The Brooklyn Rail

The year before I started doctoral study in Italian Renaissance art history, my family sent me to spend nine months in Seoul. The aim was to repair my broken Korean. To prepare myself for graduate applications, I had studied Latin and German, French and Italian. But the language of my birth somehow ended up lost and buried. Sentences fell apart when I spoke.

For two semesters at the Yonsei University Korean Language Institute, I sat in front of a chalkboard, reciting verb endings and connectives. My classmates were mostly diasporic Koreans: adoptees from Denmark, Zainichi (Japanese-born), Joseonjok (Chinese-born), Goryeo saram (born in the former Soviet Union), gyopo (Korean-Americans, or Koreans living outside of Korea, like myself).

Weekends I’d cross the Han River and visit my uncle Chang-Kun, a nuclear engineer. In his library were books about atomic energy in East Asia and the threat of nuclear attack from the North, only an hour’s drive away. Three volumes caught my eye. They were bound in burgundy leather and embossed. I sounded out the title: Bachali…Ital-lia…lene-sangseu… On the title page was written a dedication to my uncle by the author and translator, Lee Keun Bai. What was this book?

Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, first published in Florence in 1550, is art history’s foundational text. It is thanks to the Lives that we take for granted the connection between an artist’s life and their work, between the flow of time and change in styles. When art history gained momentum as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century, complete translations of the Lives were published in German, French, and English. The twentieth century would see fresh renderings in Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Hebrew, Serbo-Croatian, and Turkish. Complete Chinese and Japanese translations are still underway.

Nonetheless it surprised me to find a translation of Vasari into Korean. While my own relationship to the Korean language has always been tenuous, those of my uncle’s generation were born as Japanese imperial subjects, in a regime where the Korean language, culture—even family names—were suppressed. Lee Keun Bai frequented avant-garde circles where the poet Im Hwa and novelist Kim Sa-ryang met to scheme about a Korean cultural rebirth. While he was a graduate student in Nagasaki—Japan being the primary destination for Koreans seeking higher education—Lee amassed a collection of rare Korean books numbering in the thousands. His passion earned a warrant for his arrest. Lee fled as far as Tianjin, where he was caught. Imprisonment, in preventing his return to Nagasaki, also saved him from the Bomb.

Later, Lee’s life in some ways began to resemble mine. He took himself far from Asia, pursuing postgraduate work in France and Italy. I imagine the pleasure and solace he felt when, on weekend trips to Florence, he would stand in the Uffizi and admire Botticelli’s Primavera (ca. 1480). Antique sculpture, once dead, becomes flesh in the form of bodies who pose and dance in a verdant garden. This painting, hidden during the war in a castle outside Florence, had survived. Beauty, as Vasari writes, spares art from destruction.

Lee Keun Bai, like myself, made his way to Harvard—this was much less common for an Asian in the 1960s. There he found Gaston du C. de Vere’s early twentieth-century English translation of the Lives and xeroxed some two-thousand pages, which he carried back to Seoul. After years of travel, he made the decision to reside again in a divided Korea, although his wife and family were unreachable in Pyongyang. He would never see them again.

Back in Seoul, the American-backed military regime suspected Lee for his Northern Korean origins. Every day, after a full day’s work at a biochemistry laboratory, after dinner and sometimes long into the night, he would translate a passage from the two-thousand xeroxed pages. The nightly activity continued for decades. His work finally appeared in print in 1986.

During my year of remedial Korean, I met Lee. On a spring afternoon my uncle took me to his apartment in a tall chalk-colored building, one of many built after the war. Lee was then close to ninety years old. He greeted us in his library. Books in Korean and French, German and English, Italian and Japanese, streamed from his shelves and spilled onto the floor. The two friends sat mostly in silence. I didn’t speak. Any breach in etiquette—the difficult honorific diction—would dissolve the delicacy of the afternoon visit. But I wanted to ask Lee:

Why Vasari?
Why dedicate twenty years of your life to the Renaissance?
Are you like me?
Am I like you?

Twenty years after that brief afternoon with Lee, I am now rereading Vasari’s Lives in his Korean translation. I am hoping that my intimate knowledge of this work in Italian will give me some insight into my “native” tongue and culture, which remain strangely unfamiliar to me. Korea makes Vasari urgent. Meanwhile, Vasari enables me to learn a sense of “Koreanness” that otherwise remains foreign. Through Lee’s translation, can I even—audaciously—discover a line of succession to Vasari himself? Can I, a Korean-American who grew up in Florida, who lost his own father at the age of sixteen, claim some form of lineage to the Italian Renaissance?

To come closer to an understanding of why Lee devoted twenty years of nights to this labor of translation, I consider a passage in which he renders Vasari’s description of the Mona Lisa. DeVere’s English translation reads “In the pit of the throat, if one gazed upon it intently, could be seen the beating of the pulse.” In the Italian, the pit of the throat is fontanella, “little fountain.” This word connects the throat with water through the shape of a basin as well as through the act of drinking necessary for life. When I compare this passage with the painting—a reproduction was tipped into Lee’s translation—“little fountain” also directs my eye toward the river valley behind and below Lisa. The winding streams loop in, around, and through Lisa: not apart from the landscape, she is, in fact, part of it. Lee paints with words the cylindrical shape of Lisa’s throat with repetition and rhyme: “mok-ŭi o-mok-han bu-bun-ŭl,” literally “in the concave part of the throat.” In choosing to place “mok” (throat) alongside “o-mok” (concave), Lee makes a parallel between sound and shape: just as “mok” and “o-mok” rhyme and repeat, so too does the form of Lisa’s throat nestle one concavity inside another. Her pulse can also be discerned: “maek-bak,” the sharp-edged Sino-Korean word for pulse, percusses deep in the throat. Thinking about the pulse in Leonardo’s painting, I am led back to the Korean word for life itself, “mok-sum” (throat-breath), to my own throat and voice.