Sukyung Huh's Global Blues: On Being a Naïve Reader

許秀卿的《全球藍調》：關於成為天真的讀者

Myles Chilton

《Tamkang Review》 Volume 54 Issue 2 (2024/06) Pp. 3-21

https://doi.org/10.6184/TKR.202406_54(2).0001

Abstracts

Because I know very little about the late Korean poet Sukyung Huh or Korean literature, in my readings of the recent English translation of her Global Blues (2021) the teacher becomes a student. This is the first convergence; the second sees me searching for ways to make Huh's poems converge in some way with my language and knowledge. Rather than dismiss this approach to poetry as unscholarly or naive, I argue that this teacher-student convergence be embraced as a conscious enactment of tensions and potentials. It is a deliberate engagement with open-ended "bad" reading which seeks to (re)place literary scholarship, and scholars themselves, in the place of an untrained, "unlayered" reader. Understanding the position of future generations of students, who will be less and less inclined to struggle with the lexical and semantic complexities of poetry, or any literary form, is vitally important in the face of the precarity of literary studies, and of the declining cultural value accorded to literary reading, criticism, and education. This occasion of reading Huh's poems thus means gauging how professionalized, disciplinary approaches can limit or even distort the reading subject, and the critical potential of inhabiting shifting scales of interpretation and knowledge opened up by translations faithful, loose, and deliberately incomplete.

Keywords

naive reading ； defamiliarization ； disciplinary frameworks ； incommensurability ； literary value

Parallel abstracts

因為我對已故韓國詩人許秀卿或是韓國文學所知不多，閱讀她的詩作《全球藍調》（2021）英文翻譯版時，老師成為學生，這是第一個交匯點。第二個交匯點是我努力尋找將她的詩作與我的語言與知識相結合的方法。與其說這種讀詩的取徑不夠學術或是天真，我認為這種老師與學生的交匯應該被視為發揮張力與潛力的有意識行為。這種開放式的「壞」閱讀，刻意將文學研究與學者置於未受過訓練、沒有「層次」的讀者立場。面對文學研究的不安前景，以及文學閱讀、批評與教育的文化價值日漸式微的狀況下，理解未來學生的立場至關重要，因為未來的世代將不再願意花時間琢磨詩作或是任何文學形式的字彙與語意複雜性。最後，翻譯或許忠實、鬆散，甚至刻意不完整，但無論如何皆開啟各種詮釋與知識，站在不斷變化的尺度加以衡量，展現不同的批判潛力，此亦為閱讀許秀卿詩作時，需要評斷的面向。

Parallel keywords

天真的閱讀 ； 去熟悉化 ； 學科框架 ； 不可測量性 ； 文學價值