Review of Unexpected Vanilla by Lee Hyemi (trans. by So J. Lee)
Three or four years ago, I wrote a review of Unexpected Vanilla by Korean poet Lee Hyemi (trans. by So J. Lee) published by TILTED AXIS PRESS.
ISBN-13: 978-1911284505
https://www.tiltedaxispress.com/store/unexpectedvanilla
While exploring translated poems, soon I want to touch the original: Korean, a sister language of Japanese. This experience is as if seeing Japanese through silk cloth. It creates a sense of wonder. And the impressions I get are quite different from poems written by British and American poets. My boat quietly drifts in ripple waves; on the contrary, it crosses high waves upon reading British and American poems. Might that be due to the similarity between Korean and Japanese languages? However, the work doesn’t make the processes of translation explicit to readers. Could the book be read without knowledge of the translation? – such a question was born in me, for I can go ahead fluently. And except for four poems, no footnotes, further, no prose cribs. In addition, readers can hardly see Hangul characters in the book. Currently, many poems include characters of languages other than English. Sometimes they can be called avant-garde or experimental. So J. Lee’s work might also be called experimental: as will be described later, her translation includes original novelty in style, though she does not put Korean letters in her translation. Except for the experimental elements, she gives readers fluid English text while staying close to Lee Hyemi’s Korean although it may be possible for readers to forget that the poems have been translated from Korean as the source language other than English.
In an interview in the online magazine ASYMPTOTE (https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2020/08/05/something-like-delight-an-interview-with-so-j-lee/), So J. Lee comments on the difficulties of this poetry translation: ‘The lines I love most in Korean are often the hardest to translate into English. Frankly, it’s a ridiculous language pairing. Korean is a pronoun-dropping, honorific-using, plural marker-omitting, agglutinative, head-final, subject-object-verb language—everything English is not. Carrying over lineation is a minor miracle.’ Japanese is similarly different from English. Therefore, Lee’s point might also be applied to a translation of Japanese.
Why, then, can I sail Lee’s renderings in English without a hitch? One reason might be that there are few proper nouns that are vernacular in these poems. Specific names evoke memories of particular places for some readers. Without these, readers cannot stumble on the proper nouns; they can enter their union world smoothly without faltering.
Simultaneously, Unexpected Vanilla feels so different from poetry by Suji Kwock Kim, Monica Youn, E. J. Koh, Hannah Sanghee Park, Don Mee Choi, and Cathy Park Hong. They are all Korean American poets, with a topography, history, and cultural background far from Korea. In this context, So J. Lee’s translation of Lee Hyemi might be read alongside translations of Korean poets such as Kim Hyesoon and Kim Yideum. Obviously, the voices and tones of the individual poets vary, but what makes Lee Hyemi’s and So J. Lee’s work distinctive? I would like to pursue this point and, if I can find an answer to the question, there might also be a clue to translation.
The first poem in the book, ‘Summer, When Loquats Light Up’, embodies love beyond gender. Musical notation appears, particularly in the last stanza, and readers can hear beautiful melodies of the violin duet.
We become newly sprouted violins and clear our surroundings.
A tree’s determination to empty the space between each
branch, like parted fingers touching the world at last. When
we produce a single superimposed seed with all the bones
we have, we hear the season we entrusted arriving inside the
luminous yellow.
In the poem, as with early summer fruit and typical East Asian harvest, the loquat brings raptures to the couple with romance, and its metaphor leads the readers to golden ecstasy. With ‘we’ (4 times), ‘tree’, ‘between’, ‘each’, and ‘seed’ in the stanza, the distinct repetition of vowel sound [i:] offers pleasant sensations at a slow pace to the readers, as if swaying.
After reading the collection as a whole, a still-life photograph with lush fruit appears – a slightly Caravaggio-esque painting with fruit. A grape on the lips, a kiss is there – queer love is there. The tableaus mirror poems that are not sentimental, are brimming with the torrent of fresh, vivid imageries. For example, in the title poem ‘Unexpected Vanilla’,
It glided along the groove of my ear, Vanilla on the tip of my tongue, dribbling down the subtle bumps.
We had to keep a neutral expression while scraping all those seeds. With a fluttering heart, we memorized the names of foreign countries. Our first sensation of sweetness. A special appetite for impermanent things.
Eros blooms with simple metaphors that are not conceits. Nectar of the poems brings me back to my 20s. Lee Hyemi’s sensations shine with unfettered expressions of queer love. Here, there are no negative feelings such as psychic scars and pain, no pessimistic worldview, no taboo for the current female situation shaped by misogyny. Just the crystallinity of pure love.
Across the collection, there is neither traditional Sijo nor Kasa (or Gasa). One crucial feature in the book is the break of punctuation in poems such as ‘Arriving Lights’, ‘World of Breaths’, ‘Banan’, ‘Someone from the Western Riverside’, ‘Water Footprint’, etc. (some poems can be read here:
https://koreanliteraturenow.com/poetry/reviews/lee-hyemi-unexpected-vanilla). As a whole, fundamentally, the grammar is not crumbled. This feature is repeated in all the poems, and, from my perspective, the form is mostly coherent. Instead of a period or comma, a capital letter is used for the first word of the next sentence. For example, here is part of the poem ‘Arriving Lights’:
Lights were born as I opened my eyes
Someone fogged up my window after leaving their shadow
behind last night I unraveled dream-bouquets that died
down in a whirlwind The lights headed towards humans
must still be lost in a distant light-year because…
Through this style, readers no longer stop to stay at the parts usually marked out for them to pause or breathe; river is where the poem is, it flows ceaselessly, and there is nothing to stop the poet’s lyrical voice. These are the translator’s invention.
