(Un)translatability? Between the (un)familiar and the intimate

Reading Dryden’s seminal essay, ‘Preface concerning Ovid’s Epistles’ alongside Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’, this paper explores creative processes in which a selection of work from contemporary Korean poet, Lee Young-Kwang, is transmitted from its native Korean and into English-language versions. Lee’s poetry is a complex affair, and his challenging work–which includes implication-filled code-switching and seemingly untranslatable wordplays–places explicit pressures on those who would attempt to make versions. We characterise our task as a spondaic mode of responding and echoing; after Benjamin, we have striven to produce accurate transmissions of essential content. Focusing toward two poems in particular, ‘나무 金鋼 로켓’ (‘Wooden Diamond Rocket’) and ‘그 B298; 속의 탬버린’ (‘Tambourine in Shade’), this paper demonstrates how Dryden’s third rule of translation–imitation through non-equivalence–enables our small team to bridge gaps (syntactical, orthographic, prosodic, cultural) between Korean and English. Traversing heuristic processes including (but not limited to) correspondence, abandonment, and invention, we have created intimate but wholly strange (and we feel poetic) connections in which the source begets an echoing other.