“We Migrating Birds”: Translating the Poetry of North Korean Defector, Imu Baek
An Interview with Hyongrae Kim and Siobhan Meï
I met translators Hyongrae Kim and Siobhan Meï in graduate school—a time that, looking back, was filled with the kind of hopeful exhaustion that comes with learning to navigate an unforgiving academic world. One of my first memories of Kim involved bumping into him at the library my first semester, wherein he took one look at me and said, “don’t burn out.” Through seminars, projects, exams, and late night conversations over the best cheap wine we could afford, my friendship with the two of them was (and remains) an anchor.
In their 2020 translation of North Korean poet, Imu Baek’s collection, Flower Swallows Sing: A North Korean Memoir in Verse, Kim and Meï bring profound sensitivity to Baek’s work. They reveal for their English-reading audience North Korean life as lived, rather than how it has been imagined for us via Western assumptions and mediations. As Kim reminds us that, despite some of its painful contours, Baek’s collection is not “all doom and gloom,” but many things at once. “[Her] ability to blend high emotions with deep compassion allows the reader space to digest the content and heal from the psychological pain the content might generate.” In many ways, atrocity works to dehumanize its subjects by only giving attention to their suffering, occluding the stratum of experiences and emotions that compose human life.
Kim is now a Visiting Assistant Professor of Korean at Auburn University in Alabama, and Meï is a Lecturer in the Manning School of Information Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Their brilliant collaboration in Flower Swallows Sing is for me a reminder of the possibilities of collaborative intellectual and creative practices.
—Sandra Joy Russell
I want to begin our interview by thinking about the extent to which texts, and thus translations, find their way to us. In some sense, they often feel as agential as their translators.
Could you talk about the origins of this collection and your decision to co-translate it? What were some of your priorities and intentions in bringing this collection into English?
HR: Flower Swallows Sing is the first collection of poetry by Imu Baek. The book chronicles her life in North Korea and her escape to China. Life as a South Korean means you are constantly faced with the consequences of the divide of the Korean peninsula and the presence of North Korea. There are many South Koreans that have family members in the North, and whenever the North Korean military tests its latest missile technology, it is reported on in the news. Because of this threat, South Korean men are required to serve in the military for approximately two years. In my case, in addition to military service, I also volunteered at NGOs that provide support for North Korean refugees, and I later worked as an interpreter/translator for a Korean government agency that is deeply involved with interKorean relations, so I have a deep personal and professional interest in North Korean affairs.
Over the past decade, I have been surprised by how public discussions about the North have shifted. The president of the U.S. engaged in name-calling with the leader of North Korea. Former basketball players made multiple visits to Pyongyang and serenaded the dictator. A comedy film about assassinating Kim Jong-un also came out around this time. And this farcical noise has drowned out talks about the serious humanitarian crisis North Koreans live under and the plight North Korean escapees face even after they smuggle themselves across the border. Flower Swallows Sing is a collection of narrative poems that draw a genuine picture of the lives of North Koreans living under tyranny, and it felt that this was a work that needed to be accessible to a wider readership.
Siobhan: Hyongrae introduced me to Baek’s work in 2017 and after learning more about the author and her harrowing journey I was compelled to contribute to the effort of making her voice accessible to new audiences. I have experience translating literary works by women authors hailing from Cameroon, Canada, Haiti, and France, with a particular focus in the translation of poetry (a highly under-published genre in the US literary translation market). As a feminist translator I am committed to practicing translation as a radical act of “deep, imaginative listening” (Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda) — in my experience, the silences of literary texts (the gaps, the absences, the unsaid) require as much “listening” or attention as what is directly on the page. I feel as if this was certainly the case for Flower Swallows Sing, which is as much a story of loss as it is of survival. Finally, I was excited to work collaboratively with Hyongrae, whose linguistic and socio-historical expertise truly brought the translation to fruition. The idea behind our collaboration was to combine our sensibilities and experiences around literary translation to produce a rendering of Baek’s story that accounts for its nuances, blunt beauty, and, as Hyongrae underscores, profound love and mourning for a homeland in crisis.
You begin your Translators’ Note with an etymology of the Korean word kotjebi, tracing it to the Slavic root kochevoi, or “nomadic” in English, and from which you derive the collection’s titular “flower” and “swallow”—a locution for North Korean orphans who wander the streets of North Korea and China.
