The Translator Relay: Don Mee Choi

[soryang]

Words Without Borders Sep 23, 2020

WWB’s Translator Relay features an interview with a different translator every few months. The current month’s translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth question.

For September's installment, Kristin Dykstra passed the baton to Don Mee Choi, who translates between Korean and English.

The second question raised a technical point:

These are Korean adverbs or adjectives that are repeated to form a pair. Such doubling is the norm in Korean, and it accentuates the sounds, which can also have the phonetic or mimetic effects of onomatopoeia. Here are two examples (underlined):

This is the title of a poem from Autobiography of Death (New Directions, 2018):


우글우글 죽음
서른나흘


Death Swarmsswarms
Day Thirty-Four

I would have left the syntax the same and not been so literal. "Swarming death" rather than "Death Swarmsswarms." However, I am only an amateur. I would not correct my senior. I think the point may have been because the theme of the interview with the author/translator seems to be on "doubling" include the mental duplication of two worlds in the mind of a translator.

...Translation helped me to find my language, just as I had to create language for the poets I was translating. So the act of translation and the act of writing something “original” are often intertwined and indistinguishable for me. It’s a doubled act. It’s like I’m writing all in duplicatives, meaning language is always doubled for me. As a child, living outside of South Korea, I imagined myself living in Hong Kong and South Korea simultaneously. For me, the translation mode of existence is the doubling of home, doubling of world, doubling of history, doubling of tongue.

more: https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/the-translator-relay-don-mee-choi?src=twitter

I found Don Mee Choi's observations very insightful.

Typically, the interpretation matures and after the appropriate period of gestation, and then pours out on its own unexpectedly. Writing something immediately in English or forcing the interpretation will be awkward and may include obvious errors. Don Mee Choi's many discarded papers are for me represented by many interpretations never finished. I like her analogy with the Shaman.