well welcome everyone to today's event um which is a bilingual poetry reading and discussion with two of the translators involved in a recently published collection of isang's works we have jack zhang and sawako nakayasu here with us i'm chris hanscom i teach modern korean literature in the department of asian languages and cultures here at ucla and i'm joined by one of our phd students victoria caudill who organized the event um as well as professor hyunsook park who teaches classical korean literature here at ucla also you just saw him briefly but also with us is uh hyungwo kim who is the associate director at the center for korean studies said and this event wouldn't have been possible without his support and also without the generous sponsorship of the center for korean studies here at ucla so thank you very much i think i'll lead off by introducing our two guests and then we'll have the opportunity to ask them some questions about their work following their readings at that point i'll turn it over to professor park who will moderate the question and answer i think you may receive instructions later but i think that there's a q a function uh at the bottom of your screen it's a zoom function and you can type your questions in uh there and then we'll receive the questions and they'll be right out to the to the the uh two panelists um but first let me uh before i go on uh with with uh introducing the our guests uh and in sort of kicking things off let me invite victoria to say a few words um if you're willing uh just a bit about how you envision today's event or the series of translation focused events that you're i'm hoping to hold here

thank you so much professor hinskam yes so this is our inaugural event of the quasong celebrating the process of translating korean literature series which was inspired really in part by this uh isan selected works and several other incredible works of fiction that were coming out in 2020 that we um that enrich our field of korean literature and i wanted to really highlight the uh work and passion and scholarship that goes into bringing all of these texts into english and allowing our field to uh be opened to so many more people and i'm really grateful to cks for working with me to create these events and the ones that will hopefully be planned in the future and thank you jack and sawako for agreeing to join us here today

well thank you thank you victoria um that's really fantastic i think this is a great opportunity to think about even what translation is and to make the translation process more visible and to learn a little bit more about the time and the scale and the effort and the scholarship that goes into the final published version of a translation and in essence victoria as you were saying to give the translators a platform to share their work with us and to get into how this works and how it might bear on our scholarship i think it's a really excellent opportunity so uh let me introduce our our two guests and we'll get going um jack jones is a graduate of the iowa writers workshop where he was a truman capote fellow he was born in seoul south korea and immigrated to the united states where he received his ba in english from harvard and an m.a in queen language and literature from seoul national university he is the american literary translation association's 2021 emerging translator mentorship program mentor for korean poetry and currently teaches korean poetry translation at the literary translation institute of korea so ako nakayasu is an artist working with language performance and translation separately and in various combinations she's lived mostly in the us and japan briefly in france and china and translates from japanese her books include some girls walk into the country they are from pink waves which is forthcoming the ants and the translation of the collected poems of chica sagawa as well as a book called mouth eats color sagawachika translations anti-translations and originals which i almost wish we were talking about today it sounds so interesting but that book is also forthcoming it's a multilingual work of both original and translated poetry she's co-editor with eric zealand of an anthology of 20th century japanese poetry which is also forthcoming and she teaches at brown university so welcome jack and sawako it's wonderful to have you here so we talked about it in advance and i we think what might work best given the sort of medium or interface that we're using is to have the translators go one by one say a few words and read the poems that they've selected to share in both english and korean or english and japanese so let's start with jack and we'll have the reading uh and then i'll ask a few questions um and then we'll move on to sawako uh we'll have the reading and then we'll have a few questions for her and then i may have a a couple of two or three questions in general to ask both of you in my role as discussant after both of you are done your readings and then we'll move on to the question and answer the discussion section so um jack could i invite you to say a few words and read from your selection of uh isang's poems i think that you've chosen four for today if i'm i may be mistaken uh thank you professor hanscom for the beautiful introduction and again thanks many thanks to my friend victoria for organizing this amazing event i am really grateful for this chance to talk about ysang's work more in depth and today i have chosen four of ysang's poems where the central motif in all of these poems are izan's mirror is mirror is perhaps one of the subjects that's been written so much about in korean literary studies since issan made his debut and four of these are uh basically the central poems that sort of uh talk about and show off his mirror image in various ways um and so what i'm going to do now is to share my screen with you and we will look at the originals as they first appeared and i will read the korean first and then my english translations

[in foreign language]

mirror inside the mirror is soundless perhaps no other world is so silent inside the mirror i still have ears two pitiful ears cannot understand my words inside the mirror i'm a lefty who knows not how to take my handshake a lefty who knows no handshakes because of the mirror i cannot touch the me inside the mirror because of the mirror i get to meet the me inside the mirror

i do not have the mirror now but the me inside the mirror is in it i do not know but he is probably obsessed with his lefty work

the me inside the mirror is the opposite of me and yet looks quite like me i am disappointed i cannot agonize on and examine the me inside the mirror

