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Bae Suah

— The protagonist of this novel shares many points in common with me. I did not know a word of German when I arrived, and tried as far as possible to approach the new language through literature. My impressions of that initial period do not match up completely with the actual life that I led there; I misperceived many things because of my imperfect German.  Some of these misunderstandings made their way into the novel, in particular through my descriptions of Germans. I hope that readers do not assume that all of the details in this novel are factually accurate.

 

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Bae Suah

— In most instances I have a clear intention when I choose a female protagonist. They are women who refuse or cannot have their own place in traditional society. I love such women. Women who cannot be guaranteed social status through marriage, or women who refuse to marry in order to obtain it; women who do not suppress themselves for the sake of their parents or siblings; women who, as a result of their independent personalities, are lonely and financially precarious. Women who go their own way in accordance with their own stubbornness, and who are not afraid to do so. I am very interested in such lives. And so I plan to write about these women in the future as well. I wish to endow them with an aesthetic status through my fiction. And I want to make them cross a certain border that I myself could not cross because my bravery was insufficient. I wish them to be stronger than I am.

 

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Bae Suah

— Musil’s book The Man Without Qualities has been translated into Korean. I’ve read it, but only the Korean translation. And so I wasn’t able to get a proper feel for the atmosphere of the original. Musil said that the characteristics of essayistic writing were provisionality, uncertainty, the possibility of intellectual adventure. I write novels, but cannot make any prescriptions about what the form should be. A story is like a universe. I think that it is unlimited, simultaneous and open. No one theory is able to explain the universe entire, and it is the same for literature.

 

I gave this novel the title The Essayist’s Desk because I wanted a slightly freer form, one that would give me greater distance from the melodramatic excitement that fiction can generate. Although this novel deals with incidents of intense emotion, I wanted to enclose them in a form that would nevertheless escape the romantic melody.

 

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Bae Suah

— I think that I made several experiments in style and technique. Perhaps I deliberately started to use very long sentences from writing A Greater Music onwards. In Korean literature, people do not much like to write long sentences. It is not uncommon to believe that the shorter a sentence is, the better. And that the only reason for writing otherwise is ineptitude. But I think a little differently. Perhaps because I am attracted to German writers whose sentences are long and strictly precise, while also well-tuned and beautiful. When I wrote A Greater Music, I thought of it as a story of an unequal love. And isn’t that a strange situation? Could love really come about if human beings were equal? Such questions came to me as I was writing it. These days I am often writing sentences that are a little more concise and have many echoes. They are short stories on the theme of childhood.

 

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Bae Suah

— Yes, I have heard many people say that my writings share this ‘translation style’. In Korea, it is a criticism often used to mean ‘Korean that cannot be good’.

 

I think non-chronological narrative is one of the techniques that all writers use. I am very interested in things like time’s simultaneity, a story that flows in reverse order. Like you, I don’t think of my writing as avant garde. I tend to rely in many parts on narrative, plot, story. And I even struggle with the method of communicating such things. Though I enjoy experimental attempts, I don’t think of that as a characteristic running through my work as a whole. I’m very interested in techniques for communicating a story in a new way.

 

I consider A Greater Music a love story; but there seem to be many more instances of people reading it as about language or music. Perhaps this is because they have read critics’ writings? I like intense emotions. Feelings are the protagonists of my fiction. But when I express them in writing, that creates a little more distance. I like investigating them through a specific perspective, at a remove.

 

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Bae Suah

— For South Korean citizens, travelling on foot has long been a symbol of impossibility. South Korea is surrounded by sea, and travelling to North Korea is something unimaginable. For the sake of comparison, it was something more improbable than Jesus walking on water. Of course Kyung-hee cannot travel this way. But the very first thought that comes to her is this grand symbol: ‘to go on foot’. And the inability to do so means having to entrust oneself to the bureaucratic apparatus of passports and visas, and the necessity of obtaining such things. Human beings, born free, should be able to travel to all places on their feet, but really everyone is in a state of confinement, imprisoned in their homeland (or, perhaps, in their mother tongue).

 

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Bae Suah

— Though shaman faith developed in Korea too and has been passed down quite well-preserved, Korean shamanism has been pushed to the fringes of society over the course of the country’s modernisation. Though in reality, the traces of shamanist belief remain in the unconscious, in a syncretic form with religion, with Buddhism. In Korea, the position of shamans – who are all women – is not a respected one. It’s not the work of intellectuals, but dismissed as something undertaken by uneducated women. Though shaman traditions can be the subject of academic research, it is not explored as a serious form of belief: a shaman can be confused with a fortune teller. In Mongolia it’s different. Shamans are seen as intellectuals and healers, those who supervise communion with nature. They’re also musicians and poets. Galsan Tschinag, a shaman I met in the Altai mountains, is a novelist who writes in German. I think that the most significant part of shamanism is seeing human beings, not as liberated from nature, but as part of one universe.

 

Karakorum is the name of an ancient city in Mongolia, but I use it in place of ‘couch surfing’, where travellers share their living space with each other. I wanted to discuss travel that bridges the east and west, like Marco Polo, which is why I replaced the modern term with the medieval.

