Conscripts of Modernization:
Transformational Variations Drawn from the Korean
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Conscripts of Modernization: |
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—for Kara There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.
What follows is an eclectic collection of Korean verse and song I translated while working as a medic at an American military clinic in Waegwan, south Korea. From December 1997 through May 2001 I wiled away many nights transcribing and translating these poems and songs, often appealing to others for assistance—Korean soldiers, civilians, university students, and English-speaking expatriates. Most everyone I appealed to delighted in helping me and for that I am grateful. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote…. None escapes it. The originals are not original. If we quote we can only quote what is prior, what came before us, what is past. The past—or representations of the past—are everywhere present. The past is carried into the present by means of quoting and translation. And this gathering of quotes and translations, of translation as quote, has less to do with the work in translation than with the work of translation—the quote passed from one language through another, from one body through another, from one text through another, from one culture through another. It is at one and the same time an act of transmission and also an act of faith. And it is through such an act of faith that I have attempted to understand my complicity in a project that has culturally and economically subordinated Korea to the U.S. for over fifty years. § HONG NAN PA—“Spring In My Hometown” |
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Hong Nan Pa—musician and nationalist. The old man and I worked on the song through the night, passing the hours while on call at the clinic. He sang this as a child. I haven’t yet finished working it, tweaking it, transforming it into English. Perhaps it can remain as is, an unfinished draft, in his hand and mine, a collaborative effort, the work always unfinished, always open, always with room for others to sing in whatever tongue they please. § Rexroth—via Dryden—believes it is an act of sympathy. This. Translation. He asserts with usual unswerving force that Hart Crane’s “Voyages” is “by far the best transmission of Rimbaud into English that exists—” Something of barbarism in the manner of all transmission, in all sympathy when sympathy involves “the identification of another person with oneself, the transference of the utterance to one’s own utterance.” § February 6, 1999. The world at once: large in possibility; smaller in transmission—becomes uncertain…. § December 31, 1999. Palestinians will release 2000 doves at midnight. There have been no reported injuries at Times Square. Part of the festivities taking place in Times Square involves skits performed to celebrate each nation of the world as New Year arrives in those nations. & in Korea something other than “Auld Lange Syne,” a popular holiday folk song sung by children in celebration of the Lunar New Year: |
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Global harmony. Global hegemony. In Seoul celebrations commenced in Chong-No and at the eastern gate of the city. Dance. Fireworks. Food. Theater. All of this coupled with technology, with technological advancement. One skit performed in Seoul in celebration of the New Year was titled “DMZ 2000.” Men and Women clad in costumes—all of them appearing like characters out of a sci-fi dystopia film—carried a large effigy, a skeleton, while other performers flailed wildly around the stage, some throwing grenades, firing weapons, weeping, mourning, dying. All of it chilling. § Just as Hart Crane & Harry Crosby have been held high as Hamlet-like figures emblematic of the modern period—their premature departures marking the end of the modern period—the early death of modernist poet Yi Sang marks perhaps the final stage in what Ngugi wa Thiong’o has called the colonization of the imagination. This from Ogamdo, Portrait of the Five Senses, Yi Sang approaching identity & imagination under a colonial roof— |
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거울 거울속에는소리가없소 |
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The Looking Glass No sound in the mirror. No |
