On my flight back to Boston from Mumbai, after winter break, I started reading Human Acts by Han Kang. I cried on my flight, on my layover, and in line at TSA. This was the first book I’d read by Han Kang, and I found it to be absolutely devastating. I described the prose, to myself, using similar language than is pointed out re: The Vegetarian––“spare” comes to mind. I haven’t yet read The Vegetarian, but it is on my To-Be-Read for this year, as is The White Book, so I have to admit I skimmed some parts of the Parks and Yoon articles for fear of spoilers. Still, I found the question Tim Parks opens with very compelling: “How can I judge a translation if I don’t know the original language?”
My partner and I read poems together every night, and he is often critical––but if a poem is translated, he says, “Oh, well, it’s translated. I’ll give it some leeway.” I think this stems from the impulse, as is articulated in the S.K. Yoon article, to treat the original text as ‘production’––“strong” and “generative” (940)––and the translation as “dependent”, playing “the inferior role of ‘reproduction’” (940) instead of seeing literary translators as creative writers. Or, in other words, the original as ‘male’ and the translation as ‘female’, which is a thread Deborah Smith introduces in the final two paragraphs of her essay elucidating her process towards translation. I found the Smith essay pretty balanced and persuasive. Like Emma Ramadan, she references Madhu Kaza’s Kitchen Table Translations and seems in favour of “resisting domestication”, of “errant, disobedient translation.” Again, then, I wonder: how much of a departure from the original text is too far, and is that a personal choice each translator makes? Or, like Jeffrey Angles’ talked about in his presentation, is that a choice mediated by outside factors, like tradition or fandom?
Yoon takes this question of faithfulness further, arguing that Smith’s translation, because it doesn't prioritise fidelity to the original text, is itself a feminist act. Where there were moments I was compelled––the idea that “translators recover women’s works lost in patriarchy to reshape male-oriented canons” (940), for example––I did have some questions. Yoon says, “In The Vegetarian, her infidelity to the source text, and consequently to ideals of the patriarchal control is clearly exposed” (940). Is the argument, then, that Han Kang’s Korean text does have ‘fidelity to the ideals of patriarchal control’? Yoon also says that feminist translation “wakes the voice of women oppressed in patriarchal language”. I think I just wonder about the nuance in that statement – are the women she’s referring to characters in the works, or authors/writers with agency themselves?
A silly aside: In Charse Yun’s essay, he posits that the difference between the styles of Han Kang’s Korean original and Deborah Smith’s translation might be akin to “the plain, contemporary style or Raymond Carver being garnished with the elaborate diction of Charles Dickens”. The reference to Carver makes me wonder if another potential comparison might even be Carver pre Gordon Lish’s edits and post, like, for example, "The Bath" and "A Small, Good Thing".
I really enjoyed reading all three Petrarch prefaces and learning about what each of the translators found crucial or valuable in Petrarch’s work, and how that manifested in the choices each of them made in their translations––whether to keep rhyme, whether to keep consistent metre, how much to keep syntax, and so on. I found David Young’s preface particularly illuminating because of his inclusion of different translation examples of the same Petrarch poem, as well as how he used the preface as an opportunity to explicitly be in dialogue with and learning from so many other poets and translators, even those whose choices he disagreed with. I especially enjoyed his opening paragraph: “Translating is a most peculiar activity. On the one hand it seems inevitably doomed both to inadequacy and to incompleteness. On the other hand, it offers a kind of loaves-and-fishes legerdemain: where one poem existed, two now stand, related but different, alike but occupying different linguistic territories and, in some cases, different ages and eras. Is a translated poem the evil twin of the original, or is it a miraculous clone, a musical transposition whereby one valuable thing is replicated, its value effectively doubled?”
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