Kim Chi-young: Words on Translation

Kim Chi-young

(Image from JoongAng Daily)

Shin Kyung-sook's recently translated novel, Please Look After Mom, is doing well on Amazon's bestseller list, ranking 10th among works of literature as of April 10th this year, according to Shin Joon-bong and Yu I-na of the JoongAng Daily in their "Interview" (April 13, 2011) with the novel's translator, Kim Chi-young. This unexpected popularity has generated quite a stir on the Korean literary scene, and a lot is being written on the possibility that now might be Korean literature's breakthrough moment, the cusp of time when foreign readers become aware of how good Korean literature is:

"The American response to this book is unprecedented in Korean literature history." said Jang Eun-su, president of Korean publisher Mineumsa. "Since 2000, more and more Americans have become interested in Asian literature, so the intense interest in Shin's book is perhaps a result of current trends in the American publishing market."

Well, I hope so, since my wife and I form a translating team, and any greater market in the English-speaking world can only be to our benefit, but I think that I ought to point out that the crucial reason for the breakthrough of Please Look After Mom is that Oprah Winfrey has promoted it.

This isn't to say that the novel doesn't deserve its success. Shin Kyung-sook is a good writer, and my wife says that the Korean original is excellent. I also know from serving as a literary judge for the Daesan Foundation that Kim Chi-young is an excellent translator. I haven't read Please Look After Mom, but I'm sure that this translation is also excellent and deserves its success.

But Oprah's the key.

I'm not here today to talk about that, however. Rather, I merely want to focus on a few points that Kim Chi-young makes about translating:

Do you have your own principles for translating?

My principle is that translated books should give readers almost the same feelings as the original ones. Readers are not scholars. They are not patient [enough to read through awkward expressions]. I cut out dialects and polite expressions from original texts. If I translate South Jeolla dialect into an American Southern accent, readers would find the translation awkward.

Do you break sentences apart?

Of course I do. I don't translate sentences word for word. In order to maintain American-style English, I often split Korean sentences into several English ones or combine several sentences to make one English sentence.

If a Korean sentence feels poetic, the translated one should feel poetic as well. If I did a word-for-word translation, my translation would be considered stilted.

My wife and I had to learn some of these lessons on the job. I remember working on Jeong Ji A's short story "Light of Spring" and trying to catch the dialect by using a rural American accent, but that didn't work at all, as I've previously noted. It was, as Kim Chi-young says, "awkward."

As for conveying the same feeling in the translation as in the original text, that's something that only a truly bilingual translator can judge for certain. My wife and I strive for the same sense as the original Korean, but expressed in English in a natural way, hopefully also of literary quality.

So of course, we also split sentences. Or combine sentences. Or even paragraphs, splitting and combining. We sometimes go so far as to rearrange a sequence of sentences for a more natural progression in English. Or add necessary information. And we certainly excise those maddening Korean ellipses, where a speaker 'says' something by saying nothing:

". . . ."

That just doesn't work in English as a stand-alone 'remark' in dialogue. It has to be rendered as something like:

She said nothing.

Or simply deleted, with the other speaker continuing to talk . . . or the like.

One of the most difficult decisions is how to handle an inconsistency. The difficulty depends on how much would need to be altered in the text to rectify the problem. Sometimes, it's easy, just a typo -- say, a slip-up, one character's name typed slipshod when a different character was undoubtedly meant. But sometimes, there's more to be done. Recently, in our work translating Yi Gwang-su's novel The Soil, one chapter was so wrong in its reference to previous events that my wife and I have advised cutting it entirely from the translation if the Korea Literature Translation Institute (KLTI) happens to find a publisher (assuming that the KLTI even accepts our translation).

Anyway, I'm pleased that Kim Chi-young is getting all this attention and that she's spoken out on the necessity of translating 'freely,' for some Korean literary referees still remain highly conservative and object to translations that are not word-for-word translations.

Kim Chi-young, by the way, is the daughter of Yu Young-nan, another excellent translator of Korean literature, and a person whom I've met . . .

'Intereview' with Park Wan-suh

Park Wan-suh

(Image from LTI Korea)

In a comment to yesterday's post on Shinga, an inquiry was posed as to whether Park Wan-suh was still living, and since others might also be wondering if this writer born in 1931 still lives, I am posting a link to a recent 'intereview' with the author by Shin Junebong for the autumn 2009 issue of the quarterly journal -list: Books from Korea., which is published by LTI Korea.

