The Foreignness of Language and Literary Translation—A Retrospective Essay on Reaching the Age of 80

Abstract

This essay revisits a few of the main ideas which the author has formulated regarding the translation of Korean poetry during the more than thirty years in which he has been active as a translator. In an article published in 1996, he stressed the difference existing between any Korean poem and its English translations, due not only to the differences between the two languages but above all to the need to produce a translation which has maximal poetic quality in English. He stressed the tension existing between “accuracy” and “readability” and the need to prioritize the latter over the former. He ends by echoing Walter Benjamin and Paul Ricoeur on the impossibility of a “perfect” translation. In a second part, he summarizes the ideas he developed in an unpublished 2016 lecture, illustrated by examples from translations of a poet such as Kim Soo-Bok. Here he also stressed the difference between the freedom enjoyed by a translator, who is always obliged to refer to the original poem, and the poet who freely creates the original poem without reference to anything previously existing. He then contrasts his own position with the extremely literal translations demanded by Brodsky and Nabokov. After briefly surveying the challenges presented by a number of the poets he has translated, some of whose works seem to defy translation completely, he concludes with a longer review of his recent work on poems by Sin Yong-mok, to illustrate his attempts to transform fine Korean poetry into English poetry that will be effective in its new world, while remaining faithful to its original.