The Impossible Transfer

Moving To A New Domain

2008-10-01T20:57:00.000-07:00

This blog will continue under the following domain:

impossibletransfer.com

Goodbye Blogger!

(I should have the site revamped by October 5.)

Phases in the "Evolution" of Literary Translations

2008-09-28T15:54:00.000-07:00

I just read an online article posted by Ding Xiasong called "Why Foreignizing Translation Is Seldom Used in Anglo-American World in Information Age". The article differentiates between direct information and aesthetic information. Direct information is the content of the source text, and the aesthetic information is the style, form or rhetorical devices in the source text. The piece agrees with Venuti by saying that Anglo-American translation culture tends to promote what he calls domestication of both direct and aesthetic information.

Ding takes the side that foreignization (as opposed to domestication) is to be preferred, if we're to follow the principle (or ideal) that a translation should transfer information (aesthetic or direct) about other cultures, language, lives, subjectivities, etc.

More interesting to me than this position (though I think I agree with the author's position, ultimately), was his observation that literary translations tend to follow a pattern. Translations aren't created in a vaccuum; they emerge because of specific historical conditions that bring two cultures, peoples, languages into some degree of communion with one another. It can be brought on by war, imperialism, commerce or whatever. Though foreignized translations are the ideal, he suggests that domesticated translations must begin the process of introducing the culture to the target audience. Once there is more interest, then the audience will be more open to challenging texts (i.e. more foreignized texts).

A slightly different category of examples: in case of Kafka and Tolstoi, we have continued increase in interest of specific writers over a long period of time. We know Kafka and Tolstoi are great, and therefore are willing to put ourselves through more challenging renditions. So we are getting "coarser" treatments of the source text, which are sold as more accurate or authentic copies of the original.

When will Anglo-American (or other English-speaking) readers be ready for more thoroughly foreignized translations of Korean literature?

I suppose the ultimate foreignized translaton (in terms of both direct & aesthetic information) is Nabokov's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, and I know of nothing that rivals this work in its degree of pedantic and encylopedic "faithfulness" to the source text.

I would love to hear from other translators on this issue.

Idiomatic Slippage

2008-09-22T11:38:00.001-07:00

I made a comment on Facebook the other day on what a wonderful hit job Jon Stewart did on Bill O'Reilly, Karl Rove and Dick Morris. And I wrote, "Really knocks it out of the park."

I was looking over that comment and thought to myself, "knocks it out"--no, that's not right it's "hits it out," because clearly, it's a baseball metaphor, and you don't knock balls, you hit them.

It didn't take long for me to realize I was conflating two expressions. "What a knock out" and "He hits it out of the park." Interestingly though, I am not alone in screwing this up. (Look up both expressions "knocks it out of the park" and "hits it out of the park" on Google. You actually get more hits with the former.)

Or am I just mistaken about this? Are both expressions okay?

Since I started translating, I have become a bit obsessive about idiomatic expressions, because the process of translating tend to somehow mangle your idioms. What's interesting is that if the slippage happens in fiction originally written in English, it's called the vernacular (or it's attributed to character or voice), but when it occurs in a translation, it's more likely to be taken as a sign of a sloppy translation.

Painter, George Deem, 76

2008-09-20T15:16:00.001-07:00

I knew nothing about the painter George Deem until I read his obituary in The New York Times in August.

For more than 30 years, Deem has dedicated himself to the work of the masters throughout art history, not simply "appropriating imagery," but delving deeper into the artist's work to reveal ever more about the secrets that lie within those masterpieces... [Text from Nancy Hoffman Gallery]

Why post about Deem in a blog about literary translation?

Mr. Deem was interested, Mr. Vance said, in the dimension of time. He wanted the viewer to experience not only the painting in front of him but also the referenced works that came before. The critic Charles Molesworth called the technique “temporal collage.”
“What he wanted was when you looked at a painting of his, you always saw something else as well,” Mr. Vance said. “You were always seeing two things at once.” [my emphasis]

I liked the way Deem's renderings re-emphasized certain aspects about the "originals" that weren't noticed before. His works didn't simply "mirror" the old paintings, they acted as a commentary on the original, not trying to replace the original but, rather, re-place it.

Myung Mi Kim & Translation

2008-09-20T14:48:00.000-07:00

"Writers of color" are often talking about (and asked about) the challenge of audience. Who are they writing for? In reference to "Kwangju" in her poetry, the interviewer asked the poet Myung Mi Kim (in Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers), "To say, for example, Kwangju calls into attention certain kinds of audiences with certain kinds of knowledge... How do you imagine your audience?"

Kim's answer (which is the best response I've seen to a question of that sort):

I'd like to propose that there is no one audience toward which one writes (or toward which I write) but that the very act of writing is an approximation of the possible conversations between "audiences." If I imagine an audience at all, I am imagining possibility. And residing inside the possibility are various communities (or audiences, if you will)...that complicate and challenge, support and enliven questions of responsibility, recognizability, and so on.

What I like about her poetry (though I find much of it very challenging) is that she articulates and puts into practice some of the ideas (or attitudes) about translation (and translating) I've been trying to cultivate. I would be interesting to hear from other translators whether they think translating is an appropriate area for this kind of inquiry.

Here's another choice quote from her book Commons:

It is not the actual translation or even the state of translatability between the two texts that is intriguing but the possibilities for transcribing what occurs in the traversal between the two languages (and by, extension, between two "nations," their mutually implicated histories of colonization, political conflicts, and son on). What is the recombinant energy created between languages (geopolitical economies, cultural representations, concepts of community).

And Kim on romanization:

Practices in trasnliteration: comparing the standard romanization to what [I] might be said to be hearing: "sesang saramdur-a" next to "sae sahng sah rham deul ah." Whose ears are at work? Where does the authority of romanizing reside? How might it be entered into otherwise?

Let Us Praise Weird English

2008-07-29T15:28:00.000-07:00

Book critic James Wood recently wrote a flattering review of Aleksandar Hemon's new book. In it he describes Hemon's extraordinary background.

When he arrived here, at the age of twenty-eight, Hemon had what his publisher calls only a “basic command” of English. Eight years later, “The Question of Bruno” appeared, stories written in an English remarkable for its polish, lustre, and sardonic control of register. This conversion is often described as “Nabokovian,” and, indeed, Hemon’s writing sometimes reminds one of Nabokov’s. (Hemon has said that he learned English by reading Nabokov and underlining the words he didn’t recognize.) Yet the feat of his reinvention exceeds the Russian’s. Nabokov grew up reading English, and had been educated at Cambridge. When his American career began, in 1940, he was almost middle-aged, and had long experience in at least three languages. Hemon, by contrast, tore through his development in the new language with hyperthyroidal speed.

Wood goes on to praise the foreign-ness of Hemon's prose.

Sometimes his English has the regenerative eccentricity of the immigrant’s, restoring buried meanings to words like “vacuous” and “petrified.” A sentence like this one stands at a slight angle to customary English usage: “I piled different sorts of blebby pierogi and a cup of limpid tea on my tray.” “Blebby” is wonderful, but, perhaps more wonderful, how many native English speakers would ever describe tea as limpid? Occasionally, he flourishes a lyrically pedantic Nabokovian bloom, as with the “fenestral glasses” a character wears.

The line about restoring buried meaning to words like "vacuous" and "petrified" reminds me of the essay by Ted Hughes I wrote about just a few minutes ago. In it, Hughes argues (among other things) that Shakespeare was able to return coarseness and immediacy to words with Latin and Greek roots. For example, quoting Gertrude from Hamlet, "And with the incorporal air do hold discourse?" (This is the part where Hamlet sees the ghost of his father who remains invisible to Queen Gertrude), Hughes shows that he brings "corpse" and "oral" back into "incorporal", which is just wild.

Oh Shakespeare, Is there anything you can't do?

2008-07-29T14:48:00.000-07:00

According to Ted Hughes in his introduction to Essential Shakespeare, Shakespeare was a master of "translating" words with Latin or Greek roots, many of which had never been heard by the groundlings, into coarser and more immediate Saxon words, creating a heterogeneous poetic language suitable for a a heterogeneous audience.

The argument is fascinating and here are some choice excerpts.

How was [a new word] to be understood? He could rely on the noblemen in the lord's gallery to give it instant meaning; they would simply trnaslate it from Greek or Latin. But what about the rest of the audience?