By the way, I write "intereview" because I made this typo yesterday in my reply to the query about Park Wan-suh and felt chagrin at the error until I realized that my newly coined word fits the sort of interview conducted -- a realization that occasioned pride . . . until a Google search found that thousands of others had already been circulating that coin for some time. Nothing new and shiny under the sun . . .

Anyway, to whet the curiosity of those who might not know of Park Wan-suh, here's how the 'intereview' opens:

The poet Ko Un and the novelist Hwang Sok-yong, often cited as candidates for the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the poet Kim Ji-ha, for whom existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre signed a petition demanding his release from prison in 1974, are leading Korean writers who enjoy a degree of recognition outside the country. But there is another Korean writer without whom the history of modern Korean literature would be incomplete, even if she is not well known outside her native country. It could be argued, in fact, that her name belongs above those of Ko, Hwang, and Kim in the roll call of modern Korean writers.The author in question is 78 year old novelist Park Wansuh, born in 1931 in Gaepung-gun, Gyeonggi-do (province), in what is now North Korea. One of the leading veterans of the Korean literary scene, Park’s achievements both as a writer of literary fiction and a popular author are remarkable.

The interviewer managed to pry out of a reluctant author the statistic that her Shinga book has sold 1.5 million copies in Korea since its publication, which is a large number for a work of fine literature, especially in a country the size of Korea.

The English translation of Who Ate Up All the Shinga?, by Yu Young-nan and Stephen J. Epstein, deserves to sell even more in America's larger book market, but we'll see how well that goes.

Return to 'Singa'

Who Ate Up All the Shinga?

Park Wan-suh

(Image from Amazon.com)

I've written about the Korean author Park Wan-suh a couple of times on this blog because I served as a referee for Yu Young-nan and Stephen Epstein's manuscript translation of Who Ate Up All the Shinga two years ago when the title was slightly different (e.g., "Singa") and thereby had the good fortune then of meeting the author for dinner.

I'm currently re-reading this 'novel' -- or so says the book cover, i.e., "An Autobiographical Novel" -- and enjoying it just as much as the first time. Except that I've been asked to write a short review for a scholarly journal, which adds a bit of anxiety to my enjoyment.

Despite the label "novel" -- used, I take it, because Ms. Park does not entirely trust her memory and considers memory, in part, an art of imagination, as Epstein remarks in the introduction (p. xii) -- the book is clearly what we'd ordinarily call "autobiography."

But the book is not ordinary. It's extraordinary. And frequently funny. I had to laugh at one anecdote about her strict Confucian grandfather, who insisted on propriety, particularly the requirement that women remain close to the home, preferably indoors, and not make a spectacle of themselves in any way that would bring ridicule on the family. One winter day when Park was still in elementary school, she was trying out her new ice skates on one of the frozen rice paddies in front of her village home -- but ineptly trembling and tumbling again and again as her friends all watched in transfixed fascination. Her grandfather happened to glimpse this spectacle through the window in their front door and, aghast, shouted an order that she be brought to him instantly:

"Don't you realize you're humiliating the entire family?" he yelled. "And a girl, at that? Don't you have any better games to play than imitating a shaman's blade dance?" (89)

As Park then writes, she herself almost laughed at the words of her old grandfather, "who didn't even know what skating was and whose limited imagination made him think of a shaman dancing on blades" (89). Park has prepared the reader well for the anecdote, having already previously described blade dancing by shamans as well as her grandfather's Confucian-honed disdain for folk religion.

I may soon be reporting more on this book and Park Wan-suh as I turn to re-read again before attempting to compose my review since writing on this blog offers brainstorming opportunities.

Christianity as Dressed-Up Paganism?

Paul Potts

Speaking of Dressed Up...

(Image from Britain's Got Talent)

A couple of weeks ago, as some will recall, I was invited to dinner with Park Wan-suh and her two translators because I had proofread and reviewed the English translation of her book Who Ate Up All Those Singa?

One of the translators, Yu Young-nan, gave me a book, Lee Dong-ha's Toy City, which Young-nan's daughter Kim Chi-young has translated and which Koryo Press has just published. Like Park's Singa book, Lee's Toy City is an autobiographical novel set in the poverty-stricken period following liberation from Japanese rule when the Americans and Russians defeated the Japanese.

