Sonagi - "Rain Shower" by Hwang Sun-won

Heh, I found a modern video remake of a modern-classic Korean story, Sonagi.

Rain Shower, also called Shower in English, 0r Sonagi (in Romanized Korean), is a short story written by Hwang Sun-won in 1959 (Hwang also wrote the seminal novel The Descendants of Cain - a horrific story of greed and betrayal). Sonagi is a brief but a heavy rain shower that suddenly comes down usually on a hot afternoon. In Hwang’s story, the rain shower both causes and symbolizes the short and tragic love of the boy and the girl. The story begins with the boy encountering the girl playing by the stream on his way back home. By the end, the girl is... well, read it for yourself. You can read Sonagi at Brother Anthony of Taize's excellent website here.

For now, here is the excellent modern video version. It contains Korean, but you don't need to know any Korean to follow the plot (It actually ends at about 5:15, the remainder is blooper stuff and credits).

The Three Most Popular Novelists in Korea? One Book Available in English

LOL - the title is a bit of a cheat, since the next two authors bring the total up to 5 currently in print and as many as 8 potentially available. ;-)

In any case, here is an interesting but brief list of the favorite Korean novelists of Koreans from the Korea Times.

Interesting to note that two of the top four authors are women, something that you would likely not see in the United States, for reasons I leave for other amateur sociologists to follow up. I also note that they are all pretty old (Park Kyung-ni is recently deceased at age 81, Lee Oi-soo is 62 as is Yi Mun-yol, and Hwang Suk-young is 67, only Gong Ji-young is young at a sprightly 46)

Here are the first five authors and the availability of their work in English (as I could find it on the web):

Most popular was Lee Oi-soo - For whom I could find no translated works
Second, Park Kyung-ni - The Land (Currently out of Print)
Third, Gong Ji-young - My Sister, Bongsoon
Fourth Yi Mun-yol - Our Twisted Hero; Twofold Song; An Appointment with My Brother; The Poet (apparently out of print)
Fifth, Hwang Suk-young - The Shadow of Arms; The Old Garden (Which may or may not be published in translation soon)

The excellent news for me is that I now have another Yi Mun-yol book to track down. He's gone three for three on books I found, so I have high hopes.

The Dwarf, by Cho Se-hui

Many years ago, far too early (before I understood the slightest bit 0f Korean history or literature) I got the chance to review Cho Se-Hui's The Dwarf in Acta Koreana. Now, as I work through the Jimoondang Portable Literature collection, I come across A Dwarf Launches a Little Ball, which is in many ways the key chapter to The Dwarf.

I have to admit that this story/novel boggles me a little bit, and may well be one of those stories which you really need to review in the original Korean to completely understand. Because of the complications of the larger The Dwarf and its self-contained novelette A Dwarf Launches a Little Ball, I'm going to, a la James over at The Grand Narrative, break this up into three pieces. First I will review the larger novel (easily available here on Amazon), then I will tackle the knotty story at the heart of it, and third I will jot down some notes about Cho, the times in which he wrote, and the impact of the novel.

First, my "oh so long ago" review, in its full envelope of incomprehension (I do hope I got some things right!):

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Cho Sehǔi’s The Dwarf is a powerful work of social criticism focusing on the forced redevelopment of Seoul in the 1970s, and the human costs that accompanied it. It combines biting realism with an often fantastic structure that pulls a reader into the difficult and fragmented era the work describes. Cho combines a kaleidoscopic narrative approach, powerful use of scientific symbols, and a dead-flat and deadeye narrative tone. Reading The Dwarf requires some attention, but the interlocking narrative arcs and often disconcerting internal shifts in narrator or time frame are both supportive of the theme of the book and ultimately rewarding.

The Dwarf was written between 1975 and 1978 as a series of semi-connected short stories published across several Korean magazines. In Korea these works were collected into A Dwarf Launches a Little Ball, which has been re-named The Dwarf in the current publication. The Dwarf is a yŏnjak sosŏl (linked novel) or collection of separately published short stories which can stand alone or supplement each other. Traditionally, yŏnjak sosŏl was written by multiple authors but Cho asserts the role of multiple-author to himself to create a particularly close thematic coherence while simultaneously partaking of the form’s fractured structure. The yŏnjak sosŏl structure of The Dwarf is the first indication of the powerful mimetic approach Cho takes to his work. This mimesis gives the reader a closer sense of navigating the same world the characters of The Dwarf inhabit. That world is a harsh one in which untrammeled capital works its semi-conscious but inevitable will upon the disenfranchised. The Dwarf asks whom “progress” is for, who loses and who wins?

