The Barren Nothing-Place

On bilingual Waste Lands

For many years, whenever I was asked how I became interested in poetry, I told the story of how my father, on a trip back from South Korea, once brought me a slim white book with the unfamiliar word 황무지 written in dark blue at the top of its cover. If you romanize those Korean letters, the book’s title becomes Hwang-Mu-Ji. Most Koreans would tell you that it clearly sounds to them like Sino-Korean: classical Chinese characters adopted into the Korean language. Growing up Korean-American, I was always busy enough trying to keep up my Korean-Korean while also trying to sound as convincing as possible as an American-American, so I never learned classical Chinese. But most Korean-Koreans who grow up in South Korea learn approximately two thousand classical Chinese characters in school.

Sino-Korean words can be written out either in hangul (the Korean alphabet) or in hanja (Chinese characters). On the cover of the white book my father gave me, the Sino-Korean term Hwang-Mu-Ji is happily written out in hangul, but still now, just as back then, I can only offer a guess at what exactly it means. « Hwang » most often means yellow (黃). But it can also mean barren, desolate, uncultivated (荒). « Mu » means nothing. « Ji » means place. « Yellow-Nothing-Place. » Or: « Barren-Nothing-Place. » Further down the cover, in a reddish-brown font, is the English translation of the title: The Waste Land.

I am not a big collector of things, having moved too often in my life to haul around objects whose only purpose is attachment, but the one thing I do collect is translations of The Waste Land. On my bookshelf is La Terra Desolata translated by the famous Italian critic Mario Praz, alongside Das wüste Land by Ernst Robert Curtius (German), La tierra estéril by Jaime Tello (Spanish), Terra baldía by Angel Flores and Vicente Gaos (Mexican Spanish), and Oppe Braekswâllen by Haring Tjittes Piebenga (Frisian). In Dutch, I have both Braakland by Theo van Baaren and Het Barre Land by Paul Claes.