Young-Key Kim-Renaud

The George Washington University

Today, I am very moved to be part of this Colloquium established in memory of the late Hahn Moo-Sook, who happens to be my mother. Seeing two Korean novelists, both of whom knew Hahn Moo-Sook and shared mutual affection and respect with her, I feel my mother came together with them. As the author Ch'oe In-ho says, she is here with us.¹

I am mesmerized by Author Pak Wan-sô 's recounting of her experiences which compelled her to write. She is the very emblem of the Korean aesthetic: that beauty and truth are what comes from deep within one's heart. Though this notion of art is very Korean, it probably could be understood across the linguistic and cultural differences. When Beaudelaire says, "Or un poème ne se copie jamais: il veut être composé (But a poem is never copied; it wants to be composed.)" (Pichois 1976: 660), he speaks to our heart. Ms. Pak appeals to countless readers, not only through the passion and intensity of her words, but also by her lyricism. Although, as Peter Lee (1998: 9) says, the word "lyrical" did not even exist in Korean vocabulary until the arrival of Western literature, Korean literature has a strong foundation in poetry and songs. Good prose in Korean literature is poetic, and Pak's work is much more powerful because of this character than her equally endearing story-telling style.

The urge to write often originates from an intense emotional experience such as Pak's. Many have made similar emotional voyages and have been fixated by an equal or perhaps even stronger desire to tell their stories. Few, however, have become writers of any merit. In short, experience is often a huge motivating factor in literary work, but great literature is born only when the author goes beyond the realm of his or her own experience into the world of imagination and creativity, as Pak guides us through the path of her creation in such an elegant way.

When I approached the two Korean authors, Pak Wan-sô and Ch'oe In-ho, to come to talk at our Colloquium, the first question both of them raised was whether the Colloquium carrying the name of Hahn Moo-Sook was to discuss her and her work. I unequivocally said no. I made the same point to the other participants, including Bruce Fulton and Yu Young-nan. However, Author Ch'oe kept hearing otherwise. It is as if something made him want to talk about my mother.

The novel, Encounter, has received many reviews, both in Korea and abroad. I have not read any of the numerous Korean reviews except for one or two. On the other hand, I believe that by now I have read all of some dozen reviews or book notices published in English by foreign readers or by Koreans living abroad. When I received Mr. Ch'oe's text, I was shaken. For the first time, I got the impression that this man did indeed encounter my mother. He was not unlike a good translator. He began by reading her work and by the end of his exposé, my mother was present in Mr. Ch'oe's own writing.

Good translators are not too different from good authors. As Gregory Rabassa (1984b: 35) said, translators are not technicians but are writers. The author Ch'oe tells us the essential nature of encounter and discovery in the creative process. The authors meet their characters through their imagination, and as their creations become alive, they are even driven by them. Authors then become part of their created world. Translators not only meet the creation of the original author, but also meet and discover the author in the process of translation, eventually becoming the author's alter ego. How resounding it is when Patrick Maurus says "I am Yi Mun-yô l in French."!

There probably is no book or conference on translation, which does not mention, at least once, the famous Italian expression, Traduttore, traditore (translator, traitor). Interestingly and rather unusually, its equally often mentioned Korean equivalent, Pô nyô ktcha, Panyô ktcha (translator, traitor), carries not only its meaning, but also the quasi-pun of the two words. This maxim (or proverb or cliché depending on the point of view) seems to be based on two kinds of problematic. The first is that there is such a thing as an ideal translation. The second is that such an ideal can never be achieved. That is, translators presumably are special breeds, engaged in futile effort and distortions, as their goal is unattainable.² However, in spite of all sorts of prejudices against translation and translators, all must agree with Gregory Rabassa (1984a: 21) that translation is almost as old as language, surely as old as the contact of a language with other languages.

