An irreparable loss

My encounter with Korea is entirely through translation, and I often wonder what I am really encountering.

In How the Other Half Lives, the translator Jung Ha-yun describes her childhood in the south:

Growing up in the 1970s in Seoul, I was taught that North Koreans were our archenemy, all of them red devils with horns. Everyone at school had to participate in anti-Communism slogan and poster contests, and girls jumped rope to a song that went, "Let's kill off those Commies. / It's about time." I imagine North Korean children were taught to see the South in the same way.

I hope I know better now, but the truth is, I really don't know how to regard North Korea and its people. Like most other South Koreans of my generation, I am stuck somewhere between that ridiculous, feverish hatred and familial sympathy, between the fear of North's nuclear threats and the burden that we need to confront this crisis in a sane, sensible way.

Reading and translating the three short stories for this feature was, for me, the most intimate encounter I have had with North Korea, an experience that I hoped would allow me to get better acquainted with this unknowable other half.

The pieces she has translated for Words Without Borders are
Han Ung-bin from Hopes for Good Fortune
Kim Hong-ik from He's Alive (“He” in this case being the Dear Leader)
Kim Byung-hun from Friends on the Road
Jung explains that these stories are about the nation and its leader, not about individuals.

But still, I got a glimpse into the everyday lives of factory workers, rural youth, party officials, a complaining husband, a demanding wife, a loving grandmother, a young couple in love. In other words, people like any other people from any other part of the world--no red-horned devils. And I also believe that I discovered some truths in these stories, about the lives North Koreans lead, their small hopes, their limitations. They worked jobs, got married, had children, wanted better housing, went on business trips, struck up conversations with the prettiest young woman on the train at the first given chance. The one distinction that marks their stories is that, for these characters, all conflicts are resolved by their faith in the Great Leader, just as European medieval literature relies on religious belief and Hollywood comedies preach the power of romantic love.

Most importantly, I feel I have met some of the people on the other side of this broken land, people I am forbidden to come in contact with as a South Korean, and saw them as flesh and blood, perhaps for the first time. No, their stories were not aesthetically satisfying, but this experience was not about taste for me. It was about re-encountering my long estranged family and coming face to face with how much they have changed, without judgment. And that, I think, is a start.

Thanks to Language hat - I hadn’t come across this wonderful e-zine before.

The essay quoted there, How to Read a Translation by Lawrence Venuti, is worth reading in its entirety. Translation is a fascinating and maddening subject.

Venuti describes translation as

an attempt to compensate for an irreparable loss by controlling an exorbitant gain.

and what translator could resist this accolade:

The translator is no stand-in or ventriloquist for the foreign author, but a resourceful imitator who rewrites the original to appeal to another audience in a different language and culture, often in a different period. This audience ultimately takes priority, insuring that the verbal clothing the translator cuts for the foreign work never fits exactly.

Again, he stresses the virtues of that unsung hero:

We should view the translator as a special kind of writer, possessing not an originality that competes against the foreign author’s, but rather an art of mimicry, aided by a stylistic repertoire that taps into the literary resources of the translating language. A translation communicates not so much the foreign text as the translator’s interpretation, and the translator must be sufficiently expert and innovative to interpret the linguistic and cultural differences that constitute that text. When a foreign classic is retranslated, furthermore, we expect the translator to do something new to justify yet another version. And in raising the bar we might also expect the translator to be capable of describing this newness.

This must be absolutely right. When I first came across an Italian translation of Heaney’s Beowulf, I did a double-take. But Heaney, in appropriating the Anglo-Saxon, had made a new thing of it, his own. And Massimo Bacigalupo honours that:

Heaney ha tradotto Beowulf appropriandosi – con mossa sacrilega simile a quella del ladro del tresoro incantato – del primo monumento della letteratura inglese. Il colonizzato che rapsice la collana fatata di colonizzatori.

Somewhere, I’ve still got a copy of Bacigalupo’s introduction (the book wasn't mine), interesting even if like me you have to struggle through it with a dictionary on the Poundian ABC of Reading principle.

Venuti enumerates four excellent rules of reading translations. No – go and read it.

His would-be radicalism is appealing:

A translation ought to be read differently from an original composition precisely because it is not an original, because not only a foreign work, but a foreign culture is involved. My aim has been to describe ways of reading translations which increase rather than diminish the pleasures that only reading can offer. These pleasures involve primarily the linguistic, literary, and cultural dimensions of translations. But they might also include the devilish thrill that comes from resistance, from challenging the institutionalized power of cultural brokers like publishers, from staging a personal protest against the grossly unequal patterns of cultural exchange in which readers are unwittingly implicated. Read translations, although with an eye out for the translator’s work, with the awareness that the most a translation can give you is an insightful and eloquent interpretation of a foreign text, at once limited and enabled by the need to address the receiving culture. Publishers will catch on sooner or later. After all, it’s in their interest.

As if.

Other Koreana on Words Without Borders: an interesting essay by Stephen Epstein: Encountering North Korean Fiction: The Origins of the Future and his Han Ung-bin translation Second Encounter