"If I'd at least gotten closer to that impossible perfection..."

January 17, 2018 7:41 AM

What We Talk About When We Talk About Translation is an essay by Deborah Smith, translator of Han Kang's novel The Vegetarian, among others. It is a response to various criticisms of her translation, first by translator and novelist Tim Parks, followed by Charse Yun, who also laid out complaints about it from Korean critics, though, as Kang Hyun-kyung reports, Smith has vociferous defenders in Korea. If you want a summary, Clare Armitstead, who comes down on Smith's side, recaps the controversy in The Guardian. Jiayang Fan touches on the dispute but focuses more on Han Kang and her upcoming books in Smith's translation in an essay in The New Yorker called Buried Words.
posted by Kattullus (32 comments total)

I'm sorry, but Yun's criticism sounds so much like the arguments you hear with modern anime fansubs and "purity". English is a different language, moreover it's attached to a different culture that prizes different things, and a translation needs to take this into account.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:19 AM on January 17, 2018 [4 favorites]

I have read neither Deborah Smith's translation nor the original -- not that I could -- but in general, you can put me down as believing that for literary works, a good literary translation is superior to a perfect literal translation. (I am the child of two literary translators and have had a first-hand view of how the sausage gets made. It is not simple. One of the most interesting tasks they ever got was translating a work which was written entirely in nonsense-Italian, which they had to figure out how to translate into nonsense-English.)
posted by kyrademon at 8:23 AM on January 17, 2018 [9 favorites]

It's fascinating (translation: ridiculous) that Parks' criticism that "I don't like this writing" gets to be transformed into the psychic insight that "I can't read the other version but this one is nothing like it!". I don't know if I would say that I enjoyed reading the book, so much as I found it compelling - and if this English translation is the garnished and embellished version, then that was a bloody good choice by the translator because it still fell on the more dry side of literature in my opinion.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 8:42 AM on January 17, 2018

It will never end, but like many unanswerable questions it does have some use as a way into understanding, or at least appreciating, the deeper issues. It can also lead to decades-long firefights between entrenched positions, which is considerably less interesting. In this, as in most things, I'm happy to take translations on their merits and not go haring after some ideal of perfection: forgiving sins is a lot more productive than vilifying them, on the whole.

Where possible, comparing different translations can be edifying, especially if you have just enough familiarity with the original to get a feeling for what the translators were about.

My first exposure to this was the Asterix books, which I devoured in English before discovering the French originals when staying in Lausanne on exchange. On returning to school, I suggested to my French teacher that they'd make much more engaging material in the classroom than our textbooks, but he pointed out that the business of translating all the puns required a facility with both French and English far above that required for the school exams.

I thought that a cop-out at the time. Still do. Once you discover that the Roman camp called Babaorum was a play on baba au rhum, and that the tent which marked it on the map did indeed look like a rum baba, who could possibly resist wanting to open all the presents? (It's translated as Totorum in the UK and Opprobrium in the American edition, which is a descending order of goodness; of the other camps, Aquarium was the same in all three; Laudanum was the same in the UK and the French but Nohappimedium in the US; and Petibonum (petit bon homme) was Compendium in the UK and Delirium in the US. Make your own judgements on the Traduttore, traditore scale...)
posted by Devonian at 9:07 AM on January 17, 2018 [11 favorites]

Favorite translation story: in the anime Fushigi Yuugi, two characters are chasing some bad guys through a corridor. The bad guys escape, slamming a door behind them.

One of the characters, a monk, exclaims, "Shimete!" (Closed!) but uses the intonation of "Shimatta!" (Dammit!). The other character observes, "That's not the sort of language I'd associate with a monk."

The English translator subtitled the monk's exclamation as "Aw, shut!"

Translation is a tricky business indeed.
posted by SPrintF at 9:18 AM on January 17, 2018 [50 favorites]

I suggested to my French teacher that [the original French Asterix books]'d make much more engaging material in the classroom than our textbooks

Not to derail too far, but to concur I'll just say that my high school French teacher made the untranslated originals available to the students, and it was a huge boost to my learning - and enthusiasm - to realize I could recognize at least some of the puns in French.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:43 AM on January 17, 2018 [3 favorites]

While I generally agree that excessively direct translation is generally not good translation when it comes to literature, if she was making basic mistakes about names for body parts I'm not sure I could count it as good translation either, though the result may be good literature. Which is a point Yun makes at the very beginning of his article -- that Ezra Pound's translations from Chinese were terrible translation but good poetry.
posted by tavella at 10:01 AM on January 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