O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe'er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute

"Capacity" is immediately reduced to a plain image "Receiveth as the sea." In other words, it is translated: capacity=spaciousness, roominess, infinite ability to ocntain. In a similar way, "validity" which was probably a new word to most, previously used only in law, is translated by "pitch," a common word meaning "height," or "calibreated position on a scale." Validy" becomes, instantly, place on a scale of values." He deals with "abatement" even more plainly. While he tosses the fine word to the lords' box, he bends to the groundlings, and quite shamelessly adds "that means--low price."

Faced with what were virtually two languages, made more distinctly and urgently so by the presence of the two audiences, Shakespeare rose to the occasion by speaking both--the full foreign text and the full translation--simultaneously. He was pushed to this, one might say, by his perverse insistence on using such a huge number of the new words...

Note: I just posted something about Wood's review of Aleksandar Hemon's new book, which touches on a related subject.

Who Owns The Panda?

2008-07-23T16:17:00.000-07:00

I came across an interesting article by Richard Bernstein about the popularity of Kung Fu Panda in China. There was some grumbling among the Chinese who felt that the panda ("one of China's most precious symbols") had been appropriated by the Westerners for their own profit. A boycott was on the way, except...er...it

never got off the ground, and "Kung Fu Panda" was an immediate box office hit. In the last few weeks the movie has provoked a deeper discussion, even a degree of soul-searching and critical self-examination of the sort that China, a country of an amazing mix of ambition, self-confidence and insecurity, goes through from time to time.

The main question being asked is: how could Western filmmakers have used Chinese themes to create such a brilliant animated movie with such widespread appeal to the Chinese themselves?

Bernstein goes on to show just how wonderfully skilled the West has been at stealing from the East (and not the other way around)

In a way, "Kung Fu Panda" is only the latest illustration of a centuries-old tradition whereby Western artists have used China and other Asian countries to produce enduring works of art. You only have to think about Gilbert and Sullivan's "Mikado," or Puccini's "Turandot," or, for that matter, the animated feature "Mulan" of a few years ago to recall the strength and age of this tradition.

Indeed, all of these works illustrate a sort of ongoing historical imbalance in cultural cross-fertilization. The West's use of China as a cultural and artistic setting is unmatched by any Chinese use of Europe or America as backdrops for its own cultural productions.

Bernstein's article seems to be premised on the idea that "Kung Fu Panda" is an undisputed triumph. Sure, the movie is fun, and I understand we're talking about an animated feature, and perhaps not all movies have to rattle the audience with tough questions, but I take issue with the way Bernstein uses the commercial success of the film as an occasion to celebrate the virtue of this supposed freemarket place of ideas that allowed creative projects like this to bear fruit.

Lu, the commentator in China Daily, had a telling story...about a project he undertook to produce an animation for the Olympic Games. "I kept on receiving directions and orders from related parties on what the movie should be like," he recalled. "We were given very specific rules on how to promote it.

If China's artists suffer from suffocating top-down management, then film makers in the U.S. have a different tyrant to answer to: i.e. the test audience. Kung Fu Panda, like Toy Story, has a sanitized feel to it, asks no tough questions about Chinese culture and tradition. In fact, I would argue that the very popularity of Kung Fu Panda shows that not enough risk was taken. To put it another way, the movie's popular success doesn't mean the major themes were handled appropriately; on the contrary, it simply means the Chinese audience liked the way its culture was represented.

Okay, so not all cartoons have to be politically subversive, but wouldn't a seemingly innocuous animated movie have been a great Trojan Horse to sneak some tough questions into a country, which, as recent events have more than shown, doesn't take kindly to criticism?

And another thing: Did Lucy Liu have to be the snake!? Come on!

Commentary: Korean translations "not up-to-snuff"

2008-07-21T07:56:00.000-07:00

Last week, I posted an article about how Korean translations are "not up-to-snuff". I promised my own take on the article, so here it is. (Some of my colleagues and mentors have already responded to this article, and my views are informed by and responses to opinions already voiced.)

I first heard about the article from my cousin, who teasingly told me about how 40% of the translations are reported to be riddled with mistranslations. Indeed, the article does say something to that effect:

Under the project initiated by the KLTI, Song led a team of 10 Korean professors specializing in English literature and four foreign scholars to review major English versions of Korean literature. They reviewed 72 works that were translated from about 1910 to 1999, and rated 29 of them - about 40 percent - at "C+" or "C." Only seven works got the top rating of "A.

If the board's conclusion is that translators could have been more "faithful" to the original, they are probably right. The article writes that, "The most reliable translations came from joint work, which highlights the need to have more projects involving experts from Korea and English-speaking countries." Indeed, I produced my best translations when I worked in concert with qualified editors; the process took a long time and was often emotionally taxing, but the resulting product, in my opinion, made it worthwhile.

But the review process fails to call into question the institutional arrangement that has led to these translations. I am not just talking about time and money. The issue has to do with how majority of translation projects at KLTI are decided by committee. This means that KLTI, a state-funded institution gets to decide what Korean literature is on the global literary stage.

It's common for a literary translator in Seoul to hear his colleagues voice their frustration with Korean literature in general; this makes sense, if you think about the power relationship between KLTI and the translators it hires. Without going into specifics, I will say the complaint has the feel of off-the-record venting, common in most professions, and I sympathize with most of their grievances. But surely we began translating Korean literature because there was something in it that caught our attention, something in it that appealed to us. Why do we find ourselves criticizing works we're supposed to love?

If we sometimes act like disgruntled employees in the break room, maybe it's because we feel like employees to the institution of Korean literature (whatever that is). If we act like students in a cafeteria making fun of books they had to read and write a report on, maybe it's because something about the arrangement makes us feel like mere students. Of course, it's not just the translators who play into this role. KLTI seems to very unproblematically reinforce it. The following is a quote from the Korea Times article on the evaluation.

"Also, the quality of the translation is closely related to Korean literature critique which guides the right interpretation of the original meaning. [my emphasis] The poor translations are partly a result from a lack of understanding of the original works [my emphasis] ,'' Song said.

He said that the overall translated sentences sound natural, are easy to understand and show a good readability in general. "But many have a problem in remaining loyal to the original text [my emphasis], which fails to revive the literary beauty and meaning,'' said Song.

Notice the phrase "right interpretation of the original meaning." Doesn't it sound like a teacher who teaches the student the "right interpretation"? It leaves no room for a model of reading as a synthetic product of a reader's encounter with a text. Readings aren't simply inherited, like a piece of land passed down from father to son; they are re-created and re-molded by the reader. The phrase "remaining loyal" is also a well-worn metaphor for understanding the relationship between the original text and translator; being "faithful" gets at the same idea. For me, these metaphors bring to mind the bond between master & slave, God & believer.

(On the other hand, we have "revive" which brings to mind, amusingly, patient & doctor dynamic, and--even more amusing--"keep alive" 살려주다--which I've heard several times--which points to something like a hostage & kidnapper relationship. These metaphors reverse the balance of power, but don't genuinely reflect the situation as I see it.)

Having said all this, I confess that I don't see myself as an authentic reader of Korean texts yet. I have been a literary translator for a little over a year now, and though Korean is technically my first language, I know I will have to keep working harder to get better. Furthermore, KLTI's current arrangement has, in fact, exposed me to more Korean literature than I've ever been before. Yet we can't forget that KLTI exists to claim institutional ownership over what Korean literature is abroad. As translators, we need to fight against the view that translation is merely a lesser copy, an inherently flawed reproduction that must be tolerated. If KLTI wants to nurture young translators, it shouldn't treat them as copy artists; it should help them become authentic readers of literature in the Korean language.

How to do this? When I was in Seoul, I took two different translation workshops. One was organized by KLTI and another by ICF (International Communication Foundation). Both allowed many translators with varying degrees of kinship with the Korean language to converse about common texts. In this way, various readings would emerge in class of the same work, all informed by the group conversations. Groups like KLTI and ICF should continue funding such events.

Furthermore, I am beginning to think we translators should focus on choosing literary works that mean something for us personally, rather than taking on projects just for the money, or because it's there. This also means searching out writers who haven't already won a dozen awards. One of the problems right now is that a small number of translators are picking from a fairly limited set of fashionable writers. In the end, I think the burden is on us translators to read widely and diversely, not reading simply to search out things to translate, so that our relationship with the text is less acquisitive and more reciprocal.

(Of course, this is a tall order. I often take on projects without knowing too much about the writer's work. I justify it by telling myself I still have much to learn; that I must be exposed to a wide variety of works; etc. But soon or later...)

On Branding Korean Fiction

2008-07-21T07:47:00.001-07:00

I recently heard a rumor (unsubstantiated, but hey, what are blogs for...) that some savvy Korean literary agent with connections in New York is trying to sell certain Korean books with psychologically unbalanced female protagonists, thinking the theme has a certain sexiness and cachet (i.e. commercial value).

