On Translating Ahn Joo Cheol

Throughout contemporary Korean poet Ahn Joo Cheol’s momentous debut collection <다음 생에 할 일들> (Things to Do in the Next Life) (Changbi Publishers, 2015), the mood is rather consistent: self-reflective, somber, sincere. There is, however, the occasional poem with a lighter touch. “Hamburg” contains Ahn’s signature serious and imagistic moments, such as the speaker’s mother’s “blood-soaked gauze” floating in on the waves, but he ends the poem with a satisfied smirk. For my co-translator Shim Jaekwan and I, this smirk was instrumental in answering one of the questions that arose when translating “Hamburg.” 

The penultimate sentence of the poem reads: 방파제에 앉아 삶은 문어를 들고/ 삶은 방파제를 떠올리다 낚싯바늘에 걸린/ 잡어처럼 피식 웃는다. Note the bolded word: 삶은 (salm-eun), which means “boiled.” In this stanza, the speaker is sitting on a seawall holding a boiled octopus. When “삶은" appears a second time, it could mean boiled. But it could also mean “life.” We considered, tried things out, debated. We consulted Ahn, whose answer was simply, with a shrug, “Yes. I mean both.” Of course, “boiled” and “life” do not have the same overlap in English as they do in Korean. We had to make a choice. 

There is also no subject indicated here, as is often the case in a Korean sentence. We wrote several possibilities. 1) “(My) life reminds me of the seawall and (life) grins like a small fish caught on a hook.” 2) “reminded of life in the seawall, (I,) like a caught fish on a hook....” 3) “(I) think of the boiled seawall and, like a small fish caught on a hook, (I)....”

And there was the boiled octopus to take into account. As we continued refining our options, Ahn’s mention of intentional wordplay lingered. I considered: What do I hope for when I choose a word in my own poem that has two meanings? How could I help both meanings come across? We talked about the poem’s turn. The rarity and therefore importance of Ahn’s wordplay. Is it possible the concept of thinking about life was already understood through other parts of the poem? 

Our conclusion: yes, it was. This speaker is in a new hometown in a foreign country. He compares his village to a father who has died. He “decide[s] to forget” that place. The poem’s final concrete image is sand on his daughter’s toes. Life is very much present throughout this poem, so much so that perhaps it doesn’t need to be stated directly. Rather, the translation can show a new reverence for life through the playfulness of language. The mood of so many of Ahn’s poems is somber; here, a lightness emerges, and this matches the turn in the poem after the speaker’s resolve to forget where he came from. 

So, the translation became: “Sitting on the seawall like a fish caught on a hook,/holding a boiled octopus while thinking about/a boiled seawall, I smirk.” The smirk determined the retention of the wordplay in the translation. Because a smirk is so rare here, because the somber, serious, sincere, self-reflective tone echoes throughout most of the poems in this book, we chose to highlight the presence, the rarity, and the value of this gesture. By foregrounding the playfulness, we hoped to also emphasize this speaker’s wish that his daughter’s future will not be limited by his own past.