Introduction: Translating Worlds

 

The Stories that We Live

Probably in the U.S., for a few generations now, the average schoolchild would have had to read by high school something written by Mark Twain that involves either Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn. Today, this is the case around the world. I, too, became acquainted with the two friends long before I left South Korea and learned to speak English.

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But it was in middle school when I read for the first time The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and in college for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In both of these occasions I had already been in America for some time. What was it, then, that I read as a kid in Korea? Even though I had never encountered the actual novels where Tom and Huck originally come from, their stories—the same ones I later recognized in the novels—took up my imagination none the less, and their names fueled me up for adventure, as did The Goonies, or Raiders of the Lost Ark, or Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, or One Piece.

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Of course, though I cannot recall clearly, I must have read either a full Korean translation of the English original or an abridged version written in easier Korean for children. There was nothing ambiguous about the idea that the book I read in Korean fifteen or so years ago as a child is essentially the same book I read last year as an undergraduate student in Michigan. But as soon as I began trying to get at the meaning of ‘essentially’ here, I was no longer so sure.

 

After I became interested in the loose and vast collection

of books and writings and writers people call 'literature', 

or language-as-art, I did not know what to make of

translation. Can I really say that my childhood self, as well

as countless children around the world, did indeed read 

Huckleberry Finn, one of the great American novels?

What is the 'essence' of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn 

that makes it great, and  can it be found in a Korean

translation? What is the essence of any great literary text,

and is it translatable?

 

It looks to me like people generally regard Huckleberry

Finn as Twain’s greatest achievement. Again and again,

many editions of the novel make sure to include on their

opening pages the remark by Ernest Hemingway that “all

modern American literature comes from” it. So it seems,

Huckleberry Finn is central not only to its author’s oeuvre

but also to America’s national literary tradition. Then, it

can be said that to read Huckleberry Finn is to live a

central part of the American literary experience. But does

it follow from here that the Huck of my childhood in

Korea also strictly belongs to America? Are children

around the world only living an imprint of American

culture that testifies to the direction of globalization

(i.e. 'Americanization')?

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Tale versus Text

When people praise the literary value of Huckleberry Finn, they usually seem to have in mind Twain’s innovative depiction of several dialects of the 19th Century South. In his own words, they include “the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary ‘Pike-County’ dialect; and four modified varieties of this last,” which are distributed throughout the book in the dialogues of a wide array of characters. But perhaps it is Huck’s narration that is most remarkable about this achievement, because, in addition to dialogues in quotation marks, Twain developed a whole new medium of telling a story.

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For example, the structure of the subject noun phrase in many of Huck’s sentences would be considered ungrammatical in what we call ‘standard’ American English: instead of saying “The widow cried over me” or “She cried over me,” Huck says “The widow she cried over me,” where the proform (a word that stands in for another—in this case a 'pronoun') “she” immediately follows its antecedent. Similarly: “Tom he made a sign to me” instead of “Tom made a sign to me” or “He made a sign to me.”  Another example: over and over again, the narrator Huck uses the phrase “by and by” to describe how a situation came about, in place of a more articulate and detailed explanation. Another one: Huck keeps saying “I warn’t” instead of “I wasn’t”; yet for the third-person plural “they” he uses “was,” not “were.”

 

These stylistic details convince us that the way Huck the fictional

character narrates sounds exactly like the way Huck the

thirteen-year-old white boy from antebellum Missouri would have

spoken if he were a real person. The carefully constructed

mannerisms of Huck’s speech help breathe a sense of authenticity

into his narration and invigorate the plot. In other words, there is

more to this novel than just the plot; the formal structure of the

narrative language itself contributes to the book’s overall quality.

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These stylistic elements make Huckleberry Finn valuable as a 'text'

with an aesthetic identity rooted in the formal structure of the language it is made of. At this point, it must be evident to anybody who speaks both English and Korean that there will be problems in translating them into Korean, and vaguely what kinds of problems they might be. The most straightforward ones concern the stark differences between the grammars of English and Korean. 

