Posts filed under 'Korean poetry'

Weaving the Intangible into the Concrete: An Interview with Mattho Mandersloot

March 27, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Matt Turner

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.

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).  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems from the Middle Korean

September 6, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Seenoo Kim

I might have lived by the seashore, / Eating seaweed, eating oysters

What might the music of the late Goryeo sing of? This Translation Tuesday, we are transported to more than half a millennia back, as Seenoo Kim translates two songs from the Middle Korean that reflect the vicissitudes of exterior and interior landscapes. Representing a tradition of folk poetry independent of the Chinese-influenced elite literature, these poems also reflect the literary possibilities of writing in the hangul script. In Kim’s translation, these meditative and often melancholic poems exude a lyricism that resonates with the contemporary ear. 

Dong dong¹

            The First Month²

The stream-waters
How lovingly they freeze and melt³
Yet I—born in the middle of the world
Walk all alone.

            The Second Month

Under the full moon
Like the lanterns lit on high⁴
Your face is one
That shines on everyone.

            The Third Month

All blossoming
Full spring’s rhododendrons⁵
You were born to be
The envy of others.

            The Fourth Month

They didn’t forget the spring
The nightingales are coming back
Not my mister; whose fault is it
He’s forgotten the old me?

            The Fifth Month

On the fifth day
The morning herbs of Dano day⁶
I’ll give them to you
So you can live for a thousand years. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Cho Ji Hoon

June 21, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Sekyo Nam Haines

but what shall I do with / my long sighs that turn my lips blue

Part of the Green Deer school of poetry that emerged in the aftermath of Japanese rule, the celebrated South Korean poet Cho Ji Hoon was one of the most distinguished poets of modern Korea. This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you two of Cho’s poems translated by Sekyo Nam Haines that evoke the complex folds of longing and distance through their meditations on the simplicity of a door or a road. 

Stone Door

There is a stone door that will open at the brush of your fingertips, without a sound.
Many people are anxious about it, but since the door has been shut, within the stone walls, the green moss grows on the shelves of twelve stair cases.
Until the day you return, I keep a stick of candlelight that will never burn out.
As long as your longed face reflects faintly in the dim light, even if a thousand years
pass, my sad soul will not close my eyes. 

What are those few dewdrops that always linger on my long lashes?
Should I dry my tears with the blue linen robe you left behind?

My two cheeks still look peach colored as before, but what shall I do with
my long sighs that turn my lips blue?  READ MORE…

Poets with Poets on Poetry: Stine An, Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, and E.J. Koh in Dialogue

March 23, 2022  |  in Interviews, Translator's Profile  |  by Darren Huang

I feel like I am at that seam between the English and Korean, looking at both languages simultaneously.

In the 2000s and 2010s, the great Korean-American poet and translator Don Mee Choi introduced Korean feminist poet Kim Hyesoon to the English-speaking world with a critically acclaimed selection, including Mommy Must Be A Fountain of Feathers (2008), All the Garbage of the World, Unite! (2012), and Autobiography of Death (2019). Choi’s groundbreaking work has inspired the flourishing of English translations of Korean poetry, and a new generation of Korean-American poet-translators, including Stine An, Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, and E.J. Koh, have built on this foundation by creating translations by Kim Hyesoon’s successors. Among their notable accomplishments include the surreal terrains of Yi Won—published in Cancio-Bello and Koh’s translation of The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (2021)—and the mournful yet witty poems of Yoo Heekyung.

In late February, I had the privilege of speaking with these three exciting new Korean-American voices in the worlds of both poetry and literary translation, where in they radiated love for the translation process, the poets whose work they have been translating, and their mentors. One could feel the warmth in the sisterly connections they recognized between each other. For Asymptote’s inaugural Poets with Poets on Poetry Feature, in which we gather poet-translators from across the world for dialogues about their work, I talked with Stine, Marci, and E.J. about the relationship between their poetry practices and translation, the idea of “rewilding” a translated piece, and their transforming relationships to the Korean language.

Darren Huang (DH): All three of you were initially trained in poetry. Can you talk about your journeys into translation?

Stine An (SA): I was actually interested in getting into translation when I was in undergrad and taking Korean language classes; I thought that translation could be a way to “give back to the motherland,” but I was told by my mentors that you couldn’t have a career in translation. Sawako Nakayasu—a poet, artist, performer, and translator—really encouraged me to explore translation as a way to enrich my own poetry practice. I had the chance to take an amazing translation workshop with her in my final year in the MFA program, in which we were getting the traditional literary translation canon while also learning about experimental translation practices—such as translation as an anti-neocolonial mode and as a way of queering language.

But my intention for going into translation this time around was to have a different relationship to the Korean language. I grew up in a large Korean-American enclave in Atlanta, and for me, Korean language has always been tied to an ethno-nationalist identity. I wanted a more personal relationship to the Korean language as a poet.

DH: E.J., do you want to talk a bit about how you came into translation? I also know this isn’t your first text of translation because your memoir was also an act of translation of your mother’s letters.