One of the things that interested me is Lee Dong-ha's depiction of Christianity's role in South Korea during the 1950s. For some Koreans of the time, survival was possible only because the Protestant and Catholic churches provided a bit of food. But the fare was thin, as was also, at times, the spiritual nourishment, which could occasionally appear hardly Christian, as in the piety of one character, Reverend Cha, who dispenses some intriguing advice on prayer when the main character's grieving, pregnant mother inquires how to pray to Jesus:

"Reverend, will my boy's father and sister be able to come home if I believe in Jesus?" This was her last wish.

I clearly heard Reverend Cha's easy answer. "Yes. Just pray to Jesus. Then the day will come when the entire family can live together."

Mother asked again, cautiously, "How does one pray, Reverend?"

Reverend Cha replied breezily, "Do it like you would to the Wise Old Goddess of Maternity." (Lee Dong-ha, Toy City, page 136)

A fascinating reply, for it not only assumes that the mother will know exactly what this means but that such a pagan prayer to a goddess can provide an appropriate model for a Christian prayer to Jesus.

Perhaps this is the Shamanism just under the surface of Korean Christianity that many observers have claimed to glimpse.

Yet, in the history of Christianity throughout the world, this is nothing unusual -- even in its European development as Christians evangelized, for instance, the Anglo-Saxon tribes of England. Here's something that I wrote about this in my article "Praeparatio Evangelium: Beowulf as Antetype of Christ" (Journal of The Medieval and Early Modern English Studies Association of Korea, Volume 12, Number 2 (2004)):

In his History of the English Church and People, Book I, chapter 30, Bede cites the instructions that Pope Gregory the Great gave in A.D. 601 to Abbot Melitus for missionary work in England:

[T]he temples of the idols in that nation ought not to be destroyed; but let the idols that are in them be destroyed; let water be consecrated and sprinkled in the said temples, let altars be erected, and relics placed there. For if those temples are well built, it is requisite that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God; that the nation, seeing that their temples are not destroyed, may remove error from their hearts, and knowing and adoring the true God, may the more freely resort to the places to which they have been accustomed. And because they are used to slaughter many oxen in sacrifice to devils, some solemnity must be given them in exchange for this, as that on the day of the dedication, or the nativities of the holy martyrs, whose relics are there deposited, they should build themselves huts of the boughs of trees about those churches which have been turned to that use from being temples, and celebrate the solemnity with religious feasting, and no more offer animals to the Devil, but kill cattle and glorify God in their feast, and return thanks to the Giver of all things for their abundance; to the end that, whilst some outward gratifications are retained, they may the more easily consent to the inward joys. For there is no doubt that it is impossible to cut off every thing at once from their rude natures; because he who endeavours to ascend to the highest place rises by degrees or steps, and not by leaps. Thus the Lord made Himself known to the people of Israel in Egypt; and yet He allowed them the use, in His own worship, of the sacrifices which they were wont to offer to the Devil, commanding them in His sacrifice to kill animals, to the end that, with changed hearts, they might lay aside one part of the sacrifice, whilst they retained another; and although the animals were the same as those which they were wont to offer, they should offer them to the true God, and not to idols; and thus they would no longer be the same sacrifices. This then, dearly beloved, it behoves you to communicate to our aforesaid brother, that he, being placed where he is at present, may consider how he is to order all things. God preserve you in safety, most beloved son (A. M. Sellar, tr., Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England, A Revised Translation (London: George Bell and Sons, 1907), Book 1, Chapter 30).

As in Beowulf, the 'gods' are suppressed and demonized, and new content is added, but the old forms and much of the familiar world remains. Interesting in this context are Bede's remarks elsewhere about the origin of the Anglo-Saxon term for "Easter," linking it to Eostre/Eastre, an Anglo-Saxon goddess of the rising sun (Venerable Bede, De Temporum Rationale, 1.5). In this instance, the name has been preserved but applied to Christ's resurrection.

Note that in the quotation above, Gregory the Great cites the Old Testament as providing a precedent for grafting Christianity onto pagan practices, a rhetorical move that allows for a bivalent reading of paganism. (Hodges, "Praeparatio," pages 321-323)

I suppose, therefore, that if one is going to see Korean Christianity as pagan Shamanism in disguise, then one could call European Christianity merely Euro-paganism in disguise, which is precisely what the Protestant Reformers claimed about the Roman Catholic Church. The Reformers, of course, fractured European Christianity into broken parts through their quest for spiritual purity and political power, so there's no little irony that in their mission work throughout the world, the various Protestant groups have largely come to see the necessity of grafting Christianity onto the more 'acceptable' pagan practices that they encounter. Even tiny Bible colleges in the U.S. offer courses on the anthropology of missions that teach future missionaries how to present Christianity in ways that are culturally acceptable to the non-Christians whom they are trying to convert.

