I am delighted to be able to share the new preface to my novel, Forgotten Reflections, available in the ebook version! While this preface has an academic tilt, I hope that it will provide some insight into the difficult task of “translating” culture.

** Please note that this preface contains spoilers.

Author’s Note on Translating Culture

In an attempt to write a preface to my own work, I have abandoned all claims to objectivity. Instead, I write this author’s note with the full force of authorial intent that in the aftermath of Ronald Barthe’s “The Death of The Author” had previously nudged me to hide behind a pseudonym, though with good reason so as to keep alive a part of my late grandmother, Lee Young-Im whose generation has died out or is in the process of dying out as it is replaced with the bright lights of Seoul’s undying nightlife that mask the stars that had once stood witness to my ancestors. This is the premise of my book. Though, in the process of using a quintessentially “Korean” pseudonym, and a cover page of an iconic “Korean” image of a lady in a hanbok (the Korean traditional dress), I have in turn masked my own ‘unusual’ identity that like modern-day Seoul, seems vaguely out of place, disjointed in time as if our all-important ‘traditions’ have somehow been irredeemably lost. Yet, a close-reader would surely know (if I may presume the position of the reader) that the forgotten reflections I speak of is not so much to prompt a reflection of the past in hopes to return to it, but is, as I have asserted in my closing remarks, a vehement call against such a backward-looking reflection:

I cannot help but think there is only so much the previous generation can imagine about what a better future looks like. All the while, I wonder if we are doing the right thing, just adopting the American mask as if it were our own. And to those who look at Korea’s skeletal bright lights and mourn for our lost history and culture, I plead you do not. This story is not meant to romanticize a past that will never return. Certainly not! It is to ask: how can we move forward mindfully without forgetting the past or becoming lost in it. (504-5)

As I look back on a very violent history (of roughly the people of Han that make up the geopolitical ‘nation(s)’ of Korea, (Han-guk, 한국 or “Han Nation”) that spans more than just a few hundred years, I feel compelled to feel a sense of anxiety, or perhaps even presume to portend: “This is our brief interlude of freedom before the bright lights [bombs] come raining down on us again to destroy then rebuild us into their own image. In this brief idyll of freedom and peace, between generations before and after us that will wage war, what will we do?” (505). This author’s note, I hope, will be a small contribution to this reflection that allows us to conceive of a new identity built not on the artifice of a pseudonym that holds on to a dying tradition, nor of staunch nationalism, but on the processes that have brought this book into being and into circulation. Situating this novel as a born-translated work, I seek to place pressure on the notion of the “native” that, in the wake of postcolonial discourse, has already been slowly dismantling. Please note, this preface contains spoilers.

 

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Edward Said’s foundational book, Orientalism foregrounds the issue of cultural difference as perceived as “one of its [Europe’s] deepest and most recurring images of the Other,” in which difference as seen as other leads to the perplexing paradox in translation in which the translator’s invisibility “that aims to bring back a cultural other as a recognizable, the familiar, even the same… always risks a wholesale domestication of the foreign text.” The end result is what Lawrence Venuti claims is the inevitable violence that occurs—a violence that is “felt at home as well as abroad.” As Schleirmacher’s astutely observes, “Either the translator leaves the author in peace as much as possible and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him,” and with this acknowledgment of the inevitability of violence, Venuti’s solution is to leave the reader and move the author towards him, with linguistic choices that aim to foreignize the translation so as not to remove the ‘essence’ of author’s cultural and linguistic choices in the original work (Venuti 19-20). Again, we return to the paradox: how can the translator ensure that the same essential difference that is preserved in a foreignized translation is not then perceived as another way to other the text? For instance, how does a translator translate “han,” a word that appears prominently throughout this book, which for the Korean people mean so much more than “resentment?” By keeping it in its phonetically Korean “han,” or by using the hangul (the Korean alphabet) “한”? Perhaps a definition would be needed in the margins of the text in the form of a footnote. Here is one such definition by Suh Nam Dong who astutely defines ‘han’ as:

A feeling of unresolved resentment against injustices suffered, a sense of helplessness because of the overwhelming odds against one, a feeling of acute pain in one’s guts and bowels, making the whole body writhe and squirm, and an obstinate urge to take revenge and to right the wrong—all of these combined. (Yoo 221)

In such a case where one-to-one correspondence is impossible, there emerges a crack in the reader’s understanding—a form of realization that can emphasize the distance of such a word, its corresponding difference in culture, thereby its otherness; yet this is precisely the difference that matters—a difference that shows, in a single word, the gut-feeling that is almost instinctively shared by all Koreans who hear the phrase, “한이 맺히다.”

