What is translation? The etymology of the word comes from the Latin translatus, meaning to carry over ‘from one place to another’. Is that really all translation entails? A simple mapping from language A to language B? What are the limits of translation? Are only good translations worthwhile? Or can ‘bad’ translations reveal palimpsestic truths?

This line of questioning is tackled in the 2016 episode Translation of Radiolab. In the first story of its multi-bus saga on the different manifestations of translation, the podcast details the lengths American writer Douglas Hofstadter took in order to search for the ‘right’ translation for the poem A une Damoyselle Malade. He spent multiple decades not only translating the 16th century French poem over and over again, but also sequestering translations from others. All because none of the translations, in his mind, could capture the original in its entirety. No matter what the translator decides to highlight, a compromise has to be made. When asked about the reason behind his dissatisfaction, Hofstadter said that “(the poet) wrote a three-syllable poem of 28 lines that rhymed wonderfully, and the essence of his poem was a form rather than a message.” In the processes of translation, structure is disregarded and words are reinterpreted. ‘Confiture’ becomes ‘buttered bread’, and ‘Clement’ becomes ‘Douglas’. What is the correct translation of a poem? Is that question even possible to answer?

Late in Hong Sang-soo’s A Traveler’s Needs (2024), we see Iris (Isabelle Huppert), a French teacher in Seoul, ask a passerby for the translation of a poem engraved onto the wall. The Korean woman presents the poem’s English translation on her phone for Iris, and proceeds to ask for a favor in return: Would she interpret the poem into French? Iris agrees, but not before asking: “Dandelion? Magpie? I don’t know what these words mean.” Prompting the Korean woman to explain that one is a flower, and the other a bird. As Iris interpreted the poem out loud, I couldn’t focus on anything but the premonition of the two words. When ‘flower’ and ‘bird’ finally appear in the verse, they are immediately and unconsciously replaced. For dandelion is no mere flower, and magpie mere bird. Yet Hofstadter’s statement haunts me: the form has been maintained. What harm would this minor change incur?

Attention is constantly drawn to the details of translation in A Traveler’s Needs. In the film we see Iris teaching French in a peculiar method: she engages in conversations with her pupils, asking questions about their attitudes towards personal matters, and transforming their answers into French passages. No textbooks nor grammar lessons, instead she asks them to repeat the paragraphs of their sentiments out loud as many times as possible. To feel their emotions expressed truthfully in a foreign language. When asked about her mode of teaching, Iris misspeaks and describes it as a mode of thinking. Perhaps this mode is exactly what Moeko Fujii describes as positing translation as “gleaning, as a constant misreading, a counter to the idea of translation as conversion.” Translation here manifests in two distinct manners, for Iris is not only translating the answers into French, but she is also translating the pupils’ answers into statements about themselves. Asking how she felt playing the piano, Iris’ pupil I-Song (Kim Seung-yun) answered that she felt annoyed at her lack of skill. Which Iris interprets as:

The same French passage reappears later in the film, with a different student. The words do not change, the delivery does not change, yet the meaning is entirely different.

Repetition is far from scarce in Hong’s films. It is often joked about that Hong makes the same film over and over again. In the section of art-house film criticism Hong attracts, exercises of pattern recognition within his oeuvre seem to be the dominant mode (some might argue this mode of attention to be exemplary of the Cinephile). I am guilty of the same tendency. The first handful of Hongs I watched baffled me entirely, and I held on desperately to the seeming repetitions and motifs. I struggled to find meaning to the recurring elements I identified. It felt like I was watching the same film over and over again, yet every time I was missing the joke; that the key to cracking the Hong mystery would reside in the next one, and the one after that. It is just that I am watching the wrong Hong. And I persisted through, for whatever reason, even if frustration was the prevailing affect. Something always draws me back to Hong.

In his 2024 article ‘Against Rereading’, Oscar Schwartz describes the practice of rereading as “a basically conservative pursuit.” He argues against revisiting the classics and, in his mind, the resulting conflation of familiarity for mastery. I see my obsession with Hong to be a counterargument to this baffling sentiment. Having been a practicing Hong devotee for many years, I struggled to be convinced by the false equivalency of returning to a work of art as a conservative manifestation. Is there nothing to be learned in returning to the same paragraph, same page, same book, same scene, same film over and over again?

Ignoring the absurdity of “being the best at moviegoing” for a second, I do think you can get better at watching a Hong film. Better, yes; but never best. Mastery is the last thing on Hong’s mind, and the last on mine. A Traveler’s Needs illustrates this attitude perfectly: the rules of a language, the rules of the film, of the game is not the most important. Instead he wallows in the befuddling complexities of his ‘infinite worlds.’ What Hong has taught me is the value in “looking at everything again very slowly.” Not to seize it, or to master it, but to indulge in the very pleasure of attention, because that is the only way things can change. So I will continue to watch Hong Sang-soo’s films, just as Hofstadter continued to translate the same poem over and over. Until there is nothing one can find, nothing one can learn. Yet as we all know, a limit can only be approached infinitely, but never reached.