Poetry
Kim Gyeongmee
KIM Gyeongmee (poet, essayist, script writer,South Korea) began her literary career by winning the first prize for poetry from JoongAng Daily Newspaper. She has published three books of poems: Can't I Continue Writing the Suspended Letter Again (1989), For the Selfish Sorrows (1995), and Shh, My concubine is (2001), as well as two books of photo essays, The Sea Comes to Me (2004), and The Lastborn (2006). She won the Nojak Literary Award in 2005 and the Best Radio Writer Award from the Korean TV & Radio Writers Association in 2007.
Sukhee Ryu is a graduate of Harvard University and is currently a student at Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Translating Kim Gyeongmee
Sukee Ryu
Although the sentiments that mark Kim Gyeongmee’s poems--loneliness, self-hate, regret, shame, sorrow, nihilism—are neither unique nor rare in poetic imagination, Kim has grafted them onto an esthetics of resignation to create the colors peculiar to her own literary landscape. In her poems, this resignation dulls the painful thoughts of hate and regret, assuages loneliness and sorrow-- if only in the most nihilist way--and ultimately affirms the poet’s existence as a possessor of such knowledge.
My work as a translator of her poems has focused, first and foremost, on accurately conveying that sense of resignation, and the ego hidden behind it. Such an assertion of self through abnegation no longer remains a symbolic gesture but rises to the surface of everyday life in “I am the Second.” In the figure of a “kept woman” who exists but doesn’t exist (for she is kept hidden), who is powerless (in terms of her financial dependence on men) but powerful (in terms of what she can make men do using her feminine wiles), who is innocent (insofar as she willfully flouts “adult” considerations of responsibility, social status, etc. to remain a partner in the forbidden love story) but is corrupt (insofar as sex is seen as corrupt and she can never silence the echoes of prostitution accompanying her love), Kim finds a physical embodiment of her poetic self. She identifies herself as the “Second” and the “self.” Here, too, is a possessor of a “superior” understanding of life and existence, although the source of that understanding stems from her identification with “the son of a concubine,” “the periphery,” “inappropriate,” “always the last.” In fact, it is by resigning herself to that role that she becomes privy to heartbreaking honesty and the “beauty of truth,” even some inner workings of “Esoteric Buddhism.” And she carries out a mudra of raising her pinkie—the secret sign of the ego resurrected through its resignation to, and understanding of, itself as a nonentity in the eyes of the world.
Needless to say, expressions that require a certain amount of cultural knowledge are the most difficult to translate. “Anchovy excrement” is an accurate translation of the original. However, the feeling it conveys is totally off the mark. Here, the poet is making a reference to a monotonous kitchen work performed by Korean housewives—sitting with a basket of dried anchovies, they would separate the head and what’s literally called “the excrement,” which makes broth bitter, from the body which is used to make the broth (in Korea, anchovy is used as often as beef or chicken to make soup stock). The feeling one gets from such a line is one of monotony, drudgery, even unpleasantness but nothing as viscerally repugnant as “excrement.” I substituted “excrement” with “black inside,” choosing to stay closer to the intent by softening the expression. In “Dust,” I encountered a similar problem. Consider the following translated by the original translator.
I go to the housewarming party to the
house on the hill which was built with the dust
with the detergent dust which I bought in the shop,
I eat and drink the banquet dust, and sing a song in the order of the dust.
It is not a bad translation and is faithful to the original. The rhythm of the sentence is pretty ordinary, and a translator faithful to the language of the original might have opted for the above. The problem is that the sadness, the sense of suffocation—I would even argue, the sense of devastation—which is conveyed by the content of the original cannot be fully translated into the target language without the deeper understanding of the habits particular to that culture. Housewarming parties are very common in Korea since people in the cities move quite often (with it comes the knowledge that such moves may be temporary and that the homes, therefore, are not real homes), and each time, you are expected to invite your co-workers and friends who come bearing the obligatory gift of laundry detergents and host a dinner and a rowdy drinking party where everyone sits around a table full of home-cooked food, and as alcohol levels rise, the party often degenerates into what resembles a karaoke night. Everyone in Korea is familiar with such a housewarming party, the routine, the sameness of it, as well as the ambience of fake mirth created in such a setting. However, the feeling of suffocation and resultant sadness, reinforced by the repetitive use of “dust,” is may not be so obvious to non-Koreans. My decision was to vary the rhythm of the sentence to give it that feeling of sadness.
to the house made of dust upon that hill
I go with boxes and boxes of white detergent dust, and to my heart’s content
I drink, and eat a table full of dust and sing taking turns with dust
The escalation of the long clause “to the house made of dust upon that hill” is broken in the next line with a short declarative “I go.” The plummeting effect here is intended to create a feeling of sadness while the next phrase “with boxes and boxes of white detergent dust” sustains that dropped feeling. “To my heart’s content” attempts to replicate the escalating rhythm of the preceding line, and “I drink” once again has a plummeting effect, and all together, they create a repetitive rhythm of a sustained rise and sharp fall without resolution, designed to suffocate and frustrate the readers. Or at least, this is what I intended.
We all bemoan the fact that poetry cannot be translated fully. What’s important is what replaces what gets lost in translation. Deciding how to fill the gap that is left by untranslatable poetry is the translator’s job.
I am the Second * Korean original
I am going to think, I am their Second
Whomever I meet
Whether they are my parents, my husband, my friends or
Those who ask me out to a drive through the spring day or
simply anyone
What I mean is I make a resolution, I am their Second
No, not the Second
like the motel parking lots along the river **
like the secret skin the color of milk
No, just a Second as it means in English
Not the first but the second, purely and mathematically
Not this time, but always the next
Always what comes later, like Hong Gil-dong ***, the son of a concubine,
like the periphery, inappropriate,
and therefore the very last
So then I wonder if you know the Law of Seconds
Don’t ever let go of your breath even if life squeezes your neck like the first wife
Don’t beg the day to spend the night with you
Don’t believe in the survival of the fittest for only in the Second
honesty, at last, becomes heartbreaking
The beauty of truth, the acetabulum of nostalgia, the detonator of life
naturally exist there, there especially
So do often lift your pinkie on the sly
and smile quietly as in Esoteric Buddhism
I am this, this of the world
Dust Korean original
Can I fathom the world of such depth
On the smooth window pane, daffodils bloom and then zebras dash
In the empty corner, black cats in their last month of pregnancy
Breed mulky little ones and then play, unraveling balls of yarn
Everyday that stunning genesis seeped in gray,
Today I try reading it out loud slowly
In the morning at the vanity I powder and paint my face with dust
I take dust out of my wallet and, how expensive, I pay for things like coffee or watermelons and will you give dust a ride on your way back?
I ask for a job on behalf of dust or to the house made of dust upon that hill
I go with boxes and boxes of white detergent dust and to my heart’s content
I drink and eat a table full of dust and sing taking turns with dust
At the news of his death, that dust who can’t be dead, I change into black dust
I listen to the honking of dust stuck in traffic and then return
To make a child dust with clouds of dust on the table or
Husband dust loves another dust, my friend dust calls and sheds wet dust and
The dust that is I writes dust called poetry
The genesis that makes something fall and settle endlessly upon the entire world
That genesis of something, will I be able to read it to the end?