Hauntology, with luminous details: a literary translation of 눈부신 디테일의 유령론 by An Mirin

This thesis provides a literary translation of An Mirin’s poetry collection 눈부신 디테일의 유령론 (Moonji Publishing, 2022) from Korean into English. Often described as the “destroyer of grammar” in the Korean poetry scene, An Mirin’s poetics traverses between the boundary of the grammatical and the ungrammatical, creating senses that are hard to capture. Centered around “ghosts,” Hauntology, with Luminous Details examines such qualities of “ghostly-beings” while imagining an unforeseeable possibility of a future.

Taking the conceptual framework Jacques Derrida’s concept of “Hauntology,” and Mark Fisher’s reimagination of “Hauntology” in the 21st century, my translation places An Mirin’s unique poetics in conversation with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement of the 1970s—particularly, Lyn Hejinian’s Language of Inquiry—and Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language. In this attempt, my paratext discusses the methods and difficulties of translating a language poet, and the approaches I’ve taken, preserving the various “extra dimensions” the poet provides in my translation.