Caveat: Coleslaw after conformity

I keep craving coleslaw.  It's not like I'm not getting enough cabbage – my two daily doses of kimchi, and all that.  Fortunately, ingredients for passable coleslaw are easy to come by – unlike some things I crave, like Mexican food, which have ingredients that are downright impossible to come by.

So I made some coleslaw.  You know, chopped cabbage, carrots…  I like to add some chopped apple, for the tart sweetness, and maybe some raisins.  I have some "coleslaw dressing" which is basically something mayonnaise-like that Koreans apparently use.  But I also have some horseradish sauce, which gives a nice flavor.  And a shake of vinegar.  My only peculiar innovation:  I add some "drinking yogurt" (which is always sweetened and flavored in its Korean variety – but that sweetness can be a nice offset in the coleslaw, I guess).  It's pretty good.

Yesterday was a strange day at work.  I had no classes – the third grade was doing some special book-report-festival (is it possible to have a book report festival?).  But I ended up extremely busy, since Ms Ryu asked me to do practice JET speaking tests.  Fortunately, I was prepared and experienced in doing such a thing, so it went quite smoothly, and I spent the day asking high-end students questions and scoring the competence of their answers.

Then, in the afternoon, we were working hard to meet more of the vice principal's arbitrary demands for making our new classroom adequate to his expectations – putting military-style (meaning very very very dull and uniform) labels on everything, and making sure nothing in the room looks too personalized or fun – god forbid our new, high-tech classroom looking like a warm, welcoming place. 

So I tried to put myself into an army mindset and just line everything up… pretending, in my mind, that some high-level colonel was going to come a-inspectin'.  Probably, this isn't far from the truth – the power plant bigwigs that are paying for all this remodelling are bound to come around at some point, soon, to see how the school's spending their money.  And they're nuclear power plant officials – they're going to like seeing lots of sterile uniformity – it will match their expectations for order and good design.  So, actually, I have some small sympathy for the vice principal's position.  But that doesn't mean he needs to be so… inhumane.

Caveat: 4) 나는 어디서 왔는가, 어디로 갈 것인가를 생각하지 않고 살아온 죄를 참회하며 절합니다

“I bow in repentance of any misdeeds lived, not thinking where I may have come from nor where I may go to.”

This is #4 out of a series of 108 daily Buddhist affirmations that I am attempting to translate with my hands tied behind my back (well not really that, but I’m deliberately not seeking out translations on the internet, using only dictionary and grammar).


2. 지극한 마음으로 부처님 법에 귀의합니다.
     “I turn to the Buddha Dharma [Law of Buddha] with all my heart.”
3. 지극한 마음으로 승가에 귀의합니다.
     “I turn to the Sangha [Buddhist community-of-faithful] with all my heart.”
4. 나는 어디서 왔는가, 어디로 갈 것인가를 생각하지 않고 살아온 죄를 참회하며 절합니다.

I would read the fourth affirmation (very tentatively) as: “I bow in repentance of any misdeeds lived, not thinking where I may have come from nor where I may go to.” 

This time, the translation was painful.

Wow, I can’t even begin to really understand what’s going on with these verbs – they’re stacked deeper than a Duluth snowdrift in January. And I may not have gotten it right – I deliberately have not gone out to try to find a translation. The Googlator gets it stunningly wrong: “I came from and where do you go from thinking you have lived without prostrate in repentance.” But knowing that Google is wrong isn’t the same as being able to do a better job, myself.

Here’s a breakdown of the pieces, as best as I can figure out:

나 = I
-는 = [TOPIC marker]
어디서 = from where[ever]
왔 = come [with embedded PAST tense marker]
-는가 = [This thing puzzles the heck out of me, but I found the following in on page 255 of my “Korean Grammar for International Learners” (my “bible”): “Vst-는가 하다  This pattern expresses the speaker’s thoughts, imaginings or suppositions about an action or state of affairs.” Also, it seems to be something that’s used when there is an alternation of choices. So from a translation standpoint, I’ve opted for the somewhat old-fashioned-sounding modal construction using “may … “]
어디로 = to where[ever]
갈 = go [FUTURE participle]
것이 = [a periphrastic “blank” nominalizer with a copula (“be-verb”) suffix. Combined with the preceding future participle, it makes a periphrastic future or suppositional tense]
 -ㄴ가 = [This the second installment of the “alternation” referenced above, in talking about “may…”]
를 = [if you decide to take the whole “sentence so far” as a nominal, this is a handy OBJECT marker making it all the object of the following verb]
생각하 = think [unmarked verb stem]
지 = [pre-NEGative non-terminative flag (maybe analogous to some language’s deployment of a subjunctive)]
않 = [NEG… the whole “think” phrase up-to-this-point is now, suddenly, negative, but I don’t think it really has that meaning… it seems more subjunctive]
고 = and / for [a kind of verbal non-terminative conjunct ending, also used in progressive modes]
살아 = live [unmarked FINITE form]
온 = [this bothers me, but I think it’s a participle of “to come” that’s been strung onto the proceeding verb “live” – that would make it an example of the famous “verb serialization” phenom that we study in linguistics, for which Korean is often used as an example. I have trouble seeing how the conjoined first “half” (up to 않고) joins to this relativized form that seems to mean “…that [I] have come to live…”]
죄 = misdeed
를 = [OBJECT marker … again, for the second half of the sentence, now]
참회하 = repent [unmarked non-terminative]
며 = while
절하 = bow [unmarked non-terminative]
-ㅂ니다 = [terminative, high-formal, declarative ending … YAY, we made it!]

I saw my breath this morning, walking to the bus terminal. Fall is happening fast, this year.

[UPDATE: So it occurs to me, on rereading this much later, that I have misunderstood this aphorism – this one, and all those that have the same structure “…misdeeds lived, not thinking…”. The “not thinking X” is in fact an example of the “misdeeds lived” – which is to say, you’re repenting for failing to experience the feeling in question.]

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