Here, one may try to apply how linguists approach the study of language to how one should do translation. It may not be harmful to think that there is such a thing as an ideal translation, just as the language of an ideal speaker/hearer which Chomsky and his contemporary followers have assumed, exposing themselves to severe attacks by those who are impressed by language variation. What fascinates modern linguists is the fact that all human beings become a native speaker of some language, regardless of its kind or place in which it is spoken. What linguists are therefore trying to do is to make the best hypotheses about what must be going on in the course of language acquisition and cognition. Human beings, children in particular, make the best possible hypotheses under their given circumstances. As more data become available to them, they keep revising those hypotheses.

I do not have as extensive an experience in translation as many of my illustrious colleagues participating in this Colloquium. My experience with translation is limited to rendering some linguistic works written in English into Korean, and some of the literary works by Hahn Moo-Sook into English. From my brief trials, however, some things have become particularly noticeable to me. I remember translating an academic article by and an interview with Noam Chomsky from the English original into Korean, my native language, rather fast and without too much pain. Of course, I had difficulty sometimes to come up with good equivalents for technical terminology, but I do not remember agonizing on how the whole sentence or paragraphs should sound in translation.

In the area of literary translation, I have almost exclusively chosen my mother's works, except for a short piece by my aunt Hahn Mal-Sook. This choice is not really from my wish to fulfill my filial piety, but from my subconscious--perhaps false--confidence that I might be able to carry her voice fairly well, as her daughter and an admirer of her works.

At my first attempt at literary translation, it became immediately clear that to translate literary works, at least three things are needed. First, one needs to clearly understand the original. Because I thought I knew my mother so well, I was surprised to realize, in the course of translation, how my understanding of her work had been superficial. I remember spending a whole summer just to translate two short stories by my mother, making frequent phone calls to Seoul to verify things. Second, one should be a good writer. If reading for translation has turned out to require much more effort than in usual casual reading, writing in English, is a formidable task, especially for most non-native speakers, for writing is at a higher realm than simply being able to convey the basic meaning of the original. Finally, one should see and feel the aesthetic sense of the original writer and that of the target language. A good translator is one who makes his or her own voice as well as the original author's heard in a way that touches the heart of the reader. It is exactly such impetus that makes literary translation ten thousand times more exciting as well as agonizing than so-called "scientific"--academic or technical--translation.

An ideal literary translator would be someone who is completely bilingual and bicultural especially in written languages. In this view, being "completely" bilingual and bicultural may not necessarily mean having physically lived in two relevant linguistic and cultural communities or even being totally proficient in all aspects of the two languages and cultures. A literary translator may be considered "completely bilingual" in written languages, even if he or she has no oral/aural proficiency in one of the languages. Arthur Waley's translations of Chinese and Japanese literatures are said to be unrivaled. However, Waley did not bother to learn spoken Chinese and Japanese (Morris 1970: 70). Even more surprisingly, he has never set foot in that part of the world from which his life’s passion originated (Morris 1970: 80). It is clear that Waley has experienced, even though not physically, the languages and cultures of the literatures which fascinated him in a much deeper level than merely having grown up and studied somewhere in East Asia. According to Morris, Waley said he "'invincibly set against déplacements of any kind'. Yet until the very end he eagerly sought intellectual déplacements" (Morris 1970: 81). As a consequence, Waley was judged as "uncannily accurate in evoking its [the 'Far Eastern'] atmosphere" by those readers who knew the region (reported in Keene 1970: 54). It is not enough for a translator to be just familiar with the two languages and cultures. A literary translator must be someone who has a tendency to seek and profoundly appreciate and carry deep feelings expressed by others. They make these feelings their own and finally express them as if they were their own.

By the word, "culture," we need to distinguish between the so-called "big C" and "small c" readings of the word, the former referring to the culture of literary classics and artistic achievements, and the latter referring to the culture of "four F's," foods, fairs, folklore, and facts (Kramsch 1989). In translation, many small-c culture aspects are initially a stumbling block, like the porcupine hair of a once-upon-a-time high school boy mentioned in Professor Fulton’s presentation. Bruce and Juchan Fulton have been very successful in this respect, because they have paid a great deal of their attention to such cultural aspects in their translation. Their translation, both clear and beautiful, has been quite reader-friendly, in a way proving that such devices as interpolation in bringing out subtexts may easily overcome these kinds of cultural barriers. However, too much interpreting may undermine the original intent of the writer, who might have wanted to simply suggest certain things rather than giving everything away, as a literary device.