Oh look! A woman (Deborah Smith) gets acclaim for her work, so some men point out that she's doing it wrong. What helpful men!
posted by medusa at 10:04 AM on January 17, 2018 [12 favorites]

Also, be sure to read the Guardian article: every word of the translation was approved by Han Kang. But she's a woman too, so she probably doesn't understand the book she herself wrote.
posted by medusa at 10:06 AM on January 17, 2018 [22 favorites]

if she was making basic mistakes about names for body parts

I couldn't tell from the Guardian article whether this was a basic mistake or translation licence, which may be part of the underlying issue. The literalists see a basic error, while the literary reader sees a translated body language.
posted by fatbird at 10:12 AM on January 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

I am the last person on earth qualified to comment on the art and craft of literary translations, but I do find the end of Tim Park's review spoils the rest. It has a taste of Principle Skinner deciding, "No, it is the children who are wrong."
posted by muddgirl at 10:32 AM on January 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

if she was making basic mistakes about names for body parts I'm not sure I could count it as good translation either

There's not enough info in the Guardian article to tell but an English phrase is "foot in the door", if the equivalent Korean phrase is literally "hand in the door" then it's perfectly fine to change it.
posted by robertc at 10:37 AM on January 17, 2018 [8 favorites]

I'm sorry, I'm at an absolute loss as to how a man who says he can't distinguish one Korean character from another presumes to criticize the quality of a translation from Korean. It's as if he wasn't satisfied with a subjective review like "I found these phrases awkward and stilted, the male narrator's voice uneven and inconsistent." (He could even then have added, "Not reading Korean, I'm not sure whether this inartfulness is present in the original text or whether it's an artifact of translation.") No, he has to find technical grounds to complain, so he sounds more Objective--even though he is 100% unqualified to make technical criticisms. Why would NYRB publish this exercise in unjustified self-satisfaction?
posted by praemunire at 11:09 AM on January 17, 2018 [5 favorites]

I'm sorry, I'm at an absolute loss as to how a man who says he can't distinguish one Korean character from another presumes to criticize the quality of a translation from Korean.

He's a man, the translator is a woman.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:13 AM on January 17, 2018 [3 favorites]

He's a man, the translator is a woman.

I assumed that went without saying. :/
posted by praemunire at 11:35 AM on January 17, 2018

I love translation philosophy. The first time I ever thought about the influence a translator has over a text was when I read a Murakami novel translated by Alfred Birnbaum after reading a handful translated by Jay Rubin, and it was a like a totally different writer was at work.

Later on I became a translator myself, but only technical translations because literary scares me.
posted by lollymccatburglar at 12:43 PM on January 17, 2018

On this topic, Le Ton beau de Marot is an amazing book.
posted by Slothrup at 12:50 PM on January 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

One of my favorite discussions on what makes a good translation is The Rise And Fall Of Anime Fansubs, in which the intent of translation is discussed, and how arguments for "purity" can make translations less accessible.
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:01 PM on January 17, 2018 [3 favorites]

As someone who is passable (but not fluent) in Korean (primarily spoken) and consumes a lot of Korean media, I see a lot of discussion about the "best" translations, and there's always a debate on whether to be more "accurate" or more "readable" in terms of translations. And this is just about the fan-made subbing material made out of a labor of love and not a professional translation.

I do find it interesting the different routes translators take. Right now there are plenty of Korean dramas available on Netflix, and just due to convenience I am watching them there instead of other, ah, more questionable means, and quite often I note how the translation differs from what the characters actually say. But then I note that the translation doesn't hurt the overall story and I let it go. Yes, people might be missing out on some wordplay that helps flesh out a character, but the gist is still the same. I used to be more into the "accurate" side because, as a student of the language, I wanted to understand the words that I didn't know, instead of just glossing over it to give me the concept of the wording, which I could already get from context.

Sometimes I will die on various translation hills, such as the time a poorly translated phrase nearly ruined a show for many people. The phrasing made some sense in context, as in, I could understand why the translator went there -- to make it clear in the English language, since Korean can be vague when it comes to referencing nouns and the like. But it was that vague phrasing that was an essential plot point, and putting an incorrect noun in there when it had not actually been said meant that those who were relying on the subtitles were lead down the wrong path and made incorrect assumptions about a character. It was a case where indirect language was supposed to lead to a red herring, but because a translation used more direct language, that red herring was viewed as truth. (And I can't even remember how the translators reconciled the fact that the character never said what they said he said when it was revealed that it was a red herring, or if they ever did.)

