Cheryl Pallant gets oriented in South Korea

In 2007 Cheryl Pallant accepted an offer as Visiting Lecturer at Keimyung University in Daegu, South Korea. She had "no images of its landscape and architecture, no familiarity with its language, people, history, or culture" other than that American soldiers fought against communism there in the 1950s. Pallant, in the middle of a divorce after a 15-year marriage, was moving from Richmond, Virginia, population 223,000 to Daegu, a city of 2.5 million people in south-central Korea. Ginseng Tango is a memoir of her year there.

It joins a tradition of naif Americans who go to a country they know nothing about to teach and write a book to explain the culture, customs, and people to the folks back home. (Learning to Bow: An American Teacher in a Japanese School by Bruce S. Feiler explained Japan.) Because Pallant is such a good writer—she currently teaches writing at the University of Richmond—and because she was a mature woman when she went to Daegu—the book's internal evidence puts her in her late 30s—Ginseng Tango is a superior example of the genre.

That she is in the middle of a divorce, that she comes to Korea with a background of Zen meditation, Buddhist practice, and dance, and that she is open (relatively) about her fears and flaws makes the book more than a simple report of what it's like to spend a year teaching in a Korean university. The title comes from ginseng—"a major ingredient in many a medicinal cocktail. Korean ginseng is known for its potency in treating ailments like high blood pressure, allergies, diabetes, sexual dysfunction, and fatigue"—and her involvement with tango and the people with whom she becomes friendly at tango club.

One of these is a doctor who invites her to his clinic and who tells her "My soul knows yours." He treats her with acupuncture and chiropractics, and says, "Curve spine I straighten." No western doctor "ever offered me a chance of removing the curve, only preventing it from getting worse. Is this the eastward pull I felt from the States, my body somehow clued that the idiopathic conditions contributing to my curvature might be alleviated?" She begins to visit the doctor's clinic regularly and they become friends.

Unfortunately, the doctor is married to a paranoid woman to whom Pallant is an insult and a threat. When the wife calls Pallant's university, the chair of the department, agrees the woman is crazy. However she tells Pallant, "In our culture, regardless of the facts, a woman such as yourself is guilty. You're a foreigner. Rumors and scandals cannot be tolerated at our school. If you don't stop visiting his clinic, we may have to let you go." Pallant's friendship with the doctor, his wife/s attacks run as a thread through the book making it more than a collection of set pieces.

The set pieces include Pallant's initial struggle with a Korean washing machine, a rock-climbing experience, a visit to a public bath, a day with a shaman that includes fascinating background on Korean shamanism, tango lessons, drinking with the ex-pat colleagues from the university, student interactions, Children's Day adventures, and more. She is aware from day one that this is another country. "Already I've sliced up a small orange sphere, thinking it a type of tomato. I added it to my salad sprinkled with soy sauce, not my preferred dressing of olive oil and balsamic vinegar, items which, if available, I have yet to locate. The tomato greatly disappointed, given its true identity as a persimmon, a sweet untomatoey fruit that never passed my lips before."

She comes to realize that she is not, and probably never can be entirely welcome. A colleague who has lived in Korea for seven yers tells her he has yet to make a Korean friend. "Every foreigner I speak with says the same thing. We're treated with civility in the classroom, office, or during mandatory after work drinking parties, but sincere lasting friendship is rare. Koreans welcome us foreigners, but only to a point."

At one point, the doctor introduces her to a group of his (male) friends. A woman schooled in dance, poetry and the arts; able to talk on a wide range of topics; considerate of local etiquette she could almost be a modern gisaeng, Korea's equivalent of geisha. Pallant writes, "A poor fit among my western colleagues and a novelty to the doctor's friends, I don't know where I belong nor what, given the choice, I want. Identities that once held sway in Richmond don't carry the same traction her. Here I exist on the margins, a foreigner in a culture that prizes homogeneity and ancestral purity." At the end of the book, she has returned to the States and is settling into a new home—alone.

Ginseng Tango is an engaging introduction to the culture and society of a country that is in the news regularly but one few of us know much about and Cheryl Pallant is an appealing guide.

We are not, after all, harmless

Because a friend whose taste I trust recommended Harmless Like You by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, I wanted to like the book. And there are many things I did like about the novel. One of the two main characters is Yukiko Oyama, a Japanese girl whose parents brought her to New York (her father was "a director of the East Coast branch of Japans most successful car company"). We meet Yuki when she is in high school in 1968, suffering from being neither an all-American girl nor a proper Japanese one. Her kanji is crude, her Japanese inadequate.