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Much of Yi Sang’s work balances itself precariously on an awareness of Cocteau’s mirror poems—though there’s something in the idea of a mirror which replicates to scale the experience of smacking a Korean head against a Japanese ceiling—later, an American ceiling. Again, Yi Sang: 꽃나무 벌판한복판에꽃나무하나가있소. 근처에는꽃나무가하나도없소. 꽃나무는제가생각하는꽃나무를열심으로생각하는것처럼열심으로꽃을 피워가지고섰소. 꽃나무는제가생각하는꽃 나무에게갈수없소. 나는막달아났소. 한꽃나무를위하여그러는것처럼나는참그런이상스러 운흉내를내었소. Flower Tree There—a flower tree in the center of a field. The flower tree thinks about the flower tree with enthusiasm. The flower tree stands blossoming with enthusiasm as if the flower tree thinks about itself with enthusiasm. There is an idea of the flower tree which the flower tree cannot come close to. I ran wildly away. It’s such an odd imitation I perform for the flower tree. Japan’s annexation & subsequent occupation of Korea in 1910 ended abruptly in 1945 with the surrender of Japan—with the savage, unwarranted bombings of Hiroshima & Nagasaki. 1945 through 1948 marked for Korea a period of allied occupation. The country was arbitrarily divided along the 38th parallel, the region north of that line occupied by the Soviet Union, the region south by the U.S. Indeed, it has often been posited that, once the war in Europe ended & Soviet forces were able to turn their attention to the war in the Pacific, the Truman administration struggled to bring the war in the Pacific to a rapid close—this in order to prevent the Soviet Union from extending their sphere of influence. This issue, among a small handful of others, informed Truman’s decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For Korea, one occupying force was replaced by two, the country irreparably fractured. & through colonization the language gradually turns inward on itself, against itself, the imagination is annexed, occupied. § Writing in 1994, in English, Choi Chungmoo illustrates the way in which language and everyday usage of an idiom specific to a region, a people, a country, can be shaped through a process of cultural occupation: A few days before my departure to America, one of my friends at the People’s Arts Council, a group engaged in the oppositional minjung culture movement, casually asked me, “When do you enter (turo gada: to go in) America?” I cringed at this ordinary question… Choi then provides a footnote which explains: The verb to enter is used exclusively for travel to the Unite States. The verb to go is used for traveling to other countries. Here Kim Min-Gi, “Morning Dew”—a song written in response to the Kwangju massacre, May 1980. Over eight hundred students & activists were killed by military and police forces while engaged in protest— |
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긴 밤 지새우고 풀잎마다 맺힌 진주 보다 더 고운 아침 이슬처럼 like morning dew prettier than pearls to cull from the past, from Sijo & Hanshi, from Korea as blossom swinging from a Chinese bough. Barbarism in transmission. Lady Kim of Kum Won— |
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She the concubine of Kim Yi-Sang, 19th century statesman, yangban. She was well acquainted with the poet Un Jo, as well as a number of other poets and artists. Throughout her life she expressed regret with having been born a woman. |
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Considering her relationship to the poet Juk Suh, she wrote: “I would like that in the next life Juk Suh & I were born as men & might then sing peacefully to one another.” |
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She was said to have dressed in men’s clothing, often to escape from her husband’s estate and run off with friends to her husband’s country home where they would read poetry to one another— |
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Perhaps to seek the civilized where barbarism exists becomes itself a barbarous act—& the words themselves, “barbarism” and “civility,” laden with meaning that calls to mind the colonial, a colonization first of land—then the landscape of mind & consciousness, the region where calendars in conflict collide. Then something which penetrates further, to the transmission itself—to language, the vehicle of barbarous transmission. § From Cruel and Unusual, Mark Crispin Miller: Bush’s hatred of the North Korean tyrant [Kim Jong-Il] came as quite a shock to Kim Dae-Jung, South Korea’s president, when he came to Washington on March 7, 2001, expecting Bush to bless his efforts to resolve the tension between North and South. Instead, Bush stunned his guest by casting North Korea as a predatory threat. § There is history & I too am implicated in its gathering, in its moment, in its gathering in the moment, through the moment, throwing the moment, projecting it outward. I am complicit in its movement—& the force with which it moves is unmitigated. I gather representations of the past into my arms & they color my present. As Basil Bunting remarks: then is diffused in now. But I do not agree. I cannot agree. The materiality of then is nowhere in the now. Museums are reliquaries made large & libraries are even larger reliquaries. Neither of them deliver to us anything more than a promise of the past. We believe the promise. We want to believe it. We must believe it. It is faith—faith in representation, construct, artifice. It is an unholy faith, a secular faith, but nonetheless