Though the pandemic that serves as the catalyzing disaster in Choi Jin-young’s To the Warm Horizon seems immediate to our times, the novel was actually published in 2017—indicating towards the larger, lasting ideas and occupations alive beneath the tide of current events. Indeed, as Choi’s sensitive, dreamy narrative unfolds, the uncanny nature of its topicality is overshadowed by its larger, human concerns of foreignness, settlement, and the way we meet one another. In the following interview, transcribed from a live Q&A hosted by Asymptote Book Club Manager Alexandra Irimia, Soje shares their thoughts on translating the unique novel, and the many invisible challenges of translating Korean into English.
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Alexandra Irimia (AI): From Italian opera and sound of the ocean, to radio static and the rain, To the Warm Horizon shapes a unique soundscape. The narrative relies a lot on its sensorial, synesthetic cues which usually demand a lot of skill and craft to be put into words and conveyed convincingly. Besides, as a reader, I felt a lot of intentionality in the author’s use of silence. Did you feel in this novel—or in the rest of your body of work—that there was any challenge particular to translating the musicality of the prose from the Korean into English?
Soje: What a beautiful question! Virtually every translator of Korean literature has commented on this at some point, but repetition is a big deal in Korean literature. In prose, it becomes more noticeable because we, as readers, expect that kind of musicality more from poetry. One of the main stylistic things I noticed was the way Choi Jin-young breaks her sentences in staccato declarations, especially towards the beginning of the book where Dori is narrating her past life in Korea and journey to Russia. And because the fragmented nature of these sentences reflects the character’s state of mind, I tried to replicate every single beat in my first draft. But upon rereading and revising, I found that these dramatic pauses felt more gimmicky in the English than in the Korean, so I had to find a balance between the rhythm of the Korean and what the English language wanted me to do. My reasoning for this partly boils to the fact that the word count expands about 1.5 times from Korean to English, so the rhythm will absolutely change in translation unless details are cut.
There are seven speech levels in Korean, mainly indicated by the verb conjugation which comes at the end of the sentence. Korean novels usually employ the 해라체 (haerache), which means that every declarative sentence ends in the same syllable, 다 (da). So there’s almost this concealed rhyme, and I used to be so fixated on it that many of my sentences in English tended to parallel in structure. Thankfully, my excellent editors at Honford Star and translators such as Emily Yae Won and Anton Hur taught me to vary my sentence structures—something that I’m still honing as an early career translator.
AI: You manage to convey into English an intuition of lyricism that I often associate with East Asian poetry, and which I can imagine is deeply embedded in the original text. Is this lyricism something that flows naturally in your translation—an effortless emanation from the original text—or something that requires a deliberate attempt to preserve in the English version?
Soje: Wow, effortless emanation? I think that’s every translator’s wish! I probably struggled with this more because Horizon happens to be my first full length translation—the two poetry collections that I translated just happened to come out earlier. In the three years that it took to get this published, I think I did three or four major revisions, each time returning to the text with the knowledge I gained from working on the poetry projects. So maybe there’s some relevance there.
As for the ties to the massive category of East Asian poetry, I haven’t really thought about that before. I guess pre-modern Korean visual art emphasizes the beauty of blank space; for an example, just run an internet search for “Korean moon jars.” They’re these very round, very large white porcelain jars that are unadorned by color or texture, meant to resemble a full moon. In paintings also, blank space is valued and not considered unpainted or empty. The void is meant to fill the work of art, which is contrary to how Western art is conceptualized.
I’m not an art historian by any means, but I can understand how that kind of artistic value can be found in Choi Jin-young’s prose as well. She’s very contemporary, so I’m hesitant to make this connection, but she does utilize silence as a contemplative space for the reader. She’s said in a couple of interviews that she invites fan interpretations and adaptations, which is why she doesn’t spell out why Jina has red hair, or how many days they were on the road—all these things are up to interpretation. I think that’s a unique quality to her work.
AI: Many times, throughout the novel, the reader is confronted with the question of foreignness: the characters travel in a foreign country, surrounded by groups of refugees talking other languages and unfamiliar writing. There is also a sense of uncanniness insofar as they apprehend the familiar in new and not always pleasant ways. I’m thinking of the episode in which Gina looks at her father and feels estranged from him, because of his despicable acts; all these lead to a reconfiguration of the way in which people perceive distances and proximities, which may not be only temporal or geographical but also affective: emotional intimacy or alienation. And of course, translation is itself a matter of either canceling or emphasizing identity and difference. How do you perceive this foreignness, as a translator? How do you deal with this dynamic tension between familiarity and foreignness?
Soje: That’s a really big question. As a translator of Korean literature into English, I think there are more cultural barriers than what one has to confront when translating from French, Spanish, or other languages understood to be “major” in a global context. So I’m excited to carry over the unfamiliar but, at the same time, you don’t want to alienate your readers in a commercial novel. An example that comes to mind is a scene in the beginning where Jina tries to talk to Dori in English. I did consciously consider how to foreignize the English to English readers just as they’re foreign yet recognizable to Korean readers. Linguistic imperialism means that most people in Korea can understand the limited English that Jina speaks. I thought that if I spell the words out phonetically, the English readers will, of course, take a moment to process and eventually see their language in a new way. And as you noted in your review, it does have a comedic effect, just as it does in the Korean. I was happy that you picked up on that.
AI: I had to read that fragment aloud to make sense of it, which, when read on the page, did not correspond to any words I knew! So I had to actually listen to it to understand what it said.
Soje: I was hoping people would do that!
AI: It is also a book that moves at a very fast pace and switches from one mood to another: from accounts of unspeakable violence to tenderness, from calm contemplation to joy, guilt, or apathy. I’m curious if this emotional complexity has influenced your translation process in any way.