She makes a best friend, Odile, who lives with her single mother, Lillian. A romance writer, Lillian is much more casual about parenting than Yuki's mother and when Yuki's parents return to Japan Yuki petitions to stay on in New York with Odile and her mother. The adults all agree, and the girls are then on largely their own. Eventually, Odile connects with a fashion photographer and takes off for Europe where she becomes a top model. Yuki is seduced by—or takes up with—Lillian's boyfriend/lover Lou and moves in with him. That Lou is perhaps twenty years older, is a frustrated sportswriter (a frustration he expresses smacking Lillian and then Yuki around), and can be violently territorial do not seem to be issues with Yuki. 

Eventually, Lou decides he wants to marry someone else and evicts Yuki from his apartment. She finds shelter with Edison, a good, gentle, kind man she'd met some time earlier. He marries her, buys them a house in Connecticut, and they have a child, Jay. Unfortunately for Jay, Yuki cannot tolerate Edison's kindness, solicitude, or motherhood and she abandons Edison and Jay to live as an artist in Germany. Which brings us to Jay.

The novel follows Yuki's story and Jay's, and two chronologies, 1968-1983 and March-October 2016. When we meet Jay, he's a gallery owner, a new father, and dependent on a 17-year-old, diabetic, hairless Sphynx comfort cat he's needed since high school to keep from fainting. His kindly, gently architect father has just been killed in a car accident leaving the Connecticut house to Yuki, and Jay's wife has delivered an ultimatum: The cat goes or the baby and I go. It's a function of Jay's disability that these feel like genuine alternatives to him. 

Unfortunately, to me, Yuki comes across as a masochist. She has seen Lou smack Lillian (another masochist) and does not mind getting smacked herself. She feels, I think, the pain is something real, like the pain you get from cutting yourself. But I think that's hard to make sympathetic, let alone understandable. Jay comes across as a jerk, not only for his indestructible connection to his ancietn cat but for fucking one of his gallery's artists late in his wife's pregnancy.

It's tough. Readers don't have to like a main character to be engaged. (Who would like Humbert Humbert?) I believe Buchanan wanted to show the harm Yuki's abandoning infant Jay did to him, but I don't think it works. Buchanan wanted to show Yuki's torment growing up as a young Japanese girl in New York City, and those chapters are convincing. She wanted to keep a reader's attention so she switches back and forth between Yuki (written in the third person) and Jay (written in the first). Although she labels each section with the character's name and heads each chapter with the time it takes place, the reader is constantly being jerked forward and back in time. It makes me wonder if putting the chapters in strict chronological order would have helped. 

All that said, I'm glad I took my friend's suggestion and read Harmless Like You. For all my quibbles, it's an interesting portrait of two people I would not have known otherwise.

What does it take to inspire you?

The Avon Free Public Library in Avon, CT, is running a Local Author Festival this summer, the fifth year in a row that the staff has promoted Connecticut authors. I have just participated in a fiction author panel in which six of us answered questions about inspiration (or Inspiration).

The June Fiction Author Panel at Avon Free Public Library

Questions like: Where do you get your ideas for a story? What do you do when you're not inspired? Do you write every day? Do you do any research in writing your books? How do you choose character names? And more.

I am always interested in hearing other writers answers to these perennial questions. After all, there is no one answer. Ideas come from everywhere, anywhere—personal experience, news stories, reading, conversation. I am hard put to say exactly where a story idea originates, although every one of my books and short stories has some connection to my own life.

And when we're not inspire, some of us write anyway—a journal, a letter, an essay, a poem. And some knit, read, watch a movie.

Not everyone writes every day. One panelist has written one book and has no plans to write another. The working writers on the panel, however, are doing something related to writing—researching, recuperating, recharging—when they're not.

Because it was an opportunity to share tips and thoughts with other writers, I thought the experience was valuable. I hope the people who attended our panel got as much out of it as I did.

What I did on my summer vacation

What do you do at a translators' conference? If it's the week-long Middlebury Bread Loaf Translators' Conference, from which I have just returned, you work your buns off.

Classes, lectures, and social events during the translators conference were held in The Barn
on the Middlebury Bread Loaf campus in the Green Mountains of Vermont.

