On Friday, Karen Emmerich repeated a few times that she does not see translation happening "on the level of the word," but rather on the level of sense and stylistic effect. She described acquiring a language as a "learning" process requiring a dictionary and an understanding of one-to-one equivalence, and translation as an "unlearning" of those equivalences in favor of a more holistic understanding of what the language is doing. I completely agree with Emmerich here. I try to translate with sense in mind, and allow myself to take liberties on a linguistic and semantic level in order to convey feeling or meaning. I would venture to say, though, that word-for-word versus sense-for-sense is not as stark of a binary in prose than it is in poetry, or at least in Ersi Sotiropoulos's straightforward prose (linguistically experimental novels are another story). While I don't read Greek, I did look at the French translation of What's Left of the Night (Ce qui reste de la nuit) and noticed that the two are very close, so I'm assuming both are pretty linguistically faithful renditions of the original. I'd be curious to see some of Emmerich's poetry translations to see how she puts her idea of translating beyond the level of the word into practice.
We read a lot of Tim Parks in Professor Waters's class last semester, so I know that Parks is not only an expert in evaluating translations from languages he does speak, but an extremely careful reader of English prose as well. I read The Vegetarian back in 2016. I agree with him that the prose is occasionally clunky, and that there are moments that fluctuate in register and tone. However, I think a lot of the issues he highlights are problems that he has with Smith's writing skills in English rather than problems of translation. On the other hand, every word counts when we're translating, so perhaps these two issues are one and the same?
His description of Smith bothers me, though: "...Having completed a degree in English literature, she decided to become a translator. Monolingual until then, she chose Korean 'pragmatically,' because she had heard there was a lively literary scene in Korea and far fewer translators than for European languages." I can't help but feel that Parks includes these details in order to discredit Smith. He writes as if Smith just woke up one day and took on the project of The Vegetarian despite having no knowledge of Korean language or culture. She had studied Korean for six years by the time she took up the project, and was completing a PhD in Korean literature. Furthermore, why should it be frowned upon to choose to learn a language that's underrepresented in translation? Was her Korean perfect? No, it sounds like it wasn't. But I think there are more responsible ways to engage with Smith's work than trying to undermine her credentials.
In her rebuttal, Smith does a great job pointing out some of the hypocrisies in her critics' reviews: if Han's original text was praised as "poetic," why is she accused of producing an "overly poeticized" translation? Plus, if Han read and approved of Smith's translation, saying that she "loved it most for capturing the tone of her own writing," who are we to say that she's wrong? Shouldn't the author know best? Or does it take an outside, neutral perspective to see the resemblances and departures more clearly? I began thinking about this after Tracy K. Smith's talk. As we discussed in class, Smith's poems take a lot of liberties with Yi Lei's poetry, but Yi Lei approved the translations and clearly thought they captured the spirit of the Chinese. To be honest, I'm not quite sure what side to take in this whole debacle. Having read the book, I'm a bit disappointed to know that Korean speakers think it doesn't resemble the original text, but I don't regret reading Smith's translation, nor do I think any of this is reason to say it shouldn't exist at all.
-Maggie
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