This worries me.

Conversations about making Korean literature more popular and salable usually revolve around creating a "brand" for Korean literature. Once a brand is created, then it would become easier to peddle other Korean texts as well. Looking a little ahead, we see that the advantage would only exist for works that fall in line with what the brand stands for.

Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club is commonly cited as a text that seems to very blithely Orientalize itself for the mainstream American audience. The damage is very real for a young generation of Asian-American writers whose task is to somehow counter or grudgingly find a companion in a text they cannot abide, only because it has left such an indelible mark on the mainstream consciousness. Order matters.

The Korean Herald Article: Korean Translations are "not up-to-snuff"

2008-07-11T16:44:00.000-07:00

I am posting the entire article here from The Korean Herald. My commentary to follow.

A growing number of Korean literary works are being translated into English, thanks to the government's more aggressive financial support. However, experts have often pointed out that quantity tends to override quality in those projects, leading to sloppy and inaccurate translations.
The state-run Korea Literature Translation Institute, a fledgling agency that promotes such projects and trains translators of Korean literature, revealed that about 40 percent of state-sponsored translation projects have serious problems with accuracy.
"The readability of translated Korean literature has been improving at a steady pace, but we have found that many of the translations have passages which are inaccurate when placed beside the original Korean texts," said Song Seung-cheol, a professor at Hallym University, at a press conference in Seoul last week.
Under the project initiated by the KLTI, Song led a team of 10 Korean professors specializing in English literature and four foreign scholars to review major English versions of Korean literature. They reviewed 72 works that were translated from about 1910 to 1999, and rated 29 of them - about 40 percent - at "C+" or "C." Only seven works got the top rating of "A."
"The overall quality of translations of Korean literature into English is far from satisfactory, but, given that more efforts are being made to produce better translations, the quality, in terms of accuracy and faithfulness, is likely to improve," Song said.
He added that English translations of Korean literature significantly improved in the 1990s, but then the level stagnated, which demonstrates the absence of a systematic and long-term approach to foster high-quality translation.

Song Seung-cheol (right), a professor at Hallym University, and Yoon Ji-kwan, the head of the Korea Literature Translation Institute, speak at a press conference on the quality of translations, in Seoul last week. [Yang Sung-jin/The Korea Herald]
The first-ever study of the quality of translations also led to a couple of revealing findings which contradict the conventional wisdom. For a start, some Korean translators got higher scores than non-Koreans. It was often assumed that foreign translators would produce better and more accurate translations, but the research shows that there are many distorted meanings and other mistakes when non-Korean translators have worked without a Korean partner.
The most reliable translations came from joint work, which highlights the need to have more projects involving experts from Korea and English-speaking countries.
Another unexpected finding was that many well-known Korean translators got lower scores. For instance, Ahn Jung-hyo, a novelist and translator, and Suh Jee-moon, a professor of English and a top-rated translator, both received a "C."
In a booklet that provides the comprehensive analyses of translated literature, all the translators are identified, which was a potentially controversial move by the KLTI and the research team, since translators' reputation could be undermined by the report.
"Identifying translators and also grading their work was a very hard decision because people involved in the research could take it very negatively, but we decided to go ahead with the full disclosure because we believe this will lead to more substantial translation reviews and criticism in the future," Song said.
He warned, however, that the research reflected only the quality of the translations included in the project: "What should be noted is that the ratings we gave will not affect their future applications to government-sponsored translation projects," he said.
Yoon Ji-kwan, head of the KLTI, said that translators whose work was criticized in the research will find the results embarrassing, but the research was needed to check how government money was spent to make Korean literature more internationally recognized. "We expect this research to provide serious momentum for translators and critics to discuss key translation issues more deeply," Yoon said.
He added that the KLTI is working on the country's first English anthology of Korean literature to provide a comprehensive guide to Korean studies scholars and translators, and is preparing to open a translation academy in Seoul in September.
(insight@heraldm.com)

By Yang Sung-jin

Chicken Without Sexual Life

2008-06-19T04:33:00.000-07:00

CNN reported a piece on how the Chinese are changing the names of their cuisines in an effort not to gross out the foreigners during the Olympics. "Chicken without sexual life" is being turned into "steamed pullet" and "bean-curd made by a pock-marked woman" is being called "mapo tofu".

Some purists have decried the move:

"The process of standardizing a menu translation is a double-edged sword," wrote columnist Raymond Zhou in the China Daily newspaper. It "removes the ambiguity and unintended humor" and "takes away the fun and the rich connotation.
"It turns a menu into the equivalent of plain rice, which has the necessary nutrients but is devoid of flavor."

I say they footnote everything!

The Scandal of Representation

2008-06-15T06:30:00.000-07:00

A reader pointed me to an article called "Asian American Literature and Korean Literature: Common Problems and Challenges from a Segyehwa (Globalization) Perspective" by Heinz Insu Fenkl. Fenkl is an author, editor, translator and mythology scholar and is well known within the Korean literature translation community.

Here's something I can sympathize with:

In the process of moving from the margins to finding their tenuous place in the problematic contours of the mainstream, Asian American writers have faced particular and complex challenges. These generally have to do with making their own cultural experience and relationship to language(s) not only comprehensible and meaningful, but also aesthetically and artistically legitimate to a readership which is predominantly white and English speaking [my emphasis] -- these are issues that might be considered issues of cultural and linguistic translation.

In the article, Fenkl is fairly critical of Margaret Cho (stand-up comic and the star of the show "All-American Girl") and Chang Rae Lee (author of Native Speaker and Aloft).

Figures like Lee and Cho make use of their Koreanness to achieve their success without following through with their reciprocal obligations to the very cultures they appropriate. They ultimately serve the American ideology of assimilation without realizing (or perhaps without caring) that they have been bought out and used against people of their own background who, to the white-dominated studios and publishers, are a mere market share.

As examples, he cites that "the rice eaten by the family in the first episode of All American Girl was cooked improperly and scooped with the wrong utensil...and that it was inappropriate, in another episode, for the grandmother to thank her grandson in honorifics" Furthermore, in Lee's novel "there are many cultural and linguistic things that the narrator cannot properly depict, one prominent example being the narrator's confusion of the words param and parum." [I'm not sure, but I think he means 바람 (wind) and 발음 (pronunciation)].

The implication here is that you either get it wrong or you get it right. Earlier on in the talk Fenkl writes, "it is Koreans who should rightfully maintain control over representations of Koreanness to the world." This raises questions about legitimacy and ownership. To put it bluntly, Who is Korean enough to sell what it means to be Korean to the white people? Perhaps Fenkl would not agree with this formulation; what seems to bother him more than the inaccuracies are Cho and Lee's apparent indifference (if awareness) about the problem itself, that they are not living up to their responsibilities as agents of cultural representation.

As for me I think the problem is the predicament of having to represent period. The predicament exists whether it's the white producers, publishers or agents encouraging Korean artists and writers to milk their ethnicity for all it's worth, or it's the Korean studies scholars or Koreans back in the motherland clamoring for them to get it right. Can you imagine a white writer being criticized for being "not white enough" or getting it wrong on what it's like to be white?

(Although white writers do seem to get in trouble for making up things in their memoirs. Should we have Oprah--or a Midwestern soccer mom version of Oprah--devote a show on being betrayed by ethnic writers who make up exotic recipes that don't exist? She can say, ever so piously, "You betrayed me and my honest curiosity about other cultures. And you made multiculturalism cry.")

Lashing Out

2008-06-10T22:41:00.000-07:00

In NYT, Hari Kunzru reviewed Name Le's first collection of short stories titled The Boat. I have not read the book, but I confess to being startled by such a naked portrayal of feelings I struggled with while I was at Columbia.

In the opening story of Nam Le’s first collection, we find a writer named Nam, who is on a tight deadline during his “last year at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.” Le is struggling with writer’s block, an affliction his classmates find perplexing. “Just write a story about Vietnam,” one of them advises. Instructors and “visiting literary agents” reinforce this. “Ethnic literature’s hot. And important too.” “You have to ask yourself, what makes me stand out? ... Your background and life experience.”

Kunzru is sympathetic to Le's dilemma and wonderfully captures in a single sentence the unease and angst I've heard echoed by many "writers of color".

“Ethnic lit” is unhappily what emerges when identity politics head into the marketing meeting, and for any writer with a non-WASP name, it’s all too easy to feel one is being pimped for one’s “background and life experience” (real or imaginary), and somehow colluding in the production of a crude, essentialized version of oneself in return for an advantage over ethnically uninteresting peers.