You can start with an hour-long yoga session at 6:30 a.m., (I started with breakfast at 7:30) and end with readings and socializing at 10:30 p.m. In between there are lectures, workshops, talks, and meetings. To be admitted, every one of the fifty or so translators at this year's conference submitted a translation and its original. Translations of literary fiction and poetry, and the underlying assumption is that the translator knows the language well enough to understand the original. You don't—for the most part—try to re-translate a work.

For one thing, who could? My workshop leader was Bill Johnston who teaches literary translation at Indiana University, who has published over 30 book-length translations from the Polish, including poetry, prose, and drama, and who (by the evidence in our workshop) has a reading knowledge of French and German. The workshop to which I was assigned did have translations from French and German, but for the rest we were pretty much on our own.

Our workshop considered two translations from Japanese (mine was one), two from French, two from Spanish, and one each from Swedish, Vietnamese, and German. Each translator read a paragraph or so from the original to give the group a sense of the sound of the piece and then discussed any problems/questions/issues she/he was having with the translation. Some of us—and I include myself—felt that the work we'd submitted was relatively polished. It did not read like a translation.

I was mistaken. By the time Bill and the group had finished discussing my prose, my first page and a half were covered with red edits. One key lesson learned last week: When you're having a problem with the English, the solution is not to return to the original but to spend more time, thought, tears, and sweat on the English. As one of my fellow translators said, "Take it all the way to English."

So the translation workshop turned out to be as much a writing workshop as a discussion of translation. What makes a good translation? How close should you be to the original? Not so close that the English sounds clunky or unnatural. Not so close that the dialogue sounds as if spoken by aliens (unless of course the characters in the work are aliens).

There is an argument to make it "translatorise" so a reader can follow along with the original, but how many readers what to do that? It's hard enough to find readers for a translation at all—Elena Ferrante, Steig Larsson, Haruki Murakami being exceptions—why make a reader work? And anyway the translations of Ferrante, Larsson, and Murakami are engaging English novels.

In my next post, I'll talk about some of the practical issues surrounding literary translation. I.e., how do you get published?

Why the traitor can use some sympathy

Faithful readers of this blog may recall posts in which I have talked about the translator's dilemma. Because I have been using translation to improve my knowledge of Japanese, I have occasionally had a problem with a term that is familiar to native speakers but would mystify most Western readers— "natto" for example.

My dictionary defines natto as "fermented soybeans." But to stick closely to the original Japanese and translate that a character was eating fermented soybeans at breakfast does not convey the reality that natto (with a burning hot yellow mustard) is seen by many Japanese as promoting health and regularity. Perhaps an analogy would be say that the character was eating muesli for breakfast. But if readers don't know "muesli"—which in content, texture, and odor is entirely different from natto—I'm not sure you've accomplished much, aside from distorting Japanese breakfast dishes.

For this reason and more I will be attending the Bread Loaf Translator's Conference in Vermont this year. This is "designed to provide training and community to beginning as well as experienced translators in the pursuit of translating literary texts into English—or to those aiming to be more sophisticated readers of literary translation and to incorporate it into the classroom." I will be in a workshop with nine others in which we will be exposed to "some of the recurring questions, problems, and pleasures of the activity of literary translation."

And in preparation for all this, I've just read Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto by Mark Polizzotti, which The MIT Press recently published. Polizzotti is the publisher and editor-in-chief at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, according to the flap copy, has translated more than fifty books from apparently French and Spanish. 

The translation issue of course goes back to the third century B.C. when seventy (or seventy-two) Hellenistic Jewish scholars translated the bible into Koiné Greek—the Septuagint. Seven hundred years later, Saint Jerome "undertook a new Latin translation based on the Hebrew and Aramaic source texts, bypassing the Greek." St. Augustine of Hippo criticized it because it wasn't based on the orthodox Greek version. And about a thousand years later, Martin Luther translated the New Testament into "a radically simplified, 'sweet and good' German that was intelligible to the common man" which "aroused the ire of the Church fathers."

There are two translation issues with the Bible: What is the source? And: Does the translation convey the sense (meaning, implications, intentions, message) of the original? (Plus, in the 16th Century there was another question: who should be able to read the text at all?) 

