Laura Yoo – HoCoPoLitSo member of Board of Directors and Associate Professor of English at Howard Community College

Some say poetry is irrelevant. That it belongs in the ivory tower.

Listen to this:

Earlier this year, The New Yorker published an article called “Battle Lines: Want to understand the jihadis? Read their poetry” by Robyn Creswell and Bernard Haykel (June 2015).  The article is a study of the function of poetry in Arabic cultural history as well as in contemporary jihadist poetry.  The authors write that, “For the jihadist, poetry is a mode of manifesto, or of bearing witness.”  Creswell and Haykel remind us of the important role of poetry in shaping and propagating a culture.  But that influence can go in the direction of “good” or in the direction of violence and hatred.

Analysts have generally ignored these texts, as if poetry were a colorful but ultimately distracting by-product of jihad. But this is a mistake. It is impossible to understand jihadism—its objectives, its appeal for new recruits, and its durability—without examining its culture. This culture finds expression in a number of forms, including anthems and documentary videos, but poetry is its heart. And, unlike the videos of beheadings and burnings, which are made primarily for foreign consumption, poetry provides a window onto the movement talking to itself. It is in verse that militants most clearly articulate the fantasy life of jihad.

The article gives  many examples of the prominent role that poetry is given by some militant jihadist leaders, but the most shocking one is this:

Bin Laden himself recited an elegy for the nineteen hijackers of 9/11: ‘Embracing death, the knights of glory found their rest. / They gripped the towers with hands of rage and ripped through them like a torrent.”

What we must recognize in all this is that poetry is not only a tool that helps us see the world in all its beauty, but is also a tool that can aid the world in its ugliness. Sure, some poems are about roses and rainbows, about love forever and love unrequited. And those are beautiful and absolutely necessary to our humanness. However, we must not assume for a second that poetry is fluffy or inconsequential. It is a powerful mirror for the human condition – the good, the bad, and the scary.

I am thinking of Martin Espada – a lawyer turned poet – and his poem, “Imagine the Angels of Bread.”  He says, “This is the year” the meek will rise and the powerful will fall because justice will be served cold and raw on a silver platter.  Well, no, he doesn’t say that – but that’s how I hear it. (And that’s how I heard it when Mr. Espada read this poem on the Smith Theatre stage at Howard Community College for the Blackbird Poetry Festival in 2013). In this poem, we sense the urgency for change. And we see how we might change the world for the better.

We also look to poetry to react to events that shock and frighten us.  Like when Billy Collins‘ poem “Names” honoring the 9/11 victims broke our hearts – in a way, a powerful answer to Bin Laden’s elegy of the hijackers. But we also look to poetry to challenge our own thinking, like when E. Ethelbert Miller wrote “Looking for Omar” in reflection of 9/11 and the growing anti-Muslim feelings and actions in our country. We might do well to read this poem once more today.

In November this year, a group of terrorists bombed Paris. I saw many friends turn to poetry to understand fear, tragedy, violence, and hatred as well as peace, comfort, and compassion. One of the favorites circulating social media platforms was Wendell Barry‘s “Peace of Wild Things.” It begins, “When despair for the world grows in me” – and you just know you have to read the rest. In it, you find sadness but also hope.

In January of 2013, a professor at University of Illinois discovered a poem by Carl Sandburg called “The Revolver.” It begins with “Here is a revolver,” and after comparing the revolver to the court of law, the poem ends with, “And nothing in human philosophy persists more strangely than the old belief that God is always on the side of those who have the most revolvers.”

The poem was discovered a few weeks after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting took place in Newtown, Connecticut (December 14, 2013).  Now almost three years later, we again turn to this poem as we are angered and frightened by the two mass shootings in one day in Georgia and California on December 2nd.

In Claudia Rankin‘s Citizen (2014) we see the world through yet another lens.

Dean Rader of Huffington Post says, “Citizen has changed how we imagine a book of American poetry interacting with and commenting on the world we live in. It reminds us that the poet is first and foremost a citizen. It reminds us that American poetry can be both urgent and vital.” Holly Bass, writing for the New York Times, says, “Citizen throws a Molotov cocktail at the notion that a reduction of injustice is the same as freedom.”

