Some non-Korean translators of Korean poetry boast about how they “know” Korean poetry, vaunting their ability to memorize and effortlessly recite verses. Trained at top American universities like Harvard or somewhere near Boston, they advocate for either literal translations bound to historical tradition or overly idiomatic creative translations. Some also brag about writing poetry in Korean, name-dropping the great poets they have translated and recounting moments spent with a renowned modern Korean poet—a four-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee now erased from Korean textbooks after sexual harassment claims—mocking a young aspiring Korean writer. They speak casually about how they had easy access to the poets they translated. Some even claim to write classical Korean calligraphy while inebriated before an audience of Korean academics. Yet, despite all their training, some of these translators reveal nothing about the original poem in Korean.
All translations are lies, but the most skillful ones allow the reader to feel the speaker’s presence without possessing the experience itself. Some translations are mere whitewashed tombs, revealing not the original work but the translator’s own literary borders. Whether bound to word-for-word fidelity or to free paraphrase, strict adherence to either approach leads to a reinvention devoid of spirit, failing even to echo the original. When a translation reads like a translation, the reader does not feel, hear, see, smell, or taste anything from the original poem. Instead, they receive the text with doubt, unable to inhabit its world. Cloaked in scholarly detachment, these translations offer no real possibility for a human heart and mind to enter and resonate with the poet’s original consciousness.
A poor translation makes the translator visible, drowning out the poem’s voice with mimicry or academic noise, leaving the reader with nothing but silence. If a translation does not flow with feeling, then its words are in the wrong order, turning the reading experience into a careless waste of time. No audience praises a work that bores them; they admire what immerses them, causes them to suspend disbelief, and momentarily draws them into another reality. A successful translation enables the reader to feel the foreign dramatic scenario as familiar and experience the poet-speaker’s emotions in their full depth.
***
I was born in Seoul in 1982. The conflict between negotiating the language of my mother tongue and the speech of my father tongue reached its peak when I began to learn how to read—late—after my mother and I settled in America in 1992, ten years later. The story of my childhood is an unfamiliar, austere counter-narrative, and I cannot dismiss the fact that without the traumatic experiences and ideas that sought to conquer me in the past, I wouldn’t be the writer I am today.
Although I feel a profound sadness over the nostalgia and intense regret, I would never dare contemplate reliving or revising my childhood. When we were living in Korea, my father was repeatedly caught and reprimanded by the U.S. Army for infidelity. Each time he was punished, my mother would take me out of school and far from whatever military base we were stationed at the time. We would travel to parts of Korea we had never been before.
Many times a year, we rode trains and buses and walked without fixed plans, with no particular destination. At the end of the day, we’d only meet ourselves again. Wherever we went and whoever we encountered along the way became part of us. My mother—Omma—held my hand in her right and pointed at old landmarks and new construction sites with her left.
My learning inevitably suffered from the days I missed at school, though my English proficiency now might obscure the reality of my chronic absenteeism during those years. But in this way, I explored and learned to see Korea with new eyes: its landscapes, its world of industry, over and over again. In this way, I have likely seen more of Korea than the average citizen.
I must also admit that I spoke very little of anything—neither Korean nor English. I exhibited what could be called selective mutism. My most exhilarating breakthrough, however, came when we moved to America. The earliest moment of this change is very clear to me: it was when I learned to express myself through the written word in the English language, and, more importantly, when I felt I was finally heard.
This occurred at the age of ten. My fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Loretta Carson, taught me how to read and project my voice when reading aloud. For the first time, I heard myself speak words in English that resonated with rhythm and flow, words in my father tongue that created stillness in the room. I saw eyes widen and sparkle, heads tilt, and eyebrows raise.
I remember this moment vividly, and I remember why: I was elated. From then I wrote essays in English with much enjoyment.
I remember that it was right after class when my English professor, Eleanor Szaszy, told me that one of my earliest works in community college was not an essay. I looked awfully surprised.
“Listen, Robert, dear Robert,” she said. “Do you know what you did?”
“I didn’t plagiarize. It’s my words if that’s what you mean—” I replied.
“No,” said Professor Szaszy. “I didn’t mean I thought you plagiarized. Quite the contrary, I haven’t read anything like this ever before. Do you know what you were writing?”
“An essay?”