Polizotti believes that in general a translation should convey meaning and, to radically simplify his argument, be easy to read. If the translation is a chore to read in English, why read it at all unless you are dragooned into doing so for grade in class? I would like the translations my conversation partner Naoko Miyazaki are doing to be enjoyable for what they evoke of Japanese life and culture and for the English to be unnoticeable.

Because Japanese is so different in grammar and syntax from English, because I believe Japanese in fact has fewer words than English, because Japanese can be so allusive, and because cultural references—like natto—can be mystifying for Western readers, translating is challenging and stimulating. I'm looking forward to my week in Vermont to learn much, much more.

Ordinary people making their way in the world

A tradition in Japanese fiction is the "I-novel," sort of  a fctionalized autobiography or memoir. Hiromi Kawakami's The Nakano Thrift Shop reads like an I-novel. The narrator, Hitomi Suganuma tells her story of working in the shop, her attraction to a younger co-worker Takeo, the advice she receives from her boss's older sister Masayo, the idiosyncrasies of the boss/owner Mr. Nakano, and the stories of certain of the shop's customers.

Mr. Nakano is a wheeler-dealer. He buys used items—not antiques—and sells them from the shop in a western Tokyo suburb where there are a lot of students. A man in his early fifties, he's on his third wife. He has a college-student son by the first wife, an elementary-school daughter by the second, and a six-month-old son by the third. Plus he has a mistress. When he says he's going to the bank in the afternoon, he's as likely to be meeting his mistress at a love hotel.

Hitomi, who seems to have no parents, no siblings, no friends, is attracted to Takeo, who is Mr. Reticent. At one point Hitomi asks Masayo for advice. Masayo is a woman in her early 50s, single, with a regular lover.

     "How does one go about having a carefree conversation with a boy?" I decided to ask Masayo one afternoon when Takeo wasn't around. Masayo was in the process of going over the receipt book, but she looked up and thought about it for a moment.
     "If you can get them into bed, they tend to relax a bit."
     I see, I said in response.

Hitomi manages to invite Takeo to her apartment for pizza and beer. After they chatted about the shop, eaten the pizza, and drank the beer Takeo smoked a cigarette:

     I didn't know you smoked, I said. Every once in a while, he replied. Without saying much to say, we just sat facing each other. We esch drank another can of beer. Takeo looked at the clock twice. I looked three times.
     Well, then, Takeo said and stood up. At the front door, he brought his lips near my ear. I thought he was going to kiss me, but I was wrong. With his lips close, he said, "I, uh, I'm not one for sex and all. Sorry."
     While I was standing there astonished, Takeo closed the door behind him as he left. After a few moments I snapped out of it. Thinking about it while I washed the glasses and plates, it occurred to me that Takeo had chosen to eat the pieces with the least amount of anchovies on them. I couldn't decide whether I should be angry or sad about it, or just laugh.

These two citations give you a sense of Allison Markin Powell's translation (with I presume the original's use or lack of quotation marks) and the tenor of the text. The Nakano Thrift Shop is a novel in which nothing very dramatic happens. Rather, individual Japanese act and interact on one another. One has a sense that the author has not attempted to heighten the reality to engage the reader but to use the minutia of daily life to convey the reality of these individuals. It is a love story, but it's not a romance. It's the story of ordinary people trying to make their way in the world, and in this case the world is contemporary Tokyo and a shop filled with used goods.

Where I'll be going this summer

For some time, I‘ve been following a website “Words without Borders,” which focuses on literature in translation. Last fall, the site announced a Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference to be held in Vermont in June, sponsored by (organized by?) Middlebury College. I went to the conference site, it seemed interesting, focuses on literary translation, and I applied.

Which was more than filling out a form and sending a $15 check. Applicants also had send along 4,000 words of a translation plus the original. I sent the first half of one of the Japanese stories I’ve been working on. 

A week ago the conference staff wrote to tell me I’d been admitted. So I will be in Vermont for a week at the beginning of June.

What, you ask, do you do at a translation conference?

I'm not sure. I suspect that we will discuss the craft of translation—general questions, not specific about any one language—and the business of translation. Craft questions like: At what point is fidelity to the original a disservice to the English? What do you do when a foreign word is not in any dictionary because it’s a neologism? Or dialect, a word many native speakers don’t understand?

Concerning the business of translation, I expect the conference leaders will talk about rights, the market for translation, publishers, and everything that has to do with getting a translation published and sold. 

Stay tuned.