[in foreign language]

crow's eye view poem number fifteen

one i'm in a room with no mirror of course the me inside the mirror has gone out right now i shudder in fear of him where did he go what is he plotting to do with me two i sleep on a cold bed damp from embracing my crime i'm absent in my explicit dream and the military boot carrying a prosthetic leg dirtied my dreams white page 3. i sneak into a room with a mirror to free myself from the mirror but the me inside the mirror always enters at the same time and puts on a gloomy face he lets me know he's sorry just as i am locked up because of him he's locked up shuddering because of me 4 i am absent in my dream in my mirror my counterfeit does not make an entrance he craves my loneliness despite my uselessness i have finally made up my mind to recommend suicide to him i point him toward the viewless window it is a window for suicide but he instructs me that if i do not kill myself then he cannot kill himself either the me inside the mirror is almost a phoenix

5 after covering my breast above my heart with a bulletproof shield i aim and shoot at my left breast in the mirror the bullet goes straight through his left breast but his heart is on the right side six a red ink is spilled from an imitation heart in my dream i am late i am sentenced to death i am not the ruler of my dream it is a great crime to seal up two humans who cannot even shake hands

[in foreign language]

clear mirror

here is a mirror one page of it during a season now forgotten my hair inside the mirror flowed down like a waterfall my tears do not make the mirror wet and the mirror does not bend even if i laugh at its face i see my ear tightly folded like a rose i look in and keep looking in the mirror's quiet world is fewer no tepid fragrance reaches my nose even after so many caresses our hearts remain parallel and it feels like a rejection of course my reflections heart is on the right but it still must have a pulse so why am i turned down i reach with my fingers a fingerprint blocks a fingerprint and cuts me off during the month of may i desired many times to be on the road had i gone i may have never returned if the mirror is like a page of a book i will meet the season i once faced but the page remains here and the mirror is its bookmark

[in foreign language]

looking glass an iron nib pen dangling on a spindle an ink bottle and a letter there is enough of each for one person nothing else i am beginning to realize that it might be an unreadable text his his remaining body odor is tripped on the other side of the uncaring looking glass making it impossible to investigate this tragic lost scholar he is in the still life of pen and ink and letter as lonesome as to them comments tomb no signs of happiness if we can have the scholar's blood if his final blood cell still remains then his life might be preserved do we have his blood have you seen his bloodstains there is no signature at the end of his esoteric opus if he is who he is supposed to be then he will come back or he may actually be dead he may have died being the final soldier his honor undisputed with all the glory tedious will he definitely return will he play tricks with his bony fugitive fingers and move the still life of pen and ink and letter even if he does he will never be joyful he will not babble he will remain cold toward his ink as he turns it into literature but for now he must be endlessly precise but still life refuses pleasure the still life must be tired the glass is pale the still life reveals even his bones the clock's needles move leftward what do their meters calculate but the scholar who is supposed to be himself is probably weary the calorie intake is reduced organs have expiration dates almost almost it is a savage still life why won't this unbending poet return to us was he really killed in battle there is a still life in the middle of a still life the still life cuts away at a still life in the middle of a still life is this not cruel the fingerprints on the mirror's glass lay siege to the clock's needles they must be revived to air out the tragic scholars warnings thank you thank you very much that was four poems by read in both korean and english um i have one extra slide to share um regarding the last poem i have always wondered if if the poem that i just read the looking glass which was published posthumously uh in 1939 uh whether isang might have been considering this painting by jacques louis davie the data mara which is a famous painting about the revolutionary writer from the french revolution and some of the details i think you might notice is very similar to what was just read out loud in the poem um but it seems like a fitting image that isa might have found inspiration in so with that i thank you again for this opportunity to talk about issan's bones and i look forward to more discussions

