Sweet Morning Choco Cream, hello. (clementines, hello!)
Autumn Coming
This summer
I shielded myself from the heat
with a thin hempen weave,
and now as autumn at last draws near
sunlight a thousand li away
touches my body just gently;
and having rinsed my mouth
this summer
with garlic wine,
as autumn draws near
the winds above my head flow clear.
The bi-lingual copy of Pak Chaesam's Enough to Say It's Far that I ordered online arrived today. English and Korean bi-lingual books of poetry are hard to find, even in Korea. I can't really do much with the Korean yet, but I'm glad it's there. I would have liked to write it out for you, but I can't reproduce the hanja (the Korean word for kanji/Chinese characters) on my computer. I don't have the tools.
What I can do with the original Korean is this:
I'm not really sure how they decided on line breaks in the English translation. In the Korean, the first lines of both stanzas are "This summer," and the third lines are "as autumn comes/approaches" (maybe, approximately, I don't really know very much about this). And everything in between is contained in one line, no breaks.
Maybe something like this:
This summerI can also tell you that the semi-colon that divides the poem in half is entirely accurate; the last syllable of the first stanza is 고 (ko/go), which is used to abridge the final verb of the first part of the sentence and lead into the second part of the sentence.
I shielded myself from the heat with a thin hempen weave,
and as autumn comes
sunlight a thousand li away touches my body just gently;
this summer
I rinsed my mouth with garlic wine,
and as autumn comes
the winds above my head flow clear.
My final year at U-M with all you beautiful people was the first time, I think, that I've really come to love and value how poetry sounds. Before then, I'd never really gotten into read-arounds; reading things aloud was something I did alone in my room in a soft voice so that my neighbors couldn't hear me.
Now, after having gotten used to our read-arounds for such a short period of time, I miss them here. Can we skype and do nothing but read poems to each other?
Seriously?
8 comments:
I love it when I check your blog with the thought "Oh, Pam-Mom probably hasn't updated again because she updated a lot earlier this week" and then I am presently surprised not only with a new post, but with a new post about LINE BREAKS & TRANSLATION.
Question time: tell me about garlic wine! Does it have any particular significance in Korean culture?
Also, I really really like the idea of a skype read around, but are you allowed to have more than 3 people in a skype call? Barring a skype read around, maybe we could all get google voicemail accounts like Audra & then we could read poems to each other simultaneously. Or something. Then we might also get the added bonus of a crazy google transcription.
I was actually thinking of making a blog post where I'd read some of Emmanuel Hocquard's poems in French & then read my shitty translation of them into English. Obviously, my French isn't perfect but it still might be nice for you, Hannah & Audra (because besides the random passer-bys looking for blog posts about Robert Creeley, you three are my main audience) to sort of hear what French sounds like.
Ok Imma stop rambling now.
On my skype window, there's an option called "start conference call" (on the "call" drop-down menu). It doesn't say anything about having a person limit.
Yes! Read poems to me in French! And when my Korean gets even halfway decent I promise to do the same.
I don't know very much about garlic wine, but it's a kind of rice wine, they make a lot of rice wine here. I've heard rumors that it doesn't give you a hangover and increases your "stamina." And when they say "stamina," I honestly can't tell whether they mean overall bodily strength, or sexual endurance.
CHECK YOUR FACEBOOK
ALSO WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH MY FISH. GOD I AM GOING TO HAVE A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN ABOUT THIS
Pam, sometimes I check your blog more than once a day. I don't know why I do this.
Does the original rhyme, do you think? Because I wonder how intentional the final rhyme in the translation was.
I don't know, guys, I mean, sometimes I go to your blogs when I KNOW you haven't updated just to reread old posts and comment threads. I don't know why I do this.
The original rhymes insofar as: The 1st lines of both stanzas rhyme with each other, because they are the same. The 3rd lines of both stanzas rhyme with each other, because they are the same. The 2nd lines of both stanzas rhyme with each other because (though they are NOT the same) they end with a similar verb conjugation. But there is NO RHYME in the 4th lines of both stanzas, and the 3rd & 4th line of the last stanza definitely DO NOT RHYME in the original.
This pissed me off. You see, my theory is that the translators purposely changed the phrasing from "autumn comes" --> "autumn draws near" to achieve this rhyme.
Also: I AM DRINKING YUJA TEA RIGHT NOW, JANE. RIGHT NOW. BECAUSE SOMEONE BROUGHT A HUGE-ASS JAR OF YUJA TEA-BITS TO SCHOOL.
IT IS SO DELICIOUS.
That's annoying! It's like, oh, poem in English, we love plunkity rhymes and also we hate subtlety.
Sometimes I think I might have started adding "-ity" onto things partially because of the Argentinian tendency to use the "-ita"/"-ito" diminuitive.
Seriously though, that rhyme adds nothing for me. I like the poem, though, esp. rinsing my mouth with garlic wine. It sounds so flavorful with the rinsing.
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