E.J. Koh (EK): Translation, to me, feels like a true beginning. I was in a program in New York, sitting in a poetry workshop with a very bad attitude, and my teacher said if you want to write good poetry, write poetry; if you want to write great poetry, translate. That day, I added literary translation to my work.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Five Poems by Jeong Ho-seung

November 16, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Brother Anthony

For the first time in my life / I washed my eyes clean with bird droppings.

Arguably South Korea’s most well-loved poet, we are thrilled to feature the award-winning Jeong Ho-seung and Brother Anthony’s translation of his poems in this week’s Translation Tuesday. All five poems, gathered from the poet’s 2020 collection Dangsineul chajaseo (Seeking You), move quite literally between the bird’s-eye view and the human’s-eye view—depicting a speaker who is learning to look at the world through a less anthropocentric, more hybrid and expansive set of eyes. Jeong’s poems show the reader what poetry can achieve through this expanded view of the world: his diction is at once sparse and emotive, his vision at once child-like and invested with wisdom. A skilful blend of the humorous and the philosophical, these poems invite us to shed our human ego and behold the landscape in ways that can centre not us but the world. 

Bird Droppings 1

Bird droppings got into my eyes.
For the first time in my life
I washed my eyes clean with bird droppings.
It stopped me seeing the human landscape
that I finally wanted to see
but did not need to see.
Thank you.

Bird Droppings 2

When I see bird droppings on the ground
as I walk along,
it rather makes me feel relieved.
Since among human paths there’s a beautiful path
where birds leave their droppings,
by walking along that path
today once again I become a beautiful human being. READ MORE…

Idle or Charged: An Interview with Soeun Seo and Jake Levine

February 24, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Zach Savich

. . . if you allow yourself to be moved, a translated poem can grasp and bewitch you.

Kim Min Jeong’s Beautiful and Useless, translated by Soeun Seo and Jake Levine, was recently released in the US as part of Black Ocean’s Moon Country Korean Poetry Series. The title poem ends with a rocky thud: “I guess love is / when we put our heads together / to figure out how to use this rock.” These lines highlight some key dynamics in this thrillingly wide-ranging collection. There’s the shrugging boldness of “I guess love is”; the way “this rock” reverberates both to the poem’s main subject—a stone that is variously like “two crab legs emptied of meat,” a “snowman’s torso,” an egg, a phallic emblem of “dull manliness”—as well as to the shared stone of two skulls coming together. It’s also a fitting metaphor for the translators’ conversational methods. As Seo and Levine discuss in this interview, this edition of Beautiful and Useless emerged from a lively process reflective of the poems’ own flights among smells and literature and “banal birdsong,” comedy and ambient dialogue.

In a recent interview with the translators, Kim Min Jeong described contemporary Korean poetry as “fragments fragmenting and fragmenting and fragmenting” away from set ideas of order, so that “all the stars in space shine every which way.” Beautiful and Useless is similarly resplendent.Its translators—recent recipients, with Hedgie Choi, of the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize and the National Translation Award for their co-translation of Kim Yideum’s Hysteria (Action Books, 2019)—emailed with me about resisting transactional metaphors for translation, the value of serious play, and idiom and attitude in Kim Min Jeong’s poetry.

Zach Savich (ZS): I know your process can include a lot of joking around. How did that playfulness contribute to this project?

Soeun Seo (SS): In an essay in Korean Literature Now, Kim Hyesoon describes Kim Min Jeong’s language as “the language of young girls prattling at the back of a bus, the language of married women gathered in a yard, all worked up to slander someone.” I think chatter, idle or charged, is a key part of KMJ’s poetry. That’s what makes her poems so organic, inviting, warm, intimate, fun. As Kim Hyesoon writes in the same essay, “Kim Min Jeong’s poetry stands at the paradoxical point where the poetic attitude of being unself-conscious about the genre of poetry becomes what is poetic instead.” Translating with Jake feels a lot like shooting shit and chilling. When we catch up or chat, we’re cracking jokes constantly, and when we get to work, we don’t exactly switch gears. We bring our playful attitude straight into work, which is especially easy with Kim Min Jeong’s poems, and ideas we first present as jokes work their way into the poem.

This happened for one of my favorite poems in the book, “Mass Shipment of Spring Greens.” We were dealing with the pun on 냉 naeng, a homonym for shepherd’s purse—a common ingredient for Korean food—and vaginal discharge. There was no way we were going to make this work in English. It was so clear that we would have to give up a direct way of translating this pun, so, already having given up on it, I jokingly said “pussyjuice.” Jake fucking loved it. It was very funny. But after discussing a few more non-viable options, “pussyjuice” seemed much more so. Considering shepherd’s purse, mugwort, wormwood are real names for edible plants, “pussyjuice” is a believable plant name. Like the poem says, “If you say it, you name it.” So we made up a plant name. We chose to include the Korean spelling and the definition of shepherd’s purse to make it clear what the pun is in Korean, but I think having the word “pussyjuice” in there really brings the original poem’s casual/sexual tension to life.