Yet Kunzru ultimately suggests that Le needs to write past this hangup, praising moments in Le's prose that seem less conscious about the industry-dilemma. Kunzru says in passages where Le just writes--"not toward or away from anything"--he writes well.

I don't know about Le, but I want to do more than just write well. The need to write, in my opinion, is greater and more profound than the need to simply tell stories, especially when the writer's relationship with the English language is so troubled. The "industry-dilemma" is what you get when you look at American multiculturalism without looking at the history of it. How did America get to have so many educated white readers dying to read about heartbreaking yet life-affirming stories of immigrant writers, these so-called "writers of color"? You can just call this a "market reality" but that overlooks the history behind that reality, a history rife with war, imperialism and assimilation.

Dwarf vs. Little Person

2008-06-05T23:11:00.000-07:00

Last week, I finished my translation of Eun Hee-kyung's "The Discovery of Solitude" <고독의 발견> for KLTI. During the polishing stage, an editor took issue with my choice of "midget" for 난쟁이. The Korean-English dictionary on Naver.com suggested "a dwarf;a pigmy;a midget;a shrimp;a manikin;Tom Thumb". As soon as the editor pointed it out, I realized that "midget" was perhaps too pejorative, that "dwarf" would capture both the sense and the tone of the term 난쟁이 better. I wasn't prepared, however, for the suggestion that "little person" be used instead, at least in some of the cases where 난쟁이 appeared. The rationale behind the suggestion was that the character would not willingly apply such a pejorative word (since both "dwarf" and "midget" are thought to be politically incorrect now) to herself.

The section in which this argument seems most compelling is when the character tries to debunk certain myths about little people. She tells the protagonist/narrator that some people believe that little people have otherworldly powers. The thing is, the little person undercuts her own argument not long after by saying that she can read other people's minds and divvy herself up into different selves. Furthermore, the story is definitely getting a lot of mileage fromcertain associations that come from having a dwarf in the story. The line between fantasy and reality is very deliberately blurred, and the dream-like quality of the story stems, at least in part, from having a little person talk about divvying herselves up and reading other people's minds.

The broader issue is, of course, about how, during the transfer from SL to TL, ostensibly straightforward words sometimes can become barnacled with offensive (and other unwanted) connotations. A Korean will probably tell you there's nothing necessarily offensive about 난쟁이 (it is simply a name for people of that kind), but I'm inclined to argue that it's not neutral because it is so often used as a derogatory term for short people (like "fattie" is for overweight people).

**A slightly different but related case is the word "흑인," or what Koreans call black people (not only African-Americans, but those of African descent). Again, on the face of it, the word is harmless enough, but my encounters with the word "흑인" in Korea has been so consistently negative, especially in casual conversation, that I cringe pre-emptively every time I hear the word, because I'm afraid of what will follow. My particular sensitivity to this is, no doubt, a symptom of my anxieties about my own latent racism, but when a Korean person says "흑인" it seems closer to a derogatory word than the currently used neutral term "blacks" or "African-Americans."

Excerpts from "Making Out In Korea"

2008-06-01T00:24:00.001-07:00

From the phrase book "Making Out in Korea". I left out the Korean part, because it just gets in the way, (Thanks Hee Young for letting me know about this treasure and Annie for lending me the book!) Enjoy.

I can't dance.
I'm not in the mood.
You dance well.
Shall we go elsewhere?
What time do you have to be home?
What time are you leaving?
I have to go now.
Don't go now.
Go later.
What shall we do?
It's up to you.
Do you wanna come to my place?
I'm not sure.
Just for coffee.
Yes, let's go.
I love you.
I'm crazy about you.
I'm yours.
You're mine.
You're beautiful.
You're handsome.
You're sexy.
Your eyes/lips/hands/face/legs/nose/breasts/neck/shoulder/back/butt is/are beautiful.
You have a beautiful body.
You smell nice.
Can I kiss you?
Kiss me!
Do you wanna sleep with me?
Oh, I'm embarrassed.
Don't be shy.
Close your eyes.
Turn off the lights.
Is this your first time?
Tell me the truth.
I'm still a virgin.
I'm frightened.
Don't worry.
I'll be careful.
I wanna hold your hand.
Look into my eyes.
Hug me.
Take your clothes/jeans/dress/skirt/T-shirt/socks/sneakers/shoes/bra/underwear off.
I'm cold.
Make me warm.
Come closer to me.
That tickles.
I'm afraid I'll get pregnant.
Use a condom.
I don't like to wear a condom.
If you don't wear a condom, I won't do it.
Oh it feels so good.
Touch me.
Bite me.
More, more.
Deeper, deeper.
Faster, faster.
Harder, harder.
Wait, wait.
I'm coming, I'm coming.
I came.
I know.
Did it feel good?
Let's get married.
I want to be your wife.
I want to be your husband.
I don't want to get married yet.
I'm too young.
I'm already married.
I love you, but I can't become your wife/husband.
I need time to think.
This is so sudden.
We must think about this.
Do you want to come to the USA/Canada/Europe/Australia with me?
I want to stay in Korea.
Let's not see each other again.
I hate you.
Don't call me again.
Get lost.
Give it up already.
I don't love you anymore.
You're boring.
Stop following me.
Do you have another lover?
It's my fault.
Can we start again?
I can't live without you.
Please understand me.
I'll never forget you.
Can we still be friends?
I'll always love you.
I'll miss you.
I'll always think about you.
I'll call you when I come back.
I'll be back soon.
Do you have to go?
Please don't go.
Stay here with me.
I have to go.
Try to understand.
Take care of your health
Don't cry.
Wipe your tears.
Wait for me.

The Rise Of The "Glocal" Englishes

2008-05-31T23:42:00.001-07:00

In Stephen Dubner's Freakonomics blog, there was an interesting post titled, "What Will Globalization Do To Languages?" The whole thing is worth a look, but I've decided to excerpt a point Professor Mark Liberman makes about how the center of gravity of English is shifting.

[The future of English] is going to be defined not in America or Britain, but by the new economies of places like Bangalore, Chongqing, and Bratislava.

Internationally, English is becoming the language of the urban middle classes, and as the ability to use English becomes a kind of basic skill for such people, the prestige that attaches to being able to speak it with native fluency is going to shrink. People who have a stripped-down, second-language knowledge of it may start to cut native speakers out of the equation. At the same time we’re going to see a proliferation of what are sometimes called ‘glocal’ Englishes — noticeably different forms of the global language that preserve their local roots. One of the ultimate effects may be that native speakers of English will be at a professional disadvantage, because they’re seen as obstructions to the easy flow of business talk and they’re competent in just this one “basic” language.

Perhaps more relevant (and possibly alarming) for translators whose target language is English is the following claim

Nobody owns languages any more. And this is likely to be especially troubling for anyone whose language is widely used by people who aren’t native speakers.

Even at the KLTI translation academy, there's a good amount of disagreement between British and American English speakers about whether an expression is overly British/North American. What will happen when the English readers are in places like "Bangalore, Chongqing, and Bratislava"?

DTE#2: Swearing

2008-05-09T23:39:00.000-07:00

In Difficult to Translate Expressions #1, I brought up staring adverbs and Sora Kim broadened the conversations to talk about adverb and adjective variations in general (깡충 vs. 껑충, 노란 vs. 누런).

Now, what about swear words? A common mistake translators make when going from Korean to English is to translate curses too literally, resulting in outrageously profane dialogue. Koreans tend to curse as a sign of affection, more so than English-speakers. (After I translated "A Lucky Day" for my translation workshop at Columbia and sent it to Brother Anthony, he gently suggested that I be slightly less liberal about my usage of "cunt" and "whore".)

In Chi-young Kim's translation of Kim Young-ha's I Have A Right To Destroy Myself, there is a nice line of dialogue where a character calls another a "dumbass" which feels pitch perfect for the situation, but it is definitely specific to our generation. Other cases would include expressions like tool and douchebag. Few things sound worse than stilted swearing, but the problem is that the closer we stick to cutting-edge profanity, the sooner the expressions might date themselves.

Right now, I'm grappling with 망할년, 망할것들.

You've foiled me again County Board of Elections!

2008-05-06T16:59:00.000-07:00

I was hoping to cast the decisive vote in the Pennsylvania democratic primary, which, of course, is now long history, but did not get the absentee ballot until May.

What happened? Click below.