“Oh, yes, you did indeed write an essay, Robert,” she laughed. “But you also wrote a poem. This is a prose poem. How did you get to write like this?”
“I just wanted to place every word properly. Make sure every word counts. All I wanted to do was to show the reader—you—where I was then, so you could have an idea of what it’s like. With me. The way I felt at that moment I could recall. Where I came from.”
“Let me take this and share it with someone I know.”
“Sure. Of course. Do whatever you want to do.”
“Since you gave me a good surprise—a good read—I have a surprise for you.”
A small stack of newsletters came into our classroom by the following month, and she handed me an issue. I received my first publication for writing.
My mother was pleased but, for some odd reason, astonished at how things were unfolding due to my unwavering passion for learning literature. My father, however, was indifferent to any talk about college or university—he just wanted me to be a soldier. When I transferred to university, I became an English major, and within a year, I declared a concentration in Creative Writing. Shortly thereafter, my mother returned from a visit to Korea and brought with her a modern book of Korean poetry by Ji-ha Kim. “This is for you, adeul–ah (son). Why don’t you try to learn at least one poem from here? Reading is where one learns to understand. Read it over and over, to the point where you wonder if you’ve become familiar with its ghost—or perhaps wonder if you could have written it yourself.” I put it away.
That changed when I took the Advanced Poetry course with Rebecca Black. She gave me an assignment, an opportunity—or rather permission—to revisit a Korea that had been hidden in my heart, in my memories, in my wonderful, true memories. I translated one short poem by Ji-ha Kim to remember my motherland, and suddenly, I found myself with a clear picture of home in my mind. Simply reading a poem brought back the place where I was born and raised. It was then that I knew: Korea was my home, and America was my country.
At that moment, the Korean language I had been afraid to revisit returned to me. For what felt like an eternity, I had been here studying English, and I realized that all this time in this country, I had not considered the stories I left behind in Korea.
For who knows how long, I struggled to reconcile my American heritage with the Korean experience—I suppose everyone in my writing community saw and recognized that obvious struggle in me, except me—and right before I was about to enter graduate school, I got into the Cave Canem Fellowship. When I was in the fellowship, my writing became disciplined and inventive but also convoluted, superfluous, and a bit too much on a single page, with a voice that was too absorbed.
Another fellow, Myronn Hardy, approached me after we had workshopped poems outside the classroom. “Everything is good in your poems about your Uncle Bobby except that—” he told me, “you ought to let the poems be about you, Robert.” As it turned out, he was completely right about my poetry predicament concerning my Uncle Bobby, a Black soldier, and his experience in Vietnam, which was a placeholder and projection of my own violent experience growing up in Asia. Of course, I knew Myronn was right. But I hid those words deep in the recesses of my mind, even as I felt them in my heart.
I attended graduate school the following year under the mentorship of Camille Dungy, studying persona, nature, kinship, and community in poetry. I remember once, during her office hours, she said something along the lines of, “Robert, I know why you want to write about your Uncle Bobby in Vietnam. His story is compelling and something special to you. But why don’t you write about Korea? I’m not asking you to answer that right now, but I feel that is the thing you need the most.” I may be misremembering the exact words, but this is how Camille made me feel: safe. It was right after I had felt very bad about having my broken heart so exposed, and yet I felt awfully good to have found the permission to go forward with my cultural and personal history. This encounter echoed what had happened at the Cave Canem Fellowship with Myronn: it doesn’t matter how the words look like a poem on the page to the naked eye; above conventions and technique, there must be courage and vulnerability in the writing; there must be a real voice in the reimagined world of words. I finally learned. One of the most important lessons in moving a reader is that when the words are read, they must surrender to the truth of the speaker. From Camille back to Myronn, I just thought I had learned something about how a poem may look like a successful poem, and may even pretend to be a poem, but that is not the same as being a poem that embodies a real human voice.
Well into my second year of graduate school, I finally listened to the lone book of poetry by Ji-ha Kim on my bookshelf. I decided to take a course on poetry translation taught by Stacy Doris—which, by this time, was not merely the most fun I’d had with verse but, looking back, was a great gift that returned to my heart the pieces of history I had hidden in the back of my mind. I grabbed my multiple dictionaries and went to work. Whenever I finished—or rather abandoned—a translation, Heaven knows how I smiled at a translated poem after the poem had finished translating me.
