Entering the Pale of Literary Translation

Translation is a literary practice that has been abused and mistreated in many ways. Literary translations have often been viewed as subordinate and inferior forms that straddle the line separating what is “literature” from what is not. They have often been kept out of standard literary histories because the translator didn’t have the appropriate birthplace, and because translations have been plagued by a discourse of equivalence, which assumes that for any given word, there exists an exact equivalent in another language. For translation to operate in this artificial way, one would have to assume that language lacks any adaptability and flexibility and is therefore impervious to the influences of its cultural context; that the meanings of literary texts are fixed and therefore there is only one possible interpretation of every story, novel, play, or poem; and that a translator is able to suppress all the experiences she would normally bring to a text so as to be a sterile medium through which this mechanical process can take place. Literary translation is, of course, a bit more than a mechanical, formulaic, or clinical process in which one text is seamlessly transformed into its equivalent in another language.

In my own academic work, I have encountered translation in one of its most creative forms. In turn-of-the-century Korea, translators were translating just about everything into Korean. Their creations transcended strict notions of “translation”: some would technically be considered “adaptations,” that is, liberal transformations in which only a skeleton of the “original” text remained. Translators wrestled with a multitude of foreign languages, and some did not even know which language the text that they were translating had originally been written in. Some translators based their work on previous translations done in Japanese, Chinese, English, and even Esperanto. These early translators understood the process as one of literary creation and went about their work with the freedom usually associated with more conventional literature. Rather than gain their rightful place in literary history, however, their role has been simplified to that of helping to introduce Western literature to Korea and thereby make Korean literature more “modern.”

Besides the two languages and cultural traditions involved in the translation process itself, there are external factors that affect literary translations. The historical relationship of the two literary traditions also influences the translator’s approach to or attitude toward the process. As a translator of Korean poetry and fiction into English, I am very aware of the uneven power relationship between Korean literature and its European and American counterparts that resulted from the cultural imperialism accompanying territorial colonialism in early twentieth-century Korea. And of course, the translator’s own position comes into play. Unlike some adherents of more standard notions of translation, I am very aware of the fact that my various identities as a Korean, a scholar of Korean literature, and a woman all leave their respective traces on my translations.

To restate, the act of translation is not merely a process of copying contingent on the linguistic principle of equivalence. The text is filtered and contaminated through the translator and thereby transformed, most obviously in its physical appearance and more subtly in its content. Literary translation, which for practical purposes is an arrested moment of such fluidity, also maintains a fluidity of its own. It is this aspect of the translation process that I aim to achieve in my own work.

What often occurs when I ask people to read drafts of my translations is that they assume the attitudes discussed above. The most frequent comment I get is some version of “We don’t say that in English,” “We don’t have that expression in English,” or “This doesn’t sound right.” Such comments are often justified. I have misread the original text, become myopic —as one inevitably does when spending too much time concentrating on a translation—or, more simply, mistyped. My reader then does her job as a reader: to point out a sentence or phrase that is incorrect. However, it is also often the case that the wording of a phrase or...