yeah thanks jack that was really um really wonderful i'm always so envious of people who can read sort of elegantly and clearly and that was certainly what we had with your reading so thank you um i think it's my uh job um to ask you some questions as the discussant and i should say i don't really work on poetry at all so i'm a bit nervous about addressing these questions to both a translator and uh somebody who's a working poet in addition to this it was it was difficult to read through the original poems themselves which i did to prepare and as you read through your translation of looking glass i recognized a feeling in the second stanza i am beginning to realize that it might be an unreadable text was something that i felt as i was reading through the poems themselves but ask questions i will and my main point with all of the questions uh is to draw out how um difficult and complex at least to me uh translating esong must be and to get uh what's a good word to sort of engage with you on some of the decisions that you had to make in the process of translating and one of the uh difficult things it seems to me is locating a subject in these poems the um as you pointed out these are the sort of mirror poems right that you've selected for us today and the trope of the mirror announces more or less that there isn't going to be a simple one-to-one relationship between the speaker of the poem and the appearance of the self or the subject in the poem in the poem mirror for instance um and as the critic is points out we have the me inside the mirror and the me outside the mirror and these are opposite they're deaf to one another but they're also similar so there's a visual dynamic here that we're all familiar with which is um the uncanniness of seeing yourself uh your opposite self appear in the mirror but in myeongdong in clear mirror which is um the poem i really have a question about here um there's also a temporal difference introduced with the each other the season in the last stanza points out which is i couldn't help noticing as i read through uh the the poem with a magnifying glass um that ejal uh is uh in its visual appearance is sort of provocatively close to how isang's name appears in hancha um and so the idol appearing in the mirror there is that's just something i happen to notice it's not in passing but the conventional reading of the poem has the eye of the poem in the present and the appearance in the mirror a woman in a different time and possibly a different place and i can see you've added the first person possessive pronoun my in the first stanza um my hair inside the mirror flowed down like a waterfall i mean in the second stanza my tears i see my ear i look in uh to the mirror um and i wonder if you would say something about what your understanding of the poem is and how you're thinking about what are conventionally two figures uh the looker and the looked at uh male and female in the conventional reading of the poem there are many ways of interpreting the poem and i'm really interested in um the meaning that you've accomplished in your translation and how it might be different from a conventional reading of the poem of course thank you for such a wonderful close reading of these translations and how they differ from the original in that sense perhaps uh i remember when i was before translating before uh translating before i when i was studying these uh works and reading myangyung for the first time my initial impression was that this was on a continuation of the relationship of the subject i and be inside the mirror uh and that it was only after reading through some of the criticisms such as the ioreon that you pointed out in your email that there was this conventional reading of thinking of it as two figures of male female and that and then when i read more into it it seemed that uh there was a conventional reading of it because one of the aspects about this poem is that when it was first published there was an illustration next to it um and that illustration was of a woman looking into the mirror and of course the poem itself was published on a magazine called yo song and yasong literally means women and it was one of the few women's magazines and it was one of the few magazines where a lot of korean poets could get published and a lot of korean poets when they got published on those on that uh platform uh quote unquote used feminine voice to write their poems and i recognizing all that i still felt strongly that this was a a continuation of a deepening of some certain type of relationship that yisang set up on his mirror poems earlier mirror poems in kohl and in the mirror and poem number 15 from crow's eye view so for instance i felt that the first mirror poem was literally the introduction of these two figures and second one poem number 15 was um sort of an antagonistic relationship that deepens uh from being feeling like they're trapped in this situation dreamlike situation perhaps allegorical of the real world um and then in clear mirror this the relationship becomes uh almost very intimate physically intimate almost denied of ultimate intimacy it's erotic almost in a sense all the touching and wanting to touch which so for me by

interpreting the uh subject as my uh was uh in my way of sort of um making a reading of this poem as that uh deepening of the relationship and of course looking glass for me was sort of uh even though issan died an untimely death was sort of a conclusion of this relationship where um the poet or the subject looking into the looking glass um foresees their death and how their literature might be read as an unreadable esoteric work

no that's a wonderful thank you and uh i'm certainly uh not suggesting that there is an authoritative reading of these poems no um and uh and comparing yours to that as far as i could tell in reading them myself there are at least three or four different uh possible meanings of any given um in the poem but i was just curious because uh that stood out to me as far as the motif of the mirror i'm running through i'll just ask one more uh question i really you know i have a lot of questions um but i think it would be inappropriate for me to ask them all um and take up the time that maybe the audience would like to spend asking you and tellical questions um so let me just ask one more and it's it's about making the poems uh readable in our contemporary moment um in a way we think of the 1930s when isang was writing it's fairly contemporary the korean language is not that much different um than than we encounter it um as as we encountered today but um there are some points where like for example also in clear mirror um in the fourth stanza where you have i reach with my fingers right which is a nice image the attempt to touch the mirror blocked by the mirror itself right you write a fingerprint blocks a fingerprint um the the um original term here uh in in the in the poem is chokchin which is a kind of palpitation um and it's a method of examining the human body and diagnosing illness through touch it's very specific it's a sort of a medical term um and this sense of a medical examination by palpitation might not be intelligible to the reader in the president and so i wonder if this is all by way of asking if you've made an effort to somehow make your translation more readable in the present moment in this instance or any other or whether that was not a consideration at all for you as you approach the original poems i think a lot of these sort of uh not anachronistic that's the not the right term these um sort of older um technological cultural terms that json uses

