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…