Jillaekott and the Difficulty of Translation

Ask A Korean! (with a festive exclamation mark) has written a wonderful post.

The song Jillaekott, by Jang Sa-ik, a wonderful Korean singer, and a wonderful Korean song, which I posted a little while ago, was taken by The Korean! (with a festive exclamation mark), and translated to English.

He gave the song and the singer a bit of extra attention, which it deserves, and he also uses it to demonstrate the difficulty of translating things from one language to the other, and what is always, inevitably, lost in the transition. He goes through, line by line, and describes the various difficulties of translating the different lines and phrases, and the ways that the nearest English approximations don't catch the same nuances...or bring in entirely different nuances that point the meanings in the wrong directions.

Here is the music clip,


here are the official lyrics, in Korean
찔레꽃

하얀 꽃 찔레꽃
순박한 꽃 찔레꽃

별처럼 슬픈 찔레꽃
달처럼 서러운 찔레꽃

찔레꽃 향기는
너무 슬퍼요

그래서 울었지
밤새워 울었지

찔레꽃 향기는
너무 슬퍼요

그래서 울었지
목놓아 울었지

아 찔레꽃처럼 울었지
찔레꽃처럼 춤췄지

찔레꽃처럼 날았지
찔레꽃처럼 울었지

찔레꽃처럼 춤췄지
당신은 찔레꽃

찔레꽃처럼 울었지
당신은


and here is The Korean's final translation,

Mountain Rose

White flower, Mountain Rose,
Simple flower, Mountain Rose.

Sad like a star, Mountain Rose,
Doleful like the moon, Mountain Rose.

Scent of the Rose is
Too sorrowful.

Therefore, cried.
All night, cried.

Scent of the Rose is
Too sorrowful.

Therefore, cried.
Wailed and cried.

Ah – cried like Mountain Rose
Danced like Mountain Rose

Flew like Mountain Rose
Cried like Mountain Rose

Danced like Mountain Rose
You are Mountain Rose

Cried like Mountain Rose
You did


When I have finished the poem that started brewing when I first listened to this song, I will post it on the blog, too.

And here is my final message to The Korean: thank you so much for doing this! You are hereby invited to my next birthday party, and the one after that, too.

(P.S.: Also covered by The Marmot)

Snow Last Weekend

Here is a picture of Dongdaemun from Saturday night.

Here is a nice picture of the snow we had on Sunday evening.
The sound of snow hitting the frozen leaves of this tree was nice.

So was the snow, just in general: I've set it to music from the "Winter" section of "Korea: The Musical" (oops: I mean, "Vivaldi's Four Seasons"), in what is the most accurate rendering of falling snow into another medium that I have heard.

Got a nice link here...

The Korean Class 101 is a recent addition to my RSS feed, so imagine my surprise when my own image turned up there!

Because of my picture, It's a pretty good post, giving a brief look at the whole unhappy expat thing I covered in the "Why do Expats Complain" series, and also offering a brief survey of some notable Korea Blogs, which serve as a good starting point for knowing who's who.

Thanks, guys.

Expat Community: Time to Pitch in.

It's time to get up, get out, and help one of our own.

Brian has more details, including HOW you can help, in the case of a South African English teacher who was burned in an apartment fire.

Read here

Read here

Here is instructions on how you can help the family with donations. I think you should. I'm gonna.

Join the Facebook group for updates.

or this one, if you read Afrikaans.

Prop 8: The Musical

When Obama was elected, California also put gay marriage to a referendum, and it was banned by the voters.

In response, musical theater composer Marc Shaiman wrote "Prop 8, the Musical" and got a ridonkulous cast to join him to film it.

Keep your eyes open for a whole swack of famous people, including John C. Reilley, Jack Black, Margaret Cho (there's our Korea connection) and Doogie Howser himself, Neil Patrick Harris.

Wherever you stand on the Gay marriage issue, it's pretty awesome: go watch it.

