Jillian Coronato interviews Translator Sue Hyon Bae

Sue Hyon Bae received her MFA from Arizona State University, where she is currently a PhD candidate in the Comparative Culture and Languages program. She is the author of a collection of poetry, Truce Country (Eyewear Publishing, 2019), and co-translator of Kim Hyesoon’s A Drink of Red Mirror (Action Books, 2019). She is the recipient of LTI translation grants for Ha Jaeyoun’s Radio Days, available now from Black Ocean Press, and Choi Jeongrye’s Lightmesh. Her work has appeared in the Telegraph, Asymptote, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere.

From former Editorial Intern Jillian Coronato: Radio Days by Ha Jaeyoun offers readers a meditative, introspective journey through time, evoking long days at the end of summer and bittersweet nostalgia for childhood. Poet and translator Sue Hyon Bae’s translation gives new life to the collection of poems, deftly employing accessible, concise language to bring it to an English-speaking audience. We discussed her writing process and past projects, and the challenges and joys of translation as an art form

Radio Days is available for purchase here.

JC: How did you come across Ha Jaeyoun's work and what inspired you to translate Radio Days?

Sue Hyon Bae: I first started translating Korean poetry in 2015 and learned about the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea). It promotes Korean literature internationally, and to further this mission, it awards grants to translations from Korean. I read broadly among contemporary South Korean poetry in search of a poet whose work was exciting and not yet translated into English. Ha Jaeyoun’s deceptively simple style caught my attention, and I particularly loved the repeated themes and nostalgia in Radio Days. Radio Days, published in 2006, is Ha Jaeyoun’s first collection. She has also published Like All the Shores of the World, 2012, and A Cosmic Goodbye, 2019. I hope to work on those someday.

JC: Can you briefly describe your translation process for these poems? How long has the translation for this collection been in progress?

SHB: By the time I started working on Radio Days, I already had experience working on a group translation of Kim Hyesoon’s A Drink of Red Mirror, and I went about it in a similar way: writing a draft that focused on the correct literal meaning, then rereading the original text again and again while adjusting the translation until it feels both natural in English and faithful to the original meaning and tone.

I won an LTI translation grant in 2016 for Radio Days. Jake Levine, a translator and editor, knew I’d won the grant and had read my co-translation of Kim Hyesoon, and in 2019 asked me about possibly joining the lineup of Korean poetry at Black Ocean Press. Then we very slowly worked on edits, first fixing technical errors then going back and forth on tone, word choice, line breaks, do we want a question mark here or not.

JC: Did you communicate with the author of these poems, Ha Jaeyoun, while translating them? Were they participative in the process, or was it more of an individual one for you?

SHB: I initiated contact back in 2016—I’d mentioned to Kim Hyesoon I wanted to work on translating Ha Jaeyoun, and she gave me Ha’s email address. Once I won the translation grant, I heard from her occasionally but otherwise, I didn’t reach out very much. I did often have questions, but I wanted to see if I could resolve them myself instead of running to the author every time. Really sitting with a poem and getting to understand it in a way you wouldn’t as a reader is one of the best parts of translation. When we were in the final editing process, we did send a copy of the latest draft to Ha Jaeyoun to ask her opinion. Her English is excellent, and of course she would spot if we had misinterpreted something radically. She made many suggestions, especially grammatical structure, but she was always very kind and said that we should go with what I thought, though I immediately made changes in response.

A few examples: “My Love Electrical Substation” is written without punctuation in the original, so I mistranslated two clauses as one. Ha pointed out that it should be “the feeling of the atmosphere wandering about the city, do people still love there” and not “do people still love there even when you can feel the atmosphere wandering about the city?” In “Circus” she hadn’t specified a gender, and Ha said the pronouns I had chosen weren’t what she had imagined. It was really nice that she noticed some of the difficult decisions I made; for example, the Korean annyeong can mean both hello and goodbye, and when it’s used twice in “Above the Highway” I translated the first as hello, the second as goodbye. Ha said she had written the poem with the ambiguity in mind and liked the surprise goodbye. She also confirmed some of the references I thought I saw, like the Beatles song “Across the Universe” in “Merchant of Four Seasons.”

JC: Have you encountered any specific challenges when translating the poems for this collection?

Ha Jaeyoun was born in 1975 in South Korea, and she received her bachelor’s and doctorate degrees in Korean literature from Koryo University. In addition to Radio Days, originally published in 2006, she has published two other poetry collections in Korean as well as many scholarly works on modern Korean poetry. She has previously been translated into English by Jake Levine in the collection Poems of Hwang Yuwon, Ha Jaeyoun, & Seo Dae-kyung.