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Linguistic Differences between English and Korean

English follows a subject-verb-object order and has a rather minimal affixation system, whereas Korean follows a subject-object-verb order and has extensive morphology. Consider this simple English sentence and its Korean translation:

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 English:

Somebody (Subject) hit (Verb) me (Object).

-This sentence follows a S-V-O order.

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Korean:

누가 'Somebody' (Subject) 나를 'me' (Object) 때렸다 'Somebody' (Verb).

-This one goes S-O-V.

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   In the above Korean translation, the characters in bold and red are 'affixes' that provide additional information, such as the tense of a verb and the role of a noun (subject/object/etc.). None of these are there in the English equivalent. English has notoriously few instances where this kind of affixation is necessary (the possessive marker in "Jane's", also called the genitive case marker, is one of those few examples).

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Also, the phonological category of 'stress' is an important aspect of English, but it does not exist in Korean. When the stress is on the first syllable of 'complex', it is a noun; when it is on the second syllable ('complex'), it is an adjective. In English, the location of the stress distinguishes one individual word from another, but this does not happen in Korean. Another way of putting this is that stress is 'phonemic' in English but not in Korean.

 

One more example is 'honorifics'. I think this one is of particular importance because it has social and cultural significance outside grammatical structure.

When you and I speak in Korean, we have to specify whether we are equals, or whether there is a hierarchy between us. We can't just let it slide. We must specify. Either you are above me or I am above you, or we are exact equals. Koreans are notoriously meticulous about this. This is not just a result of social etiquette; specifying the 'degree of formality' is a necessary part of the Korean grammar. Knowing that English does not have such extensive honorifics system, we can easily imagine the problems the Korean-English translator must face. 

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The translator faces another huge problem. The examples thus far deal with general grammatical rules that apply to English as a whole and Korean as a whole. But there is the Midwestern weather-report American English, Irish English, African American English, Bostonian English, Southern American English, Australian English, a number of Englishes spoken in India, Hispanic English with many Spanish borrowings, and many more.

 

Likewise, there are many varieties of Korean spoken in Seoul, Jeju, Jeolla, Gyongsang (so far South Korea), Pyongan, Hamgyong (North Korea), as well as Yanbian (China), some of which are more grammatically alike than others. There is no linguistic reason why one of these should be 'standard' and another 'slang'; there only are social and political ones. All languages in the world and their variants are equally legitimate for the simple reason that they are real languages spoken by real people. But that is another matter.

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Back with Huck

The grammatical differences between Korean and English explained

above pose a dilemma for the Korean translator of Huck Finn. How in

the world would she translate “the extremest form of the backwoods

South-Western dialect; the ordinary ‘Pike-County’ dialect; and four

modified varieties of this last”, into Korean? The Mississippi doesn't

flow in the Korean Peninsula. I looked at three extant Korean

translations of Huckleberry Finn available online at Kyobo, Korea's

largest bookstore chain: Kim (1998), Jeon (2002), and Paek (2010).

How did the Korean translators account for the varieties of speech 

within the English language?

 

Well, they simply didn't, because they couldn't. The variations within English just are not the same variations that can happen within Korean, because the two languages are different in the kinds of structures that they allow their speakers to play with. They could not translate Huck’s mannerisms that deviate from the norms of ‘standard’ American English (such as reiterating the subject and saying ‘warn’t’ instead of ‘wasn’t,’) because the grammatical systems of English and Korean were so different that they could not identify direct correspondences for the deviations. Therefore, many of the phonological and syntactic differences among these varieties disappeared, and we already know that some part of  the 'literary value' of Twain's original has not been able to reach the readers of its

Korean translations.

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Because they could not deliver the exact dynamics between the English dialects used in this novel, the translators had to choose either to ignore this aspect entirely or to find some reasonable alternative that somehow imitates the intralingual relationships of English. Jeon (2002), and Paek (2010) opted for the former option: all characters speak in the 'standard' dialect of Seoul throughout the book. But the third translator, Kim (1998), attempted something else, and that is where the real problem arises.