So much of this collection is contoured by Baek’s movement toward and away from known geographies, both physically and psychically—this is especially visible in her representations of the entanglements between human and natural worlds. For instance, in “Operation Border Crossing,” she writes:
no need for boats
in the summer we swim
in the winter we slide
across the border
there’s nothing to it
we migrating birds
take flight in the spring
and return in the fall
every year we perform
operation border crossing
it’s no trouble at all
Can you speak to your translational engagements with Baek’s use of movement—both with regards to the process of translation and the language itself? How did you work to capture this in English? Was anything lost or gained in this process?
HR: “Operation Border Crossing” was one of my favorite poems to translate because it provides a rather lighthearted illustration of how North Korean escapees crossed the border between North Korea and China. This poem gives the reader some breathing space in what is a generally solemn record of human tragedy. The process of translating this book was in many ways similar to the situation depicted in that poem. It was a serious endeavor, and there were serious challenges as we tried to move across the linguistic border, but it was also exciting and undoubtedly rewarding.
In terms of capturing the spirit of the original work, it helped that the source text was in most part narrative and, as the poet mentions in the last poem of the collection, her reason for writing this book was to preserve the memory of her fellow flower swallows and to inform the world of the unimaginable hardships these young people face. Since our goal for translating this work into English was to inform readers of the reality of the situation, we tried to employ brutally honest language that mimicked the intensity and immediacy of the original.
Siobhan: I wonder too about our attentiveness to movement in Baek’s work as a reflection/refraction perhaps of our own experiences engaging in collaborative translation, a process that is its own sort of “operation border crossing.” Hyongrae and I worked on this project in a pre-Covid world which meant that we met in-person at Hyongrae’s house one or two nights a week to translate together. In anticipation of these meetings Hyongrae would generate a crib (a literal rendering of the original text) that we would then work from. This crib was critical to our collaborative work as I do not speak Korean. Thus, there was a form of ‘border crossing’ that would occur regularly as Hyongrae would use his expertise to help me understand both the meaning and the stakes of what we were to translate. I remain grateful to him for this— there is deep generosity in helping someone discover a new voice in literature; in assisting someone in seeing beyond the “borders” of their own experience. Translation can be powerful in this way.
Flower Swallows Sing demonstrates the rich possibilities of collaborative translation, especially as you both hold different linguistic backgrounds. Can you talk in more detail about this collaborative process? How did you approach the translation and make decisions? Were there any particular techniques you employed, and if so, what are some examples of translational choices that speak to these processes?
Siobhan: As I mentioned, Hyongrae and I met weekly at his house usually after 8pm (my son was only a few months old at the time, so translation meetings were coordinated after my son was in bed). These meetings involved plenty of tea and snacks and lots of conversation and problem-solving. What are the ethical and accurate ways we could translate this culturally-bound idiom? How do we recreate the rhythm/rhyme scheme in this stanza? What does this word mean in the North Korean context? Each of our sessions would last two to three hours and involved long back and forths often over very small sections of text, usually the “crib” that Hyongrae would produce prior to our meetings. But this is what translation (for me) often looks like— a back and forth movement, a sort of iterative, non-linear ushering of a text into its new form. I appreciate collaborative translation because it makes this sort of approach very obvious; even my “single-translator” projects involve these types of conversations and collaborative problem-solving with native speakers, scholars, authors, and other stakeholders.
A translation challenge posed by this project concerns form and punctuation. Baek’s poems use stanzas strategically to create ebb and flow in the stories she recounts — many of these stories draw heavily on allegory. Capturing this flow in English meant also considering how we were to use stanzas and, relatedly, punctuation. This poem titled “Pick-Pocket” is a burst of adventure and emotion that has a critical utterance from the protagonist at the very end where she states emphatically “I’m alive!” The original (as you can see in the final stanza of the original) uses quotations to designate the child’s speech act and then uses ellipses to create emphasis— a moment of celebratory pause. To recreate this moment in English and for a US context, Hyongrae and I took out the quotation marks and the ellipses and instead situated the exclamation on its own line and in italics. On the page, our translation draws on structural moves from free-verse poetic traditions in the West, while being attentive to how punctuation and placement shape how Baek wanted to emphasize this moment of relief and celebration in the original poem. Baek’s regular use of ellipses in particular was a challenge as the … in her writing is both a space of flexibility and, a space of mourning, a placeholder for the unsaid and the unspeakable. Hyongrae and I went back and forth about how to recreate Baek’s use of ellipses and while we did preserve the usage as it appeared in the original on several occasions, we also relied heavily on the em-dash, another form of place-holding and pause that is commonly found in Western free-verse poetry.