faith. Mythology is no man’s work; but what we daily observe in regard to the bon-mots that circulate in society,—that every talker helps a story in repeating it, until, at last, from the slenderest filament of fact a good fable is constructed,—the same growth befalls mythology: the legend is tossed from believer to poet, from poet to believer, everybody adding grace or dropping a fault or rounding the form, until it gets an ideal truth. One would be hard pressed to find a Korean citizen unable to recite Hwang’s poem “I would slice the waist” from memory. She is said to have existed. Of the writing she left behind only nine poems are extant, three of which are Sino-Korean verses. The other six are sijo. My translations of her work are drawn, perhaps appropriately, from a cheaply printed children’s book I stumbled upon in a small, cluttered shop very close to Waegwan Station. The Sino-Korean poems, or hanshi, have been transliterated by the editors of the book so that they appear not in Chinese but in Korean. The reading is thus suitable for children. The reading is thus suitable for imagination— |
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The contemporary Catholic poet Ku Sang devoted ten years to writing an opera based on the fragmented tales that exist concerning Hwang’s life. At the time the opera was staged it was the largest ever performed on the southern half of the peninsula. |
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Much like Hwang Chin-I, kisaeng entertainer Hyan Kum was an exceptionally versatile artist know for her ability to dance, sing, write verse and play the zither. She was involved intimately with the Choson king Chungjong (1506 – 1544). Once this relationship collapsed she withdrew from court life and devoted herself exclusively to writing verse. The extant verse attributed to her is Sino-Korean, but again I draw it from the children’s book where it has been transliterated into Korean— |
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It is not that there’s anything particularly exceptional about this poem—or, for that matter, my ability to translate it—but that it contains a word and this word is charged in such a way that it points toward the impossibility of translation. The word appears in the third line. Ae’kkulda (애끓다). It is a word so charged with meaning that it can never be properly translated. I have translated it here as “rending” but it is more than rending. The word expresses an emotional pain so intense that it is a pain which might tear one’s bowels to shreds. It is a word of Chinese origin and is connected to a story which involves a group of sailors following the coastline of mainland China. While moving along the coastline the sailors come upon two monkeys, a mother and child. Bored and inclined toward mischief, the sailors abduct the child and take him aboard the ship. As the ship continues along the coastline the sailors realize that the mother of the baby monkey they abducted has been following them along a cliff. In a fit of pity, the sailors anchor the ship and bring the baby monkey to shore, hoping to reunite it with its mother. As the mother approaches to reclaim her baby she suddenly dies. Curious, the sailors perform an autopsy of sorts on the mother. They find that her bowels have been torn apart by gastric acids. Such was the anxiety of separation. Separation. Like that of north & south. § During the 2000 U.S. presidential election the tension throughout south Korea was palpable. While Clinton enjoyed eight seemingly playful years in office north and south Korea experienced somewhat of a thaw in an otherwise icy relationship. Kim Dae-jung—who was imprisoned several times for his outspoken opposition to dictatorial regimes such as that of U.S. backed president Rhee Syngman and, later, Park Chunghee—was president of south Korea at the time of the U.S. presidential election. He had done much to foster an amicable dialogue between north & south while Clinton was in office. Indeed, his so-called “Sunshine” policy improved relations so much so that he received the Nobel Prize in 2000. Families which had been separated for over fifty years were, albeit it temporarily, reunited with one other. Large amounts of aid were delivered from the economically prosperous south to desperately impoverished north. Citizens of the south with ample time and money were allowed to travel north and visit Paektusan—a mountain widely regarded as an integral part of Korean myth and history, a space which stands as a cultural signifier that is prior to and transcends the division between north and south. Then George W. Bush was elected. By 2002 north Korea was included in George W’s fantastical axis of evil. Everything that was gained during Kim Dae-jung’s administration fell away as though it never were. |
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