This month’s Asymptote Book Club selection, Kim Yideum’s novel Blood Sisters, raises profound questions about class dynamics, gender roles, and the power of language to uphold existing hierarchies. In today’s interview, translator Ji Yoon Lee talks with Asymptote’s Jacob Silkstone about the challenging process of recreating the tones and nuances of the original Korean in English. They also discuss the parallels between Korean political narratives of the 1980s and the current discourse in the USA, as well as Lee’s innovative use of Spanish to translate Leonard Cohen’s “I’m Your Man.”
Jacob Silkstone (JS): Referring to her work as a whole, Kim Yideum has said (in your translation) that “A female writer needs to fight to build her own language against the default system.” It feels to me as though there’s an echo of that statement when the protagonist of Blood Sisters says, “I speak with my own mouth, so I will address others on my own terms. . .”Could you say a little about that “default system” that Kim Yideum’s work struggles against? Are there any aspects of the struggle that feel unique to Korea?
Ji Yoon Lee (JYL): I absolutely see the echo there, too. Specifically, the protagonist, Yeoul, is resisting: in Korea, we often address people by the role that they play in our lives, such as “teacher,” “president of the company,” “older lady,” and so on. Once intimacy develops, there is a shift in the form of address, often towards familial terms, even when you are not related: “older brother,” “older sister,” and so on. That is meant to make people feel a closer connection beyond the societal roles they play for one another.
However, this practice often prompts people to perform affection and intimacy, even when the feeling isn’t mutual, as when Yeoul doesn’t feel close to the cafe owner or Sungyun. This is where the power dynamic enters. Because Yeoul is an employee, a younger woman, she is pressured to accept the terms that those in power are assigning to her.
The default system here is to pretend the power dynamic doesn’t exist and to politely perform the appropriate version of intimacy. But Yeoul rejects that. I see “I speak with my own mouth. . .” as a really powerful moment where she rejects societal imperatives in the language system. It is as simple as that: I am making sounds with my mouth to speak the language, so it is my language, and I speak it on my own terms.
I don’t think I would call this a struggle unique to Korea—performing and emoting something different from what you feel inside, being pressured by the power dynamic. That’s why art can be a universal refuge for our internal truth.
We make art so that we don’t forget what our truth is. That is how I approached my writing too. I wanted to really tap into what “I” am feeling, even when one is living in a situation where expressing that truth would be harmful. I connect that with the letter from Sol at the end—the letter written in code, aware of the fact that it may be read by an “enemy.”
I’m also thinking of the scene where Yeoul discusses burying the jars filled with her mementos, which connects to this reading of the novel as well. How can one preserve one’s memories and one’s truth when all elements (societal imperatives, time, space. . .) are eroding them?
JS: Do you think this is a gendered struggle, or is it primarily a matter of social class, or place within the prevailing hierarchy?
JYL: Yes, in saying the struggle is universal, I don’t mean to suggest that the intensity of the struggle is flat leveled. The gender power dynamic is a huge part of what Yeoul (and Yideum) has to work against. At least in public media and discourse, Korean society idealizes the heteronormative nuclear family as a model that one should strive to fit into. In that worldview, a woman is assigned the role of caretaker, mother, the one who smooths out social interaction, and rejecting that role has the potential to really damage her social standing. Thus feminine-coded speech, music, and poetry have to create safe spaces for women against the default system.
Yeoul (as well as Jimin and Sol) is also trying to navigate the social and economic class struggle, though—everyone needs shelter, food, and a sense of safety, and Yeoul’s lover, Jihyun, offers that to her. In this situation filled with landmines, how can you truly locate your emotions, reality, and dreams for the future? The scene where Yeoul incredulously explores Jihyun’s beautiful apartment, and the scene in which Jihyun proposes to her, are good illustrations of this struggle. Of course, Yeoul “speak[s] with her own mouth” and snaps back that he may have some fantasy about women and the heteronormative family model. . .