Now that Europe is 'post-Christian' -- as some claim, anyway -- and Christians turn to thoughts of re-Christianizing that continent, they face a rising Islam there within the neopagan secularism that otherwise pervades European culture. Faced with a daunting task, they aren't giving up, and they might even gather their courage from Philip Jenkins's recent work, as his article in Foreign Policy, "Europe's Christian Comeback" (June 2007), currently makes clear:

In fact, the rapid decline in the continent’s church attendance over the past 40 years may have done Europe a favor. It has freed churches of trying to operate as national entities that attempt to serve all members of society. Today, no church stands a realistic chance of incorporating everyone. Smaller, more focused bodies, however, can be more passionate, enthusiastic, and rigorously committed to personal holiness. To use a scientific analogy, when a star collapses, it becomes a white dwarf -- smaller in size than it once was, but burning much more intensely. Across Europe, white-dwarf faith communities are growing within the remnants of the old mass church.

Perhaps nowhere is this more true than within European Catholicism, where new religious currents have become a potent force. Examples include movements such as the Focolare, the Emmanuel Community, and the Neocatechumenate Way, all of which are committed to a re-evangelization of Europe. These movements use charismatic styles of worship and devotion that would seem more at home in an American Pentecostal church, but at the same time they are thoroughly Catholic. Though most of these movements originated in Spain and Italy, they have subsequently spread throughout Europe and across the Catholic world. Their influence over the younger clergy and lay leaders who will shape the church in the next generation is surprisingly strong.

Similar trends are at work within the Protestant churches of Northern and Western Europe. The most active sections of the Church of England today are the evangelical and charismatic parishes that have, in effect, become megachurches in their own right. These parishes have been incredibly successful at reaching out to a secular society that no longer knows much of anything about the Christian faith. Holy Trinity Brompton, a megaparish in Knightsbridge, London, that is now one of Britain’s largest churches, is home to the amazingly popular "Alpha Course," a means of recruiting potential converts through systems of informal networking aimed chiefly at young adults and professionals. As with the Catholic movements, the course works because it makes no assumptions about any prior knowledge: Everyone is assumed to be a new recruit in need of basic teaching. Nor does the recruitment technique assume that people live or work in traditional settings of family or employment. The Alpha Course is successfully geared for postmodern believers in a postindustrial economy.

Alongside these older Christian communities are hugely energetic immigrant congregations. On a typical Sunday, half of all churchgoers in London are African or Afro-Caribbean. Of Britain’s 10 largest megachurches, four are pastored by Africans. Paris has 250 ethnic Protestant churches, most of them black African. Similar trends are found in Germany. Booming Christian churches in Africa and Asia now focus much of their evangelical attention on Europe. Nigerian and Congolese ministers have been especially successful, but none more so than the Ukraine-based ministry of Nigerian evangelist Sunday Adelaja. He has opened more than 300 churches in 30 countries in the last 12 years and now claims 30,000 (mainly white) followers.

Well, that's certainly interesting, and a different perspective on Europe's religious future than one glimpses from the viewpoints of those many other commentors who see an Islamic future for Europe. Even the secularists are coming around as they come to appreciate Europe's Christian inheritance when faced by the great cultural difference and challenge that Islam presents:

The result has been a rediscovery of the continent’s Christian roots, even among those who have long disregarded it, and a renewed sense of European cultural Christianity. Jürgen Habermas, a veteran leftist German philosopher stunned his admirers not long ago by proclaiming, "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."

Prompting Jenkins to remark that if a Marxist like Habermas can praise Christianity, then:

Europe may be confronting the dilemmas of a truly multifaith society, but with Christianity poised for a comeback, it is hardly on the verge of becoming an Islamic colony.

Is Jenkins right? Faced by Islam, a culturally contextual re-Christianization of neo-pagan Europe? That would take a miracle!

Sometimes, however, miracles do happen, as in the case of the fortunate Mr. Paul Potts, a mobile phone salesman from South Wales whose dream was to sing opera.

Where have all the singa gone?

Singa (싱아)

Aconogonum polymorphum (Ledeb.)

