New Directions in Art History — David Young Kim "Listening to the Lives anew: Giorgio Vasari in South Korea circa 1986"

Lee Keun Bai (1914–2007), born in Pyongyang and educated in Nagasaki, Paris, Milan, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a biochemist lauded for his research on human metabolism. During South Korea’s forays into nuclear energy development early in the Cold War, his research contributed to understanding how radiation interacts with living systems. Yet unbeknownst to his scientific colleagues, Lee spent his evenings translating Giorgio Vasari’s Lives (1550/1568), one of art history’s foundational texts, into Korean. After more than twenty years of work, his translation was published in 1986 without much acknowledgement from the art history establishment, either in East Asia or the West.

A year before I entered graduate school in the early 2000s, sent by my family to Seoul to rehabilitate my broken Korean, I came across Lee’s forgotten translation on my uncle’s bookshelf. Ever since then, I have been preoccupied with how to read this work—written in a language I am both close with but distant from, written about a subject matter—the Italian Renaissance—to which I have devoted my scholarly life.

Against the backdrop of Lee’s life story, in this talk I discuss how Lee deploys Korean onomatopoeia while empathizing with a shivering figure in Masaccio’s famed frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel. While Ferdinand de Saussure disparaged onomatopoeia, calling it “a marginal phenomenon,” specialists in Korean and Japanese linguistics have pointed to the significance of mimetic words in those languages. In Lee’s translation of Vasari, the alliteration of consonants in the Korean sonically mimics the movements of the mouth and tongue when the body is exposed to cold. Lee’s translation thus both echoes Vasari sonically and mimes the gesture of the freezing figure’s mouth. In reproducing the stammering and chattering with their own mouth, the reader is brought from the scale of epic Biblical events into the momentary span of sensation or utterance.