My mother didn’t say more on the subject. The following day, she returned from the neighborhood library with a Korean translation of the book. But her version of Don Quixote was different from mine: where my copy was stuffed with small print squeezed onto thin pages, her two-hundred-page copy was full of illustrations and wide spaces between the lines. In these spaces, our respective conceptions of the book’s protagonist would crumble and clash, differently colored, as they were, by the brutal and beautiful art of translation.
I have inherited many things from my mother—the curve of my fingernails, my neuroses, the smile in my eyes—but the older I get, the more I realize that we live in distant worlds. You can observe this distance in our linguistic intimacies, for one thing. My mother does not know Spanish, and it is likely she never will. Meanwhile, I have devoted the past ten years of my intellectual formation to linguistic worlds far from our shared Korea; I have studied—am studying—in countries like the United States and England, in classrooms and seminars that my mother will never know due to reasons of distance or a lack of will. Perhaps this barrier explains a lingering doubt of mine, one related to my lack of faith: Is this Spanish even mine? I do not know, to tell you the truth. I can write these words and understand the mundane happenings of daily life, but I have never said te quiero—I love you—in Spanish and felt these words resonate inside me. I learned to say lo siento—I’m sorry—in a classroom. I can claim never to have hurt another person in Spanish, and I think the ultimate mark of mastering a language is being able to touch, with words, the heart of someone you love.
But the truth is that this process isn’t easy. I know this because I inherited it. My mother learned English when she was twenty years old from Mormon missionaries stationed in her hometown in southern Korea. At one point in her life, a part that I never witnessed, her job was to teach this English to kindergarteners. Nearly thirty years later, she spends her days in front of her work computer in Seoul with her screen divided down the middle, an online translator on her left side and an email, written in English, on her right. The setup is a tell-tale sign of a person who simultaneously knows and doesn’t know a language, or rather trusts it and doesn’t trust it at the same time. The image is a familiar one to me: I am looking at it right now as I write this essay.
What do you think of Don Quixote? I asked my mother one night, after dinner.
I don’t understand why you like this knight so much, she replied. He is crazy—truly crazy. And all he does is go around hurting other people.
Don’t you find it brave, the simple act of leaving home in pursuit of adventure? I pushed on. And the ability to believe in your own illusions until they become reality?
But I don’t see that in my book, my mother said. What I see is an egotistical protagonist, to be honest.
According to the Cervantes Institute, there are translations of Don Quixote available in more than 140 languages and linguistic varieties. I would imagine that each one, by nature of being a translation, is distinct not only from Cervantes’s original but from the other translations as well.
Many translators and linguists maintain that there are no equivalents between words from different languages. If we accept this premise, each translation would be an act of invention: a fresh genesis achieved with materials that already exist, like constructing a house with recycled materials or combining infinite possibilities to create a child. These possibilities mingle and cross paths like neighbors living in the same city; they meet as lovers and friends, or, in an ideal world, as equals. This image of camaraderie is one that a professor of mine, Matthew Reynolds, uses in a text about the concept of borders in literature. Languages are not distinct entities between which translation can jump, he writes. They do not have a clear border separating the words that are citizens of one from the words that are citizens of another.
However, we will always struggle with the conundrum of the Tower of Babel. That is, no two translations are the same. Two people can read the same text in different languages and have different reactions, especially if one version is abridged and promoted among a different audience. And there will always be different audiences. We live in a diverse and unequal world.
After the conversation with my mother, my first instinct was a burning desire to translate a book I loved, for her, so that we would understand the book in the same way. I pondered over Don Quixote’s anticipation for impossible-seeming adventures and wished I could be more like him; I even wished to be more like Sancho Panza, who develops this faith in the impossible over time, little by little, until it becomes the real. Truth be told, I knew that the translation in my head would be unlikely, and not only because my Korean—a Korean cultivated in the home—would be insufficient for a work of literature as large as Don Quixote (at least, for now). Untranslatable, too, would be the privileges that I have had that my mother hasn’t. The two of us walk in different universes: I in some of the richest and oldest universities in the world; my mother in the local library of our residential neighborhood in Seoul. I had a professor who gifted me a copy of Don Quixote, saying: You must read this. My mother, she had nobody. Not even me, to be honest, because I wasn’t the one who encouraged her to read the book in the first place. The only thing she had was the desire to understand a daughter who would return home, between semesters at school, as someone growing increasingly distant; a daughter who dedicated her life to something else, like Spanish—a language in which I could read Don Quixote one day, if I wanted to, while my mother couldn’t. But I would only be able to do it because my mother was the one who gave me the opportunity.
It’s true: my mother will never read this essay in its original version. I admit that, for the rest of my life, she will understand what I do principally in translation. But isn’t this always the case? I am a translation of my mother: I am of her, but I am not her. The infinite possibility of my existence is only made possible by hers. My mother has always supported me in the venture of knowing other worlds; it was my mother who would pay for my Spanish language classes, and who brought me, one summer, to Spain, imploring me to use the Spanish that she had allowed me to have. 언어를 알면 언어를 써야지, my mother would say, meaning: if you know the language, use it. Meaning: I gave you the opportunity to know this language. Meaning: Use it, please. For me. To master a language is to come full circle.
엄마. Mother. Without you, I am nobody. I am the person you are, but there is so much distance between the versions of who we are. I want to believe in the fact that we can meet in the middle of this distance, one that I have never attempted to cross until now. But you, you have always attempted to close this distance in the act of raising me. Little by little, day after day, you are coming closer and closer. Is this not what inspired you to read Don Quixote in the first place? My desire to reciprocate is what propels me to write these words right now, on my computer, with an online translator to my left and a Word document to my right. I am attempting to write in a language that I know and do not know at once. It is a humble echo of what you do in your attempt to understand another language, another person. To understand me. To love me.
And now I think I know how it is. There is only one thing that I want to tell you now, mamá: lo siento. I’m sorry. And I am so grateful. I am here using what you gave me, as you told me to do, for you.