얘

2008-05-06T04:07:00.000-07:00

I'm currently attending a weekly workshop at KLTI's translation academy. Our group is working on 김훈's 언니의 폐경. In our last meeting, I was met with resistance when I suggested we not worry too much about the fact so much of the older sister's dialgoue began with 얘, which is something like, "Hey" usually used by an older female to get the attention of a younger person. I thought (still think) "Hey" is a bit problematic. The older sister says 얘 over and over again, which doesn't grate, because it's a natural enough thing for Korean women to say, but it's my opinion that the repetition of "Hey" begins to sound strange. The other members of the group also pointed out that 얘

signals to the reader that what is being focused on by the story is a dynamic between women. (얘, like 어머, is something only women say.)
shows repeatedly that she wants to be heard and listened to by the younger sister. Though elsewhere in the story, the older sisters behaves as though she doesn't care if she is being listened to, so much of the thematic weight comes from anxiety of disappearing, fading into the past (폐경 means menopause), coping with one's waning years.

List: Things that Korean Mothers Worry About

2008-04-12T00:39:00.000-07:00

A bit off-topic, but I couldn't resist.

I will begin, and this comes from Kim Hoon (김훈)'s short story "언니의 폐경"

--근데 너 키가 좀 작아서 학교 책걸상이랑 아파트 싱크대랑 좀 불편하지 않니?

DTE#1 (The staring adverbs) A Follow Up

2008-04-03T21:18:00.000-07:00

A fellow translator Sora Russell Kim wrote an amazing comment to this post worthy of being a post in its own right, so here it is:

Seeing the words listed together like that reminds me of other types of adjectives where you have these variations in vowel sounds (light vs. heavy vowels) to indicate different nuances. Like 깡충깡충 vs. 껑충껑충. They both basically mean something like "hippity hop," but the first one would apply to a small animal, like a rabbit, while the second would apply to a larger-bodied animal, like a kangaroo. Another possible comparison might be color words: 노랑 vs. 누렁. Depending on the vowel sound, you have either a bright lemony yellow like a daffodil or a deep brownish yellow like a cow.

I agree. 통통한 vs. 뚱뚱한. The vowel sounds in these adverbs and adjectives tend to modulate the degree (weight, size, severity, etc) of the thing or action being described.

With the "vacant" words, I wonder if there are any detectable patterns in terms of how they're applied. Are some words only used for older people or men? Do others only apply to children? Are there specific moods associated with them, as in "absentminded" vs. "aloof" vs. "indifferent" vs. "moony"?

It seems like it can often come down to these slight differences in nuance and feeling. What does the word feel like? How does it resonate sonically? The word itself is just a brief blip in the paragraph, but does it help to set the tone for the piece, or does the word simply reflect the surrounding tone? Maybe these variations have no meaning of their own, and we have to look to the overall tone of the passage or what we know about the character to make our word choices in English.

She's absolutely right. My previous post more than implied that the words were being used interchangeably by the writer, which is presumptuous. The problem for me is that while I hear the difference, between 껑충껑충 and 깡충깡충 and hear how they should be translated differently (exactly as Sora described above) but I'm completely at a loss when it comes to 멀거니 and 멀끄르미. In practice, I think it will come down to context (as it usually does), but I'm interested in hearing what some native-Korean speakers have to say about the difference.

멀거니One case that arose for me recently was "무심히". At first glance, I just treated it as another synonym for "absentminded," but I kept coming back to it during editing. The dictionary leans towards words like "inadvertently." But how can someone be "sitting inadvertently" in a saddle (without having fallen onto it)? In a way the Buddhist root of the word was more revealing: "absence of desire." And this, in a story where some of the main themes were Buddhism and forbidden desires. Is it Xanax, or is it nirvana? :P

The other issue, though, is to what extent are these words choices deliberate on the part of the author, and to what extent are they merely part of the author's own everyday diction? Or do they simply reflect a moment of laziness or disconnect with the character?

Some less than skilled American writers tend to use adverbs as garnish. They don't think the sentence is pretty enough so they tack on adverbs to aestheticize it. As translators, we must make an effort to differentiate between what is on the page because of fundamental realities about the SL and what the author deliberately chose. The case Sora cites above about 무심히 definitely seems to be a case of the latter, but the sheer amount of 'staring vacantly' language I've encountered leads me to believe that this is how many Korean writers narrate interpersonal exchange.

I was planning to stop here, since it's already such a long comment (미안!), but another thought just sprang to mind. Maybe I'm reaching too much with the cultural interpretation now, but I can't help but wonder if part of why these words nag at us in translation is because of different cultural expectations of how people should hold their faces. For a Western reader, someone sitting with a blank look on their face would tend to read negatively--the person is unfriendly perhaps or otherwise failing to engage with their surroundings. Whereas in other cultural contexts, a face devoid of expression can convey calmness or dignity or meditation. "Still waters..." so to speak. Which, I suppose, could open up another discussion of Korean facial mannerisms in general (blank looks, sideways glances, hard stares, etc.) and how they contrast with Western facial expressions.

I've always struggled with translating "casting sidelong glances" which is the common dictionary defintion of 힐끗거리다 or 흘켜보다. For me, it's more like throwing daggers with one's eyes, but then it has to be done sideways, and saying all that's too cumbersome. In any case, it's telling that the problem of 힐끗거리다 seemed deserving of that struggle, whereas 물끄러니 and 무심히 sounded to me more like placeholders (the way, for example, "a beat" functions in a screenplay or beverage movement and sitting up and reclining functions in lazily narrated realism - See Stagedirections Gone Wild.)

Do these gestures have more meaning than I'm giving them credit for?

Goldblatt--> Kafka --> Oddness

2008-04-01T07:41:00.000-07:00

I read an interview on Full Tilt the literary translator Howard Goldblatt says the following:

Who do you translate for?

I believe first of all that, like an editor, the translator's primary obligation is to the reader, not the writer. I realize that a lot of people don't agree, especially writers. I don't think that these things have to be mutually exclusive, but I do think that we need to produce something that can be readily accepted by an American readership. Ha Jin can get away with writing unidiomatic English and many people are charmed by it, but a translator's English is expected to be idiomatic and contemporary without being flashy.

What are some of the problems specific to translating from Chinese into English?

Not knowing Chinese well enough, not knowing English well enough. Actually, not knowing Chinese well enough isn't a big problem—you can always ask someone. You can ask your author, you can ask your friends. No, the thing that's really killing translation in our field is literalism. Too many translators are afraid of the text, especially when they're first starting out. And I understand that, because I was too. They're all afraid of the text. You need to overcome your fear of the text, put some distance between you and it. You have to because Chinese and English are so different. Take the use of the passive voice, for example, which just runs through the Chinese language. Five different agents for the passive voice! We only have one. And the Chinese use it all the time. It is part of the language, part of the way they express themselves. But if you use it that much in English—God!

Each language has its own syntactical resources, and I agree with Goldblatt that it's folly to try to capture it with a literal translation, especially when the TL you're working towards is structurally so different from the SL. Hayun Jung explained that when going between, say French and English, you can "lean on" the original text for organization and order of the ideas. When you're going from Korean to English, on the other hand, you usually have to reconstitute the sentence entirely.

But here is an exhibit against normalizing syntax for the TL reader. I quote from the first sentence of Kafka's Amerika, translated by Michael Hofmann which the poet Charles Simic calls a "magnificent new translation" and which John Ashbery claims has been "restored to its original beauty".

As the seventeen-year-old Karl Rossmann, who had been sent to America by his unfortunate parents because a maid had seduced him and had a child by him, sailed slowly into New York harbour, he suddenly saw the Statute of Liberty, which had already been in view for some time, as though in an intenser sunlight.

Here's an older translation

As Karl Rossmann, a poor boy of sixteen who had been packed off to America by his parents because a servant girl had seduced him and got herself a child by him, stood on the liner slowly entering the harbour of New York, a sudden burst of sunshine seemed to illumine the Statue of Liberty, so that he saw it in a new light, although he had sighted it long before.

I can't pretend to know how the original read, but I notice that in terms of fluency, cadence and how the phrases are balanced, the older translation is superior; it actually reads like something that could have been written originally in English. But because the sentence is stretched longer for that purpose, it sags more, and the last clause "he had sighted it long before" is also kind of a let down (the clause is basically redundant; "saw it in a new light" already implies that he saw it in a less intense light earlier).

