Ten Thousand Burdens: Ian Haight and T’aeyong Hŏ on the Hanmun

February 13, 2025 | in Interviews | by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

. . . the language is not working in a literal sense; it’s trying to evoke an imaginary landscape, and do so aesthetically.

Translators Ian Haight and T’aeyong Hŏ have forged a remarkable partnership in bringing the timeless beauty of classical Korean poetry to English readers. Their work spans centuries, breathing new life into poetic masterpieces originally composed in hanmun, or ‘literary Sinitic’, the written language of Korea’s past. Together, they have delivered evocative English renditions of Borderland Roads (2009) by Hŏ Kyun and Magnolia and Lotus (2013) by Hyesim—both of which were catalogued in The Routledge Companion to Korean Literature (2022). Their more recent projects include Ch’oŭi’s meditative An Homage to Green Tea (2024) and the eagerly anticipated Spring Mountain (forthcoming June 2025) by the poet Nansŏrhŏn, all from White Pine Press, a New York-based publisher.

Through their Korean Voices series, White Pine Press has long been a bridge between Korean literary tradition and global readership, featuring works by writers Park Bum-shin, Ra Heeduk, Park Wan-suh, Shim Bo-seon, Eun Heekyung, and translators Hyun-Jae Yee Sallee, Suh Ji-Moon, Kyoung-Lee Park, and Amber Kim, further cementing its role as a vital conduit for transcultural dialogue.

In this interview, I spoke with both Ian, based in Ramstein, Germany, and T’aeyong, in Pusan, Korea, on translating poetry originally written in hanmun, as well as the historical and contemporary divides between what’s revered as cosmopolitan and what’s relegated as vernacular—in language and broader cultural contexts.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): For readers who can read Korean literature only through translation, could you briefly explain what hanmun is? Why did Korean poets, before the invention of the Korean script (kungmun or chosŏnmun) in the mid-fifteenth century, write in this orthography? Additionally, how distinct are classical and contemporary language, ‘literary’ and ‘vernacular’ language, and written and spoken language in the modern Korean literary landscape?

Ian Haight (IH): Hanmun is the Korean use of classical Chinese to write literature. Kungmun is an older term for what we now call hangul in South Korea, which is the contemporary written language of South Korea. Chosŏnmun is pretty much the same thing as hangul, but it is for North Korea. There are some regional dialectical differences between chosŏnmun and hangul, and owing to the political ideologies of North and South Korea, there are also some differences in the words and how some words are written.

What’s New in Translation: April 2024

April 15, 2024 | in New in Translation, Reviews | by Georgina Fooks, Nestor Gomez, and Willem Marx

New titles from Kazakhstan, South Korea, and The Netherlands!

This month, our editors introduce three incredible new works that delve into family, solitude, and fractured legacy. From the lyrical explorations of family by Surinamese author Astrid Roemer, the delightful oddities of Yun Ko-Eun’s sincere and humorous short stories, and the vivid, compassionate vignettes of Kazkah author Baqytgul Sarmekova, these newly published translations invite reflection, tenderness, and joy.

Off-White by Astrid Roemer, translated from the Dutch by Lucy Scott and David McKay, Two Lines Press, 2024

Review by Nestor Gomez, Editor-at-Large

In Off-White, Astrid Roemer weaves a grand, multigenerational narrative around the matriarchical figure of Grandma Bee and her family in Suriname, a South American country on the Caribbean coast. The year is 1966, and each member of the Vanta family is going about their lives in different directions, threatening the bond that is necessary to continue Grandma Bee’s vision of the family’s legacy.

While one part of this narrative is deeply embedded in identity, exploring how structures of race, class, and gender have been encoded within the family, another part is inextricably tied to loss and getting lost, as various characters all reckon with their history (cultural, personal, and traumatic) in different ways. Translators Lucy Scott and David McKay demonstrate remarkable skill and artistry in conveying the story with ease and clarity, relaying the subtle tensions in both the spoken and the unspoken. Through their work, Roemer’s prose enlivens with emotive and physical details (especially that of meals), deeply coloring the multiplicity that threatens the family’s unity while highlighting their diversity of experiences.

Even before beginning the novel, we are immediately confronted with the issue of color in the title: Off-White. The Dutch term, “Gebroken Wit,” is also included in the book’s very first page, and Roemer describes it as having multiple translated meanings, such as “broken white” or “refracted white.” In a conversation with Two Lines Press, Roemer states: “essentially, [gebroken wit] refers to refracted sunlight—a rainbow, for instance—showing a wide range of colors. . . [It] also means that sunlight always finds a way through time and always keeps gathering together.” This imagery of sunlight resonates strongly throughout the novel in the many harrowed struggles of the Vanta family: Heli’s burgeoning relationship with an older married man who teaches at her school, Louise’s ongoing incestuous relationship with her brother, and Laura’s diminishing mental health from the sexual harassment she experienced as a child at the hands of Grandma Bee’s brother, Lèon. READ MORE…

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What’s New in Translation: March 2023

March 13, 2023 | in New in Translation, Reviews | by Andrea Blatz, Ian Ross Singleton, and Rachel Landau

New translations from the Yiddish, Japanese, and Esperanto!