i felt that in this case there was a way for me to perhaps translate as i add in this medical examination as kind of um it's all an entire image but what i felt more compelling about myeongyoung clear mirror for me was it's very one of very few if not perhaps the only one where isang writes in lines and there is this uh beautiful music that's so different from his other work and ultimately my decision to sort of shorten the medical style of palpitation to reaching with fingers was more of a musical choice form choice that tried to make the reading of this poem in english as sonically pleasing as possible or at least what i heard in the korean of course there are other cases i think for example there were other cases where i was just um trying to research a lot of his hanza usage which he has a tendency to flip the order the common order of the hansa just because sometimes or perhaps that's a part of his mirror image that he's trying to do uh and salaku will probably touch upon this but the way he uses hiragana and katakana katakana for hiragana awards that's another thing that he just plays around with and is um at first seems like um kind of a this access in uh language that turns sharply political at times i remember one of my snu colleagues once told me well one of the experience of reading isang is the sheer difficulty uh of the terms uh the hanza that he uses so um they're they're kind of a half-hearted but perhaps have serious recommendations why don't you translate all these hanzon to latin and then that difficulty might come across to western readers uh and i think for a translator who's working across a century or a few centuries of time there is a tendency and perhaps desire to bring it closer to our language and i think that's what my choice often uh was based on yeah that's wonderful thank you um let me i'll save my i see we have questions popping up in the q a and um i don't want to take any more time here so i'll save my questions um that i that that remain uh for the end if there's any chance to um deliver them but for now um let's turn to zhako and um i wonder if you'd be willing to say a few words and then read the two poems that you presented for us today sure um hi everyone thank you so much for inviting me to join you today thanks to um professor hanscom and victoria and jack and everyone who's labor may not have been visible to me i'm happy to um to join you here and thanks for all the work you did to make this possible um i am happy to share a couple of poems that i translated of esong and i'm going to share my screen with you to do this um i'll say that i first was introduced to ysong's work when i was living in japan this was the early 2000s and kyomi park who's a korean japanese poet she had asked me to translate the first poem from the crow's eye view series which is one of his most famous poems it got translated and put on a poster for um this avant-garde art school that she and her husband were involved with called the guilty art studium so that was my first introduction was just being asked to translate something and in that process i came to learn what an interesting poet he was and the thing that really struck me was that i had already been translating um the poems of modernist avant-garde japanese poets who were working at the same time so his contemporaries and because i was already familiar with the kinds of experimentation that was going on in that group of poems or poets when i read songs poetry i i just felt from his work that he must have read these works because uh both yisong and these japanese poets were doing such interesting things with language within their poems that i had never seen anywhere else in japanese poetry um especially but and then all the more so in ysong's work it was even um kind of an extension of that experimentation so um so i just want to show you a couple things for example um this is the poet chica sagawa who i translate and one feature of the modernist um poetry was how they would incorporate vocabulary that was from um newly imported western language um contexts and culture so this poem uses the word promenade um from french and the word screen both of these are sort of new to the japanese lexicon in general but they're throwing it into their poems there's a very um disjunctive feel to it and then on the other hand some other poems poets this is and he was doing a lot of work with graphic design this one is translated by william gardner but um that kind of play with typography and graphics was one of the features um and and sort of many one of many features that were part of um part of that modernist poetry in general so this is a poem of these songs that we reproduced in the recent wave books and you see how when i saw this i thought there's something there's something very um connected in the work that he's doing and um this is this is one of the original pages thanks to jack by the way for doing all of this research and footwork and finding the original publications the first publications they're very hard to find i imagine and it's really a pleasure to see them so i'm going to read a poem called fragment scenery which starts in this lower left hand corner i sort of pieced together the poem so you can see it but it's a little bit hard to read all the characters so i also made a version from from a newer edition so i'll read it in japanese first

[in foreign language]

i'm going to read it out of the book

actually fragment scenery

is my amaros

i gave up and cried the lamp post puffed a cigarette

is i over w

oh i suffer i play

slippers are not the same as candy in just what way am i expected to cry thinking about those lonely fields thinking about that lonely day of snow i am not thinking about my skin i am a rigid body against memory

is my dream as opposed to the fact that you should have hit my knee saying perhaps you might sing together really a cane you are lonely and famous what do i do

at last i buried it was a snowy landscape

oh did i not show you okay here is the next poem called hunger

in the original printing and here's a newer printing in case anyone wants to follow along

[in foreign language]

0:42:48.880,1193:02:47.295

here's the english

that one's hard to read okay hunger

no snack bag in my right hand i said and backtracked five re on the path i just came in search of the snack bag clutched by my left hand this hand has fossiled this hand no longer wants ownership of anything will no longer even feel the ownership of that which is owned if the thing in the process of falling right now is snow then my tears that just fell should be snow my interior and exterior and each and every midpoint regarding this system is frighteningly cold left right these hands on either side forget their obligation to each other and never again shake hands and upon this road that needs cleaning that is full of difficult labor sprawled about i persist in independence but it must have cold it must have cold

who points at me and calls me lonely just look at this rivalry of warlords just look at this war i fall into a stupor in the middle of the fever attack of their discord tedious months and years flow by and i open my eyes to see i imagine a quiet moonlit night after the corpses have evaporated

oh innocent dogs of the hamlet don't you bark my body temperature is irresponsible and my hopes are sweet indeed