 

When I first went to Mongolia, the nature landscape, of course, made the greatest impression on me. Once I went to the Altai, there was the true Mongolia. Altai is in the north-western region of Mongolia, near the borders with Russia and Kazakhstan. I stayed in a ger along with twenty German-speaking Europeans. In the Altai, nature was oppressive from the day I arrived. It didn’t conform in a single way to the idea I had of ‘nature’ – green vegetation, fresh woods, fruit-bearing trees, grass, sea, beautiful refreshing scenery. In one of the books I read in order to go to Mongolia were the words ‘stone mother iron father’, and earth of the Altai was precisely that. The landscape called ‘steppe’ had no grass, and the river flowed grey. The wind always raged. There was no electricity, no telephone, no coffee, no salad. It was truly isolated. I came to believe that at some point mothers had formed out of stone, fathers out of iron. And I came to believe that fire probably would have been the first human god. In that place, nature wore its original face.

 

The second greatest impression were from the nomadic people themselves. Particularly their faces, their ‘expressionlessness’. It was the expression of the Koreans I had known as a child. If you look at photographs from the old days, Korean people have faces that are sullen, stiff, and hard, as though angry. But it is not that they are angry, nor displeased. They’re simply facing unfamiliar people or an unfamiliar object, and so look awkward and embarrassed. But, now, due to Western influences, Koreans – or at least city dwellers – are not expressionless as in the past. In the Altai, looking at the nomadic faces, it was as though I had time travelled. Our guide, a Swiss woman, said to me: ‘looking at you, who have walked here from far away, I thought you were a nomadic woman I’d never seen before, carrying a shepherd’s crook, wearing a woollen skirt, who’d come to our ger…’ At the time I was carrying several branches that I’d picked up in the course of my walk, you see. I did not forget those words. I came back from my trip and wrote a travel essay, and that book’s title became ‘A Nomadic Woman Who I’d Never Seen Before’.

 

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Bae Suah

— I wanted this book to be read with the whole body; with the flesh. This novel is a voice, and the voice is an inherently physical entity. Individual voices differ according to the shape of the vocal chords, creating a characteristic through which we distinguish one other. It can neither be faked nor falsified. Through the ear of the one (reader) hears the voice of another (the novel). I wanted that voice to flow materially into the body, to reside at each region of the body. I tried especially to make the description of physical sensation and relations come alive: re-presenting images and symbols through repetition. For example, the passage which describes Mr Nobody giving Kyung-hee an eye kiss, licking her eyeball, whilst at the same time hinting doubly at sexual conjunction. The word ‘mucous membrane’ would be the core of that. Human beings enter into others through regions of mucous membrane: eyes, mouth, throat, genitals, anus. ‘Penetrating and passing through’ can occur on various levels. In the novel I wanted to describe a radically physical touch, the sensation of feeling a new dimension through the touch of a mucous membrane, which has no skin. An example of these membranes are the vocal chords, and the voice that resonates. I think that the myth of the Egyptian goddess Nut, which explains the cycle of the universe through a woman’s body, fits well with this novel. Coincidentally, in Korean ‘vocal chords’, seong-dae, and ‘genitals’, seong-ki, begin with a syllable which has the same sound. Though of course the hanja are different.

 

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Bae Suah

— Though the meaning as it is originally designated is the author’s, the sounds – which become the body of that meaning: the number of syllables, the vocabulary, the rhythm, the pronunciation and intonation – are the creation of the translator. Even though I listened to the same passage repeatedly at each event, I always enjoyed it.

 

As we were there focusing on my other book, A Greater Music, it seemed that many of the audience had a connection with Berlin. In Korea, readers are able to feel that they breathe the words of the reading in unison with me. In America that is impossible. Instead, the audience are alienated. That is the greatest distance. But I wish and hope that a form of language can nevertheless be communicated, through sound, rhythm, meter. That’s why I enjoy readings.

 

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Bae Suah

— Among my fellow writers, there are several who, though they’ve previously worked in translation in the past, do not wish to continue translating. In general, they want to be precise and faithful to the original. Due to the impossibility of this, they consider translation difficult and taxing. But I think a little differently. I tend to believe that the same word does not exist precisely in different languages. A single word has various meanings, and is translated into another based on one of these, which is the representative meaning. The spectrum of meaning or atmosphere of nuance ends up being unmade. And so I do not agonise greatly over vocabulary. Perhaps I am a lazy translator. Instead, I tend to agonise over the sentences as a whole. Rather than selecting precise words individually, I want to change the sentence structure in order to communicate the original feeling.

 

Personally, translation is an act of reading and recommending a book to others. I select the books I translate very carefully. I struggle over whether I’ll be able to respond to the original sentences appropriately; whether there’ll be a good synergy between the original and my translation. There are books for which the translator makes little difference, and there are books for which each translator offers a completely individual translation. I prefer the latter kind. This kind of translation gives the translator a pleasure similar to that of creative writing. In my work, I see this form in my translations of Pessoa and Sebald, and the Swiss writer Robert Walser.