I turn back to my husband and ask, Which author? Shin? Park? Kang? Oh god, it’s not Hwang, is it.
Kang is dead, darling. She’s been dead since 1943. I think it’s Bora.
Are you sure?
No, I’m not. I only met her that one time at Seoul Pride.
You never forget a face, though.
I turn around and scan the crowd: Seoul saram in their muted winter colors. Not just their clothes in shades of charcoal and chestnut but the colors of their skin and hair, pale and lusterless like the landscape outside. Winter is a dead time in Korea. I don’t see Bora, but I can’t be sure.
Our food arrives and we forget about it.
The second thing that happens is the letters changing in the PDF file.
I translate from PDF files, not from books. I also sign contracts through PDFs. PDFs are law, inviolable. Appropriate, as the source text is inviolable.
Not in this PDF. The letters on the monitor suddenly flicker, and words start changing on the page. The predicate at the end switches places with the subject in the front and back.
I blink. I blink hard.
I get up, go to the bathroom, and splash my face with cold water. My home office has bright natural light—maybe too bright. Every literary-type person has a specific fantasy of a room of one’s own, and mine happens to involve a big table and lots of natural light. I pull down the translucent blinds and sit down at my large table in front of my large, curved monitor, a newer addition to my room-of-one’s-own fantasy.
The sentence is back to what it was. (Or is it?) At any rate, the words have stopped jumping around. The text is inviolable once more.
With some relief, I get back to work.
Translators like to say, we discover our authors. Sometimes I just open a book and the sentences convince me: You have to translate this book. Bora was like that. I picked up her book at a book fair—not one of those bullshitfests like London or Frankfurt, but the one in Seoul’s Hongdae’ap neighborhood. The one where real readers squeeze by the double-sided line of bookstalls set up along a narrow street, stalls filled with books glorious books. Which is why the bookstall I found Bora in, run by a niche speculative fiction publisher in Seoul, seemed taken aback when I switched from real reader to Bullshitfest Industry Mode, stuck my proverbial foot into their proverbial door, and politely yet firmly asked to see the publisher because I wanted to translate the book.
But maybe we’re wrong. Maybe the books choose us. Books always choose their readers, anyway. And who’s more of a reader, a shadow following the writer’s thoughts, than a translator?
Cafés are the natural habitat of literary translators. We work there, we moonlight there, we procrastinate there, we die there. We also congregate there.
I’m sitting with Yi, a Korean translator colleague and friend of mine.
You look different, they say to me.
Older? I touch my mask. (The café makes us wear them, even when we’re indoors. Lower them only when you sip, they say to us.) I thought these things were supposed to make us look younger.
You said older, not me. Not older, just different. How far are you on the Bora manuscript?
I’m almost done. Really in the thick of it.
Ah, they say, as if this explains something.
I change the subject. You know, I had the weirdest thing happen to me the other day. The words kept changing on the screen.
Maybe it’s time for a new computer?
No, the letters kind of jumped around by themselves. The PDF file changed itself. I don’t know. Maybe I’m working too much. Or too little.
Could you hold that thought, I think I see one of my poets.
Yi goes off to say hello at another table. I don’t turn around to see which poet. This is Hapjeong, I imagine the cafés here are full of poets. But Yi is back in two seconds, looking a bit flustered.
Wow, I almost embarrassed myself. I could’ve sworn it was her.
My husband thought he saw Bora at a restaurant last weekend. Actually, I’m still not sure if he did. What’s the weirdest place you saw an author?
Yi is quiet for a moment. A moment long enough to make me look up and see they’re staring into space.
The weirdest place, they say, was not too far from here. At a club in Hongdae. One of our clubs, if you know what I mean. And it was this poet, actually, the one I thought I just saw. I went into the bathroom of the club and she was there. I was really surprised to see her. We were finishing up her book, the editor and I. It took longer to negotiate the edits on that book than I’d expected. The poet’s voice was in my head the whole time. Usually that stops after translating, but her voice stayed by my side throughout the editing process. I got really deep into the edits and she talked me through it the whole time. Not bossing me around, but making suggestions, encouraging me. To take risks and be creative and push back when I needed to. I felt like I’d spent a lot of time with her, eight hours every workday for four months. Sometimes I feel like translators have a more intensely intimate relationship with our authors than with our partners or girlfriends. Anyway, I saw her in the bathroom and was shocked because it was like she’d just walked out of my thoughts. Also, I’d heard she was traveling. I shouted, Hey! I thought you were in India! She shouted the same thing at me. We walked right up to each other. I reached out my hand and she reached out hers, our fingertips smashed into each other, very improbably, like there had been a very clean window between us. But it wasn’t a window, it was the mirror.
