelist than to anyone else, even the translator. Certain purists and other scrupulous people claim that one can only read poets in their own language. This, albeit arguable, view, is one that is nevertheless often heard, yet one rarely hears anyone admit or regret that they haven’t read Tolstoy or Turgenev because they were unable to read them in the original Russian. Translation, then, is universally accepted – with the inevitable exceptions – as a true and adequate reflection of almost any text. Now, what lies behind this acceptance of translation as a valid means of knowing a literary work when, from one point of view – rather unimaginative, it’s true, but not entirely to be dismissed – it is undeniable that nothing could be so at odds with the essence of that work than its supposed transposition into another language and, therefore, its renunciation or abandonment of the language in which it was conceived and written? How is it possible unreservedly to accept a translation when one knows that what characterizes and distinguishes a literary work is, in large measure, not to say primarily, the language in which it has its home and that has made its existence possible? This question, given that it was solved and settled centuries ago, may seem inadmissible or futile. But it is perhaps worth looking into the reasons for that age-old solution. It is due, I think, to the establishment and acceptance of certain conventions, so deeply rooted – so taken for granted, so taken as read – that their existence is often forgotten both by translators and by readers. Everyone knows, we all know, that a translated work is not and cannot be exactly the same as the work of the author who wrote it: the brutal shift involved in the change of languages makes this impossible, prevents it from being the same work. It is clearly something else, and yet since time immemorial, people have pretended, have made believe that it is the same. That’s why, as I see it, one could compare the activity of translation with any of the usual modes of performance, both those with centuries of tradition behind them and the more modern varieties, because they all require similar conventions in order to exist. In the theatre, for example, it’s obvious that what is represented on the stage isn’t real, indeed, the inevitable inadequacies of the scenery tell us so or, at the very least, remind us of this. A backdrop of trees is not intended to be taken as a group of real trees, and yet we accept them as such because of their context; we accept as a door something that our senses tell us is just a piece of painted cardboard that doesn’t open onto any room at all; we ignore the fact that no water comes out of a tap when one of the characters turns it on; we’re not surprised to see a famous actor disguised as Tamburlaine: we accept him as Tamburlaine for as long as the play lasts, even though we know he isn’t Tamburlaine. The same thing happens at the cinema, where the capacity for visual suggestion is far greater: and yet, were we not predisposed to immerse ourselves in a film, we would be unable to forget that we’d travelled to the cinema especially to see those images or that we were seated in a darkened room or that someone was sitting next to us or that the shifts of perspective happening before our eyes bear no relation to what our eyes are capable of in reality. We accept all this as natural because it’s part of an accepted convention. The theatre- or cinema-goer knows that in order to take part in, enjoy, understand and believe in the work being shown, you have to suspend your usual sense of reality for the two hours that the show lasts. You must be prepared – this is what the convention demands – to accept as trees something your eyes know to be a mere expanse of canvas, to perceive as a door what is mere cardboard, to imagine water coming out of a tap, and to ignore the fact that Tamburlaine has the face of a particular actor. Equally, we could say that someone looking at a painting sees volumes, shadows and dimensions that could never exist on a flat surface, and that being in close, permanent contact with the pages of a book in no way prevents us from experiencing passionately and innocently the adventures of Jim Hawkins or the misadventures of Madame Bovary. Well, in my view, the way in which a reader reads a translation belongs to that same realm of experience: we, the reader, know that Dickens could not possibly have written the sentences we’re reading in Spanish, nevertheless, we make believe that those words were written by Dickens, in his own hand, and to do this we must deliberately suspend all knowledge that any transfer or mediation has taken place: that is, we must accept that we are reading the words of a linguistically gifted Dickens, as well as the bizarre idea that this is how Dickens would sound if his work had undergone a miracle similar to that which occurred to the apostles after Pentecost, when they spoke in their own language – the only one they knew – but each person listening heard them speaking in his or her own tongue. Now, for such an attitude to be possible in any kind of performance, and for the spectator happily to accept the conventions that allow such a phenomenon to occur, and for it to be both effective and natural, the people putting on the performance must, of course, do all they can to make the illusion believable. They can’t rely solely on the spectator being in the right frame of mind, they have to confirm and maintain that frame of mind. That’s what lies behind the painted backdrop of trees and the actor’s costume, even though neither can be relied on to deceive entirely; that’s the reason – in part – why they turn off the lights in a cinema, or put frames around pictures, isolating them – even if only fictitiously – from the equally flat wall that accommodates them. To continue with the example of the theatre, while we the spectators must be prepared to accept the convention, we must also be prepared to make the effort required to be convinced. There must be a desire on our part to believe. Or perhaps the convention consists precisely in our willingness to allow ourselves to be deceived whenever there is an attempt or an apparent attempt to deceive us, whenever we are offered the appearance of or an attempt at verisimilitude. As far as the spectator or viewer is concerned, the convention, the rules of the game, could be set out in the following terms: “I will believe that the trees on the set are real trees if you really want me to believe it, and if, by painting them and putting them on the stage, your intention was that I would believe them to be real. I will pretend that I believe this precisely because it seems to me that you have tried to make me believe it, and your confidence in your ability to deceive me convinces and encourages and allows me to deceive myself during the time stipulated by us for the pretence and the performance to last. However, it’s vital that you help me to do this; that is, in order for me to experience your simulation as real, my willingness and readiness are not enough: I need your willingness and readiness too, and it’s up to you to smooth the way so that I remain willing and ready. And if you prove too implausible, you will have demonstrated that you do not entirely believe