JS: Do you regard Blood Sisters as a historical novel? Can you give our non-Korean readers a sense of what the country was like in the 1980s, and how those events are recalled by the younger generation today?
JYL: I’ll have to start with a disclaimer: I left Korea as a teenager, and despite my attempts at self-directed continuing education regarding Korean history, I may not be entirely apt at navigating this complex era. The reason I open with this disclaimer is that the era is often discussed with such emotional loadedness.
While the Gwangju Uprising was taking place, the president at the time, Chun Doohwan, tried to spin it as communist (the word has a different ring to it in Korean, carrying reverberations of the trauma from the Korean War and a dehumanized vision of North Koreans), and there was a constant struggle for control of the narrative.
The narratives surrounding the Gwangju Uprising are still extremely combative towards one another. Politicians still comment on the Uprising to position themselves on the political spectrum and align themselves with certain political dialogues.
Kim Yideum and my parents’ generation lived it, and my generation observed the intense battles of narratives without having lived it. I admire that Kim Yideum, instead of taking sides and only endorsing one narrative, explores the experience of multiple conflicting narratives of the Gwangju Uprising in Blood Sisters. Near the beginning of the novel, Yeoul says that she joined the protests mainly to avoid being ostracized: “We were just protesting because everybody was! . . . If you didn’t join the protest, everybody would’ve thought you’re an unpatriotic government dog!”
For me, that was such a courageous move. Reading it for the first time, I thought “I can’t believe Yeoul just said that.”
I’d like to add here that I am not suggesting the different narratives of the Gwangju Uprising have equal validity. I’d just like to suspend the emotionally-charged discussion regarding the historic event for now, to discuss what Kim Yideum is doing in Blood Sisters.
You asked me if I regard Blood Sisters as a historical novel. I would say Blood Sisters poses a hugely important question about how we narrativize our experience of the world as we experience it, in private and public spheres—how we negotiate our sense of self and our sense of others; how we make sense of a historical event that an individual cannot possibly experience in full.
I constantly asked myself about the parallels between Yeoul and Yideum: who is this speaker, what is this novel trying to do here?
The novel does not strive to represent the era or an experience. Through a fragmented format and difficult-to-follow conversations (often lacking dialogue tags), it is doing something strange, coded, and invigorating.
One of the reasons I decided to translate Blood Sisters is that I hoped it would allow readers to see both parallels and differences between today’s polarized narratives in the USA and the narratives prevalent in Korea during the 1980s. Maybe those readers would ask similar questions of themselves: “What do I make of what I see here—privately, publicly, and in that shadowy space in between?”
At the Thinking its Presence conference, Roberto Tejada used a phrase that allowed me to articulate what I sense in my translation process: “uncanny kinship.” It is incredible to me that I can meditate on my experience of today’s world as an immigrant—between Korea and the USA (Texas, to be specific)—through a novel about a completely different world, written in Korean by a woman of an older generation who led an entirely different life.
JS: You’ve translated Kim Yideum’s poems, in addition to her debut novel. How does the challenge of translating poetry differ? Do you think of Kim Yideum as primarily a poet rather than a novelist, or does genre not really matter here?
JYL: Yes, I am honored to have encountered Kim Yideum through her prose and poetry (and in person, too). Let me start off answering that multi-layered question by discussing my thoughts on literary identity—what it means to be a poet, a novelist, and so on. I used to ask myself whether I was a poet or translator (or a grad student, a Korean, an American. . .). I decided to stop asking questions about my identity once I realized that when I use the identity verb (“I am. . .”) it limits what I can perceive or do or produce. I try to view everyone the same way, beyond identity, including Yideum/Unni/Sunsengnim.
Defining a text as part of a certain genre can be similarly restrictive; on the other hand, asking questions using genre can be productive, as long as genre-expectations are used as tools to view the text from different perspectives. When I translate, I start by thinking of the text in front of me as a question mark. And I pose questions like the following: what is this “?” doing? If I were to view this “?” as poetry, what would I see? If I were to view this “?” as prose, what would I see?
