How to Make Humanity: Anton Hur's "Toward Eternity"

By Dez Deshaies on July 18, 2024

In an early conversation between two characters in Anton Hur's Toward Eternity, a cellist and a poetics researcher discuss the scale of interpretation versus creation when a musician plays a written piece of music. The cellist calls her instrument – and herself – a machine, a mere body that translates the notes, and then wonders whether the composer is a translator as well, "of moods, of chance, of moments." To this model where everything is a machine, the cellist says, "Behind all of the machines there has to be a human […] at some point. A real Wizard of Oz."

These two characters – Yonghun, the researcher, and Ellen, the cellist – are two of the first recipients of a medical treatment that replaces each of their body's cells with small machines called nanites – not only curing their terminal diseases, but also preventing them from aging, becoming sick again, or even dying. Yonghun outlives his husband, and begins working for the institute that preserved him, training an AI named Panit how to discover and develop their own taste in poetry – once again, creating a sequence of translation. Yonghun determines the most humane methods of introducing poems to Panit, and Panit translates the poems into their own poetic sensibility.

Then, Yonghun disappears. Security cameras in his lab record him there and then not, and he is nowhere else. An investigation launches, and then his body appears again – though he (or whoever he now is) swears that he is no longer Yonghun. He has been re-instantiated – the machines have translated a new version of him into a new body.

Hur, of course, is also a translator – one of the most widely-acclaimed translators working today – shepherding the work of so many great authors – Ocean Vuong and Bora Chung, to name just a few. But Hur is also the opposite of a machine-translator, like the models that Yonghun and Ellen discuss. Much of his success has involved guiding translated work beyond its literal, one-to-one meaning, and working with that work's original author to find whatever actual sentiment sits at the core of their words, while tightrope-walking close enough to those original words that meaning is retained. Great translators are great writers. In Toward Eternity, Hur proves that he is both.

When, in Toward Eternity, another researcher asks Panit about their favorite poem, they respond that – on that particular day, at least – their favorite poem is "Winter: My Secret" by Christina Rosetti, a playful, teasing number that ends with:

Perhaps my secret I may say,

Or you may guess."

Part of why modern literary translation is still a very human process is because of what we could call that secret that exists between the original text and the kinetic text of the translation. To my knowledge, there is not currently any way for even the strongest computational systems to hold that secret, let alone parse it into another language altogether. One of the questions that Toward Eternity asks is: What if it could? What if, through the understanding of poetry, a machine could become alive – even as the man who helped it gain that consciousness fades into the unknown?

It feels almost too aerodynamic to mention only one question that the book raises as part of this review. It is one of many – the scale of the book, despite being just over 250 pages, is massive. Geography-wise, it spans distances so long that I'd spoil them with mere mention. Temporally, it moves from the near future to, as promised, eternity. Part of the joy of reading books written by folks who have translated many texts is that – at their best, like Toward Eternity is – they are lush with inquiry and unafraid to challenge much of what we, as readers, expect. Some of the early press for Toward Eternity has aptly mentioned Kazuo Ishiguro as a comparison, and there are also shades of other writers who translate, who work in that special kind of multidirectional yet focused space of re/creation, like Brian Evenson or Anne Carson. There were multiple events across Hur's novel that happened just as I thought, "Surely you can't move at that scale in a book this size." Somehow, Hur does.

Toward Eternity is in conversation with all the work Hur has translated – all of the secrets he's guessed and guided – but it's beyond mere instantiation. It adds to an exciting literary canon of queer Korean fiction that is expanding across the world (see Sang Young Park's Love in the Big City, for instance – which Hur also worked on), while simultaneously being excavated and reexamined (see Hur's translation of Yi Kwang-Su's 1909 story, "It is Love"). Hur, in the middle of it all, has created a work that speaks to all directions of this bloom. Even across all of its action scenes – which are fast and brutal and everything that they should be – Toward Eternity is a moving examination of Hur's perspective on art: how the secret of a text exists with, along, and beyond it – and how folks who engage with art build and redefine humanity.

An important part of how Hur voices this perspective happens through characters that are repeatedly instantiated. Each iteration is a new – and sometimes warped – version of their predecessor(s), with diluted memories and, of course, a few of their secrets. Generations of a family prevent a language's extinction. A clone at the end of the world remembers a snippet of poetry. These strands of memory-through-shared-culture – for what is a secret if not something shared, or at least felt – are how humanity remains alive. If one has the experience of understanding, or appreciation, or enjoyment, Hur seems to say, one may pass that sentiment – that building-block of humanity – into wherever one vaporizes next. And if that's the case, then maybe the point of art – the point of unlocking these secrets, or at least responding to their potential – is, as Younghun says early in the book, to "write selves into being." At least one apocalypse later, a character describes a text to which she has contributed, saying, "It contains the very weight of our lives." Successfully possessing that weight – and holding it well, with all of its secrets – is exactly what Toward Eternity does.