Janet Poole on Translating Ch’oe Myŏngik

When Ch’oe Myŏngik was writing short fiction in the mid-twentieth century, he was known as a master of the detail. While other Korean writers of the time were cranking out dozens of pages of writing per week, often for serialised daily newspaper novels whose fees could amount to a living at that time, Ch’oe’s slow and deliberate productivity and time-consuming care as a writer added up to about one short story a year. Though he claimed that earning a living in business stole the time that might allow him to write more, I sense that his character would have prevented him from ever writing enough to constitute even half a living. This is most likely what attracted me to his work as a reader.

Much of Ch’oe’s care and attention seems to have been devoted to the placing of small objects throughout the pages of his writing. The interiors he describes sometimes seem like stage sets: a pot of narcissi placed on a table, blue wallpaper with a gold foil pattern backdropping a shop window, a worn sofa stretched before twosash-windows, a sofa’s shadow falling on a wall. Even the exteriors feel staged: a tiny, grape-shaped lamp glows over a gateway in the rainy night. The more singular details seem to throb with the power of metaphor. Such details stick with the reader, who cannot but smile at the thought of that “bastard of a frog’s stomach” used to point to a slightly paunchy commercial photographer eating and drinking his way through the humid summer evenings.

Who knows a translator who is not obsessed with the tiny unit of the word?

Early on in my reading of Ch’oe’s fiction, a helpful friend told me to look out for the insects and animals—and there they were: myriads of mosquito larvae in a rainy season puddle, a lark with an overgrown claw dying in a Manchurian cage, an enormous snake on a roof defying capture, frogs croaking on the side of an outer-city path, yes, just as that frog’s stomach of a bastard turned off the light in his nearby house to sleep. These insects and other small animals share the essential feature of the detail in that they appear either gigantic in their singularity or dwarfed in the masses of a crowd.

In some ways, this dynamic of shifting scale resembles that of writing and translating itself, for Ch’oe’s details are, of course, words. As a translator moving through a text, it is a familiar feeling to find myself figuratively running through a sentence or paragraph, fingers moving at speed across the keyboard, only to come to a crunching halt caused by incomprehension or perplexity: What does that mean? Or, what on earth could that be in English? The reader will never know how many hours and conversations went into comprehending the “sharpness of a blade of grass” that the protagonist of the story “Walking in the Rain” feels he lacks as his days repeat themselves in ennui and malaise.

Who knows a translator who is not obsessed with the tiny unit of the word? Sometimes the problem is that the word itself seems to have disappeared—failing to appear in dictionaries or lost to contemporary common knowledge. Sometimes the problem is that the object it names has become obsolete. While a word in a story titled “Spring on the New Road,” set in the countryside, surely named a winnower, I could not understand why it was turning. I pictured all the images I had seen of farmers tossing their harvest into the air to separate the chaff from the grain. Surely winnowers don’t turn? Then a colleague found a video of a winnower from the mid-twentieth century and, sure enough, a handle was turned on a wooden machine into which the farmers were pouring their grain. It was a lesson that farming in the 1930s was more mechanised that I had ever imagined. I even found myself exclaiming that YouTube is the translator’s new best friend. Alongside my pile of dictionaries, of course.

While translation requires getting words correct—and thus shares Ch’oe’s own obsession with the correct placing of words—it also asks for the recovery of time.

Some details made me throw up my hands in despair: How could I translate into English the Korean accents with which some characters pronounced their Japanese statements when faced with the authority of the train inspector?

Although the idea of a translation is to make new, it struck me that it also demands of the translator to become something of an antiquarian, especially when translating fiction almost a century old (not to mention the demands on those translators who cross centuries and centuries in their work). While translation requires getting words correct—and thus shares Ch’oe’s own obsession with the correct placing of words—it also asks for the recovery of time. In Ch’oe Myŏngik’s case, his stories detail scenes of a city that is inaccessible to the majority of those reading today. It is not simply that we cannot travel to Pyongyang for geopolitical reasons, but that Ch’oe’s Pyongyang was carpet-bombed with napalm and burnt to ashes during the Korean War. In one story he describes a young boy returning to his inner-city neighorhood to find his street unrecognizable: the blown-out windows of a few remaining buildings seem like “eye sockets missing their eyeballs.”

The detailing of a scene or an environment can feel like ethical care. As a translator, I did not feel I could skip over those difficult phrases, not when Ch’oe himself had clearly dedicated himself to describing his city and the lives lived there with such love and devotion. Perhaps that was how the relationship between myself as translator and this author played out—Ch’oe himself was already describing scenes with the detail of a photograph, trying to fix them against the travails of time and history. It does not feel accidental that his first story, “Walking in the Rain,” was set in a photographic studio where shadows and darkness always threatened to swallow up the objects into ink paintings. Translating his stories today—across a divide of time but also of the Cold War, the ideology of which always threatens to categorize the work of North Koreans into that of mere propaganda, denying them the respect of recognizing any truth—reminded me of all the details that are lost, but also all the pleasure of attempting to recover them, without indulging in the conceit that full recovery is ever possible, of course.

Janet Poole is chair and associate professor of East Asian studies and distinguished professor of the humanities at the University of Toronto. She is the translator of Patterns of the Heart and Other Stories by Ch’oe Myŏngik.