This article is from the list: Books from Korea webzine (www.list.or.kr) by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. It was written by Marianne Godefroy, a Korean studies student at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris. She translated “Yang-ui Mirae” by Hwang Jung-eun into French. In the article, she talks about her experiences on the translation journey.

When our literature teacher at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO), Professor Jeong Eun-Jin, first submitted the idea of a translation workshop, I didn't know what to expect. I had never translated literature before, and the task seemed too big, given my far-from-perfect level of Korean. However, as we worked our way around Hwang Jung-eun’s short story “Yang-ui Mirae,”I soon discovered that this was precisely the thrill of translating: to plunge head-first into a text, without any clear idea of where it is going, and discover the direction step by step. It was like advancing into a maze, getting lost again and again while looking for the meaning of the words, until you knew every corner by heart and could, at last, understand it as a work of art.

At first glance, "Yang-ui Mirae" is a simple story. The narrator/ protagonist is a young girl who seems to pass through life quietly without any goals or dreams, with no other future in sight than the endless string of part-time jobs she takes on to support herself and her parents. One day, a girl disappears in the neighborhood of the library where she works. This incident ripples through her life -- raising new questions and pushing her boundaries -- but life still seems to move on in endless repetition.

As a translator, you get involved more than usual with the story because you have to live with it for a long time. Some of us grew angry with the protagonist. Why couldn’t she make any decisions? Or, why would she react to certain things that way? As the story unravels, time and time again she chooses inaction. It doesn’t seem, at first, to be of consequence: not breaking a wall; not telling an old lady what she wishes to say; not getting out of the library to check on a young girl alone with two men. The scariest thing, however, was the subtle sense of numbness that her story conveyed. How easy it seems to forget how to live, to become a detached spectator of life.

One of the central questions of “Yang-ui Mirae” is legacy. When life is tiring and meaningless, what can, and what should, one leave behind? "When you are alone and poor, it is better not to have children,” writes the narrator. However, at the very moment she affirms her will to not leave anything in the world after her death, she hopes that those words will survive, that, even in this slight way, she will leave her mark. While developing a pessimistic vision of the present generation and its bleak future, this novel still manages to give the reader a feeling of hope.

The very personal nature of reading and translating appears in the way each of us translated the title, “Yang-ui Mirae,” as it can be interpreted in different ways in Korean. When we asked the author about the “real” meaning of the title, she told us that every meaning could be correct. “The Future of the Lamb,” “Miss' Future,” “The Future of the Yin and Yang” were all meanings that made sense in the light of the story. I chose the third, translating it as "Futur clair-obscur” ("A Future of Light and Darkness"). The text had most impressed me with its visual quality: descriptions of the sun’s light and of the dream tunnel’s darkness created a sense of constant in-between; in-between dream and reality; light and darkness; action and inaction. This resonated with me as, for the first time, I discovered a text through the in-between languages of translation.