As The New Yorker article on jihadist poetry reminds us, through poetry we can possibly know one another, about what propels our actions and shapes our beliefs. We must allow poetry to bring to light the violence and the injustices we commit against one another. We must recognize also the potential power of poetry – like many other forms of art – to comfort our sadness, calm our fears, expose our frailties, shape our vision, and even change our thinking.

Laura Yoo – HoCoPoLitSo member of Board of Directors and Associate Professor of English at Howard Community College

While writing the last musing on “Multiple Writing Personalities” I began to pull at another thread – the art of translations.

There are many words that are not really translatable from Korean to English, and this is the case for many (if not all) languages. One example is the Korean word 한 (pronounced “hahn” and sort of means grievance) which comes from 원한 (pronounced “won-hahn” and sort of means grudge). Usually this word is used to describe the kind of deep grievance or regret that awakens a dead person’s body and spirit. Like Jason in Friday the 13th or the scary girls in The Ring or Grudge.  But none of these words – hatred, resentment, grievance, regret – captures quite wholly the meaning that Koreans put in that word when they use it.

Language is cultural.  Words communicate values, beliefs, cultural experiences, and history. Sometimes a single one-syllable word like 한 means a whole lot. This complexity is what makes a translation – especially a poetic translation – a work of art.

When Ko Un, one of the most well known Korean poets, read at the Dodge Poetry Festival in 2006, Richard Silberg performed the translation.

While Silberg’s translations communicate the idea of the poem, I think most would agree that it doesn’t transfer the whole meaning that is communicated in Ko Un’s reading – the audience can sense or experience the poem in the way Ko Un performs his poem that’s quite different from the way Silberg translates and performs it in English.

There is also an interesting translation of one of Ko Un’s poems by Suji Kwok Kim and Sunja Kim Kwok on Poetry Foundation’s website.

Here is an excerpt from the translators’ notes.

With “Taklamakan Desert,” we tried to “translate” the translation towards greater spareness. […] We translated “명사도  동사도  다” (“all nouns and verbs”) as “all words,” which sounds less awkward in English, and decided not to isolate “there” (“거기”) on its own line, the way it’s isolated in the original, since it would sound overemphatic in English, especially as an ending.  We added “in the Taklamakan Desert” in the penultimate line, for music, and “the silence of” in the last line, for rhythm, so that the last line becomes a line of iambic pentameter, a structural counterpoint to “the cry” in the second stanza, but only because silence is central to Ko Un’s work.  (We could have rendered the last two lines more literally: “There —/ someone’s thousand-year-old skull.” — and again, may change our minds tomorrow.)

I highlight the last line above, because it shows the delicate choices one must make in translation – there is no such thing as “direct” translation, and we can see here the flexibility and creativity required in creating a work of translation.

In addition to the meaning of words, much of the art of translation has to do with the sound of words (and silences) – the intonation, the vowels, the consonants, the accents, the shapes that your mouth makes, and the way the tongue rolls to create sound. In the line “명사도  동사도  다” (“all nouns and verbs”), the Korean words for “nouns” and “verbs” rhyme: Phonetically, this line reads, “myung-sa-do dong-sa-do dah” (“do”=”too” or “and” and “dah”=”all”).  So, there is a rhyme in “sa-do.” I wonder if it’s that difference in sound or the specificity of naming “verbs and nouns” instead of grouping them as “all words,” but the translation doesn’t quite… translate for me.

Still, I do not mean to argue that this translation is bad or that translations in general are inaccurate. Not at all. Ultimately, poetry translations are never about accuracy. It’s about telling and re-telling, creating and re-creating. Through the translators’ works, we share the words, the values, the thoughts, the stories, and the languages of all cultures.  Works of translation open up poetry to interpretation, re-imagination, and even re-vision.

Translation itself is a work of art.  It has its own creative process. It is original in its own sense of coming into creation.

Here are a few lines from Willis Barnstone’s “An ABC of Translating Poetry”:

Translation is the art of revelation.

Translation is an art between tongues, and the child born of the art lives forever between home and alien city.

Yet translation of poetry is conceivable.

A translation is never an exact copy. It is different.

A translation dwells in exile.

