The question of the translatability of untranslatable elements through the poem Hwasa by South Korean poet Sŏ Chŏngju

Abstract

The difficulty of literary translation has been the subject of numerous studies. Regardless of the angle from which they examine the relationship between the source and target texts, their conclusions often point to the impossibility of literary translation. The problem is often caused by what Jieun Kaier, in his 2022 book on the translation of Korean poetry into English, calls ‘invisibles’. These are usually culture-specific elements or characteristics of the source text that, due to the difficulty of translating them, often do not appear in the target text, hence their name. Such ‘invisible’ elements may include, for example, onomatopoeia, realia, or dialects. In prose translations, these features can be addressed with the help of explanatory inserts or footnotes, but in poetry translations, there are no such possibilities, which makes the translator’s task even more difficult. The study aims to give insight into the translation of the ‘invisible’, focusing on realia and dialects, and to present possible translation methods, using a specific poem as an example. The work examined in this study is the poem Hwasa by 20th-century South Korean poet Sŏ Chŏngju. This poem is an optimal choice not only because the realia and dialects appearing in the text make it difficult to translate into other languages but also because, although it is taken from the poet’s most important volume, which is a seminal work of modern Korean poetry, a Hungarian translation of the poem has not previously been published. The study introduces various definitions of realia and the translation strategies aimed at addressing them. It then examines the issue of dialect translation by introducing the standardisation of the Korean and Hungarian languages and dialectal literature in the two countries. This research shows that while the issue of the translatability of realia is a relatively often discussed topic, the number of studies on the translation of dialectal poetry is notably scarce. This paper presents two possible Hungarian translations of the poem, illustrating two different methods for translating dialectal poetry. The study thus makes a new contribution to the corpus of Korean literature translated into Hungarian while also presenting the factors influencing the translation, the translation difficulties arising from the peculiarities of the source text, and possible solutions.