<

Notes From the Land of the Morning Calm

	From My Notebook	Audio Letters	Pictures of Korea	Links
	Translations	Favorite Lit. in English	Papers in Korean	Korean Course


(Sept 2000)

Why I Want to Translate Korean Poetry part of a grant application

(Jim and Deb G rated page)

I'm writing to you because I want to translate poems. I suppose that's obvious. I bet you are wondering why I want to translate poems. "Why" can be a tough question. In this case it is simple. I love reading poems. Some people say a good poem is full of deep meaning. Cow pies. The best poems take us to a place without meaning. Poetry takes us to a whole and connected place that just is. Poems are the roads home to a place where we know the world without thinking. When a poem takes me to this place I want to tell the whole world about it. Korean poets have built great roads home to this place. I want to tell the world about them.

The other day on the way to work I glanced at the Korea Economic Daily. I majored in economics in college so I still do that sometimes. The headline read, "The Embrace of a Half-Century." The paper was covering the reunion of families separated by the Korean War and the 50 years of division that have followed. Underneath the headline were photos and a poem, "The Road Home." I love that poetry appears in Korean papers. I love more that it appears on the front page, above the fold, in an economic daily. In Korea, even editors of an economic newspaper seem to know that beyond the pictures and the facts surrounding the event, a poem can make the experience real for their readers. It's hard to find a poem in an American newspaper these days. If the Wall Street Journal has ever printed a poem above the fold on the front page, I've never seen it.

It's inspiring that in Korea poetry is not relegated to the hinterland of poetic journals and chapbooks. It's inspiring that books of poetry are best sellers in Korea and that you can find the whole 10 volume set of "The History of Modern Korean Literature" intact at the Omokkyo and Kwachon subway stations. Newsstands often sell books of poetry along with the daily papers. The American William Carlos Williams wrote, "It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/of what is found there." Although Korea has many other ailments, Koreans don't die for lack of what is found in a poem.

Poetry keeps us from dying miserably because poetry gives us a road back to what is fundamental to our lives. It gives us a road home to that place, as I said, that just is. It connects us to other people by giving us something common to share. The details of our experience become common. The round rim of our favorite cup, the smell of a lover's hair, the sound of our mother's voice, we share these experiences that are fundamental to our lives in poetry. Round and its circular connotations, lover's and its pungently painful insinuations, mother's wholly specific meaning, we share the language that is fundamental to our lives. When these fundamentals merge to become each other in us, we have something basic to our lives. We feel whole and connected. Any poetic success, whether it is Kim So Wol's "Azaleas" or Elliot's "The Wasteland" is this merger. We make it. It makes us. In the end, it just becomes our reality. It just is. This is our existence. Without poetry we lose contact with this reality and that is what death is.

The cliché goes "poetry is what is lost in the translation." This may be true if you are translating words. It may be true if you were trying to translate the meaning of a poem. Of course, trying to translate "meaning" never works. Words and their "meanings" aren't that merger I was talking about. Besides, that merger has no meaning. That merger is just the poem we experience. The Korean word non meaning, "rice field", for example, will never have the same flavor to an American or English reader. If you ask a Korean what they think of when they read non they say "home town," "agriculture" and sometimes "traditional." If you ask people from my home state of California what they think of when they read "rice field," they will tell you "Asia" or "foreign country." We have many rice fields in California. Some people find this strange for land as arid as California's. So sometimes when you ask people what they think of when they read "rice field," if they feel like joking they say, "California farmer wasting a lot of water." The same word carries different associations in the two languages and therefore "means" something different to Korean and English native speakers. Translating "meaning" will never work.

Robert Hass, the American Poet Laureate ('96-'98) writes in his poem "Meditation at Lagunitas, "All the new thinking is about loss./ In this it resembles all the old thinking. /The idea, for example, that… because there is in this world no one thing / to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,/ a word is elegy to what it signifies…." But the poem builds in opposition to this idea. In fact, it builds in opposition to ideas in general. The "Meditation" ends, "…There are moments when the body is as numinous/ as words, days that are the good flesh continuing./ Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,/ saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry." Hass seems to be saying that experience can have substance enough to be as "numinous as words" and that words can have substance enough to exist as "what they signify." He seems to be saying that when words and what they signify come together the moment becomes whole and connected to something greater. Beyond what he seems to be saying, in the whole context of the poem, blackberry becomes as sweet as any hanging high in a blackberry bush. This is what is important. He shows us that the reality of our experience is the merging of language with experience. Beyond the idea of a blackberry, we experience a blackberry sweet enough to taste.

Those who say a word is only elegy to what it signifies are probably the same people who say, "poetry is what is lost in the translation." Of course these people are missing the point. They focus too narrowly on the words in a poem and the fact that words never have exact equivalents in a foreign language. They still think that poetry means something. They forget that the original poem, if it is successful, simply is for the translator. It exists as a blackberry among its thorns. It exists as the road home for the translator. They forget that if the poem can simply be for a translator reading it in a language other than his or her mother tongue, that poem is in two languages. The poem exists in the translator and all a good translator must do is write it again in his or her first language. This, of course, is not easy. However, it is not impossible.

As I have said, poetry is the merger between experience and language in a person. Different languages, of course, make what is different. However, a translator is in that lucky place where what is simply is in two languages. The headline read "The Embrace of a Half-Century." It was describing the reunion of a few people from a group that was whole once. A translator makes a similar kind of reunion possible. A translator reunites people separated by the reality of language. This division happened so long ago we have forgotten we are all one people.

Poetry has always been this kind of reunion. It's because poetry is a shared experience. blackberry is a memory for me as real as any other. It is the same for anyone else who has read Hass's poem. We may have experienced it differently. The blackberry may have tasted sweet to me and tart to my friend, but we both experience Hass's creation. This shared experience is reunion. It's like all the little things the families shared when they were reunited, the smell of the room where they met, the sound of other families crying and then laughing, the red carpet in the hotel dinning room. It is a reunion in that it brings us all back to the fact that, despite how differently we experience life, my friend and I have a common blackberry in the bramble of our lives.

I'm writing to you because I want to translate poems. It's because I love reading poems. I love going to that place without meaning, that whole and connected place that just is. Poems are that road home to where we know the world without thinking. Going to this place keeps us alive by keeping connected to our reality. When I find a poem that takes me to this place I want to tell the whole world about it. I want to translate Korean poems because Korean poets have built great roads home to this place. The notion that I might be able to contribute to reuniting a few people long separated by language also makes me happy.

Home Page