By Yinka Fabowale
Poet Laureate and Emeritus Professor Niyi Osundare has just had some of his poems translated into Korean.
The 240-page anthology is a collaboration between the multiple literary award winner and Joon- Hwan Kim, a Korean university professor with extensive literary experience in translation.
In this interview with YINKA FABOWALE, the National Merit Award winner who is billed for two international meetings in Korea in October 2023, one of them taking place in Paju, also called The Book City of Korea, speaks on the project and related issues.
QUESTION: Tell us about this new work of translation taking you to Korea, Prof.
ANSWER: Actually, I have been invited to Korea for two major deliberations.
The first is a Keynote Lecture at an international conference under the overall topic DMZ Peace Literary Conference, taking place in Paju, also called The Book City of Korea.
(DMZ is the short designation for Demilitarized Zone) the strip of land that was portioned out as demarcation between South Korea and North Korea in 1953, and which is still there, 70 years after). . . .
I will be keynoting the second session of the conference with the topic “Global Crisis and the Role of Writers”
You will remember that this kind of subject has been in the very centre of my literary and political engagements since the publication in 1986 The Writer as Righter, my very first extended monograph.
It is a session on a theme that has been around for a long time, but which has refused to go away, especially here in Africa where literature and political commitment have found it impossible to stay far apart.
Now, the book of translation. Yes, this is a 240-page book containing Korean translation of selected poems from about 15 of my poetry books. The translator, Joon- Hwan Kim, is a Korean university professor with an extensive literary experience.
The translation was methodically done such that I actually gained a lot of experience from the process myself, from the way he handled the two languages.
That is, English and Korean. Prof. Kim usually sent me questions, and at times he would send two possible translations of a phrase or expression for us to work out in a bid to arrive at the more appropriate choice.. This practice took me to the depth of many of my words and many of my poems because a thoughtful translator brings out a new kind of consciousness: you become more aware of the words and more watchful of their hidden meanings, and their endless nuances .
A patient, meticulous scholar himself, he was very interested in the collocation and complex leanings of words and ideas. He was aware of the company words keep and the company they avoid.
My dealing with him frequently took me back to the creative process itself, reminding me of the agonies and pleasures I felt during the original composition of many of the poems. I began to wonder: how did I choose this word and not that? Is this word really working in this poem? Did I write what I thought? Did I mean what I wrote?
At times I wished I knew that language, Korean, so that I could actually know how both languages interact with each other in this translation process.
As you know, my English is not “English English”. My English has been enriched, complicated, and ‘contaminated’ by Yoruba, my mother tongue. People who are familiar with my poetry will know that I think in Yoruba most of the time and write in English.
This phenomenon is captured in my creative ‘confessional’ piece of many years ago: “Yoruba Thought, English Words: A Poet’s Journey through the Tunnel of Two Tongues”, originally presented as a conference paper at the University of Birmingham, UK, and later published in my book of essays, Thread in the Loom: Essays on African Literature and Culture.
Most of the time, I operate between the two languages and cultures, an act and practice I find frequently fruitful and sometimes frustrating. So, in a very intriguing way, what Professor Joon- Hwan Kim did was a translation across three languages, three semantic deep structures, three stylistic and rhetorical frameworks.
Trying to translate into English and Korean was thus an adventure of many delightful journeys, of many roads.
A delightful learning process for both translator and translatee.
No wonder his thoughtful title for his Korean translation is BRIDGE ACROSS THE SEAS
-The Nation