I suppose what impresses me most is that Smith apparently had learned Korean for three years before translating The Vegetable. After nearly nine years of casual study, my reading comprehension of Korean is terrible. I'm still basically on a child-level, and I wonder how far I could get if I studied faithfully in three years -- certainly I don't think I'd be confident enough to translate a book, but I suppose that's more about my ability to learn than anything else. I have a lot of respect that she could do so much in so short of time.

I do wish more people would be willing to translate Korean literature. As one of the articles referenced (sorry, can't remember which one), there is a wealth of poetry and stories from Korea that are essentially a mystery to those of us who may not be fluent enough to read it in the original language. I hope that this debate doesn't prevent someone for having the courage to just go for it and translate stories/poems, even if the translations may not ever be "perfect" (but, as pointed out by many others, what translation is ever "perfect?").
posted by paisley sheep at 1:09 PM on January 17, 2018 [6 favorites]

I'm sorry, I'm at an absolute loss as to how a man who says he can't distinguish one Korean character from another presumes to criticize the quality of a translation from Korean.

Why does he need to read Korean to say if the English book in front of him is good or not? He can't say if it's an accurate translation, but he can absolutely review the result as a stand-alone work.
posted by markr at 1:34 PM on January 17, 2018

Park claims in the first few paragraphs that he can only review it as a stand-alone work, then he continuously fails to do so while acknowledging that the only reason he is reviewing the translation at all is because it won a Man Booker award along with the original. Throughout his review he makes constant references to the original, which he has not read, and to reviews of the original, which he cannot corroborate.
posted by muddgirl at 1:43 PM on January 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I read and disliked the novel in translation, but his argument is that she is a bad translator, and he has no direct way of knowing that. It seems clear the author was on board with how Smith interpreted it, so even though I didn’t like the book, it wouldn’t occur to me to attack the translator or her abilities or her philosophy of translation.
posted by leesh at 1:56 PM on January 17, 2018 [2 favorites]

Why does he need to read Korean to say if the English book in front of him is good or not? He can't say if it's an accurate translation, but he can absolutely review the result as a stand-alone work.

Of course he can review the result as a stand-alone work in English. But he needs to be able to read Korean to critique the quality of the translation. That would be why my comment explicitly distinguished between critiquing the style in English and technical critique of the translation, which you no doubt would have noticed had you read the whole thing.
posted by praemunire at 2:06 PM on January 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

> "Yeah, I read and disliked the novel in translation, but his argument is that she is a bad translator"

I read it as him not liking the translation and not knowing if she is a bad translator or the original was bad, for example: Do old-fashioned literary formulas like “demure manner of speaking,” “sorely regretted,” and “current plight” correspond to the Korean here? Is the original equally muddled syntactically? and also: And so it goes on, a repository of melodramatic cliché. This can hardly be the translator’s fault.

> "which you no doubt would have noticed had you read the whole thing."

Sick burn!
posted by markr at 2:09 PM on January 17, 2018

Park's real argument was that the original work was not deserving of a Man Booker prize, and was given the prize over other works because it feeds into white savior narratives and exotic fetishism*, but since he hasn't read the original he's kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Looked at closely, the prose is far from an epitome of elegance, the drama itself neither understated nor beguiling, the translation frequently in trouble with register and idiom. Studying the thirty-four endorsements again, and the praise after the book won the prize, it occurs to me there is a shared vision of what critics would like a work of “global fiction” to be and that The Vegetarian has managed to present itself as a candidate that can be praised in those terms.

(*seriously though since when has surrealism in literature been considered the mark of "global fiction" specifically and not just modern literature in general?)
posted by muddgirl at 2:11 PM on January 17, 2018 [2 favorites]

A fair review of a translation as a stand-alone work, by someone who does not read the source language, involves pointing out that it's impossible to discern what is the translator's responsibility and what the author's. As noted above, the reviewer seems to have tried to do this without getting his point across.