And so on. But “Z” is the best:

Good translation of poetry is essential to a hungry reader in a decent book store and to a global village of letters. We need it, for we still suffer under that early Babylonian God’s edict of language dispersal. Although Antigone and Lear sometimes speak in exotic tongues, subverting God’s rage against the monolingual builders of Babel writers still scrawl their words in a thousand scripts, pile them up on mounds of hope and futurity, awaiting translation. Translation is a zoo and a heavenly zion.

I love the phrase “a global village of letters.” That’s what the art of translation offers the world.

Last summer when a relative was returning from a trip to Korea, she brought back a few collections of Ko Un’s works for me. I thumbed the pages but found many of the poems too difficult for my comprehension – so my mother took the books.  Having thought a little bit about translations through this little musing, though, I’m now processing my order on Amazon for several Ko Un translations by people like Richard Silberg, Brother Anthony, and Claire You – This Side of Time (2012) and Maninbo (2015).

Though my knowledge of the written Korean language is limited, having access to some of the poems in Korean and some in English (and maybe a few in both?) will give me a unique experience of Ko Un the Poet. Not necessarily fuller or more expansive experience – just different.  Not only that, but it will also help me – a 1.5 generation Korean-American – become more familiar with Korean culture and history. And that is pretty awesome. Thank you, translators, for your word-art.

Mom, I need those books back please. 

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“Taklamakan Desert” in Korean

타클라마칸 사막

내가 타클라마칸 사막에 가는 것은

내가 열 여섯살의 꿈속에서

타클라마칸 사막에 가는것은

거기

허허 망망 때문이다

내가 일흔다섯에 살의 대낮에

명사도 동사도 다 두고

타클라마칸 사막에 가는 것은

거기

무지무지한

허허 망망의 울음 때문이다.

내가

타클라마칸 사막에 가고 가는 것은

세상의 욕망에

내 욕망에

더 이상 견딜 수 없기 때문이다.

누구의 천년 해골

거기

Laura Yoo, a member of HoCoPoLitSo’s Board of Directors and Associate Professor of English at Howard Community College, writes Mana’s Musings on the HoCoPoLitSo blog.

Even though I teach writing, I cannot really remember or trace the early years of my own journey of learning to write.

Thanks to my mother’s foresight and my own tendency to hold onto things, however, I do have two special artifacts from my childhood – photos below.

First is a report on Beethoven that I wrote in the 5th grade, only a few months after my family moved from Korea and I began to learn English. This is my first “writing” in English that I can find. Mostly, it seems, I copied sentences from the Britannica. And that was “writing.”

Second is a newspaper article that I wrote in the 5th grade to a Korean Catholic newspaper about my observations on adoption.  In that article, I express sadness about Korean children who are adopted by families in other countries and I urge Koreans to adopt Korean children. An impassioned argument and plea from a 10 year old.

During my teenage years, I wrote a lot. Flipping through the many spiral notebooks that were my journals reveals that I wrote my “diaries” in English (even through the early years of my language acquisition) but insisted on writing my “poems” in Korean.  In English, my writing was about what I did that day, what I saw, what happened to so-and-so, or what I was thinking.  In Korean, on the other hand, my writing demonstrates an annoyingly dramatic teenage-angst in what appears to be verse. I can’t help but to roll my eyes at my 14 year old self.  It seems that my young mind associated English with recording facts (information) and Korean with describing love, pain, betrayal, suffering, drama, and dreams in poetry.

Later on in college, the notebooks got fancier and I wrote exclusively in English – and I stopped writing poems. Probably realized how terrible they were.  There was also a vague attempt at fiction-writing but I quickly learned that I was no good at it. So, instead of trying to create literature, I studied it.

The evidence of various transitions between Korean and English in my writings makes me wonder not only about my cultural identities but also my relationship to writing. You are what you write – and I guess how you write.

A recent article in The New Republic called “Multilinguals Have Multiple Personalities” cites studies that illustrate a personality difference exhibited by one person speaking in two different languages. The article summarizes one particular study:

In one session, the volunteer and experimenter spoke only French, while the other session was conducted entirely in English. […] When [Susan Ervin] compared the two sets of stories, she identified some significant topical differences. The English stories more often featured female achievement, physical aggression, verbal aggression toward parents, and attempts to escape blame, while the French stories were more likely to include domination by elders, guilt, and verbal aggression toward peers.