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

Personally, I think the Christian right is in the wrong here: as I wrote in my essay series, "Why Modern Religion Deserves Richard Dawkins," part Four, when I was writing a prescription for how organized religion can return to true relevance on the world scene:

9: Get on the right side in the LGBT (Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, Transgender/Transsexual) debate. Every other time a group was oppressed, disenfranchised, or in need, Christians were on their side offering compassion, love and support, until this one, and it’s hurting us. As my friend Mel said in an e-mail once, "We're on the wrong side on this one." Doesn't "I cried for hours when I heard about that gay teenager who got beaten to death" sound a little closer to the Godly compassion we're told to have than "AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals." (Jerry Falwell) or "[Homosexuals] want to come into churches and disrupt church services and throw blood all around and try to give people AIDS and spit in the face of ministers." (Pat Robertson) Who are these guys and what have they done with my faith?

Enough pontification for today.

Watch the clip. It's awesome.

Roboseyo's K-Blogs of the Month: November and December

So bein' busy and all, I didn't quite get around to my K-Blogger of the month award for November. My bad.

To make up for it, today I will give you two K-Bloggers worthy of recognition.

The first one is well-known around the K-blogs, but I'd like to take a moment to say something nice about Korea Beat anyway. See, Korea Beat's blog is simple: the layout is simple, the premise is simple, but Korea Beat does something really valuable, by regularly, consistently translating articles from the Korean media into English. Even takes requests.

The article choices range from goofy to noteworthy, celebrity news, stuff relevant to the expat community, examples of horrible journalism, to weird court cases, the occasional (usually bizarre) picture, and serious stuff, and provide a look at Korea, from the horse's mouth. I'm especially fond of the weekly "Most-Read Naver Stories Of The Week" series, where Korea Beat recaps the articles on Naver, Korea's most popular web portal, which received the most hits this week. There isn't a huge amount of pontification (kind of the opposite of mine, where I'm about never current, but always have lots to say about whatever story I'm late to the game on), but I'd have to say Korea Beat is one of the most reliable Korea Blogs out there. Give it a look, if you haven't already.

So, that's November covered.

Next, I'd like to draw your attention to another newcomer.

One nice thing about doing a K-Blogger of the Month series is the same thing that sucks about living as an expat in Korea:

See, there are so many comings and goings that even if you DO know where it's at for a while, people are constantly going home, showing up, losing interest, and such, so that keeping your bearings on where your friends are at here, and staying on top of K-Blogs is a bit like doing a foxtrot on the deck of a sailboat on choppy seas. My second year in Korea was the hardest for this personally, because all my first-year friendships, which I approached the same way I approached friendships back home (on the assumption they'd be around for a while) moved on to wherever else, faded away, lost touch, you know. For building lasting friendships, this sucks. However, for finding new blogs doing interesting stuff that deserve a look, it's great. It's also a bit of hope for bloggers plugging away in obscurity: other than the very few of us who are here for the long haul, eventually, several, many, maybe most of the blogs that currently get more hits than yours, will repatriate or move on, so all you have to so is stick around, keep making worthwhile stuff, and eventually you'll make it on the list. Sure, you're not gonna pass some of the ones who started ages ago, who have been in Korea, and possibly writing about Korea, since the days when people had to know how to write HTML code to have a blog, but other than them, you'll get there.

That said, a blog I like these days is OK Korea. It's a very new blog, only posting since October, with a really nice look and layout. OK Korea posts a lot of photos, and slice of life video clips, with a very "Hey! Look what I saw!" kind of feel. OK Korea isn't (as far as I know) a professional photographer or anything, but does know where to point the camera to get a look at Korea's fun wrinkles and quirks, without feeling the need to add the kind of "Koreans are weird" commentary that some bloggers throw in there whenever they show something different from How Things Are Back Home.  So once again, go give OK Korea a look; won't take you long to read the posts, because they're not text-heavy, so have some fun and add it to your RSS feed.

Now it's late and I'm sleepy.

Have a good one, all.

-rob

By the way: if you want to be a Roboseyo K-Blog of the month, send me an e-mail with your link, and three reasons why I should feature you, in less than a hundred words.  What do you bring to the table?  That failing, I regularly graze at the Korean Blog List and add a few newcomers to my RSS feeds, so get your name on there, and if you catch my eye, you'll be a candidate.  From there: write a good blog.  It's that easy, really.

It's getting to be that time of season.

Here's a cheerful little christmas video for you.



(and here are my real thoughts about what you just watched:)

Snowed this morning in Seoul.

Here are more thoughts about Christmas music, especially ... dum da da dum!

My dream Christmas Playlist!

