The void that represents everything and yet represents nothing
White paint splashed across the text, translation, about that whiteness.

A collection of essays by Hong Han-byeol, translator of Claire Keegan, Joan Didion, and Susan Sontag

As the title suggests, “On the Whiteness of the White Whale” is a grand metaphor for translation.
Just as Herman Melville wrote such a vast epic poem through the mouth of Ishmael, the narrator of Moby Dick, to elucidate the existence of a great white whale, translator Hong Han-byeol spends fourteen chapters of this book sketching out the never-ending translation on the pages.
“A prayer to explain the intangible act of translation in words” and “an impossible gesture to define the impossible translation,” a persistent and beautiful adventure in writing driven by absolute love.
In the challenge of approaching the pure white vacuum between languages, countless stories emerge and are connected through the axis of translation.

Translator Hong Han-byeol has translated over 100 books over the past 20 years, earning praise from critics and readers alike.
She won the Yuyoung Translation Award, given to the translator of one English literature translation published in a year, for Anna Burns' "The Milkman," and translated Claire Keegan's "Such Trivial Things," which swept bookstores in 2024 and was hailed as the best book by many media outlets and readers.
Works by Kazuo Ishiguro, Deborah Levy, Susan Sontag, Sigrid Nunes, Rebecca Solnit, Joan Didion, and Virginia Woolf, among others, have met readers in Korean through Hong Han-byeol's translations.
Following 『Anyway, Dictionary』, which delicately caressed the world of dictionaries with a list of words that is close to infinite, 『On the Whiteness of the White Whale』, the second solo book published, is an essay on translation, the act of penetrating the other side of a text and expressing the silence beyond it through language.

I don't feel confident in clearly defining or logically explaining translation, so I'll try to approach it obliquely, using an analogy.
What I'm trying to say in this book might be something like Ishmael's attempt to define the white whale.
Like Ishmael, it will be a story of failure, of citing examples of translation, of analyzing translation, of dissecting translation, of trying to explain translation.
The writings here are a story about how people each speak of translation differently (with the same words), a prayer to explain the intangible act of translation in words, an impossible gesture to define impossible translation, and an attempt to draw a white whale.

--- p.21

Translation is a betrayal because it attempts to temporarily fix the confused language and the floating meaning.
Translation is a fleeting but inevitable attempt to fix, even for a moment, an ever-changing language.
It's a matter of choosing one of countless possibilities and - for the most part - discarding the others.
As everyone knows, no translation can accurately mirror the original text.
Paradoxically, Nabokov's endless tower of commentary is a visual monument to how much translation has missed (elegance, good sound, clarity, taste, modern usage, grammar, to name just a few).
And as the tower of comments stretched out, the margins were also lost.
(room for imagination, possibility of ambiguity).

--- p.47

I also like to think of translation as being similar to the work of a detective.
The goal of a detective in a detective novel is to construct a story that explains why, by whom, and how a crime was committed.
Just as a detective considers all the circumstances and context to create the most plausible narrative, a translator gathers clues from words to create a single, seamless sentence, a flawless plot.
The translator tries to translate what cannot be translated at all by trying to fit together the scattered pieces of meaning.
Then, at some point, the puzzle is solved.
The story is completed by fitting the clue/word that fits perfectly into the empty space.
The joy of completing a sentence like this.
Ultimately, the reason we translate is because this is what translation is all about.
A rare sense of completion.

--- p.65

In reality, when translating, you are not just translating 'words' (literal translation) or translating 'the meaning of words' (paraphrasing).
There is something third.
That's why a simple sentence like 'What do you think?' can be translated dozens of ways.
You could say that it translates the lines, the silence, the margins.
There's so much between the lines.
Context, tone, emotion, mood, character, allusion, nuance, cultural allusion, intention.

--- p.75

The essence of language is change.
Language is not fixed.
No matter how much Shylock says, “I swear, I swear, I swear to heaven.
Even if one tries to sanctify one's contract by equating it with an oath to God, saying, "Should my soul bear perjury?", as long as the contract is made of words, differences in interpretation are inevitable.
It takes compassion to integrate and understand those differences.


Given the nature of language, what if we insist on merciless verbatim translation, refusing to tolerate any disloyalty? If we attempt to translate only words, ignoring the silence between the lines and the meaning, who can guarantee that the body and soul of language won't be severed and destroyed?
--- pp.92-93

Perhaps translation should be a transformation, a body-altering act.
“It should be translated as ‘standing up with an indifferent face as if it was that way from the beginning’, or ‘letting go of the body and putting on a new one’, but I’m worried that it’s not possible.
'I' says that I am afraid that I will change before the words.
What does this mean? Is it a fear that I'll write as if I were the author, deluding myself into thinking I'm the author, as if I were writing as if I were writing? That the translation process will sever the bond between signifier and signified, that words and stories will transform into something completely different, that I'll betray the author, that I'll damage the original text through translation? That I'll shamelessly cut away at it, polish it, and erase its literary quality?
--- p.105

For a translator caught in the dilemma of being unable to translate words or meaning, the experience of translating poetry that is composed of neither words nor meaning but sensations, the freedom to create language by translating unreadable poetry into unreadable poetry, may be necessary.
And then, like Artaud, he declares that the translation is closer to the original than the original.
That's actually true, since translation is closer to pure language.