At any rate, the situation is much more problematic, when a particular literary genre is appreciated as a culturally specific big-C aesthetic. For example, Professor Fulton talks about some Korean authors being stylistically easier than others to translate into English. He mentions "Some Korean authors [in comparison to Hwang Sun-wô n,] are verbose, tendentious, and repetitive." These characteristics may be exactly the qualities of Korean aesthetic. For example, in Korean language and other behavior, being cuttingly simple is emotionless, dull, and sometimes downright rude and tactless. It is an aesthetic that appreciates the so-called "yô -un," i.e., the ripple or the sound that remains after having been uttered, sung, or played on an instrument. Repetition is one way of expressing one's intense emotions. And I think this particular characteristic is again in the lyrical origin of all forms of Korean literature. Newly popular Korean authors with simple, staccato style are clearly influenced by modern Western literature.

There are of course many other challenges a literary translator must face. A great deal of culture-bound expressions seems to be just impossible to translate or possible only at the expense of tantalizing loss of literary quality. One good example is sound symbolism in Korean. Typically, sound symbolism, other than in the case of onomatopoeia, is highly language-specific. Should one worry more about the sound or the meaning? Again there can be different approaches to this, but one way of dealing with this may be to give both, one by simple romanization followed by the best English approximations in meaning, hoping the readers will get a sense of how the original might be.

Another language-specific characteristic in Korean is honorifics. One clear usage of honorifics as literary device is the change of honorific marking to indicate the change in interpersonal relationship. Such a shift cannot be easily caught in a target language, where such forms are not grammatically encoded. Let us also talk about the class or regional variety of language. Again, Gregory Rabassa convincingly tells us, "Rustics are rustics the world over, but it is absurd and outlandish to have a Brazilian sertanejo talking like an Appalachian mountain man. Even black English is poorly served by translation into black Spanish." (Rabassa 1984: 24) Translators often realize also, as some authors have been concerned about, how "an environment that is commonplace in one culture becomes exotic in the other." (ibid)

Toward the non-native speakers of the target language doing the translation, including herself, Dr. Yu may be overly critical or modest. Non-native speakers, like native speakers, are not a homogeneous set. Some of the most beautiful pieces of English translation from the Korean original have been done by non-native speakers such as Peter Lee, JaHyun Kim Haboush, Suh Ji-moon, and Chun Kyung-Ja, and of course Yu Young-nan herself. In the final analysis, their degree of success has each time had to do with the meticulous attention each of them has given to their task, and the pride they have taken in their role as translators. Because each of those individual translators is to a varying degree insecure about their English, they have put themselves under more scrutiny than any native speaker might. My experience with native speakers of English clearly leads me to conclude that being a native speaker does not necessarily make a literary writer.

I am impressed at the number and kinds of native speakers to whom Dr. Yu asks to read her initial translation. And I wonder if her effort to please everyone would be necessary. Even within the same linguistic and cultural communities, readers are not uniform. Plus, things change. The porcupine haircut and the outhouse will soon be things of the past, and in fact already are in Korea. Even aesthetic values will change as cultures come increasingly in contact with others, and it would be only natural if new literary styles are appreciated. What might be necessary for the translator to find a voice that he or she feels can best express the original work. I agree with Peter Lee (1998: 8) that a translator should "recreate in a new language an equivalent beauty, equivalent power, and an equivalent truth" which will carry the voice of the original author. So long as translation is a creative activity pursued within such clear constraints, a translator is more than a re-creator. A translator is someone who lives in two worlds seeing the beauty that exists in both.

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