Yet, for Venuti, whose notion of linguistic foreignization situates the translator between two languages, each tied neatly into their respective geographical location and people group, it is hard to imagine a work that is foreignized, not through its use of language, but through the fundamental altering of the story itself. As Born Translated author Rebecca L. Walkowitz notes, Venuti’s How to Read a Translation “takes for granted that the reader of an original work is supposed to have access to its language and that all books have a single language in which they begin. The distinction Venuti offers between the native and the foreign reader, for example, relies on New Critical standards of comprehension while also invoking confidently the boundaries between insiders and outsiders, between one’s own literary tradition and the literary traditions that belong to others” (173). Instead, born translated works that modify Venuti’s model as David Damrosch has done, begin to conceptualize language as “homes” (66), suggesting that “translated books, like migrants, can make their homes many times, though not without effort, and some more easily than others” (174).

In view of this particular novel that seems to be written in Korean for a Korean audience, then subsequently translated into English for an English-speaking audience, Walkowitz’s Born Translated provides a conceptual framework through which such national bounds are questioned and thereby weakened. Bolstered by Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities,” that places print as the means for a national consciousness to be crafted, the same print can then become the means through which a new community can be imagined. Forgotten Reflections: A War Story is a “born-translated” novel, not in terms of what can be seen on the front cover, but what can be discovered within and through the lives it has lived not just in the linguistic differences that are emphasized, but through such differences that become part and parcel of the narrative itself. It is not necessarily born translated because of the lives and the paths the book has already taken in the western world, but that the work remains proleptic in the lives that it could have taken or could still take if the original Korean script is made available, and as the novel continues to reach a wider audience both in the West, and in the non-western, English-speaking parts of the world. As Walkovich notes, “they [born translated works] are trying to be translated, but in more important ways they are also trying to keep being translated.” In this sense, Forgotten Reflections “occup[ies] more than one place, [is] produced in more than one language, [and] address[es] multiple audiences at the same time” (6). Using Walkovich’s framework, the remainder of this note will briefly trace the life this English version has taken and juxtapose it to Korean version to address the aforementioned paradox of different and other in the linguistic and narrative choices I have made.

If Venuti’s moments of foreignizing linguistic translation accounts for such a difference, but may in turn inflict violence domestically, causing the balance to tip towards reader’s ultimate othering of the text, Walkowitz’s blurring of the boundaries of what is considered “foreign” and “native” not necessarily only through linguistic manipulation but also through altering the narrative plot points may bring the balance back towards a difference that is not completely othered. In such moments of difference (either linguistically or on the narrative scale), the reader is either triggered to 1) make the difference feel at home and/or 2) ultimately reject/other it. As such, Gerald Genette’s narratological concept of metalepsis can further provide a conceptual tool that can account for this moment of trigger. Gerald Genette’s defines metalepsis as “any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narrate into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse” (234-5), a concept that can simply be understood as narrative moments that call attention to the “the shifting but sacred frontier between the two world, the world in which one tells and of which on tells,” blurring the boundaries between the world of fiction and the extratextual world the reader resides in (Smith 236). If we modify Genette’s concept (not in terms of the paradoxical effect that occurs when the literary fourth wall breaks, drawing the reader’s attention to the artifice of the work thereby causing a mimetic break and/or further drawing them into the work), metalepsis as applied to our moment of difference can function as a trigger of a different sort in which the breaking of the fourth wall draws attention to the foreignness that is either made at home in the reader or is ultimately othered.

