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Sugungga, Translation and Translatability, and Something Weirdly Beautiful

sugungga imageSugungga (Soo-goong-ga, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the standard form of Korean romanzation, which is as opaque as pinyin to those who cannot read Hangeul) is a pansori, of which I recently bought (a 3-CD set) and to which I have been listening. Yep, that’s the cover to the right. Don’t click that link yet. Read it later. For now, bear with me. People say that this form is “Korean traditional opera” (always “Korean traditional”, not the other way around as we’d say in native-speakers’ English). I understand why they compare it to opera, of course — as the most exalted form of traditional vocal music in Korea, the comparison seems sensible — but the thing is, it’s about as similar to opera as the Beatles is to Wagner. (My point being, not very.)

No, the comparison that makes most sense to me, as a person who studied music intensely for years on end, is that Korean pansori is like the European oratorio… sort of. They’re similar to one another, and different from opera, in that you tend not to get costumes and acting, just music and voice and a story being told by the singer. You’ve got something like the aria — though it’s not all about singing high and pretty, it’s about a kind of hardass, impassioned ripping out of the melody — and you’ve got something a lot like recitative. You’ve even got a little antiphony with the accompanist, who whacks a buk (drum) and calls out responses and encouragment — like blues musicians do, I suppose. “Say it, sister!”, that sort of thing. The audience gets in on it too, grunting and shouting and calling out formulaic supportive phrases to the singer. I swear that the first pansori performance I attended shocked me. I was with a friend, and we were both blown away by the apparent transformation the audience underwent. Suddenly it was like being in a gutbucket blues show or something, noise all around us from the other audience members, the singer just wailing on the melody, her accompanist calling out to her, encouragingly, “Eolshigu!”

(This is Lee Il Ju, the performer of the CD pictured above, the woman whose voice you’ll hear below, and by the looks of it, she’s in one of those impassioned moments that make pansori so cool to listen to.)

So yeah, by now you can see there are some differences from oratorio, too. The oratorio tends to have more than one singer, and while some pansori get performed that way, it’s not a harmonic-counterpoint thing — at least, the few pansori I’ve seen performed live either had only one singer, or involved several people taking turns singing the different sections or “movements”. The other thing missing from the European oratorio is any kind of an orchestra to accompany the performance. The stress on the pansori soloist is much higher than on a singer performing most Western song forms, because she or he performs most of the functions in the music. The passion, the melody, the frills, the shifts in rhythm, the raising and lowering of dynamics (getting louder and softer)… everything is done by the singer, and the accompanist mostly just accentuates the ends of the phrases, responding a tiny bit. Yes, I imagine that a good accompanist is important — knowing the form, inserting the right kinds of responses, giving the singer something to work with. But the performance basically rides on the shoulders of the soloist in a way unknown in most of Western vocal music.

Which is why it’s so cool. It’s fascinating music. There are these, if you’ll pardon my jazz-isms. “fascinating rhythms” that the singer works through, shifting and hammering them out. There are these kinds of undulations and these weird melodic flip-flops — almost like choosing two drone notes, jumping between them and then changing them or ornamenting it in increasingly complicated ways. I am totally convinced that if I could learn to do this kind of thing on a saxophone, it would be incredibly cool, incredibly worthwhile, and very listenable. Well, to oddballs like me.

And appropriately, there are also many parallels with jazz, or blues, and pansori that get excluded by the comparison to opera. The participation of the audience is really important, or at least that was the sense I got. People were shouting their support to the performers I saw, and in doing so, they seemed to find a special kind of satisfaction in the performances. This is very much the kind of thing we find in jazz music, or blues. A good audience can’t stay still. A good audience simply cannot keep quiet, because the passionate delivery of the singer or soloist drives them to call out in joy, in pain, whatever. If you coarse-grain it enough, you can see a parallel between the ecstatic traditions of the East and the West — the way passion causes people to yell out, the way narratives sometimes take possession of people, the way that those possessions — whether understood literally or enacted figuratively as I suspect is part of the pansori performer’s act as the channel of passion, the speaker for the group, who calls out supportively to her (or him)…

This brings to mind a series of exchanges that I’ve been having, off an on, with Charles from Liminality about issues in translation and translatability, and the emulation of translation in original works set in foreign cultures. As an SF writer, I find the things that are untranslatable the most interesting and important in any culture. Those are usually the core of a story. Is “pansori” an untranslatable word? Not necessarily — I imagine that, having read this, readers will have some idea of what it is. Perhaps in translation what gets limited here is a kind of limited-bandwidth imposed restriction that emerges as part of a form. Mainstream novels, at least, aren’t given to long essay-like expositions on the meaning of a single word. They screw up the flow of the original story, and they annoy the crap out of people who already know the deal, and often bore the people who don’t.