For illuminating further reading, I'd suggest Edward Seidensticker's Genji Diary, which everybody should just read anyway, but which also contains reflections on the literary translation of classical Japanese and the issue of making the second translation of something when the first is already considered a modern classic; and Gregory Rabassa's If This Be Treason, a short autobiography by a great literary translator of Latin American novels, which goes into the details of translation issues with great readability and is also very funny.
posted by huimangm at 2:11 PM on January 17, 2018 [4 favorites]

I read it as him not liking the translation and not knowing if she is a bad translator or the original was bad

And yet he starts off with two full paragraphs about judging translation and translation and then the mission statement: "So the novel provides an excellent opportunity for asking whether we can get any separate impressions of the achievements of writer and translator." In the end, he manages to reach judgments such as: "the translation [is] frequently in trouble with register and idiom." He states:

Unable to compare translation and original or even to check single English words against the corresponding Korean, since I cannot distinguish one Korean character from another, I have but one resource. I must consider the relationship between content and style in the English translation. In a literary text a certain content manifests itself in a certain style. There is no separating the two. The difficulty with translation is always to reconstruct that relationship. The danger is that one winds up with a voice that may be fluent, but that sits uneasily with the content.

He is essentially stating here that, lacking what some people might consider the sine qua non of criticizing a translation as a translation, a grasp of the original language, he is trying to figure out a way to reverse-engineer a "separate impression of the achievements of [the] translator" by looking at "the relationship of content and style," to determine, e.g., whether a "fluent" voice may nonetheless "sit...uneasily with the content." If he were simply criticizing the book as a work in English, he would not need to undertake this project. This is obviously not the "one resource" he has for criticizing the book as a work in English. He clearly doesn't care for the English style of the work, but that is not all he is looking at, or we wouldn't be getting those paragraphs and paragraphs about translating, rather than a sentence or two to the effect that he is unable to evaluate whether the same problems exist in the original Korean text, which I doubt anyone would find objectionable.

Sick burn!

Well, the alternative is that you didn't follow the simple distinction I was explicitly drawing and thus thought it was meaningful to offer that distinction yourself as a criticism of my comment, so.
posted by praemunire at 3:25 PM on January 17, 2018 [2 favorites]

Having read more, it's significant that The Vegetarian is a story about a woman refusing to behave the way men around her have decided is the proper way to behave, leading the men to brutally punish her for doing it wrong. The men in the book are furious with the prisoner's inconsistent behavior! It's misogyny all the way down.
posted by medusa at 6:58 PM on January 17, 2018 [4 favorites]

Yes, as I mentioned in my comment earlier.

This interview with Smith is very interesting, talking about her reasons for choosing Korean and her publishing house - http://thequietus.com/articles/19833-verfreundungseffekt-han-kang-interview-deborah-smith-tilted-axis
posted by the agents of KAOS at 10:14 AM on January 18, 2018

That's a nice interview, the agents of KAOS.

It also gives me a chance to plug my new favorite writer, Bae Suah, who Deborah Smith mentions. Her novel A Greater Music, translated by Smith, was one of my top three favorite reads last year, and I've got the short story collection North Station, also translated by Smith, in my reading pile. I've read one story so far and I restarted it three times because the opening was just so brilliant that I couldn't help but go back to reread it. I can't recommend Suah's books highly enough.
posted by Kattullus at 2:16 PM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

I haven't read this work (in Korean or English), nor have I had a chance to read all the articles yet, but I'm very interested in digging into this since I've started doing a lot of translation work (from Korean to English). I'm kind of intrigued yet feel strangely hesitant in seeing in the comments is that someone who learned the language in 3 years did literary translation for something as deep of a topic as talking about cultural ideas and place of women in Korean society etc. because one of the biggest troubles I've run into when reading/watching/listening to translated works in different medium (Korean to English and vice versa) is always when I notice things that make me thing, "but would the translator have made this choice if they were familiar with the culture." Not as a criticism of Smith, since again I haven't read this work at all or have I read into the criticisms, but as Korea in general as a construct becomes more popular in representation in media, I've always worried about that aspect of translating. Because translation is rarely just about translating words from one language to another.
posted by kkokkodalk at 10:38 AM on January 23, 2018 [4 favorites]

Anyway, apologies if all of that is covered in the linked articles and if I'm derailing the in tent of the original post. I've actually been too busy and to do in depth reading because, ironically, I'm bogged down by a bunch of translation deadlines.
posted by kkokkodalk at 10:43 AM on January 23, 2018 [1 favorite]