thank you

that's so wonderful thank you sawako for that reading and also for the introduction it's extremely interesting um you know as you were reading hunger it occurred to me that we can really see continuity with the poems that jack selected in the sort of division between the right hand and the left hand sort of mirroring the split self that appears inside and outside the mirror the i think that you read the hands forget their obligation to each other um they do not shake hands right um just as the right-handed me uh outside the mirror couldn't shake hands with the lefty in the mirror i mean there's also the reappearance of coldness in that poem uh cold of a kind of non-relation or of independence from the other and there may be something to say about this later but let me just ask i can see i've been looking at the questions in the q a and they're so much better than my questions that i just want to get to them um but let me just ask maybe one or two um just sort of very quickly things that occurred to me as i was looking at your translations and one of the things is and you sort of mentioned it when you talked about the avant-garde and avant-garde and modernist work that you were looking at before you begin your reading but one striking thing about these two poems is how they appear on the page and the layout the white space the use of symbols i noticed that you held up the inverted triangle or the sort of upside-down triangle i don't know why that's upside down but um that triangle um well there are two there's there's one way and the other way that's right and i suppose either one could be read as an inverted triangle uh but there seems to be this attempt to achieve meaning formally um as well as in terms of the content of the writing and i wondered if you could say more about the visuality of these poems and if you took that into consideration when you were thinking about how to render them on the page in translation yeah the poems are they are very visual and um the the most striking aspect of their visuality for me as a japanese reader is in the extreme subversion of orthography that he uses and even in reading these poems to you today i could feel my i could feel my stumbling because of the well partly because of his grammar and syntax and partly because of the inverted um orthography where he's switching the characters you use for um local japanese language versus foreign um language and and by switching that it creates a very interesting disorientation of the basic language so as i'm reading something in japanese i feel the poem signaling to me that it's not written in japanese even as it is and so that's a hard thing to translate it's hard to bring that disorientation um and one of the reasons why i use a lot of um capital letters and small caps is partly because the blockiness of those characters speaks to the blockiness of the katakana characters that are phonetic um but there's there's also just um a way in which the reading experience is intentionally um stilted or um there's a there's an awkwardness in the syntax and so whatever i was doing was trying to replicate that awkwardness which is um a little bit different from other kinds of translation that i've engaged in where i'm trying so hard to make it beautiful to make it good um which i didn't think would serve these poems very well because they they were so intentional and there was so much um clarity in some internal logic that the poems held i can't claim that i understand the internal logic fully it's very complicated but um but my job as the translator is trying to engage what i what i can see at the surface of the language um and to create a somewhat similar experience in the english yeah that's incredible um and very revealing i hadn't realized what you were doing with the katakana and hiragana and the capitalization until just now but that's extremely interesting and a nice approach to translating a difficult material i wonder if you would mind if i turn to a couple of questions that could be addressed to both of you and this is a little bit away from a close reading of the poems and more toward the process of translation and working together um it's just incredibly interesting to be able to hear from you as translators in terms of the the work that went into producing um this this volume um so i i guess i would ask if if you could each say a little bit about what the collective translation and editing process was like particularly in terms of working to bring a kind of cohesiveness to the volume across multiple languages

what was it like this sort of collective process i think there are at least four translators at work editors

shall i call start i mean i was just say it was really challenging but uh i think you can you can take it jack um

so uh i i had been working on or studying islam since college and well into my graduate program at seoul national university and um i i'd say there wasn't a like a role uh that everyone was given or anything but i i i was the one i was the guy who did the research on the facsimiles and the original pages and finding them scanning them going back to korea and then so doing sort of the leg work on that um helped us have this foundation from which we could all work together and of course um don may uh was uh the sort of uh the conductor of this orchestra in a sense because uh had had it not been for her my early drops of these translations were something that i'd been working on for many years but hadn't considered uh hadn't been considered for publication anywhere until uh dadmi approached me about um creating this eson volume that was both a uh first that would be first there will be a first major introduction of isang into english and as well as this uh artifact in which uh translators are engaging through essays and personal experiences and timelines uh what isang means as a literary figure historical figure and as a poet that we've come to admire and find difficult and love

i want to mention too

you were talking earlier about the poems in and the question of how to bring something to a contemporary audience and one of the things that i find very beautiful about dami's conception of the book as a whole is um is that her vision for editing and the kinds of work that um got combined into one book is a way of bringing it to the contemporary moment and bringing it in um conversation with her own work as a writer translator and korean-american human and um also with jael mcsweeney's work um that domi had done a lot of work with jael before and so there's a there's a way in which the contemporary um aspect of bringing the translation forward is in the editing rather than necessarily at the language level um so i feel like i feel like it's a it's a process that really bridged time for us in um in an interesting way yeah that's that's uh that's tremendous let me just ask this i'll just ask one more and then i'll pass it on to professor park um for the uh the q a but um it's just something i'm very curious about and i can't help myself from asking i know you're both poets in your own right and i wonder how your own work as poets has had an impact on your work as translators of poetry if any if any

