Living Language
June 11, 2007
“Sweetheart Sorrow,” in the Summer Fiction Issue, is the first published story by David Hoon Kim. Here Kim discusses translation and identity with his editor, Cressida Leyshon.
CRESSIDA LEYSHON: In your story this week, the narrator, Blatand, is a Danish speaker of Japanese origin who lives in Paris, dates a Japanese woman, and makes money by translating a French text into English. At one point, Blatand says, “A foreign language allows one to rename the world and everything in it.” Were you interested in looking at the relationship between language and identity?
DAVID HOON KIM: In a word, yes. I’ve always been obsessed by languages, perhaps because I don’t really have one that I can claim wholly as my own. It might have something to do with the fact that, having lived in Korea until I was eight, and then in the United States and France, I don’t really have a native language—at least, not the way most people define a native language. I feel at home in more than one language, but never quite completely at home in any. I’ve always been disturbed by how often people confuse the words “nationality” and “ethnic origin”—both here in the U.S. and in France—as though the two were interchangeable. (One’s nationality, all too often, is not the same as one’s ethnic origin—and sometimes neither is the same as one’s national origin.) For me, these terms are far from interchangeable, and my nationality and my ethnic origin give only a partial picture of who I am. I speak French and Korean but do not have French or Korean nationality, which doesn’t keep me from feeling French or Korean, especially when I’m in the U.S., just as I feel very American when I’m in France. As a result, rather than adhere to a nationality or seek affiliation with a native language, I see myself as an inhabitant of the French language, a denizen of the Korean language, and a citizen of the English language. For me, the bond between language and identity is at once unavoidable, tenuous, and paradoxical. I suppose this might be what I was trying to get at in my story, even if the character’s ancestry happens to be Japanese, not Korean.
Much of the dialogue in this story is conducted in French (although the story is written in English), and some of the most important exchanges concern words that are misunderstood or whose meanings vary in different languages. Was it challenging to find a way of representing this in English? Did you follow any particular logic in deciding when to use French words and when to stick to English?
Yes, it was quite a challenge. My basic rule for deciding when to use French words was when I saw that it was absolutely indispensable—when a translation or paraphrase wouldn’t do, when an equivalent of a French word or expression didn’t exist in English. The meaning also had to be self-explanatory, either from the context or from the many similarities in etymology between French and English that I regularly take advantage of, when I can, in my fiction.
I am used to depicting other languages and foreign realities in my English-language fiction, as many of my stories are set in France or, inversely, have French-speaking characters in English-speaking environments. Not only that, but my stories written in English usually take place in France, while my stories written in French often take place in the U.S. This geographical chassé-croisé can be explained by a simple lack of confidence on my part: I didn’t feel I could compete with native French-speakers writing about their own people; just as, in English, there were writers, of Asian descent or not, writing about the U.S. much better than I ever could. At the same time, I wanted to be true to myself as a writer. I’ve always felt that it doesn’t matter what you write about; what matters is how you write about it.
As a result, there are a lot of times when a story requires me to explain or translate this or that foreign cultural aspect, and I realize how second-rate and secondhand such attempts are, ultimately. For example, there is an instance of wordplay in the current story that hinges on the similarity between the French expressions en revenant (coming back, returning) and un revenant (a ghost). I was very happy to have thought of it, only to realize how much more effective it would have been had the story itself also been in French: I wouldn’t have had to explain anything. I’ve had many other moments like that, when I wonder for a moment whether the story wouldn’t be more effective in the other language.
Blatand is translating a physics text written by an eccentric old scientist. Blatand admits that the little knowledge of physics he has was gleaned from magazines and science-fiction novels. I wondered whether you knew more about theoretical physics than Blatand—or whether you started writing this story with his level of knowledge. Did you do much research for this part of the story?
I actually didn’t have to do a lot of research. Not because I have a scientific background but because, when I started writing the story, I was working as a technical translator, like my character, albeit under somewhat less harrowing conditions. So the vocabulary and the details were already in my head. At the time, for each of my translating gigs I would spend about a week on research—interviewing specialists, attending conventions or fairs—before and while I was translating. So I was a little bit better off tackling the subject than Blatand, but by no means an expert. And, of course, even though I am capable of translating scientific documents, I don’t understand everything I translate. It was the discrepancy between what I knew and what I didn’t know that, I think, became the catalyst of my story. I had to research the Japanese and the Danish parts, as well as some of the literary references, but I didn’t do any research for the physics.
Do you find translating and writing to be quite different disciplines, or do they draw on the same skills?
Although I spent three years working as a freelance technical translator, I have always had an enormously hard time going from one language to another. I don’t know why this is. For me, the languages inhabiting my brain are not neatly lined up next to one another—it’s more like a jumbled mess—and no one word in one language has an ideal equivalent in another. I’ve always imagined my head as a darkened room, where all I have is a flashlight, so that I can never see the whole room, only parts of it at a time. Just the other day, while writing in English, I couldn’t remember the word “blackmail”; my brain would only give me the word in French—chantage—and, as I don’t own any bilingual dictionaries, it took me something like an hour of on-and-off thinking to remember the word “blackmail.” I try to keep the two languages separate when I write, but I find that one language is always contaminated by the other. For the longest time, I was beginning a lot of sentences in English with a subordinate clause, less noticeable and more natural in French. I didn’t realize how deeply this habit had infiltrated my writing style until a reader finally pointed it out.
