The first time someone called me hyeong, I had no idea what it meant.

Sure, I knew the word. It was one of the first Korean words I learned. It means, literally, “Elder Brother.” I had a vague sense of its deeper associations, the respect and the feeling of being able to count on and look up to such an “elder brother.” The idea that his longer experience in the world suggested wisdom one could turn to. Sometimes older guys would try to be my hyeong, dispensing advice or trying to set things up for me in a way they thought was proper.

But the only way to really learn the meaning of the word was through a relationship. It was despair that drove one of my friends to say to me, “You’re not my hyeong, if you give up. You’re just not my hyeong anymore.” I knew that I understood the word because it hurt in a way that summoned up strength in me, the desire to be that wise, calm Elder Brother. The kind of Elder Brother whose title would, in English, need capitalization.

That was when I realized I knew what the word meant. Maybe the context was weird; maybe a real hyeong could not be told he was no longer a hyeong. But in some way, I got it, the word had taken on a meaning inside me, and the translations I’ve offered above don’t really do it justice.

I suspect they can’t, unless you have been, or had, a hyeong.

Global SF has been on my mind lately. One Korean friend recently translated a novel by Heinlein into his native tongue, and is now translating one of my stories into Korean. One Western friend (whose Korean language skill drives me into seething bouts of envy) has been translating Korean flash fiction into English. I’ve talked to both about their respective translation projects, and also been reading about the Korean SF translation scene as well.

All kinds of questions have come to my mind, but they all boil down to a simple one: how translatable are a society’s dreams? How much transliteration is necessary? And does the line matter?

In one of my classes last week, we did a small analysis of the Korean SF/horror film Gwoemul (known in English as The Host). For my money, this is the most brilliant of all the Korean SF films of recent decades, with only Jigureul Jjikyeora (Save the Green Planet) even remotely in its league. In the class, we took up the idea of what the monster might represent. After all, rubber monsters are never just rubber monsters. King Kong ain’t just a big ape running amok in New York — he’s a big black ape with a white woman in his grasp. Godzilla, the critter in Cloverfield, the tons of giant bugs in postwar American film: they’re all expressions of one or another massive social anxiety.

With my class, we dug deep into Korean history. We talked about the dictatorships of the latter half of the 20th century. We discussed the Kwangju Massacre. We talked about the hyperaccelerated economic development through the dictatorships known as the Miracle on the Han River — which is the river from which the monster emerges, the river that bisects the city of Seoul, geographically but also in terms of wealth and relative social power. We discussed economic and political corruption, and talked about the anger of the poor and downtrodden. We talked about the dark side of the Miracle on the Han — the dark side that is so powerfully suggested by the maze of tunnels in which the characters hunt for the missing little girl.

I think, though, that even if you don’t know all this stuff about Korean history, you can enjoy The Host. It’s a bughunt, it’s a touching family story, it’s weird and so deeply Korean yet also so universal.

It’s a film, though.

Genre media is often pretty translatable. Take, for example, the Yeogo Gwoedam films. They’re a long-running series of Korean horror films, set in girls’ high schools. (The title of the series literally translates as something close to “Girl’s High[school] Ghost Story.”) To an outsider, this probably doesn’t seem all that peculiar. After all, Western media horror also plays on the hellishness of school life. One of my students — incidentally, my Korean tutor at the moment — is an enormous fan of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series; according to her, the show perfectly encapsulates the hellishness of high school in Korea. And believe me, if you think high school was bad for you, it could have been worse. Korean society is obsessed with education, in a way that a number of my Korean friends agree is unhealthy or even destructive. The stories my university students tell me (with affable smiles and quiet resignation) about physical and psychological abuse in dingy hallways at the hands of teachers, of their senior year spent doing nothing but studying for the university entrance exams that will hyperdetermine many of their adult lives, and the outright fascism of the high schools most of them attended — their stories are nothing short of horrifying.

Little wonder that not only the Yeogo Gwoedam, but also many other Korean horror films, revolve around high schools and high school children. I was not surprised too much when I was told that, while in the West we are obsessing about terrorists and fascist governments, Korean genre stories feature recurrent glimpses of classrooms and students and study.

Each society’s dreams and nightmares reflect its waking life. And with literary SF, when the nightmares and the dreams are more powerfully locked into the society’s preoccupations, which must, absolutely, make translating the stuff a herculean task.

This makes me wonder how some of my favorite novels — for example, John Brunner’s best novels (Stand on Zanzibar, say) or Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang, or Paul Park’s Celestis, or Bruce Sterling’s Holy Fire, would be received in Korea. What would Charlie Stross’s Accelerando look like when projected onto a Korean cultural context? It makes me wonder, too, how well Korean SF stories will be received in the Anglophone world, since there is now some stirring in the project of bringing at least a taste of Korean SF to the English-speaking world. When I read (mainstream) Korean literature in translation, I wonder how much of what makes sense to me would make sense if I knew nothing about Korea. Certainly, I would miss a lot of the deeper connections and meanings in these stories and poems.

But SF is a special case. SF isn’t only about history, and it’s not even just about what we dream. It’s also about about the ways in which we dream, about the ways we worry and hope and rage and laugh. A part of me believes that, as human as we all are, we dream about the same kinds of things, and our hopes and our terrors are absolutely translatable. But how difficult it must be, to transmute stories from a radically different culture, a radically different dreamscape, into your own, because while we dream about the same kinds of things, the forms that take sometimes are utterly alien.

It is with awe that I look upon the translators I know here, this strange little subculture of people who leap — sometimes gracefully, sometimes like action heroes — from dreamscape to dreamscape, transposing the music of one culture’s fantasies to another key. Me, I’m taking my pathetic little intermediate Korean lessons right now, hoping that someday I’ll be able to do my own little part in this project — not just to talk about these stories, or even just read them competently, but actually to be able to work the magic that my translator friends somehow work. Quietly, in my heart, I call them hyeong and nuna (which is how men refer to their Elder Sisters). Some of them are much younger than me, but in their mystical society, they have run for many miles where I still crawl, and often fear I may never even learn to walk.

But look at this world of ours! Our stories can travel across the lines of radically alien languages. It is difficult and perplexing, but I think this is one of those things we need. We Anglophones have too long seen SF as ours, and not looked or listened to the amazing things that people who are not quite like us have to say, while people the world over have been carrying the gospel of SF into their native tongues, evangelizing, waking up their societies to wonder.

I say it’s time for us Anglo SF fans, readers, and writers to sing this song of ours with our ears more widely open, and listen to all those dreamers singing back to us in their strange and wonderful tongues. Or, to go with a metaphor perhaps more natural to our era, it’s time to play this exchange game on the global scale, exchanging our horrors and hopes for the wonder of seeing the strange faces on bills from lands we may never visit, and seeing what it feels like to rub the strange little coins between our fingers.

We will all be the richer for it.

Gord Sellar is a Canadian SF writer who teaches at a university in South Korea. He has been published by numerous markets, including Asimov’s SF, Fantasy magazine, Apex Magazine, and the anthology Tesseracts Twelve. (You can read his story in Apex Magazine, “Cai and Her Ten Thousand Husbands,” by clicking on the title.) Visit his web site at www.gordsellar.com to lean more. You can read his con report (from which the second image above was borrowed) of the Seoul 2008 F&SF Festival here.