um well i guess i'll go first um i've been i've been translating japanese poetry for a little over 20 years now and and i i've i've often been asked that question and i've often wondered what the answer was because it's not necessarily something that i can identify in the language of my poems themselves i don't think it's necessarily visible at that level and yet all the work that i've done with the modernists with issan with these very very experimental individual iconoclastic people they have affected um if anything it's more about my stance as an artist and what i care about what i value how i perceive my role in the world as an artist and and um and those things are they're large they're not necessarily um things that i think about very actively but i feel that i'm in kind of a conversation over all this time with the kinds of things they were doing

um i

so i i my poetry writing began at the same time as my translation passion sort of got ignited and

i i've often been sort of thinking of those as one and the same in a sense um because my very initial introduction was well if you know another language my one of my college uh workshop professor uh recommended that if you know another language you should um definitely translate and that would be a great way for you to learn uh the craft and that's how it began but the more i did it it it became perhaps as important or if not more important in uh because uh this work of bridging the cultures for readers who are not able to sort of jump across as some of the translators can felt a very meaningful work uh that was almost like a public service in a sense um whereas uh i guess my own poetry i it's it's it it remains very private even now and i assume it must have been for izan who was fascinating because he he was adamant about publishing these poems and works on the most public spaces possible on the newspaper and things like that and then and saucy said he's an iconoclast and indeed he is he he was very much about updating the language to be able to face the cruel illusions of his time i think and i think that sort of um has been uh a guiding start for me in my writing to be able to uh fight off any anything that's holding us back from a true true experiences

yeah thank you thank you very much for those answers uh let me just pass it off to uh professor hansuk park who i think will take it from here and sort of moderate the q a thank you okay good afternoon well thank you so much for the wonderful presentation and thank you for uh professor hanscom for the discussion uh my name is hyun suparg and i'm here to be moderating the q a session so if you have any questions to the presenters please post your questions at the q a which is at the bottom of your screen so that so that i can i can convey them to the presenters we have a couple of questions already so i'm going to read them um in order so the first question is from um gilmarise carolina um besides from the semantic implications of the mirror issan also uses mirroring in the very form of the text could you tell us a bit of how you see it in isang's work and how it is like to translate it and the second one is not a question but a comment from minsin kim a phd student at ucla um it's interesting to note that the book cover of uh of a novel entitled i have my right to destroy myself by kim yong-ha also has the same painting by jack lewis davis the death of mara as a cover photo in some ways kim and issan could meet across different types of places regarding how self-division occurs so i think the the first question was to uh jack john uh could you please answer in any way um of course so

the semantic implications of the mirror or the mirroring in the very form of the text i i believe carolina is uh talking about some of the other poems that were not mentioned today including

poem number four from isang's crow's eye view if you can see here we see in this work isang uses a mirror image of the numbers this number board which he actually made this number board in his earlier japanese work first and uh sahaku has translated it uh it's a poem called diagnosis zero one let me see if i can find that here

um here is yep

and in this one the numbers are presented correctly they're not mirror images and i've always wondered i've always found it fascinating what the implications and possible interpretations of that are to have one language's version be the on the right side and then his uh native language his uh mother language is a version to be on the left side so to speak and esang is constantly using these formal visual experimental forms as well as um using these mirror motifs throughout his other works in essays and short stories one of the uh his early works uh called dark room of the map is a short story that's very experimental it's difficult to read but it throughout it all he there's a constant appearance of someone inside the mirror that's always chastising or that's working that seems to be working against the protagonist so i i think for me it's important to see these mirrors as a continued exploration that is the writer and poet was exploring

i hope that answers the question okay thank you um the next question is from professor lothrophon uh falkenhausen um a specialist of early china teaching here at ucla he asked and the first slide to uh is asking to jack in the first slide i noticed that quote unquote chinese meaning chinese art in germany is written in mira writing about the poem is there unintended referentiality to the topic of the poem why the german does a weird art deco typeface convey an additional layer of meaning

so i believe professor faulknausen is talking about this specific image and i remember when i first saw this i had a similar desire to explore um what this art deco design was doing and then when you go to the actual magazine it was published in this design is on all the pages from start to finish and this right to left type i thought initially that it was

a specific mirror type image but then this was being done throughout the entire magazine as well as if like it's kind of border on the upper side so

the magazine itself was called catholic youth it was published by uh the the myeongdong cathedral and one of the few korean language magazines there were gloss magazines as well as a general interest magazine that could publish a lot more korean language works freely at the time during the japanese occupation so i have tried i i went through the other works in this issue to see what the chinese art was exactly talking about but i couldn't find the very

definite connection to any of this but it is something i i would love to sort of go back to when i get a chance so thank you for pointing that out it was it was this used to be one of my obsessions back in the day