Having taught selections from Beek’s collection to undergraduates, one of the things my students found particularly distressing are the vivid and painful descriptions of starvation and cannibalism. For example, in “The Final Struggle,” Baek observes, “people are eating people/but no outcry resounds—/there is only the clicking of tongues//in this final struggle/there are no words/we consume one another/we are no longer human.”
I am thinking about the process of translating—what is for many people—unimaginable violence and brutality. Translators are, of course, not neutral vessels through which these horrors move and re-articulate themselves. On a textual level, what were your priorities in terms of conveying these images and emotions to your English-reading audience? On a personal level, how did you navigate this process psychologically and emotionally?
HR: As you said, many of the circumstances Baek depicts in her works are dire. In addition to the hunger, cold, and violence the narrator describes, there is a general feeling of helplessness which echoes throughout the work. This made it difficult to continue to translate for extended translation sessions. Working with my co-translator Siobhan made this process much more bearable, as it allowed for me to distance myself from the work whenever I got too immersed in the content by engaging in talks about translation strategies and our approach to the process.
I would also like to mention that the collection is not all doom and gloom. There is also a great deal of love that the poet expresses for her family and her homeland, and the strong sense of camaraderie she feels towards her fellow flower swallows. Baek’s ability to blend high emotions with deep compassion allows the reader space to digest the content and heal from the psychological pain the content might generate.
On the subject of agency, I want to explore the problems and possibilities of translation (and thus translators) as a political praxis. As you also mention in the translators’ note, “this translation labors to make Baek’s story available to English readers and hopefully, in so doing, continues her project of denouncing the violence of fascism in all of its forms.” Would you speak more to how you each view your translational work engaging forms of resistance?
HR: The original work is itself a strong political statement as Baek writes that she sees her poems as a call for help to people around the world and a rallying cry for her own people. I saw the process of translation as a way to lend the poet a voice that might reach beyond the language in which it was written and inspire a readership that would otherwise not have ready access to this important work. We were very fortunate to work with our editor, Grace Presa, from Hollym International, who saw the value of the work and agreed to work with us on the project. That said, this collection can also be read as a cautionary tale that warns us of the tools oppressive regimes may employ, the dangers of losing one’s political voice, and the tremendous value of our democratic institutions.
As a scholar of Ukraine, I am interested in the extent to which political and ideological systems of domination are produced, justified, and sustained through narrative. We have seen this extensively in recent years through Russian state propaganda regarding the invasion and war on Ukraine. We have also seen these tactics used in Palestine, Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq– the list goes on—and we know the human cost of such falsifications.
While some English readers (perhaps especially in the US) may read Baek’s work and think these problems to be “far away,” I would insist that her project is very much a global one; one that holds that capacity to reveal ourselves to ourselves. As her translators, how do you see Baek’s work speaking between cultural, political,and ideological spaces? Did this at all texture your translation process?
Siobhan: As Hyongrae underscores, Baek’s work is deeply political and high-stakes. By telling her own story—one that contradicts state progranada about greatness and prosperity— Baek risks her life, hence why, in part, the author has chosen to publish pseudonymously. We know literature has the power to uphold and to challenge dominant narratives—Haitian anthropologist Michel Rolph Trouillot has written on the ways in which power (and power imbalances) shape the stories we tell ourselves about the past, present, and the future. In his 1995 book, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Trouillot writes: “History is the fruit of power, but power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots" (xiv). This quote from Trouillot’s work speaks to the motivations I see undergirding Baek’s text and, in no small way, Hyongrae and I’s investment in bringing Baek’s critique of power to a broader reading audience. Social inequities in the US, for instance, remain a persistent facet of human life as neocolonial corporations and banks continue to grow and consolidate power/capital with the help of the government. This is not a comparison to the North Korean state by any stretch, however in an effort to answer your question I think Baek’s assertion of the truth—namely the truth of power and the way exertions of power render vulnerable human life and the natural environment—does speak to human realities across cultural, linguistic, and national divides.