in or are incapable of accepting and fulfilling the convention that I, in good faith, am prepared to embrace the moment the curtain goes up; should that happen, I, too, will have the right to reject it.” So what happens, then, if we see translation, too, as pretence, as another kind of performance? As I said, every reader knows that the text has undergone a transformation that allows us to read what the author wrote in a language that we the reader do not know, while, at the same time, preventing us from knowing that text as it really is. Well, if we the readers are to ignore this fact, this knowledge, we, like the spectator or viewer, need to be convinced by the translator, who is, when you think about it, performing an operation as bold as it is bizarre, namely, giving someone who doesn’t know, say, English the ability to read English. Or to be more exact, the translator is trying to make the reader of his Spanish text believe he is reading in English even though he is, quite clearly, reading in Spanish. For such an absurdity (when seen from the point of view of common sense) to occur, a degree of verisimilitude is also required. So, what form does that verisimilitude take in a translation? Here is what Octavio Paz had to say on the subject: “Performance requires not only a degree of agreement and affinity with what is being performed, but also conformity and, above all, likeness.” If we accept that definition, which seems to me pretty accurate, we are being presented with an apparently insoluble problem: how can an ordinary reader judge how “like” a translation is to the original if he cannot read the original to which he has access, or thinks or pretends he has access, only through its enactment as a translation? In order to take part in the game and to play his part in the convention agreed between him and the translator, the reader must not be continually reminded that what he is reading is just that, a translation: for him to forget this and put that idea on hold, he must be able to read the text as easily and naturally as he would in his own language; but, at the same time, and so that he can believe that he really is reading Dickens, that is, for that reading to be plausible, he should also be aware of “something” distinctly and unmistakably different from what he is used to finding in texts written originally in his own language. He must be aware of “something” which, without it constantly reminding him that he is reading a translation, allows him at the same time to sense, to intuit, that original text, which, as we have seen, he cannot know in any other way. It’s hard to say what that “something” is or should be, and I’m not going to try and explain it here: the questions provoked by that contradiction would be endless and this is not the place in which to address them (although one should remember, purely as a bibliographical note, that Walter Benjamin held that any translation from language A to language B makes tangible the existence of a third active presence and reveals the traces of what he called the “pure language” that precedes and underlies both languages). Nevertheless, in the light of that, it would not be out of place to say a few words about the advisability or not of literary translations preserving certain indefinable but unmistakable elements of the original, which would give the reader some sense of what the original is like. In this respect, for example, it is often said that Spanish is being undermined by the overwhelming and indiscriminate invasion of English words and constructions, and there are those who say that these additions are contributing to a deterioration, not only in the standard of the very translations from English that introduced them, but also in the general quality of spoken and written Spanish. There’s a lot of truth in this, and it is, alas, commonplace now to find such absurd redundancies as autoconsolarse or autodefenderse (I’ve even heard someone say autosuicidarse, which would mean a triple suicide), or with unnecessary and dangerous semantic shifts, such as the use of contemplar to mean “consider” or “to bear in mind”, or with ghastly, superfluous neologisms like liderar or implementar. However, being overzealous about protecting language from such evils often brings with it, as a consequence, the tendency for the translator to eliminate from the resulting text any vestige, any trace – whether tangible or not – that might remind the reader of the original language, which, although possibly correct in its literal or exact application in Spanish, might “jar” because it feels awkward or odd; such zeal brings with it a tendency to translate syntax, semantics and diction in an ultra-Spanish way. This, in my view (albeit for different reasons), is equally prejudicial to Spanish – or whatever the target language might be – and can, in the long run, lead to a grave impoverishment of the very language the translator is striving to preserve. Languages are enriched in all kinds of ways, but one of these is, undoubtedly, contact with and permeability to the uses and dictions of other languages, which are also in a state of permanent evolution. Any translator intent on trying maintain at all costs – simply out of a fear of dissipation – a rigid, stagnant Spanish into which he would have to translate the most diverse styles coming from the most diverse languages, runs the risk of producing a translation shorn of all the original language’s peculiarities. But it’s not only that: such an attitude, the implementation of such tendencies, would be to deny translation one of its essential and most inescapable characteristics: pretence and performance. No serious reader would be convinced or satisfied to read, say, Shakespeare as if he were Lope de Vega or Dickens as if he were Galdós. If the reader is to accept and join in the pretence, he should find, in the translated Shakespeare, elements and facets and constructions not usually found in his own language, things that may even seem odd and, dare I say it, wrong. That’s why, to achieve this, the translator needs his own language – the instrument he’s working with – to be as flexible, ample and open as possible: he needs a language that will, first and foremost, accommodate all possible languages with their respective, infinite particularities. Ultimately, the task of the translator is not a matter of allowing or providing the reader with a mere understanding of a text, but of incorporating that text into his own language. And to achieve this, just as the actor playing the role of Tamburlaine will only succeed when, in the eyes of the spectator, he appears to be Tamburlaine in both costume and interpretation, so the translator should appear to the reader as a Dickens or a Shakespeare risen from the dead, like a Dickens or a Shakespeare writing in fluent Spanish, but still, undeniably, paradoxically and quite naturally, writing in the most perfect English. Javier Marías Presented at the First Iberoamerican Translators Congress (Primer Congreso Iberoamericano de Traductores) in Madrid on November 10, 1982. Published as “La traducción como fingimiento y representación” in Nueva Estafeta, January 1983. Copyright © 1983 by Javier Marías Translated by Margaret Jull Costa

by Javier Marías

1 2 3 4 5

Strings

All Category