***
And here’s my own translating approach I discovered that’d help me distill the many memories and transpose the too many stirred imaginings in my mind.
- Recognize an experience you’re familiar with in a poem or better yet recognize the poem that selects you as its familiar.
Select a poem you care about or a poem that appears to genuinely care about you. You will be an honest translator when you want to see what in reality happened. And after you finish transposing the speaker’s voice with yours, the reader can feel that the voice is true and as if the happening in the poem happened to them.
- Use only the words you need. Let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No.’ For whatever is more than these is from the superfluous one, so—
Let’s avoid talking endlessly, aimlessly around this.
- Do not make it sound simple and natural. Make it simple and natural.
It is not the gymnastics of the target language that pushes or pulls the reader but the real language of being that reveals itself: a real place, a real weather, a real regret and grieving, a real rapture, a real harm, the real truth that was.
- Know what to abandon.
Prevent faking with language. Keep the absolute. Keep the weather. Keep the place. Keep the good and the bad. Lose the portrait of the exaggerated, perfected character. Keep the people. Keep the people real.
- Entertain the reader.
Make a poem so true that it transcends the reader’s reality, becoming part of their consciousness and experience.
In a world where the minds of men and women are entertained with music, movies, and media, the skill and attention required to read a book and think about it have become too demanding and complicated. We live in a different time in the world, where we are now scanning and skimming characters. The majority of people can barely read, and the majority of people cannot even write after twelve years of schooling.
The translator, as a writer, must accept that readers, whose attention spans are now unusually limited, will not be great interpreters of the text, to begin with. In a generation and culture saturated with fast-moving forms of entertainment, the writer must become both a narrator and an economist with words—using brevity, clarity, and commitment to guide the audience with precision and ensure the words resonate without letting their minds wander. A writer must be able to suspend the reader’s disbelief through a sense of time and trust built on efficiency and effectiveness.
- Become one with the poet-speaker, honestly and absolutely.
As the translator, you see the poem as a temple that no one else sees, its veil of language separating the rest of the world from the voice within. On the other side of the poem, another consciousness lives, and you are the window—or rather, the priest—looking into that sanctuary, seeing the altar where the poet-speaker’s consciousness dwells. The sacred responsibility to bear the image and magnify the poem’s spiritual reality is upon you. Assume the responsibility. Write precisely what the poet-speaker meant to say. It is your responsibility. Write that poem. There is no need to lie if there is a truth to tell.
The reader does not need a translation—or rather, the offering—that is lame and blind, weighed down by jazzy punctuation and redundant diction. The reader does not wish for their intercessor to sound like a rigid postmodern robot or a saucy, egotistical erudite, stringing words together that offer nothing but a wounded interpretation of the original poem.
So write as if you have a worthy treasure to share and a whispered prayer yearning to be heard.
The reader needs the poem to be a familiar spirit, like a sound they have experienced before. They already struggle to express themselves, to connect with other perspectives, and to understand society. They need the translator to do the sacrificial work of making sense of the dance of the characters on the page from another realm.
- Translate without sounding like a translation.
When I notice my eyes wandering around the room, checking the clock, or the phone, or rereading the same line over and over, resting my head in my hands, setting the book down now and then, or abandoning the book entirely, I feel that the translation is a failure. Maybe it’s because it sounds like an interpretation or summary rather than a poem. But no translation is a failure. Truly. But in the end, I just meant I mean no one would care to read it unless the translation has something treasurable to say about life that gives them a feeling of definite elation.
***
One of the most difficult aspects of translating Korean poetry into English is transposing Han, especially since the concept is largely unknown outside Korea. Han is the poetic burden that defines Korean identity—a complex mix of communal and personal unresolved grief, suppressed sorrow rooted in historical hardship, societal suffering, and personal struggle. But as a burden, it is also a source of resilience, strength, and redemptive hope. To outsiders, it may appear as an outdated, melodramatic cliché of simple sadness, anger, and passive despair best left behind. Yet every Korean embodies Han in different ways: the historical inheritance of separation or war, the societal inheritance of pressure with no resolution, the artistic inheritance of communal grief, injustice, or revenge, the communal inheritance of silent resilience in everyday sacrifice for the future, and the cathartic inheritance of rituals for celebration, deep friendships, or traditions like sharing a drink of wine to release Han itself. As a Korean writer translating Korea into English from a personal cultural perspective, I recognize that even an imperfect, clumsy representation of Han is better than none at all.
