I met a friend who is majoring in Korean literature at Jeonnam University. She expressed interest in helping me translate some poetry of a famous leper poet, Han Ha-Oon. Here are the first drafts of translations of five poems. They are translated with some liberty, and some of them are not complete. But I think the spirit of the poems is more or less intact. I would like to post the Korean alongside so that fluent speakers can offer critique on these translations. It is my understanding, based on an encyclopedia of translated Korean poems, that these works have never been translated before. Others by Han Ha Oon, such as "Reed Pipe" and "Bluebird" have been translated.
It's difficult to provide here the Korean versions because I don't know the pronunciations of the Korean Hanja characters, but hopefully I will be able to figure it out. The translation is by no means perfect, but it's a fascinating expression of a man who grew up during the Japanese occupation and became famous for his lyrical expressions of the suffering of outcastes and the transience of our physical existence.
Upon reviewing the poems, they definitely paint an unique perspective on the experience of Hansen's disease patients of the time. In these five poems, we can see the progression of experience from being cast out of society to die alone. He is later committed to a leper colony-- Perhaps Sorok island?-- where he is perhaps subjected to electric shock therapy. He also experiences a wedding to another leprosy patient. As he remarks, the eyebrows have been drawn on to her face as make-up because Hansen's disease often causes the eyebrows to fall out in its early stages.
What can we make of the claim in the second poem that "I am the child of lepers." Is it to be taken literally? Perhaps he was one of the children that Japanese officials, as well as missionary doctors, hoped to prevent by forced sterilization. But we know that he was only infected with leprosy later. Perhaps it is only a poetic flourish not to be taken literally.
I was first made aware of Han Ha-Oon by the introduction in a bilingual version of Ko Eun's works entitled "The Sound of my Waves" in which Ko Eun recounts that he was first inspired to become a poet by Han Ha-Oon, the famous leper-poet. Ko Eun definitely carries on certain themes of Han Ha-Oon's such as the transience of the body and a despair of being caste out from materialistic society.
All translations are Copyright of Joji Kohjima 2010.
At the foot of the Zelkova tree
In the past as today
The watermill turns the destiny of every man
to soil and rice wine
Year by year, by turns, destiny is set afloat into life
Absently I recount this old story to you.
How under the zelkova I have come to live.
It was there under the zelkova that my forebears who begat me lived
It was there under the zelkova that they learned the ancient wisdom
that the strong live, and the weak die*
Now, stricken by disease, I have been caste out
The healthy people banished me to live there, under the zelkova
Since that day, the lonely zelkova has wept sparingly in the bottom of my heart
* This adage is a chinese 4-character saying or 사자성어. Here it is on naver:
適者生存 Literally: "the capable people may live"
I am not a Leper
My father is a leper
My mother is a leper
Myself, I am the child of lepers
But the truth is, I am not a leper
In the relation between heaven and earth
Between the flower and the butterfly
The love withn the sun and moon
becomes the stuff of life
Because the world laments this life
I, a man, am called a leper
Without even a birth registration,
I repeat the same old story
to an audience who cannot understand
No matter how I labor to become a whole person I cannot
I am an absurdity
But I am not a leper
I tell you truly I am a healthy person. Not a leper.
It all seems senseless
It would seem an impossible task for this world
A cry bursts forth
Softly dry the precious tears shed over
This love for which we can see no future
But rather beautifully forgetting,
As we weave this fleeting love song
As our hearts proceed
Let us swallow our tears
Cry out our song
To weave again this ephemeral tune of bittersweet blues
Towards the pain of our separation
Cast the flowers and cry out the song
悲愴 [비장] "Pathetique" (Tchaikovsky's symphony No. 6 in B Minor, Op. 7)
In this isolated leprosy treatment center
There exist neither borders nor distinctions
Nor even bacteriology
Tchaikovsky's Pathetique on the radio waves
Moves me to tears
Now I am in the past, in my season of good health
It's as if the I of the present does not even exist here
Downstream of my long-anticipated destiny
I jettison my reality
In two, three pieces my reality shatters
Now everything is broken
It is as if only Tchaikovsky's Pathetique
stretches into infinity
Pity the Sick Marriage
Because we are soiled,
Though the cloudy blue horizon is broad,
There is no land for a leper to live
An abandoned man and an abandoned woman
If an old shoe finds its match
Might it be moved to weep and weep?
Have the gods ordained this auspicious event which pains to the bone?
Just for today the bride has drawn her eyebrows with a matchstick
And this artificial shroud is not lifted
5 colored confetti falls like snow
Beautifully is she preened
