[W Forum] The Nobel Prize, Translation, and the Power of Poetry

Eun-Gwi Jung, Professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies

The literary reporters at newspapers were undoubtedly taken aback last Friday night. This was because the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to an American poet, Louise Gluck, who was so quiet and unexpected that no one had foreseen it. When she received the call with the news, it was so early in the morning that she asked if she could have "about two minutes" to drink her coffee. The prize is not given to those who have perfectly prepared acceptance speeches. As someone who specializes in modern poetry and receives calls from reporters every year around the Nobel Prize announcement, I too received many calls that evening on my way back from a walk. I rushed back through the alley to explain who Louise Gluck was, feeling both surprise and delight at the same time.

The poet grew up in an environment surrounded by poetry from a young age, but she suffered from an eating disorder in high school and had to undergo about seven years of therapy to overcome it. She did not even properly graduate from college. Having endured a difficult and sensitive period, she wrote poetry that transformed her own experiences of pain and loss into universal human experiences, reflecting them through nature and mythology. Although Gluck has won many awards in the United States, she is neither a poet with widespread popular appeal nor one who has attracted significant critical attention. In relative terms, she is a lesser-known poet. While I do not wish to overemphasize her gender, it is striking to realize that, for the first time in 24 years since Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, the Nobel Prize has been awarded to a female poet. This highlights the reality that both poetry and women remain marginalized within and beyond the literary field.

After the Nobel Prize announcement, we found ourselves bewildered once again. Not a single collection of this poet's translated works existed in Korea. Only one or two of her poems had ever been introduced in books. After the announcement, I posted a couple of my translated poems, which I had kept in my reading notes, on social media, and the response from readers was enthusiastic. Why do we still not have even one translated collection of this poet's work? There may be several reasons, but the main one is the lack of attention given to contemporary poets in the translation market.

Literature, and especially poetry, occupies a very narrow space. In a literary market driven by a handful of popular authors and genres, poetry translation faces a tough reality: from copyright contracts to the selection of translators, every step requires careful calculation of the market landscape. There is also a frequent misconception that poetry is an obscure genre, detached from reality. But is that really the case? Poetry is the crystallization of language that comes after passing through pain and enduring it; it is the fruit where the particularity of the individual meets the universality of human experience. We need to breathe this in more often. We should be more proactive in sending our poetry out through translation and bringing in poetry from abroad through translation as well.

In one poem, Gluck ends with the following lines: "I speak / because I am shattered." She uses the voice of the poppy, a flower that blooms red, to describe blossoms scattered in all directions. I translated this final line as, "I speak because I am shattered." Another male poet rendered it as, "Because I speak, / each petal is scattered red on the ground," but I wanted to preserve the original rhythm and the concise, resolute, and poignant feeling of "because I am shattered" in Korean as well, without any unnecessary embellishment. If a flower blooms by overcoming pain, then poetry is the voice that bravely speaks out by standing on the shards of life's hardships. This is why we draw great strength from short poems. In these difficult times and in a wounded world, this autumn is a time to reconsider the healing and communicative power of poetry and translation.

Eun Gui Jung, Professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies

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