Earticle

Korean Studies in the English-speaking world has reached a significant turning point in this first decade of the twenty-first century. If we make the correct turn, it will continue to advance, promoting greater understanding of Korean history and culture in academia as well as a heightened recognition of the distinctiveness of Korean culture in the wider world. However, if we make the wrong turn, Korean Studies could stagnate and grow less, not more, productive. What is the right direction for Korean Studies in the English-speaking world? We have already made a lot of progress in providing material in translation to help our students and others gain access to Korea history and culture through the words of Koreans themselves. However, most of that material has been state-centered, focusing on politics and the cultural productions of the wealthy and well-educated governing elite. We need to move beyond state-centered documents and translate more material on daily life, especially the lives on the non-elite, to give those who can’t read that material in the original a better sense of what it was like to live in Korea a thousand, five hundred, or even just fifty years ago. In this article, I will make some specific suggestions for the type of material we should think about translating.

Premodern Korean writings translated into the German language are mainly restricted to literary works—at least as far as monographic publications are concerned. Besides attempting an overview of existing German translations, I will try to provide answers to the question why this is so, and discuss the potential value of German language translations of premodern Korean materials (including, but not confined to literary works). Finally, I will address future prospects and issues of quality management.

Very few western scholars have ventured into the study of Koryŏ. Moreover, Koryŏ, often looked upon as the middle of Korea’s three dynastic periods, gets little respect in Korean historical circles. This lack of focus on Koryŏ is due in part to rather limited sources when compared to the richness of Chosŏn. Despite this, there still remain important sources such as official dynastic histories, miscellaneous literary writings, religious tracts, tomb and other inscriptions that beg for translation. Although the perils that confront the translator are many, the process of uncovering the past and making it accessible to general readers offers unique rewards. This paper explores these issues and reveals this writer’s own problems and successes in translating Koryŏ source material. Koryŏ sources pointedly show that there is much more to this often overlooked kingdom than just celadon.

Translation is a means to remove a linguistic barrier and enable communication. But that way of understanding the problem is too simple, for the notion that the barrier to be overcome is a matter of unfamiliar language assumes that words carry meaning independently from their larger social/cultural context. The interesting challenge of the translator is to bridge not only a language barrier but also the temporal and cultural gap between the milieu of the source and the milieu the reader. Standing with one foot in each milieu, the translator is aware of assumptions, understandings, and expectations that belong to one but not the other. In the case of philosophy, this is often the major point of interest: adventurous readers come to texts from distant times and places hoping to discover something new, a challenge to the world of their accustomed thinking. But to really “hear” something new most often demands sufficient linkage to the familiar; absent such linkage, the material translated simply sounds bizarre, and the translation has in fact failed. And even worse, traditions themselves die and become museum pieces when they fail to “translate.” I will argue that the two most central concepts in Neo-Confucian discourse, i (li) and ki (chi), generally translated as “principle” and “material force,” represent a rather extreme example of this problem. A close analysis of the difficulties that emerge in this case will also serve as a sketch of the general terrain that renders the translation of Neo-Confucian thought difficult. In philosophy the paradoxical reality is that at precisely the points where there may be the most to learn the barriers to com-munication are often the highest.

There is a useful distinction in contemporary English poetry practice between craft and technique, where craft refers to the nuts and bolts of poetry practice—rhyme, meter, syllable count, etc., and technique refers to the inspirational side, the soul of the poet. Craft can be learned; technique is a gift. There are two radically different poetry traditions in Korea, hansi and vernacular poetry. In the case of hansi, craft is determined by the rules of Chinese poetry; but in the case of vernacular poetry craft is a very vague concept, not formally discussed until the beginning of the twentieth century when Japanese scholars became interested in hyangga and Koryŏ kayo, and the first generation of Korean sijo scholars established the framework of sijo criticism. The elaboration of a prosody of Korean poetry remains an urgent task. The tradition has been technique rather than craft based.

This article aims at examining some issues to consider while working on Korean vernacular poetry translation in relation to the 110-year tradition of Korean studies in Russia. Examples will be taken from the Namhun t’aep’yŏng-ga 南薰太平歌 (Songs of the Great Peace at South Wind) poetry anthology (1863) by an unknown compiler. I. 1). Borrowed Classical Chinese Images: Korean vernacular poetry is full of images borrowed from classical Chinese literature, some of them being phrases organized according to the grammatical rules of classical Chinese. They play an important role in a text as symbols of literary expression requiring a number of specific textual features to be transmitted in a translation. This presents a difficult task in the case of a language, which is not related to the Chinese literary tradition directly (e.g. a western language such as Russian). The issues are: a) The dual-language character of the text: Korean and classical Chinese; and b) metric features as a result of laconic Chinese expressions. 2. Compositional and literary modes: a) inversion; b) parallelism etc. Most of the modes are based on Korean syntax which differs from that of western languages, therefore, a way of conveying these modes is suggested. 3. The necessity for commentary: There are numerous methods for showing the beauty and particular compositional quality of the original in translation, but in many cases extra comments are necessary: a) symbols; b) allusions; c) traditional images; d) geographical and historical names or terms etc. II. Some of the features to be considered when translating vernacular poetry correlate with those of contemporary Korean poetry. For instance: a) borrowed Western images; and b) compositional and literary modes. This will be shown through the example of poems by Chŏng Hyŏn-jong. A conclusion is drawn concerning the similarity of issues to consider when translating poetry from both periods, especially a similar tendency in the functioning of borrowed images which occurs in both classical and contemporary poetry. The former was based on the Chinese literary tradition as a source to enrich the poem’s expressive world and to participate in this tradition, the latter appeals to the western and the world cultural tradition in order to become a part of it as well as to enhance its expressiveness. Similar compositional and literary modes which need to be reflected in translation may be found in classical and contemporary poetical texts, but their purposes may differ, and they increase in variety in the case of contemporary poems.