 

In the conversations between Huck and Jim, a white child and a black

adult, while Huck uses the ‘standard’ speech of Seoul, Jim speaks in

the dialect of Jeolla-Do, a province long known for its distinct leftist

political orientation in the predominantly conservative South Korea,

repeatedly using the sentence-ending suffix ‘-랑께’. By making Jim

speak in the Jeolla dialect, and Huck in the Seoul dialect, Kim (1998)

is superimposing the political relationship between the two Korean

dialects on that between the English variants that Huck and Jim use

in the original. The 19th Century black-white inequality is now aligned

with the modern Jeolla-Seoul inequality, the latter of which is to be

found absolutely nowhere in Twain's original.

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There are other politically charged choices made in these translations. Recall

that honorifics is a 'must' in Korean grammar, but a 'what?' in English

grammar. In Paek (2010), while Huck and Jim both talk in the Seoul dialect, Jim addresses Huck in the 'formal' mode of speech that consistently uses honorific suffixes. Huck, on the other hand, talks to Jim as a cocky senior talks to a timid freshmen, a master to a slave. A power dynamic, with Huck as superordinate and Jim as subordinate, is immediately established, even though it is not explicitly presented as such in the original.

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We have looked at the formal elements of Twain's language that

make Huck Finn valuable as a text. Grammatical variations using

dialects are, of course, linguistic categories that make up the

structure of that language. But the weight they bear in real life

also make them cultural ones. In short, language and culture are

inseparable; the text is inseparable from the tale that it tells. In

this project, I want to dig a bit deeper in to the relationship

between language and culture, between text and tale, between

form and content.

 

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One Life to Live

My neighbors in Incheon, Korea probably know the stories of Huckleberry Finn. My grandparents in Yongin, Korea also probably have at least heard of his name, the juvenile pariah, the worse-off and less popular friend of that other kid Tom Sawyer. Through translation, Koreans have become acquainted with the tale. Many of them might even have discussed the book in schools, hagwons (private education institutions) or book clubs; some might even be able to associate the heavy themes in the book, such as slavery and domestic violence, with the cultural context of the antebellum American South.

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On the one hand, I think that is a sweet phenomenon. It is nice to think that people on the other side of the world are able to empathize with people situated in the distant past of a distant country through literature, even though the stories they read are not factual. Now that stories like Huck's circulate all the way to places like Korea, literature has been given the power to expand the readers’ scope of empathy and increase the awareness of diversity around the world, so that distant peoples can discover or develop shared virtues amid all the differences between them. This is what is good about globalization.

 

On the other hand, Koreans can't experience this novel in the way English-speaking Americans can, not only because they are reading it in Korean, but also because Korea never had slavery and is not a society where inequality is manifest along the conceptual lines of 'race'. It is hard to deliver Mark Twain's original Huckleberry Finn to Koreans untouched because it is hard to translate its structure as a text as well as the significance of its tale.

 

More generally, it seemed possible that when an artistic product of a culture enters another, its reception cannot be the exact same. Maybe the experience of reading, viewing or listening to that artwork always differs, however slightly, because it is contingent on all other experiences each person has had in her life; and language and culture are significant factors that influence the kinds of experiences she has. If this is the case, we can't really arrive at a universal standard of experiencing art and literature, because life is not the same everywhere.

 

In the following chapters, I want to explore how we should approach this idea that our understanding of a translated work of art must be limited. If we can't experience an artwork from another culture to the fullest extent, how can we pinpoint its values or make any claims about its essence or 'greatness'? But don't we all judge artworks from all over the world all the time? If the essence of an artwork can only remain intact in its native—untranslated—context, does this mean all the thoughts we have about the foreign art we experienced are meaningless? In Level One, we'll start with a more precise understanding of what translation is.

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