창작과 비평

 

 

* Conference on 'The Poetic World of Ko Un' / 8 May 2003 / Stockholm University, Sweden

 

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Haas goes on to admire and read in full “The Women from Sonjae”:

 

In darkest night, near midnight, the dogs
in the middle of Saeto start to bark raucously.
One dog barks so the next one barks
until the dogs at Kalmoi across the fields
follow suit and start to bark as well.
Between the sounds the barking dogs produce
echo scraps of voices: eh ah oh…
Not unrelated to the sound the night's wild geese
let fall to the bitter cold ground
as they fly past high above,
not unrelated to that backwards and forwards
echoing splendid sound.
It's the women from Sonjae one their way home
from the old-style market over at Kunsan
where they went with garlic bulbs by the hundred
borne in baskets on their heads,
since there's a lack of kimchi cabbages
from the bean-fields;
now they're on their way home, after getting rid
of what couldn't be sold
at the knock-down auction at closing time;
several miles gone
several left to go in deepest night!
The empty baskets may be light enough
but empty-stomached with nothing to eat,
I wonder just how light they feel?
Still, they don't each one suffer on her own.
It's a pain they share,
these plain simple people
these plain simple women.
What a good homely life!
Perhaps the dogs have got used to their voices,
for the barking starts to die away.
Night seems eager to declare: I myself am night!
And the darkness blinks its vacant eyes. ( The Sound of My Waves , 89)

 

I fully would agree that we have here an admirable English poem in its own right. And it hardly merits the charge of verbosity. (The only real problem I have with the translation is with the lines “these plain simple people / these plain simple women,” which smacks of sentimentalism and patronage. ‘못난 백성', the original for ‘these plain simple people' means ‘foolish [or benighted, insignificant] people [or subjects in the sense of not being citizens]' but used with a certain gentle irony implying that their very lack of any qualities to show leads them to share the hardship and go through the life in neighborly fellowship.)

 

Yetㅡagain I say this not to disparage the English version but to enhance appreciation of the Koreanㅡwhen we go back to the original, we realize how much has been lost in terseness and sheer speed of movement. Of course, difficulty of translating poetry is a universal problem?further aggravated when the languages in question are as far apart both in structure and vocabulary as Korean and English. But the point I want to emphasize is that a sense of untrammelled speed, a distinguishing feature of much of Ko Un's verse, plays a particularly important role in the Zen poems and in many of the realistic yet ‘Zen-like' portraitures of Ten Thousand Lives . And as Korean has very different resources for condensation and compression from an Indo-European language, a translator faces a particularly difficult challenge.

 

Below I quote the full original text. Those who do not know Korean can at least note that it has only twenty-three lines (as compared to the thirty-five read by Robert Haas.)

 

선제리 아낙네들

먹밤중 한밤중 새터 중뜸 개들이 시끌쩍하게 짖어댄다
이 개 짖으니 저 개도 짖어
들 건너 갈뫼 개까지 덩달아 짖어댄다
이런 개 짖는 사이로
언뜻언뜻 까 여 다 여 따위 말끝이 들린다
밤 기러기 드높게 날며
추운 땅으로 떨어뜨리는 소리하고 남이 아니다
콩밭 김치거리
아쉬울 때 마늘 한 접 이고 가서
군산 묵은 장 가서 팔고 오는 선제리 아낙네들
팔다 못해 파장떨이로 넘기고 오는 아낙네들
시오릿길 한밤중이니
십리길 더 가야지
빈 광주리야 가볍지만
빈 배 요기도 못하고 오죽이나 가벼울까
그래도 이 고생 혼자 하는 게 아니라
못난 백성
못난 아낙네 끼리끼리 나누는 고생이라
얼마나 의좋은 한세상이더냐
그들의 말소리에 익숙한지
어느새 개 짖는 소리 뜸해지고
밤은 내가 밤이다 하고 말하려는 듯 어둠이 눈을 멀뚱거린다

(<萬人譜> 1권 148-9)