Further, for example, the poem “Lalala Cherries (라라라, 버찌)” adopts the same device. Comparison of both languages enables the readers to find it. Here are both the original Korean and the English translation in the online magazine ASYMPTOTE:
(Korean)
라라라, 버찌
버찌를 따러 갈 거예요 붉푸르게 얼룩진 것들만을 골라 주머니 가득 담을래요 버찌, 서로를 베껴 쓰는 빨강 빨강들 환한 밤 내내 버찌를 가득 물고 곤란한 키스를 나눌까요
꽃도 잎도 벗어던진 버찌는 오늘, 그저 한 알의 유희
아직 그의 버찌는 익어 터지지도 못했는데 진물 흐르도록 섞이지도 못했는데 뭉쳐진 초록만 베어 물고 계절이 다 지나가요 우리, 너무 일찍 수확되었죠 그의 입속에 내가 가진 물감을 한가득 풀어놓고 싶은, 얼룩지는, 버찌의 시간인데요
( https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/unexpected-vanilla/korean/ )
(English)
Lalala, Cherries
Hello, I’m going cherry picking I want to fill my pockets with only the ones stained dark Cherries are red copying another red Shall we fill our mouths with cherries and kiss naughtily knottily all night long?
Cherries strip off their flowers and leaves Today they’re just kernels of play
Her cherry hasn’t even had a chance to ripen and burst, to schmooze and ooze We only got to bite into a clump of green And now the season’s almost over We were harvested too soon I want to swirl my paints inside her mouth This is the time of cherries A time that stains
(Korean)
라라라, 버찌
버찌를 따러 갈 거예요 붉푸르게 얼룩진 것들만을 골라 주머니 가득 담을래요 버찌, 서로를 베껴 쓰는 빨강 빨강들 환한 밤 내내 버찌를 가득 물고 곤란한 키스를 나눌까요
꽃도 잎도 벗어던진 버찌는 오늘, 그저 한 알의 유희
아직 그의 버찌는 익어 터지지도 못했는데 진물 흐르도록 섞이지도 못했는데 뭉쳐진 초록만 베어 물고 계절이 다 지나가요 우리, 너무 일찍 수확되었죠 그의 입속에 내가 가진 물감을 한가득 풀어놓고 싶은, 얼룩지는, 버찌의 시간인데요
( https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/unexpected-vanilla/korean/ )
(English)
Lalala, Cherries
Hello, I’m going cherry picking I want to fill my pockets with only the ones stained dark Cherries are red copying another red Shall we fill our mouths with cherries and kiss naughtily knottily all night long?
Cherries strip off their flowers and leaves Today they’re just kernels of play
Her cherry hasn’t even had a chance to ripen and burst, to schmooze and ooze We only got to bite into a clump of green And now the season’s almost over We were harvested too soon I want to swirl my paints inside her mouth This is the time of cherries A time that stains
( https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/unexpected-vanilla/ )
This poem uses the beauty of sound and colour as euphemisms for sexual experience. Spring is gone and the cherries are still green, and the lovers attempt to nourish their love to be painted on their canvas.
This poem uses the beauty of sound and colour as euphemisms for sexual experience. Spring is gone and the cherries are still green, and the lovers attempt to nourish their love to be painted on their canvas.
Through the entire collection, there is no religiously clear voice such as God’s salvation or Buddhism, and very few instances of the term ‘god’. Most poems expressed feminine tones with things in the natural world. For example, my favorite poem is ‘Sense of Snowflakes’. Winter’s ephemeral world is drawn as follows:
Winter’s plumbing
Faded
Like antique jewelry, most beautiful when thrown away.
The number of words in each line and the number of lines in each stanza are irregular, perhaps evoking the capriciousness of snow, until the heat of the final line ‘we hugged the wet trees and went up in flames’, the couple’s lives are like ascending to heaven. The poem ‘Under the Fluttering Red and White Flags’ is the most interesting to me, singing a dream through Korean shamanism, with the starkness of emotions illustrating death under the power of the mudang (Korean shaman). When Korean readers flip over it, they might attend to more myths, ambiguities, or imaginations beyond English readers.
Overall, So J. Lee’s translation is exquisite. Aphrodite, the goddess of love, wandered in East Asia, and lent her lyre and plectrum to Lee Hyemi and So J. Lee. With the lent instrument, they played together beautiful poems of queer love beyond one place: Korea, and the poems echo to the world.
Winter’s plumbing
Faded
Like antique jewelry, most beautiful when thrown away.
The number of words in each line and the number of lines in each stanza are irregular, perhaps evoking the capriciousness of snow, until the heat of the final line ‘we hugged the wet trees and went up in flames’, the couple’s lives are like ascending to heaven. The poem ‘Under the Fluttering Red and White Flags’ is the most interesting to me, singing a dream through Korean shamanism, with the starkness of emotions illustrating death under the power of the mudang (Korean shaman). When Korean readers flip over it, they might attend to more myths, ambiguities, or imaginations beyond English readers.
Overall, So J. Lee’s translation is exquisite. Aphrodite, the goddess of love, wandered in East Asia, and lent her lyre and plectrum to Lee Hyemi and So J. Lee. With the lent instrument, they played together beautiful poems of queer love beyond one place: Korea, and the poems echo to the world.