The Hofmann translation (the first one quoted) is more condensed. Notice how "a sudden burst of sunshine seemed to illumine" which makes the sentence more readily tractable and commonplace (not to mention cliche - burst of sunshine is always sudden and sunshine tends to illumine) is reduced to, simply, "he suddenly saw the Statue of Liberty...as though in an intenser light." The "as though in an intenser light" is both strange and beautiful, because the wording "as though" implies that it's not be the sun, but merely Karl's own perception (e.g. the thrill of his arrival in America). The sentence culminates with that brilliant impression, instead of the obligatory backtracking translated sentences sometimes must do to pick up whatever was left behind.

Arguing For Strangeness
I'm still too inexperienced as a literary translator to start making claims that sound like a translator's manifesto, but I'm finding myself increasingly drawn to the idea of literary translations as language artifacts. The violence done to the TL's grammar, syntax and idiomatic expressions when a translator begins his work is called interference. I agree with most seasoned translators who say the literary translator must get beyond this (Howard Goldblatt says this above, as does my mentor, Brother Anthony of Taize). But once the translator gets beyond it, I think it is up to the translator to modulate the strangeness as he sees fit, and it is pointless to deny that this process is either arbitrary (if the translator is blind to the issue or just careless) or controlled. If it is controlled, I see it no different than any other kinds of artistic expression, where an artist is working within a set of constraints to create something beautiful. (Perhaps the question of whether you're a conservative or an experimental translator is what you consider to be those constraints...)

The basic rules exist (e.g. "add nothing, omit nothing"), or at least we say they exist. In reality, however, I think the process becomes less about these rules and more about some undeniable facts about the translator's brain. In the case of native English speakers who learn Korean as a second or third (or fourth or fifth...) language, the tendency is probably to normalize the text, but in cases where the writer grew up bilingual (in my case), I think there's "interference" going on at the deepest level, and one could argue that the two (sometimes three or four) languages both disrupt and enrich each other.

Isn't there a case to be made for an oddness in the text that isn't mere "literalism"?

Difficult To Translate Expressions #1

2008-04-01T00:16:00.000-07:00

The following words aren't difficult, but appear so often in narrative language (usually during dialogue) that to translate them directly as "vacantly", "absent-mindedly", "in a daze" every time might lead the reader to wonder why so many characters in Korean fiction are high or on Xanax.

멀거니

멀끄미

물끄러미

멀끄르미

멍히

멍하니

망연히

우두커니

Any suggestions?

Pizza --> Franzen --> Sentence Writing

2008-03-13T06:39:00.001-07:00

I saw this ad a couple of weeks ago, and I still can't stop thinking about it. About the ad itself I don't have any more insight to offer than the person who wrote about it in Slice, which appears to be a blog devoted solely to pizza:

In South Korea, the adoption and emulation of American popular culture is not a new phenomenon, but what's happening here involves layers upon layers of mashup: a Korean musical artist who adopts Kongrish along with a West Coast gangsta rap style, cross-dressing in a slapstick commercial with comic book elements, promoting a South Korean chain pizza with octopus on it. Catch all that? Nevermind the fact that pizza alone is conceptually a historical mashup—this 30-second video represents a mashup on a truly global level, in terms of language, food, clothes, culture, gender definitions, and music.

For those who don't know what Kongrish is, the writer offer an explanation:

Konglish: "The words, having initially been taken from English language, are either actual English words in Korean context, or are made from a combination of Korean and English words."
It may sound incredibly similar to English, but it's decidedly not. Context helped, but still, my mind reeled, trying to keep up but only recognizing a word or two; I felt like I had a broken Babel Fish in my ear. Mr. Tyfoon's unique, contemporary speaking style is so new and radically different from traditional Korean that even my native Korean friends living in the U.S.couldn't figure it out.

The experience is uncanny, kind of scary, and, to be honest, I feel like I'm hearing a Korean-American dialect in some distant future -- or perhaps from a parallel universe. The ad, in any case, reminded me of something Jonathan Franzen said about The Novel in that infamously infamous "Harper's Essay," about the faded cultural relevance of novels. Harper's can't get their act together to post their archive online (I thought they're suppose to want to share, communist-style!), so I had find an article about the article about the article, written by Jess Row.

Franzen places himself in an opposing camp: "Contract" authors, who place a high value on the relationship between narrator and reader, who primarily see the novel as a device for social and cultural communication, and who take human life (rather than, say, language or ideas per se) as the ultimate subject of their fiction.

It's worth noting that Franzen is an admirer of writers like Don Delillo, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer who supposedly had/have their ink-stained fingers on the pulse. Furthermore, he is nostalgic for the times when people eagerly awaited new novels to have these writers explain and make sense of the "tentacular" complexity of America.

Franzen's "Harper's Essay" was passed around when I was in college, and I still remember reading it in the lounge of my dorm, remember, especially, the line about how writing a novel was like building a ship, and what determines whether it will float it or not is the culture that receives the novel. But how can you build a ship when these conditions are changing faster than ever before?

Bloggers must've realized this long ago, but the novel doesn't have the specs to do the job of diagnosing the culture anymore. It's not that it can't do it, it's just that blogs like the one above do it better, in a more timely fashion -- not to mention the fact it gets more readers. This brings me to a quote from Ben Marcus's piece against Franzen, as quoted by Jess Row:

Unlike Franzen, [Marcus] expects his readers to work, to become "fierce little reading machines, devourers of new syntax." Defending Gaddis, he writes, "it is arguably sublime when a text creates in us desires we did not know we had, and then enlarges those desires without seeming desperate to please us." Referring to Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, he praises fiction that is "free of coherence, so much more interested in forging complex bursts of meaning that are expressionistic rather than figurative, enigmatic rather than earthly, evasive rather than embracing."

Ben's preference is ultimately taste, but I can't help but wonder whether, soon or later, the only people who'll be reading serious novels will be those who want and relish something more challenging, complex and labyrinthian than language cobbled together online for rapid consumption.

Stagedirection Gone Wild

2008-02-26T06:30:00.000-08:00

Consider the following sentence from <당신의 수상한 근황>

박수연이 사는 아파트 단지 입구 맞은편 쇼핑센터2 층에 있는 카페에서 만나기로 약속하고 전화를 끊었다.

Literally translated, it reads,

"We made plans to meet up at the cafe on the second floor of the shopping center facing the entrance of the apartment complex where Park Su-yeon lived and hung up the phone."

The unwieldy construction,

"cafe on the second floor of the shopping center facing the entrance of the apartment complex"

shows just how detailed the location of the cafe is. Why is this important? As far as I can tell, the only detail that matters is that they're meeting up at the cafe. (Does the writer feel that we need to be able to visualize exactly where the narrator is headed? The same way we would in a movie?) No matter how much I think about it, I think most American writers would've just written, "We made plans to meet up at a nearby cafe and hung up the phone."

I've noticed similar patterns in other writers when it comes to dialogue. The same way film directors are said to have used smoking as a way of pacing dialogue (i.e. "I love you baby" He takes a puff. "Don't you believe me?") characters in stories need something to do when they're not talking. I think when writers get lazy, they use beverages, windows, and various ways of sitting to achieve that effect. For example,

...she said, taking a sip from her cup...
...he said, then gazed out the window...
She sat back in her seat, crossed her arms, then said...

I'm not saying these transitions are necessarily bad. Some writers are against ALL transitions (some pejoratively call them 'placeholders'), but I think readers just need to take a break once in awhile from the main action. Problems emerge when these transitions or placeholders, meant to be relatively transparent call unwanted attention to themselves by being syntactically awkward or curiously detailed, as is the case in many works of Korean realist fiction.

I think there's a case to be made for editing some of these stage-directions out when they're being translated into English. More examples to come.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

2008-02-25T06:58:00.000-08:00

Korean Literature Translation Institute (한국문학번역원) was recently in Yonhap News (연합뉴스) regarding their plans.

KLTI appropriated around 7.5 million dollars for this year for its various projects.

Director Yun Ji-gwan announced plans to accept 15 students per year for KLTI's translation academy. The academy is supposed to last 2 years, during which the students will work on the art of translation "systematically".

Currently, there are only 81 translators at KLTI who can translate Korean literature into another language. 22 of them translate into Chinese, 17 into English, 4 into German, and the rest fall under "others". The number obviously seems really low, so I wonder how they're making that count. In any case, the hope is that in the next 10 years, KLTI will be able to train up to 300 professional translators.

Other points in the article:

The biggest problem, in some ways, has to do with the copyright. Apparently this has something to do with FTA, and I'm not smart enough to understand it. In any case, KLTI has 1.5 million dollars earmarked for "exporting copyright" starting this year. The process will begin when a domestic publisher translates a proposal. The KLTI will take on part of the cost that comes with translation, publication, marketing, etc.
They will support residency programs abroad to inspire Korean writers to go abroad in countries like the U.S., Russia, Sweden, Argentina, Germany, etc. Any poet, playwright or novelist with at least one book under her belt can apply.
They will expand their international "Book Report Competition" to 12 countries (from last year's ten). The idea is that you write a book report on a Korean novel. Prizes include scholarships, and if I understand correctly, preferential treatment if you apply to Seoul National University.