Nakai ex Mori [싱아]

(Image from Plant DNA Bank in Korea)

Had I not read Park Wan-suh's book, I wouldn't even know that any singa (싱아) had ever existed, but I also now wonder where the singa have all gone.

Last night, I had a chance to ask Park Wan-suh herself. Purely for the accident of my having been randomly chosen to review the English manuscript of her novel Who Ate Up All Those Singa?, I was invited to a private dinner along with the translators Yu Young-nan and Stephen J. Epstein.

I'd met Stephen before, as readers of my blog may recall, but Yu Young-nan was a new face for me. She, in fact, writing to Stephen last Friday, is the person who invited me:

If Jeffrey would like to join us on Monday night, that would be great. I can change our reservation easily. Please let me know.

At least, I think that this "Jeffrey" was me. Usually, I insist on my being the person "Jeffery," but I wasn't about to draw fine syllabic distinctions between "Jeff-rey" and "Jeff-er-y" when such might get me dis-invited:

Sorry, we were looking for a 'Jeffrey'...

For one evening, therefore, I went as "Jeffrey," pretending to be someone whom I'm not -- not too difficult, actually, since I've already spent years pretending to be something of a scholar.

And in my work as a something-of-a-scholar, I'm expected to write scholarly book reviews, such as my recent review of Park's Singa book for the Daesan Foundation:

The work is eminently readable, which I attribute to both the genius of the original author, Park Wan-suh, and the talent of the two gifted translators, Yu Young-nan and Stephen Epstein. I believe that this literary work can find a ready readership among native speakers of English. The story is very interesting.

For this hard work, I received my restaurant invitation from Young-nan:

Thanks for writing such a glowing review on Singa, which I received this morning. I'd be happy to meet you on Monday at a subway station and go to the restaurant with you.

I'll have to write more "glowing" reviews if they so easily get me dinner invitations with eminent translators and writers. But having never seen each other, Young-nan and I needed some means of recognizing who we were, so I wrote:

I'll be wearing a Muslim-appearing cap, standing about 6 feet tall, and looking very foreign.

Young-nan replied:

Look for a woman in her 50s with short gray hair.

Despite how that sounds, Young-nan looked as her name implies: Young. Youthful, slender, and energetic, she greeted me at the Gwangnaru Station, and together we hailed a taxi and rode to a prearranged spot in the Seoul suburb of Guri, where Park Wan-suh and her daughter picked us up and drove us to the restaurant near the Han River.

On the way there, I asked Young-nan how she and Stephen had gotten to know each other, and she told me that she had sought him out after reading his positive review for her translation of Park Wan-suh's novel The Naked Tree.

Incidently, if you click that link to Stephen's review, you discover that Park Wan-seo is not the only variant of Park Wan-suh's transliterated name, for The Naked Tree gives its author as Pak Wan-sô. So if you start Googling for Park, you'll need to use three different spellings. Or just go with the Korean: 박완서.

Anyway, after we had arrived and were heading along the path leading up to the riverside restaurant, I looked about at the various grasses and other plants and asked Park Wan-suh:

"Is there any singa growing here?"

"No," she told me, "I haven't seen any singa in South Korea. Around Gaeseong, there were lots of singa, but in my 50 years here in the South, I've never found any singa."

The singa stayed on my mind, even after we had sat down at the table to eat. Perhaps noticing my abstracted look during the mostly Korean discussion, Young-nan asked:

"Are you following the conversation?"

"Uh..." I hesitated, "well, actually, I was still thinking about the singa."

They laughed at my obsession.

"Since it's all missing here in South Korea," I explained, "I can't imagine what singa looks like."

So, Park explained that it has a long stalk and that one can chew that part, which tastes both sweet and sour. I tried to imagine that and wondered if it would do well as part of a salad.

At that point, Stephen arrived, along with his wife and baby daughter, and the conversation veered away from the captivating topic of the mysteriously missing singa and toward the very present but equally mysterious and captivating baby, Sonia Sylvia.

Or Sylvia Sonia. I'm not certain of which. Stephen had assured us that his daughter could speak English:

[There will be five] English speakers ... if you include Sonia, who's "daaaa" (= "cat") is definitely English.

But she remained silent about her name, refusing to tell me whether she goes by Sonia Sylvia or Sylvia Sonia. She also feigned ignorance of the singa, which remained missing even from the general conversation.

I didn't give up, though, but kept searching through the night long after the dinner was over, and as you can see from the image above, I finally -- long time passing -- found a bit of singa...