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Lee Sung-il, translator of ancient Korean poems into English in “The Brush and the Sword” |
By Chung Ah-young
Staff Reporter
``Gasa'' (Kasa), a form of poetry popular during the Joseon Kingdom (1392-1910), has long been consigned to oblivion for modern Koreans who learn it only in their high school days.
But the traditional poetry has been revived in an English translation by Prof. Lee Sung-il, who retired from the English Department of Yonsei University last month.
Targeting a world readership, Lee has recently released a book of Korean poetry in English, titled ``The Brush and the Sword.''
The book is the first of its kind to translate old Korean poems into English, and contains 15 poems composed in the gasa form from the early 15th to the late 18th century, including works by Chong Chol and Pak In-ro.
 Providing a parallel translation in Korean and English, the book allocates a considerable portion of its bulk to the translator's comments and notes to help readers tackle the original verses and become immersed in the artistic merits of gasa.
``There has been much talk about the possibility of producing Korean Nobel Literature laureates. But I don't think it's likely to happen soon because Korean literature remains still unknown in many major countries, especially Korean classical literature, which lays the foundation for modern literature,'' Lee told The Korea Times.
He said that without introducing classical Korean literature to the world, recognition might continue to remain low.
``I hope this book will be important material for any foreigners who want to study Korean literature, as there are not many available English references to the classical Korean form,'' he said.
Lee said that it was not easy to translate old Korean works into English because they contain a lot of abstruse Chinese words and phrases and even archaic Korean words.
``I think that the best way to understand the work perfectly is to translate it, then it becomes clearer. To translate the works, I studied a lot about ancient Korean literature,'' he said.
Concerning the role of a translator, Lee said that he doesn't think a translator should hide their voices in the work.
``A translator can be likened to a musician who plays a classical piece. As a musician's interpretation with spiritual feeling is important to the performance, it's the same with the translator. Translation is re-creating the work with the translator's voices and spirit,'' he said.
The term, gasa, literally means ``words for singing,'' or ``words to be sung.'' Gasa is unique in the sense that it doesn't have any form unlike ``sijo'' which typically consists of three lines, each containing 14-to-16 syllables evenly divided into four units of breath, each constituting one beat.
Prosodic scheme, or the number of lines, does not restrict this type of poetic composition. In some sense, gasa can be considered an equivalent in spirit to ``blank verse'' in English poetry. Formlessness is the main feature of the poetic sub-genre.
Chong Kug-in's ``Song of Indulgence in Spring,'' the first to appear in the book, is generally believed to be the very first gasa ever written, the prototype of all such poems.
However, in the book he says that in translating gasa into modern English verse, he tried to make the rhythm of the original text reverberate in English. In any gasa, a reader is bound to feel sustained musicality arising from the regular beat repeatedly heard in the lines. He tried to transplant the rhythm into English verse although, in many cases, producing an exact replica of the verbal resonance of the original in translation is impossible.
He insists that the rhythm of the original be felt in the translation and has made the verses reflect this line by line.
``A brave and astonishingly successful attempt to represent this distinguished but remote ancient poetic tradition in English, together with an illuminating introduction and the source texts for scholars and serious students of the language and culture,'' Daniel Weissbort, founding editor of Modern Poetry in Translation and director of the MFA Program in Translation, University of Iowa, said in a review.
chungay@koreatimes.co.kr |
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