On the linguistic level, the novel notes the various instances of metalepsis that showcase transitions from English, Romanized Korean to even Hangul words in the midst of a largely “fluent-sounding” text with ample use of colloquial English expressions. For instance, the aforementioned phonetically preserved word, ‘han’ is used in three different languages (“한,”

“恨” and “Han”) in tandem with a peripheral English definition that appears before its use throughout the narrative in Romanized hangul. Among the many examples of romanization is the colloquial word, “oppa” (오빠) that, in its continued use in the Romanized form does not necessitate a peripheral definition or footnote: “‘Yeong-Hoon oppa! I don’t know why it isn’t working.’ Iseul called her fiancé as she banged the side of the radio” (28). Yet, in a book that largely gives voice to characters in colloquial English, it would be easy to believe that the characters are disjointed in time and place, as if these are “American” or “native English” characters living not in the small rice farming village of Yeoju in 1945, but in modern times, coming from the traditions and cultures that are infused in the English language they seem to speak so fluently. The difference then is reiterated not only by the interspersed use of Romanized hangul, but through the use of hangul in strategic narrative moments such as the retelling of Korea’s foundational myth of the “Legend of Tangun” (420), implying that this story too is likewise another modern retelling of a fundamentally Korean tale. The most prominently featured example of a metaleptical narrative moment is in a play on the Korean word “영혼”:

영혼: Spirit/ Soul*

* Pronounced Yeong-Hon

* Not to be confused with the common Korean name, Yeong-Hoon

* Not to be phonetically confused with the capital of the Republic of Korea, Seoul (477)

Here, the concept of “영혼” (Spirit/ Yeong-Hon) is the play on the phonetically similar character, “영훈” (Yeong-Hoon) whose identity remains a mystery throughout the novel. In this final revelatory moment on Iseul’s deathbed (the protagonist and grandmother figure who is dying of Alzheimer’s), Yeong-Hoon, one of two love interests who first emerge in Iseul’s childhood on the precipice of the Korean War, is finally revealed to be a figment of Iseul’s imagination, though this ghostly figure’s exact genesis (and eventual path) still remains largely unknown by the end of the novel. The various implications are clear:

Is it so hard to believe that an old lady dying of Alzheimer’s would imagine a person into being? She had made up the character, Yeong-Hoon after the disease had taken hold. Furthermore, she had retrospectively reconfigured her memories of her war-ridden childhood and painstaking adult life in post-war South Korea to include the man she had always planned to build her life with, though the war had taken him too soon.
“The man [Yeong-Hoon] laughed. ‘You’ve always had an overactive imagination.’” Here, I imply that Iseul had always imagined the character from her youth and Iseul’s own realization of the fact devastates her: “…realization washed over her. Yeong-Hoon oppa—the man she was betrothed to, the man who had a limp and was her father’s apprentice, the man who had spoon-fed her in those weeks after her father was murdered and Jung-Soo disappeared—was never there.”
Yeong-Hoon’s ghostly figure doesn’t stop him from holding his own agency as he clarifies, “‘I was there,’ he corrected. ‘I witnessed every second of it. But you did it all by yourself; you are stronger than you remember. You got back on your own two feet, buried your father’s ashes by your mother, started making drums for war, and started the paper-making movement in your village’” (482).

And in a story that is meant to carry the weight of war into a modern city like Seoul that holds no remnant of its own tragic past “other than a cemetery and museums that come in vogue once a year—a true testament of how our people tried our very best to forget the problems we cannot fix, as if the war isn’t still ongoing, marching to the rhythm of progress made in the past sixty years to eradicate all memories of our most recent trauma,” Yeong-Hoon is the liminal figure who lives between the past rice-farming villages like Yeoju and modern-day Seoul, between life and death, and perhaps even between this war and the next, whose ghostly presence/non-presence stand for the unseen hand that has guided us to where we are today, but also calls us to usurp the agency he himself cannot fully wield.

