Translation Tuesday: “Mathematician’s Morning” by Kim So-yeon

February 18, 2020 | in Translations | by Megan Sungyoon

I have lived long forgotten such tears and such sighs

Acclaimed poet Kim So-yeon weaves abstraction into longing in this week’s Translation Tuesday. Kim’s speaker examines the life of a Mathematician haunted by memories of intimate sensations: an embrace, a heartbeat, the sound of an imagined breath. Fragments of the Mathematician’s embodied experience are juxtaposed with jarring moments of disembodied calculation. This confluence of abstraction and sensation becomes existential as the process of dying is compared to a triangle, a line, even absolute pi. Between these mathematical similes, Kim deftly illustrates a life confined by rational linearity, but which also pines for the tangible, the organic, and the non-linear.

Mathematician’s Morning

I will die for a moment
like a triangle

Look around the quiet shadows of still objects
A birdcage starts moving around around

The Invisibility of the Translator

June 22, 2017 | in Essays | by Stefan Kielbasiewicz

We were taught to imagine a sliding scale between “Author,” “Text” and “Reader."

For English literature students, it has almost become cliché to mention Roland Barthes’s 1964 essay, The Death of the Author, which argued for prioritizing the reader’s response in the meaning of a text rather than the supposed intentions of the author. As students, we were encouraged to focus more on texts themselves, their connection to other texts, discourses, and historical contexts. Whatever decisions the author may have consciously made were to be treated with heavy skepticism—authors no longer had a say in the interpretation of their own work as much as readers and critics. Like many other literary theorists, Barthes’s text arrived to me through translation, and whole branches of the degree I finished one year ago gave me the chance to study a variety of literature in translation.

I never seriously questioned how a translation can affect the meaning of a text until we were assigned to read the French theorist Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967), translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. I found it incomprehensible, along with many of my classmates. The one-hour lecture we had as a kind of introduction essentially came to, “Just keep reading the original text and you’ll understand it,” and I remember telling a friend at the time that the actual, original text was in French; perhaps the translation had something to do with it. Granted, even in French Derrida’s text is notoriously difficult to understand, but there could very well have been issues with Spivak’s translation, as one reviewer for the Los Angeles Review of Books suggested.

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Kim Haengsook

May 16, 2017 | in Translations | by Lei Kim

My nostrils were buried. I had breakfast in a world which didn’t smell at all.

In these two poems, the acclaimed South Korean poet Kim Haengsook focuses on the human face and its excess of meaning in a world where meaning itself is volatile and unstable. The face, always at the center of human relations, can signify the deepest feelings of happiness, loss and confusion, yet its silent vocabulary collides with the world of objects and our desire to communicate with other people. It is a pleasure to feature Haengsook’s thought-provoking work on Asymptote, translated by Lei Kim.

The Fall of a Face

The face that stayed with me, like a brother-in-arms, ran away like another brother-in-arms into the skin of the infinite, placid night.