It is the poet-translator’s task to witness the multitude of Korean experiences, to reveal everyday sacrifices, to record resilience. Some might argue that articulating Han risks leaving me, as a Korean, in a place of undiminished sorrow. Over and over, I consider the immense cultural burden Han places on me, compelling me to look ahead and strive for a better future. This drive is essential and my primary concern as a translator. This is the tone of voice Korean speakers have—the tone of survival, for better or worse, through one misfortune after another. To translate Korean clearly, one must close the distance from these historical, communal, and personal struggles—because before moving forward with purpose, the writer must first take an unflinching, honest look at people and their lives.
The defining moment came when I had to confront that I am a true scion of the Gyeongju Park clan of Korea. Researching my origins, I did not trace my roots to Seoul but to Gyeongju. This meant that what I offered of Shi-Seup Kim, King Danjong, and Nanseolheon Heo—from the rank stones of Gyeongbokgung Palace, from the Buddhist temple within Seoul, and from Sungkyunkwan Royal University—was a unique perspective. They bore the burden of my history; this was my inheritance. I delved into them and immediately saw my being reflected back. This was my legacy; I was an heir and an intercessor.
The predicament of faithful renditions is not unusual. Because translators work in the literal medium of language, not experience, it is no surprise that much of Korean literature rendered into English—whether by foreign translators or by Koreans and Korean Americans unfamiliar with poetic sensibilities in English—often sounds like the dry pronouncements of an Englishman reading a weather report or a robot attempting human speech. I never expected devoting an extensive amount of writing to the process of translating Korean poetry to be the sole focus of a writing project, but I now see it was a necessary threshold before I could address anything else in my writing about Korea. Any meaningful discussion of Korean literature in English must consider its broader context—history, traditions, materials, and inherent concerns, including its shadowy aspects. Translation is inextricably tied to the deep personal and cultural fabric of Korea. Despite what some may assume, no translator can evade this responsibility; every translator is, to some extent, accountable for keeping it real. I believe this even more strongly because readers often express contempt when English translations of Korean poetry transgress the laws of language, either drowning the reader in excessive detail or providing no context at all, leaving them isolated.
All true and clear writing originates from a fundamental source—the happenings of life. It hinges on how effortlessly one distills a real event, whether heavy with sorrow, drifting on a tide of calm, or both. This is the artist’s only real concern: to shape the chaos of life into what we call art. For me, as a mixed‐race writer, being cast out of Korean society was not a hindrance but a gift. My removal allowed me to observe my own experience with a clarity that those confined by convention could never achieve.
As for my academic qualifications in translation—I have won no prizes. I hold no distinctions that would make the most notable translators of Korean literature burn with jealousy. I have not memorized Korean classical verses in Chinese, as taught at illustrious institutions like Harvard or somewhere near Boston. I do not possess the uncanny ability to instantly translate and interpret, nor can I compose a poem in my mother tongue. I cannot name-drop any modern poets with whom I have had coffee, nor have I ever wielded classical Korean calligraphy tools—brush, inkstone, and paper—especially before an audience of renowned professors from the SKY schools (Seoul National University, Koryo University, and Yonsei University) or any other university. I do dream of having coffee with a literature professor from Sungkyunkwan University or Hanyang University, likely because my family clan is intertwined with these schools. Yet, despite my lack of academic accolades, with all my heart, all my soul, all my mind, and all my strength, I remain a committed poet, translating and transposing.
It is my melancholy conviction that I have rarely found enough successful Korean poems in English translation—how can one feel satisfied when reading from the current canon only to be left feeling betrayed and questioning? I do not appeal to academia or academics, nor do I concern myself with those who cater to industry-elected umpires of taste or ignore attentiveness as a primary muse. I care little for those who dismiss my work due to my mixed‐race heritage or rudimentary Korean.
I care only about reading an honest translation and, in the end, a good poem. When I hear the poem clear, I write the poem clear. When I see a poem that is real, I hear it asking me if I can see it. I want to tell the writer in the life after this one, “I heard you. I saw you. I saw you clear, and now others can hear your voice clear, too.”