Koreans love bureaucracy and I'm worried about what kinds of translations this kind of "systematic" education will produce. I worry about how the works will be selected and assigned to the translators. As a translator, though, I can't exactly say that a glut of money coming into the industry is a bad thing. I still need to learn a lot more about the art of translating, not to mention about Korean literature and its history. But is being enrolled in this kind of academy for two years the best route?

Click here for the full article in Korean.

Translating <당신의 수상한 근황>

2008-02-02T22:33:00.000-08:00

I'm currently translating a story called <당신의 수상한 근황>, which literally means "your suspicious state-of-affairs" or "The suspiciuous state of your affairs" (Both are very awkward... Any suggestions?) The author is Kim Kyung-Uk (김경욱 -- pictured to your left).

The protagonist's job is to ferret out people who are committing insurance fraud. He ends up taking on a case in which the claimant happens to be his ex-girlfriend he hasn't seen for ten years (she went to the U.S. to study design -- BTW, I'm beginning to notice a pattern that a convenient device in Korean stories & movies & TV shows to make young people disappear for awhile is to send the character abroad to study English...).

Here's a detailed description of how I translated the sentence 조수석에 타고 있던 임신 8개월이던 아내의 머리에서는 피가 흘러내렸다.

Like in most Korean sentences, the main subject "피" (blood) and the main verb "흘러내렸다" (flowed/trickled down) are at the back of the sentence. The first part of the sentence leading up to the 피 (blood) qualifies the protagonist's wife, who is sitting on the passenger side and is eight-months pregnant.
I begin by preserving the main subject and verb in Korean as the main subject and verb in English and start with "Blood flowed..." So I end up with something like "Blood flowed from the head of my wife, who was eight-months pregnant and sitting on the passenger side." There's nothing grammatically wrong with this sentence and I managed to get all the literal meaning in there, but the phrase "from the head of my wife" will probably raise some eyebrows. The native speaker part of me wants to say, "You don't say 'from the head of my wife' You say 'from my wife's head'," but the trouble then is the rest of the sentence 'who was eight-months pregnant..." We don't want to have "from my wife's head, who was eight months pregnant..." since then, we would end up with a pregnant head.
In the end I settle on the the following sentence: "Sitting on the passenger side was my wife, who was eight-months pregnant, bleeding from her head." This actually preserves the order of the ideas presented (which is rarely a priority for me, since Korean syntax and English syntax are so different) and has the unsettling juxtaposition of "pregnant, bleeding". Notice how the subject has changed from "blood" to "my wife" and the main verb from "flowed down" to "was sitting"; the grammatical structure of the sentence has changed, but the alteration is justified in my opinion.

An Extended Reading List

2008-02-02T20:31:00.000-08:00

If you're interested in translation theory but don't know what to read, you could probably do worse than ask the people who run Words Without Borders and Circumference for guidance. If I were still taking classes at Columbia, I would jump on this in a second!

TRANSLATION MATTERS

Instructors: Dedi Felman and Alane Mason, Words Without Borders
Jennifer Kronovet and Stefania Heim, Circumference

Literature has always been global in its reach, but writers the world over now operate in an international sphere that is vaster than ever before, and it's often difficult for the individual writer to know how to engage with that fact. How do writers learn about and respond to what's going on in literatures the world over, written in languages they don't know, and how does the way in which such works are presented affect this process? In this course, editors from the international literature website Words Without Borders (www.wordswithoutborders.org) and from Circumference, the biannual journal of international poetry in translation (two affiliate organizations of the Writing Division's Center for Literary Translation) will introduce students to the presentation and selection issues inherent in working with translations, using hands-on independent projects curating translated poetry and prose. Issues of presentation and selection are intertwined with questions about intercultural exchange, responsibilities toward both the source culture and the reader’s culture, translation as domestication, the judgment process, the limits of culture and the limits of translation, and an appreciation of the process of translation and the translator as creative artist in his/her own right. Readings will include already published and not yet published translations of works from a variety of languages, and selections on the “task of the translator” as outlined below.

1. INTRODUCTION
"The Task of the Translator" by Walter Benjamin
"How to Read a Translation" by Larry Venuti http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article.php?lab=HowTo
"Dialogues without Frontiers" by Juan Goytisolo http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/?lab=GoytisoloDialogues

Selections from Issue 1 of CIRCUMFERENCE: translations by Charles Simic (Serbian), Elizabeth Macklin (Basque), Pierre Joris (German), Paul Muldoon (Irish), Odile Cisneros (Portuguese), Mary Ann Caws (French), Hiroaki Sato (Japanese), and a short essay by Wyatt Mason.

2. PROCESS
"The Process of Translation" by William Weaver http://www.arts.ed.ac.uk/italian/gadda/Pages/resources/babelgadda/babeng/weavertranslation.html
"That Awful Mess on Via Meruluna" (excerpt) by Carlo Emilio Gadda, translated by William Weaver http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/?lab=Mess
"No Two Snowflakes are Alike: Translation as Metaphor" by Gregory Rabassa
"The Joy of the Demiurge," "Silence, the Devil, and Jabes," and "Irreducible Strangeness" (selections from Dissonance) by Rosemarie Waldrop
Circumference, Issues 3, 4, 5, 6: The first ten poems of each issue, with a special focus on their curatorial relationships.

3. LIMITS & CULTURAL RESPONSIBILITY
Introduction to The Predicament of Culture and "On Ethnographic Allegory" by James Clifford
"The Translator's Invisibility" by Larry Venuti
"The Limits of Translation" by Ammiel Alcalay
Selections from essays by Jerome Rothenberg
"Toba Tek Singh" by Saadat Hassan Manto--http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/?lab=Toba
Selections from "A River Runs Through Us: Mexican Literature Now" http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/?front=FEBRUARY2006
Selections from the "Embargo" section of Circumference, Issue 2.

4. PRESENTATION: PICTURE + TEXT
Selections from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" -- Walter Benjamin
Selections from WWB's February 2007 graphic issue
Mu Xin, An empty room, http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/?lab=Empty
"Breathturn" by Paul Celan, CIRCUMFERENCE, Issue 4
Letter from the Designer, CIRCUMFERENCE, Issue 6
ASSIGNMENTS: Students will be asked to write response papers to each set of readings. The final project would be to curate an issue/anthology of their own, with special attention to design and images. Final projects should creatively engage the question of the "limits of translation" and "responsibility to source and readers' culture."
TEAM TEACHING: The Circumference team will lead the teaching for two sessions and the WWB team will lead the teaching for the other two. We will all attend all four classes so that we are tracking what's happened in previous sessions and presenting the most seamless and coherent class possible for the students.

Are you Korean and PoMophobic?

2008-01-11T07:57:00.000-08:00

If you're looking for academic essays in English that discuss the post-modern turn in 21st century Korean literature, look no further.

Here's a link to the issue; full text articles are available on .pdf format for download.

(I'll be adding my own take on some of the essays in the near future.)

Imperfect but better for it

2008-01-08T06:54:00.000-08:00

When my girlfriend Justine visited me in Seoul in October, one of my older cousins wanted to meet up with us in Insadong to treat us to lunch. He doesn't speak much English, so I had the job of interpreting everything he was telling her about Korea, as he played the role of tour guide around Insadong.

At one point he used a very common Korean idiomatic expression that describes when a feast has been prepared for the guests. The expression in Korean is, 상다리 부러지게 차렸다.

The expression states literally that there was enough food on the table to break its legs. When I interpreted it for Justine, I said "enough food to make the table legs wobble" which, of course, was less than satisfactory. Justine corrected me immediately by saying "You mean, buckle". It's true that legs can wobble, technically, but her choice "buckle" is clearly superior. It makes the image of the legs giving out sound more irreversible, sudden, even violent. You also get the sinking feeling you would have as the legs give out.

If we look back at the actual expression, we see that "buckle", while better than "wobble", is still technically inaccurate. The expression calls for breakage, and since no comparable idiom exists in English, the interpreter's task should be to create one. What interests me is that though the translation "enough to make the table legs break" or "snap" would be more literally correct, it is less graceful and desirable than "buckle".