Hypertext may help that in a kind of prosaic way, but there’s something about hypertext that’s also cheap, and will degrade the artistry of the translation. Nobody wants to read a novel that feels more like a day with Wikipedia than it does a story with flow, characters and important motivations in the hearts of those characters.

The way to really understand pansori — something I don’t claim to do — is complicated. You have to know some culture, and certainly more of the language than I do, and be able to grasp the significance of the audience’s interaction with the singer (and vice versa), and, most important, you very likely need to listen to a lot of it. Just as most Westerners don’t really understand jazz music, I imagine most Koreans I pass on the street don’t give pansori much thought. I’ve heard from some Koreans that traditional Korean music sounds “exotic” to them. It’s funny, though, because while kayageum does sound exotic to me, there’s nothing I’ve heard that’s earthier than pansori. Hearing it, in fact, removes all the illusions that accrete when you hear Koreans trying to explain what pansori is. Grabbing understandably at the elevatedness of opera, they lose some of the most important discerning features of the musical material itself. It’s a fascinating case study.

So how would I translate the word pansori? I wouldn’t offer a definition, that’s for sure. If I were working in online media, I would give a sample or play some in the background of my verbal narration. If I were working in a textual medium, I’d probably fall back on what I’ve done above — I’d show, instead of telling.

But since this is online, I’ll give you a teeny sample.

Oh, and on the subject of sugungga and untranslatability, I think that this, in context or out, is one of the weirdest (in a beautiful way) texts I’ve seen anywhere:

Chorus: One upon a time. In the mid-summer of the year A.D. 1344, during the reign or King Soonje of Won Dynasty china, King Gwangnithe Dragon King of the South Sea, held a huge banquet for two or three days to celebrate the building of his new palace, called Youngduk-jun at which all creatures of the court enjoyed themselves with great quantities of food and wine. But, suddenly, the king was taken ill, and all the eminent doctors in the sea assembled at the palace where day and night, they tried to cure the King’s illness, but in vain.

Clam: All his internal organs hurt, so it is urgent that we make them warm and restore his energy, so we mainly gave him 18 grams of sook-ji-hwang first, followed by various kinds of other-herbal medicines, but nothing seems to have worked

Carp: His diarrhea is serious, so it is urgent that we preparega-gam-paek-ch’ool-t’ang for him at once.

Catfish: We gave him 11 grams of fried baek-chool 8 grams of sa-in 3.75 grams each of various kinds of other medicines, and continuously gave him gam-ch’o 8 p’oons and soo one doe, totaling 30 packets in all, but it was to no avail.

Painter: We gave him 7 grams of mahuang , 3.75 grams each of various other kinds of medicines, and continuously gave him gam-ch’o five-p’oons, and water one doe totaling 40 packets in all, but it had no effect.

Turtle: Well, then let’s try acupuncture.

And that’s before Minister Terrapin, Minister Abalone, and the Taoist Immortal even get involved, let alone the “Meeting of the Fur-Bearing Animals,” or the kidnapping of a poor rabbit for the purposes of organ theft! (I kid you not.) I can’t vouch for the reliability or quality of that particular translation, but I certainly assure you, it’s thoroughly entertaining! And yeah, the story really is about the kidnapping of a rabbit whose liver, if extracted and eaten, is supposed to save the life of an ocean kingdom’s ruler. I hope it’s not too much if I give away this much of the ending, after he leads Minister Terrapin onto the land to fetch his liver, which he claims to have left hidden somewhere outside his body:

Rabbit: (Arrogantly [to Minister Terrapin].) Hey you silly, stupid bastard! How can I take out and put back in a liver which is contained in my abdomen? How silly. Your king is an idiot. If I had had his stupidity, I surely would have been killed. I owe my life to my three ass holes. [sic] I’m returning, I’m returning, I’m returning to my beautiful mountain at last.

I don’t know about you, but to me, it brings ol’ Brer rabbit to mind (like in the picture, which is from Britannica online). See what I mean about stories and forms and their roots running deep and strangely similar?

Now, if you’re interested, a more sedate version of the story. The operatic version, let’s call it.

And here’s a movie I’d like to track down sometime, based on another pansori tale.

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