yes uh professor fulkin i was i left a message that he has to leave for class but i think we can be uh taking a look at the recorded video uh later on i guess um the next two questions can be addressed to both of you um so the first one is by kairi are there a particular set of rhyming choices practices rules that you make in relation to translating into the korean language especially because english is such a rhyme-based language and korean isn't and the next one is by kyung park is it possible to accurately get the nuances in meaning across from asian languages such as korean and japanese into a western language like english

so i guess either of you can share um your ideas

i can start by saying that um i personally haven't noticed a lot of rhyme in esongs poems but there is a lot of rhythm and a lot of music and it does take a certain kind of listening to his sound patterns which um can be replicated in english to some degree um so it's for me i don't think it's so much about the rhyming but there is still a lot of sound that comes across

um it's fascinating in the case of izong's uh use of um musicality in this language because as uh sahaja you mentioned even in korean he has a very aggressive and definite sense of rhythm it's uh very in your face about the most immediate effect is how he uses repetition throughout uh throughout his works that almost feel like chanting and um another aspect of it though is he he uh he sang in one of the magazines back in the day was asked a question in a very short interview that asked a bunch of poets at the time what is your favorite line in korean poetry right now and the isang answered and i'll try to say it uh as politically as possible i love this line from zhang jiang's poem and tsungjang was one of his mentors and izan said uh

chuma and that the musicality of that line i hope even if you don't uh speak korean you can hear it it's so um different from the rest of ysang's works like he doesn't try to imitate anything like that he he is doing something very different in his own style um and some have argued that what isang did in this near prose like style is what has come to sort of uh dominate korean poetry in general since then and so

in case of english however i would also argue that um english is very difficult language to uh rhyme and that's why some of the rhymes are stand out more when poets go out of their way to make their rhymes i mean like compared to italian english is like hell it's very difficult to run so and those kind of things i think are less about rhyming and more about finding a sense of a rhythm in both korean and how to make that happen again in english

okay thank you so much i guess we have another question on the musicality of poems from seth chandler hearing the poems writing japanese made me wonder about the sound conventions of japan's poetry i don't speak japanese but it seemed like there were so many um repeated sounds at the beginnings and sometimes ends of lines and phrases is that in keeping with some tradition a break from tradition intentional coincidental or am i imagining it no no you're not imagining the repetition um often they do happen at the beginnings of lines sometimes at the ends those are very um very present but as far as the other part of your question um about relationship to tradition it's um it's really a huge break and you know esong is not a japanese poet in the first place so he's already um working from the position of of being a colonized subject and writing writing in a colonial language in the midst of the occupation and so he's very aware that he does not inhabit the language in the same way that a japanese person would but um the thing that's interesting about that is that he doesn't take that as a problem per se he kind of embraces his position and um and even in terms of error he'll he'll do things that are grammatically incorrect in japanese and i can only um i can only guess but i have a feeling that he's being intentional in breaking not only from poetic traditions but also breaking from grammatical conventions where um where they're just they're just very awkward like there's one line um that's translated into he is fossiled and in our minds were likely to want to say something got fossilized nothing can ever get fossiled it doesn't work and yet he's insisting on these kind of um these subverted grammatical elements and so it's just something it's it's a break but it's such a far break because he was imitating and learning from poets who themselves were making a huge break from traditional poetry so it's really it's hard to um communicate the degree to which his poems are so unique in the context of japanese poetry especially they're just unlike anything else that i've read or translated i i would just like to add that if you are interested in um reading more about japanese avant-garde movement um this is a great book shredding the tapestry of meaning uh it's about one of the uh sort of contemporaries uh

poetics um i highly recommend this as a kind of introduction to what sort of a general avant-garde movement was like in japan and how it may be it could perhaps we could argue one day some kind of sort of a east asian thing what's going on we'll see

all right thank you so much um we have another question from seth chandler i'm also curious about the place of isang's writing and japanese literature you mentioned that he was probably reading the japanese avant-garde poets were they reading him do people commonly read him now

um it's hard for me to know very definitively but i i doubt they were reading his work at that moment um i don't think he was publishing in japan he was publishing in occupied korea and i don't i haven't seen any evidence that they had read his work on the other hand there are people who read him now because there are people who have come to recognize this this fascinating poet so so i own a big anthology of work translated into japanese and and in that in that book there's a section of it um that contains the works already that were written in japanese so it's accessible and available um it's probably not read by that many people it's not a mainstream part of the canon but it is part of that modernist history so so there are some people who know about it and who read it all right thank you um we have one more question from uh maris carolina how do the characteristics of isan's poem differ from his korean works and his japanese works

um i guess i should start by saying that he

is isang's first major korean publication was in the newspaper where he published series crow's eye view 15 poems of which some of which are we could say is his all uh his his translation that he does of his own uh japanese works into korean um the one that i showed you before with the number board and so those some of these most experimental visually striking poems are in japanese whereas uh his more uh

