Since South Korean poet Han Kang has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, I wanted to celebrate that well-deserved recognition by sharing one of my favorite poems of hers, from her 2013 collection 서랍에 저녁을 넣어 두었다 (I Put the Evening in the Drawer).
A Thing Called the Heart
I stare at an erased word.
A part of a faintly visible line
where an L or V angles
around spaces already empty
before it was erased.
I want to squeeze into such a place
hunching my shoulders,
bending at the waist,
kneeling as I squeeze my ankles together.
But this heart that wants to fade
can erase nothing else.
A less faded knife
parts my lips lengthwise.
And my tongue, looking for a darker place,
curls back in silence.
—Translated by David Bowles
October 10, 2024
Original Korean
심장이라는 사물
지워진 단어를 들여다본다
희미하게 남은 선의 일부
ㄱ
또는 ㄴ이 구부러진 데
지워지기 전에 이미
비어 있던 사이들
그런곳에 나는 들어가고 싶어진다
어깨를 안으로 말고
허리를 접고
무릎을 구부리고 힘껏 발목을 오므려서
희미해지려는 마음은
그러나 무엇도 희미하게 만들지 않고
덜 지워진 칼은
길게 내 입술을 가르고
더 캄캄한 데를 찾아
동그랗게 뒷걸음질치는 나의 혀는
—한강
Thank you for sharing this poem, David.
Your choice of diction—“an L or V” that “angles around spaces”—adds a profound layer to the original Korean poem. The Heart grapples with capturing or rewriting what is ineffable in the speaker, and this impossible act of articulation holds the speaker in thrall, possibly bound by duty to ideate what is held within the Heart. To this Korean, the Heart may hold an entangled sense of modern Korean history and the poet’s obligation to articulate what simple locution cannot expound.
However, your translation introduces the possibility that the Heart may also contain “L o V e” within it. This is a brilliant stroke that adds nuanced depth.
I thoroughly enjoyed your translation!
L glaze 별로임요 ㅇㅇ 님 영어는 챗지피티로 쓴듯하고용
당신의 의견에 고마워, 친구야.
Thanks so much! One of the tricks of translating is searching for mechanisms in the target language (English) that will evoke similar or similarly strong emotional reactions in the reader. With this piece, I had to ask myself, “How do I, without the interference of footnotes, convey the mute power of the Korean original?”
The fortuitous visual similarity between the Hangeul letters ㄱ / ㄴ and L/V from the Roman alphabet allowed me to tap into shared reservoir of understanding about the impact of love’s erasure from our hearts … enabling English readers to at least feel the impact of the original, if not the specific nuances.
why did you choose ‘silence’? that word’s absent from the original korean. as the closing word, it adds a lot of externally injected direction
The curling of the tongue into a darker place, juxtaposed with the discussion of the erased word and the desire to fade implies, for me at least, that the darker place the speaker’s tongue is seeking is absence, silence.
I wanted to make that more explicit in my translation.