This process was especially useful for me when I translated Blood Sisters. There is a protagonist, a narrative. . . it sure sounds like fiction. There is also the coded language and strange moments like “mute mitten,” which sound more like poetry. Blood Sisters is multi-dimensional and operates in between genres (a quick note: “inbetween” was the theme of the first issue of the magazine Kim runs, Paper Yideum).
What makes this really fun is that these questions I ask of the text circle back to the genre definitions themselves: okay, this text is doing “[insert observations].” What does that mean in terms of poetry and prose? If I call this text poetry or prose, what does that tell me about those genres? Now that I’ve read this text, what can poetry (in my definition) do? What can fiction (in my definition) do?
And perhaps (if I continue) the questions expand towards the self. What can I do with writing? What can I do with translating? What is swirling inside me and gets pulled to the surface when I engage with a text?
JS: Were any sections of the novel particularly challenging to translate? I’m thinking of rendering Leonard Cohen’s “I’m Your Man” into Korean (and Spanish), or perhaps capturing the colloquialisms (and the swearing) in Jeong Yeoul’s voice. . .
JYL: Yes, I had to experiment with colloquialisms and various different tones to translate Yeoul’s voice. Korean is a language with multiple layers of honorific and appropriate terms for addressing others, and a casual tone in Korean just doesn’t feel equivalent to a casual tone in American English. At some points, I had to add harsher English slang and expletives that weren’t exactly there in Korean to truly capture the resistance to hierarchy and existing power structures implied in Yeoul’s crass speech. While I have this opportunity, I’d like to let readers know that Yeoul’s tone, which may come across as unnecessarily irreverent, is something akin to the howl of cornered animal: when the power structure marginalizes you in so many ways, being a young woman with no family support and a challenging economic situation, how could you accept the honorifics and formality of a language that seems to acquiesce to the prevailing power structure? I hear Yeoul’s voice resonate with punk spirit— the scream, the scratchy sound quality of a self-produced garage record—so I added a punk edge to her voice.
And thank you so much for asking about the Leonard Cohen moment! That part keeps me up at night. . . What I tried to do in that section was convey how English feels to a Korean with a certain level of English comprehension skills. The lyrics and their subtlety may not be fully understood, but some of the meaning comes through as the Korean listener (Yeoul in the text, Korean readers outside the text) tunes into the music.
I thought I could use Spanish to create a broadly similar experience for English-speaking readers. When I was translating Blood Sisters, I was working at the refugee resettlement agency in Dallas, and I consulted an Argentinian coworker and friend—a marvelous human being, another immigrant, artist, and scholar looking to expand his horizons—about the translation. But I lost some parts of the notes I took from his advice, so hopefully that section of the novel came across okay. . .
I really wish I could publish all my translations as Google Docs, perpetually updating, getting comments and suggestions from the readers, a constant work in progress.
I absolutely want translation to be a conversation—the conversation starts out between the source language and target language, the writer and the translator, but then it keeps on growing, which is what I love about translating. Perhaps another analogy I could use is music: different layers and instruments entering and exiting, slipped fingers and off-beat breaths all forming a living entity together. So I invite you to add your notes, play your instruments, adding to what is in motion, knowing that something larger is brewing beneath the surface. It’s all good fun!
Ji Yoon Lee is an immigrant-poet-translator. Her collaborative translation of Korean feminist poet Kim Yideum’s Cheer Up, Femme Fatale was shortlisted for the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize. She is the author of the poetry collections Foreigner’s Folly (Coconut Books, 2014), Funsize/Bitesize (Birds of Lace, 2013) and IMMA (Radioactive Moat, 2012).
Jacob Silkstone is an Assistant Managing Editor for Asymptote. He was previously Managing Editor of The Missing Slate (Pakistan) and has worked at international schools in Bangladesh and Norway.
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