I find myself experiencing this kind of shift in my identity when I switch “code” between English and Korean in my day to day life. In speech, I communicate not just the words or the “thing” that I’m trying to get across but also the cultural mores, the values, the manners, and the habits deeply rooted in that language. And I dare say the language also shapes human beliefs and behaviors.

Sadly, I don’t know if the same kind of code switching applies to my writing now – mainly because I don’t write in Korean anymore. So, it seems I have lost my Korean writing personality. Or even more sadly, perhaps this means my Korean writing personality will stay trapped in that 14 year old teenager ridden with angst. Scary thought.

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Laura Yoo, a member of HoCoPoLitSo Board, writes Mana’s Musings for the second week of each month on the HoCoPoLitSo blog

Remember this from my last musing on the “thing” of the book?

Excitement is not exactly what I found in the marginalia of my Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra Behn.  Inside the cover I found this: “A.J. De Armond 1980- review copy”.  Then a note to the future readers of this book from A.J.: “Borrowers: please don’t confuse me by adding further notes to mine.” I’m trying to hear the tone of this message – is it a polite plea or a bossy command?

A few days after this posted, I received an email from my friend Jean – subject line “OMG.” At first she thought it a coincidence that the initials I mentioned – A.J. DeArmond – was the same as her friend’s. Then we realized that she had given me that very book.  How could I have forgotten?

I learned from Jean that A.J. DeArmond is Anna Janney DeArmond, her dear friend and former college professor from University of Delaware.  When Professor DeArmond passed away in 2008, my friend inherited some of her books.  Jean wrote in her email that Professor DeArmond “began teaching at Delaware in the 30’s when the university had a separate women’s college and when female professors could not be married and had to live in the dorms with the students.”

What really floored me was that Jean was familiar with the kind of writing that you’d find in Professor DeArmond’s books:

Finally, I am sure her inscription and notes are in pencil, not pen, in the tiniest writing imaginable. I have many of her books with those notes.  And I am sure the inscription was a warning. She did a lot of book reviewing and her specialties were 18th century and American Lit. I am sure she saw that book as a teaching tool whose notes needed to be preserved for her future efforts.

This email from Jean made me smile all day long.  This book, which had been read and written in by Professor DeArmond had traveled from her hands to her shelf to Jean’s to mine within the span of about 30 years.  I had put it on my shelf without reading it, but the book’s life is one of resilience and patience.

An article remembering the professor after her death explained that she was the first woman to become a full professor at the University of Delaware. She went on to receive numerous awards in scholarship and teaching, and she served as a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Munich in the 50s. She also taught in England, Australia, and China.  She lived a full and rich life of teaching and scholarship.  Indeed she was a pioneer woman. There I was, holding this scholar’s book in my hands – all the knowledge, the history, and the experience that was in the hand that scribbled these tiny writings in pencil.

Speaking of pioneer women, Aphra Behn is often cited in English literary history as the first woman to earn a living by writing. She is part of the canon in the study of the “rise of the novel,” and her Oroonoko and The Rover are common readings in any English major’s reading list.

So the other night, I flipped through my own three books of Behn’s writings.

In the Norton edition (green cover), I came across an article written by Robert Chibka. What?  Chibka? Professor Bob Chibka who was my favorite English professor at Boston College? The guy responsible for my scholarly interest in the eighteenth-century English literature?  Yup. The same professor who gave me two very good pieces of life advice: 1) If you want to be an academic, marry an accountant – which I did. 2) No, your writing is not good enough to get into an MFA program in creative writing (sorry, but not sorry) – boy am I glad he gave me such brutally honest advice.

Okay, so it may seem a bit hokey to put stock in what seem like coincidences but I don’t think we can deny the connections that the material book makes simply by existing and being passed around. And the book’s journey can tell us a lot about its own material life, the lives of its previous readers and owners, and the literary work that’s inside the book.

How about one more story about a book’s travels?

A couple of weeks ago, I picked up my copy of Mitch Albom’s The Time Keeper which was among a large bulk of books I had ordered from Thriftbooks.com.  I noticed the bar code sticker from the library of Camp Hovey.  When I opened the book, a piece of paper fell out and it was a photocopied magazine article written in Korean.  Naturally I googled “Camp Hovey” and it turns out Camp Hovey is an American military base in South Korea.  And yes I am from South Korea.

Is your mind blown yet?  Let the magical journey of books sink in, dear readers.