In this month’s round up of the latest releases, we’re thrilled to introduce three singular works from rulebreakers, free thinkers, and true originals. From Japan, an early novella from the nation’s renowned enfant terrible, Osamu Dazai, gives a telling look at the writer’s internal monologue. From the Nobel laureate Issac Bashevis Singer, a bilingual edition of the Yiddish author’s story—in multiple translations—opens up an inquest into the translator’s pivotal role. And from the Ukrainian émigré Vasili Eroshenko, a collection of the author’s fairy tales, translated from the Japanese and Esperanto, presents a well-rounded selection of the transnational author’s politically charged work. Read on to find out more!

gimpl

Simple Gimpl by Isaac Bashevis Singer, a definitive bilingual edition with translations from the Yiddish by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, and David Stromberg, and Illustrations by Liana Finck, Restless Books, 2023

Review by Rachel Landau, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

Whether you choose to know him as “Simple Gimpl” or “Gimpel the Fool,” the main character of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novella is a likable, rambling man who finds himself in an unfortunate situation. His wife, Elka, is frequently using their shared home for affairs with other men, and all of Gimpl’s attempts to come to terms with the situation are complicated by his deep love for her. Even when the pair are forbidden by the town rabbi from seeing each other, Gimpl works tirelessly to provide for the children and for Elka. He feels betrayed to learn, at the end of Elka’s life, that the children were not really his—and his reaction to this deception is a surprising one.

The narrative in Simple Gimpl is slow-moving, reflective, and witty. It is an undeniable pleasure to read—and certainly not difficult to read multiple times in a row, as this edition of the book incites the reader to do. This “definitive bilingual edition,” released by Restless Books, includes back-to-back translations of the Yiddish work; first is Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Simple Gimpl,” which is followed immediately by Saul Bellow’s “Gimpel the Fool,” and this compendium of translations is decidedly about translation itself. Over the course of more than one hundred pages, one must realize that this is not a book about Gimpl, and not even about the differences between Saul Bellow’s Gimpel and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Gimpl. It is about the role of the translator; it is about the strange impossibility of rendering a story. READ MORE…

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Translation Tuesday: An excerpt of “Beasts Head for Home” by Abe Kōbō

April 4, 2017 | in Translations | by Richard F. Calichman

Kyūzō stood motionless, vacillating, when again he heard the sound of approaching footsteps. They stopped directly in front of him.

Best known for The Woman in The Dunes, Abe Kōbō is widely recognized as one of the most important Japanese writers of the 20^th century. Today, we’re thrilled to partner with Columbia University Press to present an extract from a new and forthcoming Abe novel in English translation. Beasts Head for Home takes place shortly after World War II, when Japan was forced to give up its extensive colonial holdings throughout Asia, and Japanese civilians residing overseas began to return en masse to Japan. In the following excerpt, Kuki Kyūzō, a Japanese youth abandoned in what was previously the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (in Northeast China) stows away in a train in order to return to a homeland he has never seen.

As the wind died, the fog began to rise. On the railroad tracks, the blurred shadows of the patrolling soldiers turned back in the opposite direction. As soon as they disappeared, Kyūzō crawled out from the hollow space of the warehouse, cut across the tracks, and slid down the far side of the embankment. Here there were fields as far as the eye could see. On his right one kilometer away there appeared an iron bridge, directly in front of which the railway siding split o from the main line.

He rushed down the slope of the bank, jumping in short steps so as to avoid slipping. The milky white mass of fog gradually came into view.

Kyūzō soon detected the heavy echo of iron striking together. He then heard the jumbled sounds of footsteps and people speaking.

In the fog, it was best to stay low. He ventured to get as close as possible. A train! Just as he had thought.

One of the men standing there was a soldier, while the other seemed to be some type of maintenance worker. Suddenly a red light appeared in the cab of the train. It’s about to depart, Kyūzō thought, and he hurriedly slid down the embankment and ran toward the back of the vehicle. The train was surprisingly compact. There were two open freight cars, three large boxcars, two small boxcars, an additional three open freight cars, and finally two linked passenger cars in the rear. The passenger cars were of course out of the question, and the open freight cars would also prove difficult. He would thus need to choose from among the five boxcars in the middle. The small ones, with their many gaps and open glassless windows, seemed to be used for livestock transport. Yet they contained burlap sacks rather than livestock. The windowed cars would be more convenient in various ways, but the larger boxcars appeared best on account of the blowing wind.

What’s New in Translation? May 2016

May 30, 2016 | in New in Translation, Reviews | by Hannah Vose, Justin Maki, and Laura Garmeson

Asymptote reads this month's translated releases

Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure: A Tale that Begins with Fukushima by Hideo Furukawa, translated from the Japanese by Doug Slaymaker with Akiko Takenaka, Columbia University Press, 2016

Review by Justin Maki, Assistant Managing Editor.

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The nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi power plant—triggered by the magnitude-9 offshore earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011—created a rift in the country over its use of nuclear power and a major loss of faith in plant operators TEPCO as well as national and local government. Many protested the 2015 resumption of nuclear operations across the country, claiming safety regulations remained inadequate and that the government had rushed to cover up past failures rather than making honest efforts to learn from them. In light of this recent example of the world’s “tradition of nuclear forgetting,” as Robert Jacobs puts it, “we have to do more than remember Fukushima, we have to learn how to remember Fukushima.”

Hideo Furukawa’s newly-translated Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure: A Tale that Begins with Fukushima offers some hope in this capacity. Written in the first months after the triple disaster struck, the Fukushima native’s literary response works to complicate and deepen what it means to “remember” an afflicted region. Rather than engage in only the personal side of remembering (his own childhood in the area and his relatives with contaminated farms are both kept to rather brief passages), Furukawa brings the reader into contact with the region in a variety of ways by using multiple genres—literary reportage, imagined scenes, alternate history—and perhaps most notably by invoking Gyuichiro Inuzuka, a character from one of his earlier novels, whose voice and “memories” of northeastern Japan appear at various moments throughout the book.