They take a sip and I wait for them to continue their story. But they don’t; glancing at their phone they say, Well look at the time, I really have to go. It was nice catching up with you.
When I get up to leave a while later, I notice the wall of the café behind me is done in mirror tiles.
Bora told me that one night, as she was driving alone back from Ohio to Indiana after an academic conference, she had got lost and ended up passing through an abandoned town that had no inhabitants, with all of its buildings boarded up. She said, It wasn’t the fact that it was abandoned that scared me but the way the boarded-up storefronts had no graffiti on them whatsoever. It was the middle of the night and there were no streetlamps, but I could still see there was no trash on the streets at all. No rats, no animals. This was around midnight. The next thing I remember is driving down an empty highway seeing the sun come up. And to this day, I have no memory of the time between midnight and sunup. I can’t recall anything about it at all.
Maybe you were replaced, I joked. And you’re the replicant and the real Bora is somewhere else.
Maybe. I guess I’m the real Bora now.
The Literary Promotion Agency of Korea keeps misspelling Bora’s name in English. Bo-ra. Bo-Ra. Bo Ra.
This is how Korean names are spelled these days, they insist after each new variant. We have a duty to preserve Korean traditions and identity. For example, we must put the family name first, just like Han Kang, who puts her family name first on her English translations.
I retort, You can’t just change people’s names because of nationalist fads, that would ruin the marketing. It will confuse readers, and readers really, really hate being confused. Furthermore, Han Kang gets shelved under K at Waterstones, and not because Waterstones doesn’t know any better. This despite winning a goddamn Booker.
We go back and forth until another translator tips me off: the Agency will override translators, but they don’t dare override authors. Which is why I message the author to get her to intervene.
Bora says, Oh, I’ve been called all of those names. Bora, Bo-ra, Bo Ra.
By the way, you don’t happen to have been at Mangwon this past Saturday?
No, I was at home. Everyone is at home now, there’s a pandemic. Why?
Oh, nothing. (Robot Bora . . .)
By the way, Bora says, we’re getting interest from translators in other territories.
How exciting! Give them my email and tell them if they need anything from me.
Thanks, Bora.
(I thought she’d been signing off, as in, “Best, Bora” but then she adds:)
Oh wait, I’m Bora and you’re Anton. Thanks, Anton.
You’re welcome, Anton.
When I look in the bathroom mirror, I half expect to see Bora now. I wonder, sometimes, as I brush my teeth, how would I know if the person in the mirror isn’t Bora? She could be the one staring back at me now. If I translate her long enough, would even my husband be able to tell? Who does he have dinner with every night, me or the author I’m translating? Could he tell the difference, after some point, between me and Bora?
Maybe I was the Bora he thought he saw in the restaurant.
I spit. I rinse. I wipe.
Who is doing these things?
I participate in many panels during the pandemic year. Every article I write, every public appearance I make restores me from Bora, whose translated manuscript has entered the bound galleys stage and no longer looks like my work. Which means, the publisher’s editors did an excellent job. The Agency does not like how visible I’m getting—as a non-white translator I was only ever meant to be a helpmate at the service of some white male missionary or dilettante—but they have precious few white success cases of my caliber in our language combination and therefore have to put up with the reality that is me. The usual bullshit rolls along, in other words. I take my shots when I can. My career, such as it is, trundles on.
There is one last thing that happened, though. I am texted by one of Bora’s other translators, and we get into a discussion about how to spell her name.
The other translator says, It’s so convenient having an author who has an actual Ph.D. in Slavic languages. She can just spell her name in the Cyrillic alphabet. And read my translations. I’ve never had a Korean author read my translation of them before.
I’m the opposite, I reply, I have that experience all the time. Everyone is a critic of English translation. Bora got her Ph.D. in the States, technically she can just translate herself into English. But she gave me free rein to do what I wanted and never asked me to send her my work. As a form of professional courtesy.
Oh yes, says the other translator. She’s a translator herself, of course, from Russian and Polish. She understands us. She is us. And as her translators, we are her.
I tell them about the Bora, Bo-ra, Bo Ra debacle. The other translator laughs in emoji.
I guess that’s what we are, the other translator says. She’s Bora. I’m Bo-ra. And you’re Bo Ra.
We think about this for a moment.
Anyway, the other translator says, enjoy your weekend.
Sure, I reply. You 2.