On a metaleptic level in which the use of Hangul may jar the reader in its persistent use of peripheral footnoting, phonetic Romanizing and outright use of 한글, the visibility of the foreignizing difference that is maintained at the core of the narrative (not just on the linguistic level) may tip the balance of the paradoxical moment ultimately made at home in the reader. Yet, I hope I have not masked such moments of metaleptic foreignization to stand as symbols for an “authentic” or “native” culture that presumably exists behind such a word like “han,” or any other quintessentially “Korean” aspects of the novel such as my retelling of the legend of Tangun. Instead, as a born-translated novel, moments of foreignization also allude to the multiple “homes” (Damrosch 66) the novel have (or potentially have) as the reader begins to question: what would a moment like the play on the words, ‘Yeong-Hoon’ and ‘yeong-hon,’ ‘Seoul’ and ‘soul’ look like in their original language? The answer is clear: there can be no such thing as the source language! In fact, I would dare argue that that which is conceived of as “authentically” Korean is an image of a past that never existed in the first place.

In this final section, I turn my attention to the other home I wish this novel to be housed—in Korea. Should this novel be completed in its preliminary Korean version I wrote before I began writing the English version, I am certain there will be another “home” for this narrative where moments of metalepsis, though different, would still occur and function in much the same way they do in English.

In evaluating the function of metalepsis in broader sense, the moments in which the author reaches out from the pages of the book to directly address the reader and/or draw attention to the artifice of the work, serve as ways of conjoining the disjointed state of time (and vice versa) that cannot possibly account for novel that is read after the fact (of being written), while the reader is in here-and-now of the present act of reading. Acts of foreignization that I have already elaborated on serve this function, though “foreignization” in the way that it draws attention to itself, can exist as a smaller subset in the larger category of metalepsis. Thereby, in a novel that weaves from the present to the past, purposefully disjoins and conjoins time through methods akin to magical realism (this subject matter could be its own preface), and whose main character, Yeong-Hoon remains the ambiguous figure who literally appears out of nowhere with an unexplained knock on Iseul’s door and disappears, not into death as Iseul does, but whose eventuality is forgotten (or neglected); such moments of metalepsis serve as a method to fold time. The past is made to feel more present in the colloquial language I use for my characters in the Korean War era and the present made to feel stunted in the sparse characterization of my modern granddaughter protagonist. They also bring the readers into this disjointedness, in which their cozy positions as extradiegetic figures outside the immediate action is brought to a halt in a dizzying spread of metalepsis in which the past made present (and vice versa) and ‘foreignness’ of the Korean language made to converge from its peripheral footnoting towards the core of the narrative. And in this brief metaleptic moment when space-time is made other in the reader, the other is then made to fold into the self.

All such moments, I hope, are captured in the English version, yet there are aspects still left ‘untranslated’ or left “hidden” that would serve the same purpose for the Korean reader. The Korean reader would not need me to explain, “Jung-Soo?… It doesn’t sound like a name from that era. Doesn’t it sound like a common name someone your age would have?” (486) as we would immediately know that none of us would have grandparents named Jung-Soo from the moment his name is mentioned on page nineteen. Instead, Jung-Soo would be a friend, a name so common that perhaps we would all know at least one. Neither would it take so long for a Korean to figure out that the Seoul I paint is estranged (almost as if the author herself is estranged from the place), just as my modern-day protagonist, Jia would not resemble a “native” Seoulite we have grown accustomed to. What is instinctive then, are how such folds in time connote the fundamental generational disjoint we have all been experiencing, from a generation that was unanimously and profoundly altered by a war so devastating that there isn’t a mark to be seen in the first world South Korea has become in the span of just two generations. This book is equally for us. I leave this author’s note with a remark that is echoed at the end of the book: “I hope that this particular exploration of the topic of identity will be a source of enlightenment and curiosity for all those looking from inside of Korea, outside or somewhere in between” (506).

 

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 2006.

Barthes, Roland. The Death of the Author. London, England: Routledge, 2002, pp. 221–24.

Damrosch, David. Comparative World Literature. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 2011, pp. 169–178.

Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1980.

Lee, Young-Im. Forgotten Reflections: A War Story. Young-Im Lee, 2017.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.

Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, “Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories.” Critical Inquiry 7.1 (1980. 213-36)

Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London; New York: Routledge, 2008.

Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York, NY: Columbia UP, 2015.

Yoo, Boo-Woong. Korean Pentecostalism: Its History and Theology. P. Lang, 1988.