--- pp.116-117

I think I want to write a translation that reads well.
So, in order to help Korean readers read with natural logic, there are times when I intervene more than I am allowed to.
There are times when I put scissors to the original text as if I were an editor (this does not mean cutting out what is there or putting in what is not there).
(Sometimes you have to combine or split sentences, twist sentence structure, or reverse affirmations and negations).
But when I think that while refining and editing the translation manuscript, I might end up approaching the cliché of Fitzgerald, my heart sinks.

--- p.134

No matter how natural and comfortable the translation is, the traces of translation are bound to remain in the translated text.
Sometimes, that trace becomes the virtue of the translation.
When the language of others and my language overlap and interfere, a beautiful trace of a dazzling pattern remains in the language.
I try to imitate people who write in Korean, but there are also people who imitate translators, and it is through this exchange and conflict that the potential of language is drawn out to its fullest extent.
Even in the language I write, the countless texts I have read and translated will remain as unforgettable traces.

--- p.175

The book also appeared in Gangwon-do during the Korean War.
The US military encountered a group of civilians who were unable to communicate.
People whose appearance is hard to distinguish and whose words cannot be understood.
A void, a vacuum of meaning, where it is impossible to tell whether they are enemies or allies.
At that time, the symbol of obedience and following appears in the form of the Bible.
It was a book that was burned, restored, and resurrected, gaining a new body and new meaning.
This scene is from Homey K.
It is not an exaggeration to say that Baba borrowed Freud's concept and called it the 'primal scene'.
The first encounter between colonizer and colonized – violence, death threats, crisis, misunderstanding, disgust and desire, identity formation, the receipt of bread and medicine, the beginning of cultural domination.
I inherited the trauma of this first encounter – and the longing – from my father.
That's why my father, my older brother, and I ended up living our entire lives translating.
The Indians living near Delhi refused to take the sacrament, but we could not refuse and received the bread - the body.

--- pp.184-185

When Emily Wilson's book was published with the tagline "the first female translation," some viewed it with skepticism.
(In today's world), what's so special about a woman translating? There are already dozens of translations, so why do we need another? Doesn't saying a woman's translation is meaningful mean the translator has neglected her duty of transparency and has arbitrarily interfered with and damaged the original? In modern terms, isn't this like "feminizing" Homer? However, as evidenced by the examples above, and as Wilson himself noted in his translator's note, Wilson strove to maintain fidelity to the original text, and was wary of incorporating modern prejudices and ideas into his writing.
It was the male translators who encouraged and exaggerated Odysseus, fed Penelope a filter, and branded the female slaves with the stigma of 'whores.'

--- p.203

Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey demonstrates that even authoritative texts can be cracked simply by digging into the cracks of the original and revealing hidden contradictions.
Even what we think of as the primordial narrative, even Homer's great work, is fractured and multi-voiced, and the woman's translation reveals that the single, pure voice is merely a myth.
The cracks hidden behind the polished surface, the pain of life, the screams of slaves, the things we turned away from because we didn't want to see them, are revealed only when we remove the plausible myths.
Translation brings out the voices hidden in the cracks of the original text.

--- p.204

Because of the Tower of Babel, there were tens of thousands of different ways to say the same thing.
Do we want to go back and have everyone speak the same way?
Do you want to abandon the clash and interplay of different words, the various ways we play with language, the mysterious transformations of language we feel and experience every day, and the infinite possibilities of language?
Can a culture develop without a living, rich, and nuanced language?
There is a world of delicate and sophisticated language that cannot be accessed through a vague and idiosyncratic common language.
If Dante had written in Latin, a dead language but a common language, rather than the vernacular people actually used, the Divine Comedy would never have been born.
Whether translation or creation, the writing we write should not become more ordinary, as it has been in the past, but rather become more excellent.

--- pp.240-241

I, too, struggle with competitiveness and anxiety when translating books whose copyrights have expired and for which there are already multiple translations, or when retranslating books that someone else has translated before me.
I hope that I can see more deeply into the author's heart and love more earnestly.
I feel an inexplicable jealousy towards the person who previously occupied this text, and I want to come up with a translation that is at least a little better than theirs.
In such cases, translation is a competition of love, and inevitably a betrayal of the object of love.

--- p.246