korean poems tends to be uh these uh kind of uh prose blocks that are exploring uh many of his uh motifs that constantly repeat themselves uh knives mirror women flower and this sense uh cell multiple cells converging into one personality these things i i think he he seems to have been exploring what was possible in a prose form before his uh untimely death so i i can't say exactly how he would have gone on writing but there is this intense break between visual experimentation to writing more in prose somewhat more conventional pros because it's not really conventional pros but it looks like pros

do you wanna provide any answers um well i would i would agree that um perhaps his earlier works in japanese were more uh linguistically experimental and um you know there's a part of me that wonders if he was wanting to reach a wider audience when he realized that people were a little bit they were not so friendly about his experimentations it was so shocking and radical in his context that you know i wondered if he wanted to to connect to a wider audience and and not necessarily that is the only reason but that his work seems to have evolved a bit over time and yeah it's too bad that uh it's too bad there isn't more of it

well all right thank you um this is a kind of request from maribel molina i'd like to know if you have a book recommendation for the korean avant-garde movement

oh i

i would say um actually sort of an introduction to this period would be professor hanscom's a real modern would be a great introduction um another work um i i can't think of right off top of my head but in english i i would uh highly recommend professor hanscom's work and sort of get a feel for what kind of um

very challenging difficult modernist writings were being done by isan and his contemporaries and his circle uh his uh greenway the circle of nine uh writers were also sort of um challenging the conventions of the time with their own writing um of course um besides uh the circle of nine there was a cough uh choreo artist a proletariat federation um which was a socialist uh writing uh group in korea and then they they were led by figures like in hwa who you may be able to find some translations online on the margins uh website uh through asian american writers workshop and that uh those kind of figures were like was one of many korean writers that were working at the time and i would hope that study into this from american universities would expand more certainly and then that we can sort of talk about this in a as a part of a world literature uh so to speak

okay um i just want to add there's another anthology um on global modernism that came out recently uh one of the editors is alice moody and that features the song in the korea section and it's interesting as a book because it places him and his contemporaries in um in the context of the global modernist poetry and writing so that would be a that would be a place to go to well thank you so much well um we were going to end the event uh by uh at 2 2 30. so i guess we can accept still one or two more questions so if you have any questions please post them on the q a um while waiting for them i guess i can um ask a very broad questions to both of you i can imagine that it could it must have been a very pace-taking work to translate issan's poems so i was just wondering how your work changed your understandings of his poems in any ways

that's a that is a broad question but if i may i guess for me

it was a process of uh

learning about another

human person um in a much more intimate way than i imagined and i say that because at least from a korean student perspective is this almost biblical figure part of the constellation in korean literature difficult and distant and overwhelming at times but um i i think the more i learned about him by closely reading his work it became obvious to me that he was someone who struggled and found ways to express and find freedom in writing in what was unimaginably difficult time to be a korean person in the 20th century

i would say that um at the time that i discovered isang's work was the time that i was living in japan and i was living in japan for the first time in my adult life i had been born there but i lived most of my life in the u.s and having gone to schools in in the us for all of my education i actually had very little understanding of the history between japan and korea so my learning about yisang coincided with my learning about the sort of horrific history between these countries and and so in that context i think that when i first when i first ready song it was interesting experimental avant-garde poetry but as i spent more time with it i do find myself thinking about what what that experience is to be both experimental and writing in um in the midst of colonialism and to be to be sort of um you know like one interpretation i have of this is that he's appropriating these tools of the avant-garde to subvert the japanese language as a kind of linguistic rebellion that he is free to do in part because those poems were so mysterious and hard to interpret very accurately there's no clear reading you can make out of some some of these poems even though there are references that are military that refer to war that are they're violent and aggressive and there's definitely a struggle in these poems and i think that it's interesting to consider how these japanese poems in particular are that that wrangling with the situation at the level of language at the level of his poetics and you know how interesting it would have been if he could have taken a moment to write a poetic statement or manifesto or something that articulated what he was doing and why and how these pieces connect because we can only look back and guess but i find it very compelling even as it's even as it remains mysterious to me in a lot of ways

well thank you so much we have a message from lisa h k thank you so much jack and sawaku for these amazing amazing translations and i'd like to say the same thing thank you so much for this um this great translations uh personally i have never imagined that we will be able to have any um you know translations of ethan's poems um

in english and i'm sure that many students and scholars and readers will be benefited from your works in the future i'd like to announce um to the audience that the um the translation is elected works is now available it was published last year in 2020 um okay so let's find a book um all right thank you so much i guess massive it's a really thick yeah there's a lot of powdery yeah all right um well thank you uh thank you everyone uh for joining this event well this webinar series uh celebrating the process of translating korean literature will be ongoing throughout the year so please stay tuned thank you so much thank you thank you thanks everyone thank you everyone