Photo Dump

More of the cool light show at the Jens Lekman concert.

Ahh hongdae.  How I love you, and not just your one, but your FOUR ho bars.

Odd, vaguely dirty sign of the day.
Obviously they pulled up the sidewalk blocks, and then put them back down in the wrong spots, creating this funny, exploding zebra effect where there used to be parking lines.
Problem with living in the city: when you KNOW there's a gorgeous sunset going on somewhere, but the buildings are just blocking it all up anyway, so the best you get is a gorgeous cloud's edge and some lovely light on the side of a building, and a monster-tease.

This empty house, on the edge of a construction site, probably slated for destruction, and hollowed right out, had a really melancholy feel.  I had to set the lens and exposure time on maximum, and hold the camera perfectly still for eight seconds (harder than it sounds) to get this clear picture: it was actually dark as a mushroom farm out there.  Meanwhile, I had the most melancholy song on my entire MP3 player buzzing in my ears, just to make the whole thing a little sadder again.

My humidifier looked nice in the morning sunlight.


From the Hire a Proofreader, Nimrod! files:
:)

that's all for now.

-roboseyo

Jens Lekman Continues to Make Me Happy

Two topics I intentionally shy away from blogging about are music and food, because if I DO start talking about them, I'll cease to talk about anything else.

But, inspired by Jens Lekman's concert on Saturday night, I downloaded a bunch more Jens, and man, he makes me happy.  The torrent included a whole whack of rare stuff and eps, which is fun, because it means I can go through it all, and my new, super-big computer hard drive (350 gigs is more than I can even imagine needing, unless I decide to download the entire AFI top 100 films or something silly like that), along with an 80 gig IPod, means I can load up on stuff, where I used to have to delete things in order to avoid topping out my old laptop.  And it's fun having music on your Ipod that isn't all already familiar to you: there's the potential something will surprise you.

Plus, when walking around town, it helps to have entire albums, or even several entire albums, from an artist, instead of just the one song you like, because the after hearing a single song, you have to go find another album you want to hear, so it's GOOD to have more by your artists, instead of just keeping the best two or three songs.

Now, I don't have a lot of musical training, other than a semester of voice lessons, two semesters of choir in university, and a lot of hours in the shower annoying my brother, I couldn't really tell you which musicians are using the most interesting time signatures or harmonic intervals: I respond to music primarily emotionally, kind of like a more nuanced Beavis and Butthead: "This sucks.  This is cool."

So, while I respond to poetry and lyrical excellence (strangely enough, in the laced rhymes and rhythms of an Eminem song as much as in a poem/song by Leonard Cohen), I couldn't care much less about Steve Vai's technical skill as he shreds on his guitar, unless those 64th and 128th notes have an emotional impact that creates a feeling in me.  

So, all that said, Jens might not be the best singer or musician, and I don't really care...but I know that, walking around at night alone, I have felt EXACTLY the way this song sounds.

(I've set it to some of my favorite roboseyo photography moments).

Enjoy it.

Recently, 

Elvis Costello: Imperial Bedroom

Flaming Lips: At War With the Mystics

Polyphonic Spree: The Beginning Stages Of...

Mugison: Mugiboogie

Camper Van Beethoven: Key Lime Pie

David Byrne: Grown Backwards (especially his duet with Rufus Wainwright, Au Fond du Temple Saint)

are some of the albums/releases that have been bringing me much joy since I revisited them, or gave them another try.

(Yes, David Byrne, from The Talking Heads, founder of "The David Byrne School of Dancing" [where you dance as weirdly as you can] features on that list.  Give it a try.)

Here's david, weird dancing in what might be his most famous song.

More from Korea's Favorite International Journalist

Joo Hee Cho, known for smearing English teachers on ABC News with the kind of junk that's usually reserved for the local media (profile here), is back, with this hard-hitting report on road safety in Korea.

(warning: innocuous puff piece ahead)


Good to know when she isn't bandying about stereotyped retreads (read her article, "English Teachers Bring Drugs to Korea"), Ms. Cho is asking the tough questions about Korea's domestic issues as well.

ht to Rate My Hogwan

I'm trying to think of a way to link the story above to this next one without being rude...but I got nothing.

What a headline, though:

Survey: Korean Men World's Most Selfish In Bed

naw. not gonna say it. too easy.