Jake Levine (JL): The decision to include the Hangeul 냉 in the poem and the idea to go with the word “pussyjuice” were magical moments. I like Ricoeur’s idea of thinking about translation as an invitation to invite the foreign into your house, and we ended up with “pussyjuice” for the English but we also invited the Hangeul, 냉, into the English poem (I think Soeun and I literally spent like ten hours working out this pun—between text messages, and chatting, and going over and over it to feel it out). Process in translation is often boiled down into the language of transaction and economy, but I think it is more like an ecology. We need space and time and laughs and cries and lots of feelings. This includes a lot of unconscious activity. Even when we’re talking and hanging and doing things that seem to have no relationship to translating poems, we are translating poems. READ MORE…

Something Like Delight: An Interview with So J. Lee

August 5, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Timmer Harvey

The lines I love most in Korean are often the hardest to translate into English. Frankly, it’s a ridiculous language pairing.

For So J. Lee, 2020 has been a year of growth. Just two years after their first translations were published, the Seoul-based writer and translator became Modern Poetry in Translation’s current Writer-in-Residence, recently released the fourth issue of chogwa (their quarterly e-zine showcasing multiple translations of a single poem), and will publish their full-length translation of Lee Hyemi’s Unexpected Vanilla next month, followed by Choi Jin-young’s To the Warm Horizon and Lee Soho’s Catcalling in 2021.

For an emerging translator working in the midst of a global pandemic, Lee’s list of publications is undeniably impressive. But one of the many things that 2020 seems intent on teaching us is that growth can no longer be measured solely in terms of productivity and output. In correspondence and conversation, it’s clear that So J. Lee has already embraced a new kind of metric, acknowledging growing pains and citing introspections, laughter, and everyday pleasures as equally significant indicators of their progression. This was especially evident when I contacted Lee in June, keen to learn more about their forthcoming books, zine, bilingual events, and drag performance. I wanted to begin our interview with a discussion around the imminent publication of Unexpected Vanilla, but instead, Lee asked if we could start the conversation with an unusual announcement . . .

—Sarah Timmer Harvey, July 2020

So J. Lee (SJL): Can I start this interview by announcing my hibernation this winter?

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): Of course! Can I ask why you intend to hibernate?

SJL: When Kim Tae-ri was asked about her plans after shooting a film and a TV series back-to-back in 2018, she said, “I plan to enter hibernation. I grew ten cm over the winter break prior starting high school. Let’s see what happens this time.” I love her casual re-articulation of rest as an opportunity for growth. I mean, rest is also rest. I don’t want to glamorize busyness, in the slim chance anyone sees me as a glamorous being. My vibe is more Pizza Rat anyway.

STH: Apart from the obvious pressures facing the world at the moment, what has kept you from resting over the past few months?

SJL: Grief. Ineffable grief and rage. Somehow we have to rest and allow for joy amidst it all. I’m still practicing. 

I’m animated by my three forthcoming books, Lee Hyemi’s Unexpected Vanilla, Choi Jin-young’s To the Warm Horizon (Honford Star, 2021), and Lee Soho’s Catcalling (Open Letter Books, 2021), all of which I reflect on in my recent essay, “Not Exactly a Sister.” I translate women writers who write about women for women, so the word Unni became an organic through-line for introducing their works all at once.

As Modern Poetry in Translation’s Writer-in-Residence, I’m also hosting a virtual workshop on Lee Jenny’s concrete poem “Space Boy Wearing a Skirt.” After that will be my interview with Lee Soho and the fifth issue of chogwa!

STH: Wow, you have been busy! Can we talk about your translation of Lee Hyemi’s Unexpected Vanilla, which is set to be published by Tilted Axis next month?  In 2019, Asymptote published several poems from the collection, including my favourite, “Erasable Seeds.” The poem describes a connection between two people as “a newly thickening forest” grown from “small seeds.” I think about that poem a lot. Like most of Lee Hyemi’s work, it is incredibly sensual and also reminds me of that moment when you first read a poem or line in someone’s poetry or fiction that’s so striking, you know that you just have to translate it. Do you remember which line of Unexpected Vanilla did that for you?

SJL: I was assigned in a translation workshop to translate a poet I’d never read before, and I wanted to try someone younger than Heo Su-gyeong, whose poems I’d tried translating as an undergrad. Then a title caught my eye: Unexpected Vanilla. I read the poem “Femdom” in the final section and realized that this young Korean woman was writing surrealistically about kink! I wanted to tell all my friends about it, which remains my biggest motivation to translate.

I’ve written about the Unni line in “Cupboard with Strawberry Jam” so many times already, but it’s simply iconic. Plus, Lee Hyemi wrote a variation of that line in my copy of the book: “We must be one person, cunningly divergent. Sharing an intimate language.” I’ll always remember the way she pulled out a stamp shaped like a fish and blended multiple colors before pressing it to the page. READ MORE…