배창환 엮음: 시 읽기 1

Normally a book that I've read in Korean would merit an entry written in Korean, but I find that the language I want to use to describe, not only these poems, but the process of reading them is far beyond my current capacity.  Besides which, I find that a lot of what I have to say isn't about the poems themselves, but about the process of reading poetry in a foreign language.  I have often in this blog railed against the evils of translation in general, and translation of poetry in particular.  Such generally respected authors as Juan Ruiz and Jean de le Fontaine left me completely cold, and I can only attribute that to having read them in verse translations.  On the verso is a wonderful book that I've been picking at for some time: The Poem Itself, edited by Stanley Burnshaw. Burnshaw seems to agree with me that translation in general is generally useless, translation of poetry is insulting, and translation of poetry into verse sacriligeous.

Nonetheless, we simply can't help ourselves, can we?  Upon finding a beautiful gem of a poem, what is one's first thought? Naturally to share it with like-minded readers.  When that poem is in a language not widely understood, the choice between keeping it to oneself and risking its mutilation by translation is a difficult one.  Expressive by nature, I choose to err on the side of communication.

Like Burnshaw, though, I feel strongly that translations cannot stand on their own.  There is simply too much in the original that can't be captured.  Take, for example, the brief but beloved Korean poem "너에게 묻는다" (I ask you), literally /it is asked of you[familiar]/:

연탄재 함부로 차지마라.
너는
누구에게 한번이라도 뜨거운 사람이었느냐.
~안도현

Such a brief poem, and so dense with imagery and layers of meaning.  Take, for example the word "연탄재". I suppose I could translate it simply as "spent charcoal", but that takes away so much.  연탄재 are a special type of pressed heating fuel that become very brittle when used up, and Koreans stack the spent cylinders outside their houses after use.  They make such a satisfying crumble when kicked, that kids sometimes go around kicking the neighbor's stacks.  Is there a comparable habit in America?  The feeling is like that you got as a kid (if you were naughty like my friends and I were) of throwing spent flourescent tubes on the ground to hear the pop, or tipping over the neighbors' garden gnomes.  How can one capture that in a word? 

And then there is the final line. "에게" is something of a multipurpose prepositional ending, and can be translated as "for" or "to" when attached to the pronoun "누구" (somebody).  So in the final line, is it "You were once warm to somebody" as in "you had warm feelings for them", or "You were once warm for somebody" as in "they once had warm feelings for you"?  The first line tends to support the former reading, but it is my belief that a good writer (and 안도현 certainly falls into this category--see the earlier entry on his novella 연어) always embraces multiple meanings, especially in poetry.  Mercifully, the multiple possible meanings of "뜨거운" are captured in the English word "warm", so that doesn't present a problem. 

A three line poem.  A paragraph of explication for each word.  This is why translation into verse is nearly always sacrilegous.  But in the immortal words of Jim White, "We're okay with a little sacrilege here".  Accordingly, here is my best effort at capturing the feeling of the above poem in English:

I Ask You

Don't just go around kicking at spent briquettes.
You too,
Though it may have only been one time,
Were once warm to somebody, weren't you?

~Dohyeon An

What do you think?  Should I have tried to keep it in three lines?  Preserve the brevity of the original?  Did putting a line break at the end of the prosodic phrase (linguistic term that doesn't apply to English; don't get me started)  add or subtract from the texture? 

Perhaps I should try one in Burnshaw's style.  Here's 도정환's 칸나꽃밭 (Field of Canna Lilies).  Even the title is problematic, because there is no English expression that captures "꽃밭". "Flower bed"?  Not a good translation.  "Flower field"? Sounds stupid.  Anyway.

가장 화려한 꽃이
가장 처참하게 진다

네 사랑은 보아라
네 사랑의 밀물진 꽃밭에
서서 보아라

절정에 이르렀던 날의 추억이
너를 더 아프게 하리라 칸나꽃밭

(1-2) The most glorious(spectacular) flower / the most grisly(gruesomely) loses(becomes). Do here selects some richly layered adjectives to describe the nature of the canna lily, which at its peak is indeed the most showy and colorful of flowers, but thereupon quickly becomes brown and crusty-looking.  처참 also carries the meaning of decapitation, and the final verb 지다 can mean to end up a certain way, to be defeated, to fall, or to get stained, all of which are appropriate readings here. 

(3-5) Look at your love / At the flower field flooded with your love / Stand so as to look. Do's choice of the imperative case here imparts an urgency to the stanza, even as he uses the most familiar of posessive pronouns to imply his own involvement in the scenario.  He again uses the verb 지다 to describe the condition of the field, at once fallen, defeated, stained, and finished.

(6-7) The memory of the day that reached the climax / may well make you hurt more field of canna flowers.  Do here chooses the more personal noun for memory (as opposed to 기억) to deepen the connection to the scene, and waxes a bit rhetorical with the choice of 리라, a choice that combined with the imperative case in the previous stanza give the poem a rather detached, advisory tone.  The structure of the final line is grammatically unconventional, and conflates the addresee of the poem with the flowers themselves, which was pointedly not the case in the previous stanza.

While this style of explication certainly is more thorough, I can't help but feel like it takes away the magic of the texture in the original.  What is a poet/scholar/translator to do?  Is there some middle road?  Or should one take the path that is most often trod, namely abandoning the idea that the texture of the original can be captured at all, and skipping straight to the chase.  Shall we see how a Korean poem would appear in the Norton Anthology of World Literature?

Mountain

In the mountain,
There is something that can't be known.

The trees unknowingly
Are growing,

And the soil unknowingly
Is breathing.

What is more, the mountain
Unknowingly,
Is incubating us.

~Dongju Seo

I hate this translation!  Incubate is such an ugly word; I hate the texture of it.  I hate the texture of this whole thing!  It's garbage.  But what is one to do?  Leave an entire body of Korean poetry untranslated?