Furthermore, I think "buckle" is a better choice, because it actually enriches the Target Language. I don't think I've ever heard another English-speaking person talk about table legs "breaking" or "snapping" because there was so much food on it, but there is something poetic and compelling about personifying the table legs to the extent that they can "buckle". It increases the likelihood that an English (and non-Korean) speaker who hears or reads the expression for the first time will use it again in the future.

From "Scattered Reflections"

2007-12-25T02:44:00.000-08:00

Not to be too self-referential, but there are some notes I've compiled on literary translation an contemporary Korean literature based on my meetings with some established literary figures here in Seoul.

Some excerpts:
(Full post, after the jump)

전성태 mentioned that certain Korean writers are trying to find where they fit into World Literature. They don't want to write for Koreas; they want to write for the world. 김영하 (Kim Young-Ha) is a famous example, someone who has attended writing conferences in Iowa and is one of the more famous post-modern fabulists of contemporary Korean ficture, doing his fair share of genre-alchemy and breaking down the boundary between reality and fantasy. He has said (according to 전성태) if Korean writers want to find readers outside of Korea, they must do away with adjectives (형용사) and adverbs (부사) many of which are too culturally specific to be translated (not to mention a pain in the ass for translators). But these words are precisely what gives Korean its unique quality; for example, Korean adverbs often use onomatopoeia. Onomatopoeias in English always feel a little hoaky, cartoonish ("Splat!" "Bang") or self-conscious (as we see in late Joyce), but in Korean it feels perfectly natural part of the language. One might argue that this shows Korean to be a more performative language than a referential language, that the way it goes about meaning is different in character from the way English means (but there is a Ph.D. thesis, if not a whole life's work there).

According to 전성태, Kim Young Ha belongs to a group of younger writers, like 김연수and 김경욱, probably grew up reading a lot of Western writers. They are savvy about the tricks and techniques and narrative modes being employed by contemporary writers in U.S. and England, and do what they like with them. Someone like Brother Anthony probably sees this shift as healthy, whereas 전성태 sees it as breaking ties with a past. There's also great influence coming from Japanese literature, which is very popular in Korea (which is disturbing to Korean writers).

Also, here are some thoughts on American literature:

I'm intrigued by this anxiety of influence. American literature, though it's only about three hundred years old, if that, never wonders about what it is. It is what it is, and if there's influence from Western or even Eastern countries, people usually see the cross-breeding as healthy and praise-worthy. (For example, people always talk about how Pound adopted Chinese characters into Cantos with great success.) [...] In America, the writers seem to want to bring more international literature past its borders, and if anything, are frustrated by the indifference of American readers to international literature. Also, the debate in American literature is what gets to be the mainstream (Nobody doubts that both Ben Marcus & Jonathan Franzen are American writers, but what's up for debate is who gets to take center stage.)

Notes on Translating "노란 연등 드높이 내걸고"

2007-12-25T02:04:00.000-08:00

I've begun translating Kim Yeon-su's "노란 연등 드높이 내걸고." (Something close to 'With The Yellow Lantern Hung High'). The story comes from a story collection called When I Was Still A Child.

This is by far the toughest story I've attempted to translate. I always tell people that translating Korean into English is an activity different in kind from translating French or Spanish, because the syntactical structure (the rules, the possibilities) of Korean is completely different from English--not to mention wider gulf between the SL and TL culture and history.

So in translating a sentence, the whole line usually has to be completely reconstituted.

For the next couple of weeks, I'll keep the readers updated on various difficulties and complications I'm coming across as I translate "노란 연등 드높이 내걸고". To start off,

#1 I am finding that the first draft of a translation has to be a very messy translation. The first goal is to set down every idea, often via excessively literal rendering, because the second phase involves a 're-translation' of the very messy translation. (I simply cannot hold the ideas of each line in my head, render them into English, and then set them down in a pleasing way all at once--the last part has to be reserved for a later draft.) I find this to be interesting. My earlier post quotes Octavio Paz, who says that every text is, in a sense, a translation of a previously existing text. So it appears that this idea can be applied to the very process of translation itself--where one draft is a translation of another draft.

Conditions of Literary Translation in Korea

2007-12-23T23:44:00.000-08:00

Why isn't Korean literature well-known in America, the way, for example, Japanese literature is? People usually answer that

not enough English translations of Korean literature exist
they exist but are not made available to American readers
the quality of English translations of Korean literature are lacking in quality
the right works aren't being selected for translation (i.e. the works that would appeal to American readers are being neglected)

Some people offer another suggestion; Korean literature, on the whole, is "behind" Japanese literature because quality translations of Western classics did not exist in Korea until somewhat recently. This might sound offensive for some, because it implies that Asians need Western "models" to create worthwhile texts. It's also possible to circumvent West/East binary oppositions by considering that promoting quality translations is tantamount to being open to outside writing (East or West) period.

The following is an abstract for the article "Conditions of Literary Translation in Korea" by Kim Young-Hee, published in Korea Journal (full article available, after the jump).

This paper explores the conditions and theoretical issues of literary translation, with specific reference to an "assessment project of English literary classics in translation." It consists of three parts: the internal and external conditions of literary translation in Korea, a brief report of the project and its findings with reference to the translations of Pride and Prejudice, and lastly, some theoretical issues involved in such an assessment. Translation has been a significant factor in the formation of modern Korea. However, the conditions of translation and the general quality of translated texts still leaves much room for improvement. The practical purport of the project is to identify recommendable translations of English classic novels, but in the case of the 34 translated versions of Austen's text, no single recommendable text was to be found. Such a result shows that the quality issue is still crucial, at least in the context of Korean translation, in spite of the paradigm shift we are witnessing now in Translation Studies from an evaluative approach to a descriptive one. This paper ends by reflecting on the categories of evaluation and faithfulness in terms of their theoretical and practical implications.

Bassnett's "Translation Studies" (in Central Issues)

2007-12-20T01:57:00.000-08:00

Metaphor as performance (Dagut)

Since a metaphor in the SL is, by definition, a new piece of performance, a semantic novelty, it can clearly have no existing 'equivalence' in the TL: what is unique can have no counterpart...The crucial question that arises is thus whether a metaphor can, strictly speaking, be trasnlated as such, or whether it can only be 'reproduced' in some way.

Eugene Nida's case of Guaica: a language of southern Venezuela, for which finding the English for murder, stealing, lying, etc. is relatively easy whereas the terms for good, bad, ugly, beautiful raise problems.

"Good" includes desirable food, killing enemies, chewing dope in moderation,
putting fire to one's wife to teach her to obey, and stealing from anyone not
belonging to the same band.
"Bad" includes rotten fruit, any object with a blemish, murdering a person of the same band, stealing from a member of the extended family and lying to someone.
"Violating a taboo" includes incest, being too close to one's mother-in-law, a married woman's eating tapir before the birth of the first child, and a child's eating rodents.

Octavio Paz's claim that all texts are 'translations of translations of translations':

Every text is unique and, at the same time, it is the translation of another text. No text is entirely original because language itself, in its essence, is already a translation: firstly, of the non-verbal world and secondly, since every sign and every phrase is the translation of another sign and another phrase. However, this argument can be turned around without losing any of its validity: all texts are original because every translation is distinctive. Every translation, up to a certain point, is an invention and as such it constitutes a unique text.

Bassnett's "Translation Studies" (in Preface)

2007-12-18T02:25:00.001-08:00

Translator can be a force of good by being "a creative artist who ensures the survival of writing across time and space, an intercultural mediator and interpreter..."

On the other hand, translation can be a "highly suspect activity, one in which an inequality of power relations (inequalities of economics, politics, gender and geography) is reflected in the mechanics of textual reproduction...translation can become submission to the hegemonic power of images created by the target culture..."

According to Mahasweta Sengupta,

a cursory review of what sells in the West as representative of India and its culture provides ample proof of the binding power of representation; we remain trapped in the cultural stereotypes created and nurtured through translated texts

Introduction

2007-12-17T23:10:00.001-08:00

A little about myself: I'm an American writer and translator living in Seoul, South Korea. I'm here under a fellowship from the International Communication Foundation (국제교류진흥회). I'm also doing some translation work through Korean Literature Translation Institute (한국문학번역원).

As a literary translator, I'm not sure exactly how helpful a comprehensive background of translation studies will be, but I do want to see for myself. This site is motivated in part by my desire to report from my studies, so there is some written trace of this (somewhat haphazard) intellectual journey for anyone else who might share my interest in the field.

There are lots of bookish blogs out there. But to my knowledge there aren't many English-language blogs dedicated to the literary translation scene in Seoul. This is my modest attempt to serve that community by keeping those interested informed.