In any case, I think that if you are a literary translator—especially of poetry—it’s not unlike being a writer. The translation must read not like a translation, but as though the writer had written the same work in another language. I think the best translators of literature always rewrite rather than translate, all the while remaining faithful to the original text. In scientific translation, the principal concern is being just familiar enough with the terminology involved to translate the document into another language as competently as possible. No more, no less. In some ways, it’s not unlike writing fiction, in that if your main character is a neurosurgeon you should know enough about neurosurgery to make the character convincing without necessarily being able to perform surgery yourself. Freelance translators, like fiction writers, are dilettantes, going from one subject to another, from theoretical physics to dermatology to horses—generalists rather than specialists.
This is the first story you’ve published. How long have you been writing fiction?
I’ve been writing fiction for ten years. For most of my life I thought I would become a comic-book artist. Ever since I was small, I’ve drawn and made my own comics, and during my adolescence, after I came to the U.S., I began to submit drawings to Marvel. When I was nineteen or so, I learned to speak French from a Swiss-American friend who spoke French at home with his parents and also from reading the French Symbolist poets, after which I took some French-literature classes. It was around that time, I think, that my interest shifted from drawing to writing. Not long afterward, I moved to France, where I spent roughly a third of my life. It was in France, writing in French, that I learned to be rigorous and exacting about things like word choice and sentence structure. If French has a reputation for being an exact language, it’s because those who write in it take care to be exact. I was always afraid of using a word incorrectly, of making even the slightest grammatical error. Good writing is praised differently in France than in the U.S. For example, people here will say, “Fitzgerald writes very well,” but people in France will say, “Proust writes French very well.” Before I showed any of my French writer friends my work, I was always checking and double-checking each word in the dictionary, a habit that has since carried over into English. I think the French language was instrumental in forming me as a writer.
Were the works of any other fiction writers significant influences when you were working on this story? Are there writers whose work you return to?
For this particular story, Haruki Murakami was definitely a big influence. Murakami and Kobo Abe. In addition, I am constantly inspired by the work of Vladimir Nabokov. What I most appreciate about Nabokov is his inexhaustible eye for observation and his seamless mixture of realism and fantasy, two things that I continually aspire to, with varying degrees of success, in my own writing. There are a number of other writers and specific works I find myself returning to: Kafka; Georges Perec; Danilo Kis’s “The Encyclopedia of the Dead”; the fantastic realism of Adolfo Bioy Casares and Julio Cortázar; Marcel Moiré’s “The Loneliness Paradox”; the Québécois writer Ook Chung, who writes in the vein of Georges Rodenbach, a turn-of-the-century Belgian Symbolist—to name just a few. Whenever I want to read beautifully written sentences, I take down from my shelf one of Samuel Beckett’s later French novels or open James Joyce’s “Ulysses” to a page at random.
I wondered whether this story is part of a collection or a longer work. Are we going to see Blatand again? Or is this it?
I’m not working on a collection of stories per se, but I am working on three stories that take place in, respectively, Paris, Germany, and a Swiss sanatorium. It’s possible that I might bring back Blatand in a longer work at some point in the future. I feel as though I haven’t got to the bottom of his character. In a sense, I consider Blatand to be my alter ego, and I would like to write something else about him, another story or perhaps even a novel.
What are you working on at the moment?
At the moment, I am revising what I hope will be the final draft of a novel about a French household in German-occupied Paris, and at the same time revising a novel I wrote in French, about a French professor at an American college, partly inspired by and modelled on Nabokov’s novel “Pnin.”
Do you think “Sweetheart Sorrow” would be the same story if it were to be written in French?
In the past, I found myself torn between wanting to write in English and wanting to write in French. In the same manner, I have always been conflicted about what kind of stories I wanted to write—character-driven, psychologically realistic human dramas, with a classical narration, or more structurally experimental, fantastical, idea-driven texts. There are no doubt writers who do both at once, but I, unfortunately, am not one of them. When I was working on a “realistic” story, I felt that I should be more true to my experimental self, and vice versa. Over time, I noticed that my writing in English was more traditional, while my writing in French was less conventional. There are exceptions, but that’s the general pattern now.
To answer your question, I don’t think it would be the same story if I were to write it in French—because I could only have written it in English. Which is also why I never think about translating my own writing. That said, Samuel Beckett’s work, absolutely unique in literature, fascinates me no end. True, other writers have written works in more than one language and translated some of their own books. But no one else has duplicated his own oeuvre so perfectly. In general, I am the worst decision-maker I know, and I can’t imagine anything worse than having to choose between two equally viable paths. I see Beckett’s work as the ultimate example of having one’s cake and eating it. Nabokov also wrote two significant bodies of work in two languages, but he didn’t always translate his own works, and, when he did, it was mostly from Russian to English. In my own modest way, I like to think of myself as an amalgam of the two writers. This might sound a bit premature, but I don’t see myself abandoning one or the other language. At the same time, I think I would be my own worst translator.
Are you planning on returning to France, or staying in Iowa City, where you recently completed an M.F.A., or moving somewhere else altogether?
There’s a part of me that would like to return to France. I left because of the writing program at Iowa. Like a lot of people, perhaps, I applied to the program hoping but not really expecting to get in. I appreciate Iowa City for what it offers to someone used to small, European cities, where you can get around, more or less, without a car, and where the stores are within walking distance. The advantage of not living in France is that it’s easier to write about it. (When I was in France I was always writing about the U.S.) In a few months I’ll be moving to southern California, near Los Angeles, where my girlfriend lives, and where I hope to teach part-time and, of course, write. ♦