Soje: I always try to meet the characters where they’re at emotionally, so there was definitely a kind of whiplash involved with this one. And since the novel has multiple first-person narrators, I feel like I experienced a fraction of what actors go through.
AI: I really like the comparison of translation to acting—it’s this contagiousness of affects sparked by the original text. I noticed there is also a distinct red thread of feminist, queer, and anti-patriarchal sensibility in your translation portfolio, including Lee Hyemi’s Unexpected Vanilla and Lee Soho’s collection of poems Catcalling. How would you situate To the Warm Horizon in the context of this literary corpus and in the wider context of your preoccupation for, and engagement with these themes?
Soje: I’m really intentional about the literary projects that I choose, which isn’t to suggest that this field is an easy one to survive in. To be honest, I translate and edit all sorts of stuff to supplement my income. But when it comes to literature, I translate books that I really want to talk about with my friends. As a Korean American who largely grew up in the US, I wasn’t without my own prejudices about Korea before reading contemporary Korean literature and moving to Seoul myself. So I hope that the books that I translate collectively present a tapestry of Koreanness that challenges and upends orientalist views of the country.
As for the specific themes that you mentioned, like queer/feminist works, those are issues that are very pressing in the world we live in, and they’re also huge topics in Korean society and literature, to the point where they’ve been super mainstream—like top ten bestsellers—for almost ten years now. Of course, there’s regressive bullshit happening on the other side, but the discourse moves really quickly. I can say that since 2017, when the Korean version of To the Warm Horizon first came out—which happened to be the year that I moved to Korea—the literary landscape has changed drastically. That’s been a really exciting thing to witness firsthand and try to capture in my work.
AI: I asked this because it seems to me that Choi Jin-young herself shares the same preoccupation and engagement in her work. From your professional profiles and the projects you both are and have been engaged in, it seems like a perfect match in vision and tone—which is not always the case between an author and a translator. Could you perhaps tell us a little bit about your encounter, how did you connect and decided to work together?
Soje: I’m glad you feel that it’s a good match. By the time I moved to Korea, I was following a queer literary archive account called Rainbow Bookmark. They posted about a new queer, apocalyptic novel coming out—and I literally ran to the bookstore, bought it, and started reading immediately. When I got to the part where Dori gifts Jina lipstick, I thought: “Oh, I’ve never seen this in an apocalypse novel or movie! I hope the ending is good.” And started working on it.
As for Choi Jin-young and me, we’ve only met twice in person; once was for the Words Without Borders interview in 2018, and the other time was for the book launch last month. I didn’t email her much either because I didn’t have questions about specific passages. Her prose is very simple and, compared to the poetry that I’ve been translating, extremely clear in meaning.
AI: Is there anything in particular that this book has taught you about the craft and/or the trade of translation? Something you haven’t previously encountered and that you feel has enriched your experience?
Soje: I write and translate poetry, but I don’t write fiction because I’m unable to come up with plot. The cool thing about translation is that it allows me to write fiction without having to plot, which is amazing! I learned a lot about fiction from going through the actual motions of writing a novel. It’s not my work, but it is my work—that kind of uncanniness is thrilling.
AI: Do you plan on doing more prose projects in the future?
Soje: Yes, I’m working on a novel called From Sisun Onward by Serang Chung. It continues in the vein of feminism, but I appreciate that she’s also an environmentalist. She expresses many ecologist concerns, including the environmental impacts of tourism in Hawai’i. Serang Chung also writes about indigenous sovereignty, which I hadn’t really seen Korean writers discuss, so I’m very excited about that project as well.
AI: In the light of the experience you’ve acquired these past years—a question that may perhaps be useful for the aspiring translators out there: if you were to go back in time to the very beginning of this project, what do you wish you would have known then that you know now?
Soje: Thank you for phrasing the question like this because I’d rather tackle the improbable task of time travel than try to give out universal advice. I have mainly practical things to say to my past self, like: It’s a big risk to translate an entire novel on spec. There’s a reason why more experienced translators warn against it. There’s a lot of unpaid labor in the line of work, so it’s best not to invite the unpaid labor yourself. There are so many people eager to exploit you, my god.
Second, translating an entire novel means that you’re physically typing as much as the author did between the first draft and the final version. It’s going to take a toll on your wrists, your shoulders, your back, every part of your body. I almost thought that I would never do another novel again because I got carpal tunnel. But then I read From Sisun Onward, the book that I’m translating right now, and I just couldn’t let go; I tried to put it down and wait for someone else to translate it but, in the end, I just couldn’t, so the best I can do is just to be mindful of how much I try to translate per day.
Lastly, I want to tell myself sort of what I said about rhythm earlier: You can’t carry over everything, no matter how much you want or need to. I’d say, tap into the essence of each sentence and let it guide you. If that sounds too woo-woo for you, don’t worry—you’ll figure it out in the next-next draft.
Soje is the translator of Lee Hyemi’s Unexpected Vanilla (Tilted Axis Press, 2020), Choi Jin-young’s To the Warm Horizon (Honford Star, 2021), and Lee Soho’s Catcalling (Open Letter Books, 2021). They also make chogwa, a quarterly e-zine featuring one Korean poem and multiple English translations.
Alexandra Irimia is a PhD student at Western University in Canada, with degrees in comparative literature, French studies, and political science. She has published articles and reviews in academic journals such as Ekphrasis, MuseMedusa, Euresis and Studia Politica, while also contributing chapters to edited volumes including Contact Zones (Leuven UP, 2021), The Rhetoric of Topics and Forms (De Gruyter, 2021), Socializing Art Museums (De Gruyter, 2020), Working through the Figure (Bucharest UP, 2019), Usages de la figure, régimes de figuration (Bucharest UP, 2017).
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