The Korean poet Choi Jeongrye once wrote: “As you can tell from my poems, memory is both my deficiency and my mind’s ruin . . .” A powerful assertion of the poet’s battle against the intangible, Choi’s work speaks to the formless, the absent, the incoherent, and the hidden. We were proud to publish a selection of her vivid writings in our Winter 2023 issue, and in this following interview, Assistant Editor Matt Turner speaks to the translator, Mattho Mandersloot, about his process, his relationship with the poet, and the universality of these poems.
Matt Turner (MT): First, let me say how much I enjoyed these poems by Choi Jeongrye from the Winter 2023 issue; your translations conveyed the eye of the author very clearly. It was as if the poems, to paraphrase Zhuangzi, used their language in order to forget their language, and pointed towards something else—the particulars of the world maybe, or maybe the stray feelings that such particulars evoke. This gave me a sense, at least in part, of the author as a person.
One lingering question I had was about Choi Jeongrye’s place—and her poetry’s place—in the world around her, and in the literary community of South Korea. Could you say a little about that?
Mattho Mandersloot (MM): Thank you for your kind words! I think your comment about the poet shining through her work as a person is very accurate, and it is this aspect of her poetry that drew me in from the very start. The way she writes off the back of her own experiences and observations, while simultaneously touching on the world as a whole, really gets to me. Somehow, her work is both personal and universal at once.
As for her place in the literary community, I am fortunate enough to have met her several times while I lived in Korea. We had this weekly ‘poetry exchange’, where she would walk me through her version of the history of Korean poetry, and I would help her—as best I could—with some English poems that she was reading and translating at the time (something in which she took a great interest, given that her translation of James Tate’s prose poetry collection, Return to the City of White Donkeys, was published by Changbi in 2019). During these meetups, which soon turned into my favourite moment of the week, she did not hide her preference for poetic realism as she explained which Korean poets influenced which. She herself greatly took after Oh Kyu-won (1941–2007), who was known for his attempts to deconstruct language and look at ‘naked reality’. To me, Choi’s collection Kangaroo is kangaroo, I am I (2011, Moonji) always brings to mind Oh’s collection Tomatoes are red, no, sweet (1999, Moonji).
MT: Was that contextual understanding important for your translation of her work? As in, while you were translating, were you thinking about particulars of place, or of her immediate audience?
MM: Only insofar as I tried to let her poetry do its work. That is to say, by trying not to explain anything, but to convey her words in their purest form.
MT: When you came to her work, you were already a pretty accomplished translator—having translated, for one, Cho Nam-Joo’s docunovel, Kim Jiyoung: Born 1982, into Dutch. Did Choi’s work present a new set of standards or challenges, linguistically or otherwise?
MM: I’ve actually been working on Choi’s poetry from early on in my career. She gave a reading at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) in 2018, when I was completing my MA in translation there, and that left me hooked. Over the years, I kept refining my translations, most notably during a one-month residency at the National Centre for Writing in Norwich in 2021, where she also did a residency in 2018. It might be a romanticized idea, but walking in her footsteps somehow helped to land on the right translation.
MT: For those of us, like me, who are reading Choi Jeongrye without knowledge of the Korean language, can you say a little about how that language— especially in poetry—differs from English, linguistically but more importantly in its literature?
MM: On a linguistic level, I’d say that Korean poetry can be beautifully concise (and for a translator, sometimes excruciatingly so). There are no articles, be it definite or indefinite, and it is often unnecessary to use pronouns, since a grammatical sentence can do without an explicit subject if it can be inferred from context. The obvious challenge for the translator, then, is to maintain a sense of brevity. If you look at Choi’s original poems, you’ll find many lines consisting of only two words. Sometimes the process feels like an attempt to keep at bay all these ‘extra’ words that we need to construct a grammatical English sentence; a first draft will often include them, after which point I keep trimming until I’ve reached the very core of a line. That way, I try to make sure the translation is equally compelling as the Korean.
MT: The five poems included in the Winter 2023 issue all had—at least for me—a gritty, urban feeling. It wasn’t just the mentions of apartment blocks and confined spaces, but something about the tone. Yet there was also something of the fantastical about them, something even dreamlike.
MM: I think you definitely are getting that right. The first poem, “1 mg of Anesthetic”, quite literally portrays a dream she had while undergoing treatment for a rare blood disease—which ultimately led to her untimely death in 2021. But in the other poems, too, there is a sense of trance or reverie. It’s almost as if this urban feeling that you mentioned, something palpable and, literally, concrete, is infused with something hardly tangible. Interestingly, this intangible quality mostly stems from nature: the rabbits in “No Rabbits Though”, the goats in “Syllogisms”, the birds in “To Each Their Own Way”, and the river in “Particle Staccato”. I feel like her poems are firmly rooted in reality, even as they are slowly carrying the reader away to this dreamlike sphere.
Mattho Mandersloot is a literary translator working from Korean into English and Dutch. A former taekwondo athlete, he earned a BA in classics from King’s College London, an MA in translation from the School of Oriental and African Studies and an MSt in Korean studies from Oxford. Among others, he has translated bestselling authors Cho Nam-joo and Sang Young Park. He has led several poetry translation workshops at the Poetry Translation Centre in London, and in 2020, he was awarded The Korea Times’ 51st Modern Korean Literature Translation Award for poetry.
Matt Turner is an assistant editor (poetry) at Asymptote.
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