SHB: One of the first things my editor pointed out was that the tone was too formal. A lot of that was resolved by using possessive apostrophes instead of the “Y of X” form. Korean doesn’t have apostrophes, and sometimes a too-literal translation can sound too plodding, especially since the Korean grammatical structures that indicate a casual, friendly tone don’t have an equivalent in English. Ha Jaeyoun also likes referring to the pupil of the eye, which is a common convention in Korean but a bit odd in English. Finally, the succinct style sometimes means the English translation has to make assumptions—in Korean, subject and object pronouns can often be left out, and the third-person pronoun can be gender neutral. It’s a struggle sometimes to decide what pronouns the poems should have.

JC: You mentioned that you collaboratively translated A Drink of Red Mirror by Kim Hyesoon. How did working alone on Radio Days impact decisions you’ve made differently than working in a group on such a project?

SHB: In many ways, co-translation often feels harder and like more work, because there is so much collaboration and arguing needed for everyone to get on the same page. Once you’ve fixed the obvious true errors like mistaking a homonym for another, it’s all about vibe and what sounds better, which is hard to argue about. However, working alone means there’s nobody immediately there to consult when you’re stuck. I worried more about errors I wasn’t spotting, and also that even though my English is fluent, my sense of what is natural disappears when I’m deep in a Korean text. The editing process, though, fulfilled many of the same functions as co-translation.

JC: Reading Radio Days, I noticed many recurring motifs; most prominently, that of the passage of childhood and growing older. Can you speak on the themes present in Radio Days?

SHB: For me, the themes that stood out the most was hello/goodbye, growing older, and the distant you. The double-meaning of the Korean annyeong was both hard to translate and key to understanding this text; every goodbye is also a hello, always looking behind and forward, nostalgia both sad and joyful, the you far and near. Growing up, meeting new people, falling in love—these are all hellos and goodbyes.

JC: I particularly enjoyed reading the poem “My Own Life.” In it, Jaeyoun illustrates the painful duality between what one owns, and what they cannot; what one can control versus what they have no power over. It is straightforward, yet profound.
Is there a specific poem in the collection that speaks to you most personally, or holds special significance for you?

SHB: I really like “Stella Beauty Parlor.” Working on Kim Hyesoon’s poetry made me obsessed with the idea of the person within the person within the person, to the point that this recursive theme infected my own poetry, and the multiplicity of “you”s in “Stella” stood out even at the first reading of this book. The old-fashioned beauty parlor also made me nostalgic for the days I spent playing outside a beauty parlor while my grandmother got her perm and gossip. I also love the challenge of taking a mostly-unpunctuated prose poem and turning it into coherent English without totally changing its shape.

JC: Besides translating the works of others, you have also authored your own poetry. Is there overlap between your methods for translating and writing?

SHB: I believe a translator of poetry must also be a poet in order to create translations that stand on their own as poetry. There are definitely overlaps in the editing process—in both writing and translation, I read the work out loud to see how they sound. The ear and instinct you develop as a poet are crucial in poetry translation. 

JC: I have a special interest in translation myself, and currently translating two poems from English to French for Hayden Ferry Review’s Thousand Languages Project. Do you have advice for someone interested in the world of translation, but still building experience in the craft?

SHB: I did the literary translation certificate when I was working on my MFA at ASU, and the translation courses were a great help. Simply reading about the variety of schools of thought on how translation should be done helped me clarify my own vague feelings about what I wanted to do. Reading the accounts of specific translators who can wax at length about their own fixations was helpful too—Nabokov especially stands out. I’m preparing to teach a course on translation myself, and I’ve built it with the elements I think are important—learning the quirks of the language, basic translation theories, lots of practice and workshopping. Just consuming a lot of translation is great, whether in comparison with the original text or against other translations. I have a favorite English version of Celan’s “Death Fugue” even though I don’t read German. I’m teaching a Korean film course right now and always do lesson prep with the English subtitles on, and find myself infuriated by one thing or another, whether outright mistranslation or the decision to drop some information or add some, and then I have to consider whether that was the right decision, what I would have done instead, keeping in mind the limitations of subtitle translation—all of that is great daily exercise.

Jillian Coronato was an editorial intern for Hayden’s Ferry Review in Spring 2023. She is currently a junior studying English literature at Arizona State University. In her free time, she enjoys reading, crocheting, and watercolor painting.