First-generation translator's joyful yet painful journey of recreating Korean literature

Peter Lee, a professor emeritus of Korean Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles / Korea Times

By Kang Hyun-kyung

In the 1960s, when English-language editions of Korean novels and poetry were almost nonexistent in American libraries and bookstores, Columbia University students were able to read some of them, thanks to Korean-American scholar Peter Lee.

When the university offered him a job to teach Korean culture and literature in 1960 for the first time in its history, Lee said he felt compelled to prepare English-language materials for his students.

His translations of old and contemporary Korean fiction and poetry helped his young American students realize that Korea is much more than a small war-torn country, but rather one with a rich literary tradition that has miraculously remained intact despite the country’s turbulent modern history.

“In Korea, written and oral literature existed side by side for more than 1,000 years,” Lee, a professor emeritus of Korean Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, said. “The vernacular was a second language until the end of the 19th century. Vernacular literature are oral-based works which reveal that features of the oral tradition have reached us in written form. One who understands the Koreans’ existential human life-world and oral tradition, which reveals the primacy of the spoken word, may be able to create a work that will appeal to the sensitive, literate reader.”

Lee, 87, is a first-generation literature translator and Korean Studies scholar in the United States. He has sown the seeds of hope for Korean literature in the West when few people there knew about its existence. In the course of his 47-year teaching career at Columbia, University of Hawaii and UCLA, Lee has published some 20 books, including a collection of Korean stories translated into English.

“When I began my graduate studies in comparative literature at Yale in the fall of 1951, I realized Korean literature was almost unknown in the West,” he said. “I began then to translate ‘hyangga’ or Silla songs and ‘sijo’ or old poetry and published them in The Hudson Review.”

His translation work continued after Yale in the 1950s when he went for further study to Switzerland and Germany, where he eventually earned a doctoral degree from Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich in 1958. Whenever he had time, he said, he translated classical Korean poems into German and published an anthology, “Kranich am Meer,” in 1959.

Kim Seong-kon, president of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, said Lee is a pioneering and legendary Korean literature translator. He called Lee’s 1969 anthology, “Flowers of Fire: Twentieth-Century Korean Stories,” a landmark piece signaling Korean literature’s debut on the Western publication scene. The book is a collection of contemporary sensations of Korean literature, including Yi Sang’s “The Wings” and Kim Tong-ni’s “The Shaman Sorceress.”

“Before Professor Lee, Korean literature had long remained unknown in the West because there were no translated works at that time,” Kim said. “The Western publication industry was sort of off-limits to Korean writers because they had no way to reach out to foreign readers. It was ‘Flowers of Fire’ that broke the silence of Korean literature.”

The book paved the way for the presence of Korean literature in the West, including in the United States, and continues to touch foreign readers to this day. “Some of these short stories are brilliant, some are not, but it gave me a lovely overall feel of modern Korean literature,” an Internet user named Andi posted a few years ago on the book recommendation and reviews site, Goodreads.

In 1991, Lee published another anthology, “Modern Korean Literature,” a revised, expanded edition of the 1969 book.

Kim said the 1991 edition has since been used as a valuable textbook in Korean Studies courses. At that time, Kim said Lee’s 1991 book was required reading for his students at Pennsylvania State University, where he taught under the Asian scholar-in-residence program. Kim later wrote a review of the book for the academic journal, Comparative Literature.

“Professor Lee’s culture-sensitive translations helped Western readers follow the Korean stories without difficulty,” Kim said. “Professor Lee is a role model for literary translators.”

Plenty of contemporary novels have been translated into several languages since the 2000s, after the establishment of LTI Korea, a government-funded organization responsible for choosing and translating contemporary novels into foreign languages to make Korean literature accessible to overseas readers.

Consequently, the translated works of established writers such as Yi Mun-yol and Hwang Sok-yong and poets such as Ko Un were able to captivate foreign readers and literary critics. Ko, for instance, had been mentioned in the foreign media as a possible Nobel Literature Prize candidate.

Professional translators, including bilingual Koreans who were born and raised overseas, played a role in drawing foreign readers’ favorable reactions to Korean novels. LTI Korea’s emphasis on meaning-based translation made it easier for foreign readers to follow the translated stories. Some translated Korean novels, including Shin Kyung-sook’s “Please Look after Mom” and Han Kang’s “The Vegetarian,” which won this year’s Man Booker International Prize, have become literary sensations overseas.

And the overseas success of these novels has turned the spotlight onto star translators. Los Angeles-based Korean-American translator Kim Chi-young drew a media frenzy following her translations of the critically acclaimed “Please Look after Mom” and Hwang Sun-mi’s “The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly.” Critics say Kim’s interpretations of the two stories were as great as the original pieces.

Deborah Smith, the British translator of Han Kang’s “The Vegetarian,” was also honored during the Man Booker International Prize ceremony, merely six years after she first taught herself Korean. According to experts, the selection committee honors translators along with the original authors because it believes the translation is a second creation and quality translation holds the key for foreign readers to understand the original literary work. Smith has also been in the media spotlight in Korea.

Professor Lee’s role as a literary scholar and translator since the 1960s is a unique achievement. The path he took to become a first-generation translator and Korean Studies scholar was tougher than that of the younger generation of translators. As a trailblazer in literature translation, Lee has translated contemporary and classical Korean literary works, including some that were written or used hundreds of years ago. Translating very old works is a remarkable feat because language changes significantly over time and this makes translation tougher.

“Difficult will be the luxurious indulgence of Korean in consonants and vowels, a passion for the concrete sensory world, as in traditional poetry, and (the ability) to transfer allusions as a part of its literary tradition to Chinese literature and history,” Lee said. “Is it possible to translate, transfer, reproduce or approximate the materiality of the language, its physical properties and recognizable qualities and such sound-making devices as alliteration, assonance, consonance, verbal synesthesia, (and) phenomimes, such as ‘allong allong,’ and phonomimes, such as ‘kamul kamul’?”

He retired officially in 2007, but has since been appointed as a research professor of Korean and comparative literature until 2018.

He has been compiling and editing an anthology of traditional Korean literature that will be published in March 2017.