Cho Sehui was well situated to write about such a topic. Born in 1942, he was a member of the so-called “hangul generation,” the first post-war generation who were taught and wrote in Hangul, not Japanese. Cho’s education was not colonial yet, paradoxically, his most important work would focus on internal colonization and would do so in an overly political way. This was a departure for Korean literature in which most political commentary had largely been in the background or historical in nature, but rarely commented on directly by characters or in text. Cho’s generation was to be the one that broke this wall of silence:

This was precisely the generation that went through the calamity of internecine struggle in a state of less awakened consciousness, that is, in a state of undeveloped powers of discrimination, and also the fact that they leapt to the fore as leading elements of the student revolution soon after passing through the void of ruin that immediately followed the war. Such generational characteristics . . . suggest two sorts of complex dispositions . . . they may show a fear of history (given the June 25 and April 19 experiences) or, on the other hand, feel either potency or frustration (as in reaction to [the] May 16 [coup d'état]); with regard to life and living, they may show intense despair (having passed through the void of ruin) or, on the other hand, feel either sardonic or contempt toward life. (South Korea's Minjung Movement: The Culture and Politics of Dissidence. Kenneth M. Wells - editor. : University of Hawaii Press. Honolulu. 1995. Page Number: 215)

For Cho, the response was both sardonic and despairing.

History was also poised for Choi’s work. Park Chung Hee, still one of Korea’s most popular leaders, presided over a South Korean “economic miracle.” But this miracle included a forced modernization that was largely mounted on the backs on the poor and the weak, and reaction was inevitable. On November 13th of 1970, Chon T’ae-il publicly immolated himself in protest against labor exploitation in the rayon garment industry and this act helped define a new era of workers activism. At the same time increasing demographic and economic pressure on Seoul resulted in waves of ‘illegitimate’ housing developments being razed in un-remunerated and semi-remunerated evictions of the poor, who could often not afford the replacement housing that was only sporadically provided for them. Laura Nelson describes this process in her book, “Measured Excess: Status, Gender, and Consumer Nationalism in South Korea”. She notes that “people continued to come … until the capital was gorged on people and the government began, in the 1960’s, to bulldoze neighborhoods and cart the people away.” Still people came, and still they were carted away.

The Dwarf revolves around a physical dwarf, a proverbial “little guy,” his family, friends and the changing economic and social relationships forged in, or destroyed by, forced Korean modernization. The book elliptically follows the dwarf’s stunted existence through squalid cityscapes and demonstrates how the oppressions visited on the father are revisited upon the children. A short cast of characters cycles in and out of the stories in a fashion somewhat reminiscent of the movie “Pulp Fiction.”

The dwarf is a handyman living in the Felicity District of the Eden Province. The area is slated for forced redevelopment and the dwarf and his family are evicted from the only place they can call a happy home, notwithstanding the “sewer-creek” which runs next door to it. Economic forces destroy the dwarf’s home and as the story works towards its unhappy conclusion the dwarf eventually commits suicide in a factory smokestack while his family is sundered. With his diminutive height of 3 feet 10 inches in “real life,” the dwarf is also symbolic of the individually crippling and diminishing immensity of the economic apparatus of the modern state. Family members routinely rue that society mis-measures the dwarf, taking him at his height and not at his skills. “People called father a dwarf. Their perception was correct. Sad to say, that was their only correct perception of father This societal focus on literal measure is a subtle irony obliquely referencing several aspects of modernization, including the necessities of measuring everything, regularizing the size of everything, and commodifying everything. It is no coincidence that as this book was being written the Park government was on the streets of Seoul, it’s fashion police literally measuring the hair-length of men and the skirt-length of women. In the factories, meanwhile, standardization, routinization and the tyranny of the time clock erased human differences between workers when not actually erasing humanity.

This diminished state is represented physically and symbolically throughout the work. The book is partially framed by two stories featuring the crippled Squatlegs and Humpback who are forced from their homes and into a literal freak-show. Healthy characters grow disabilities throughout the work. The dwarf’s health fades. The union organizer, Chi-Sop is slowly whittled down throughout the book. Near the conclusion of the book he is missing two fingers and his face has nearly been destroyed, “his nose was squashed down and disfigured and below his eyes there were scars.” Even the rich and apparently successful son of the Chaebol leader is rendered psychologically broken (“The Spinyfish Entering My Net”) and spiritually empty.

This scarring and diminution is not merely physical, it is social and economic as well. The dwarf dies, his son becomes a murderer, and the dwarf’s daughter is reduced to concubinage to steal back her families’ right to a home. This last theft is largely unrewarded as when the daughter returns to her home, “there was no sign that the dwarf, the dwarf’s two sons, and the dwarf’s daughter had ever dwelt there.” Instead, the engines of omnipotent capital have destroyed all signs of previous human habitation and sundered all previous human relationships.

The confusion, disorder, and randomness of the world Cho describes is partially paralleled in his structure of loosely linked yet intersecting stories, narratives out of time and space, and short, disconnected sentence structure. Cho’s narrative structure, is analogous to the era about which he writes and it gives a sense of the disorder in which the characters live. In this time neighborhoods, families, and social structures were destroyed in seeming instants by the implacable onslaught of government mandated economic progress. From inside that historical process, events must have seemed without meaning, or conscious intent, a series of random forces converging to destroy. In The Dwarf traditional social structures, communal and Confucian, are eliminated in a moment and replaced by the relationships of capital. Nelson notes that the eviction/building process “represented a rupture with the nations’ Korea history” and Choi articulates this dislocation clearly. Similarly, outcomes are random and often without meaning. One of the key plot turns is the dwarf’s eldest son’s murder of the head of the Ungang Group, which has spearheaded the mass eviction that catches up the dwarf and his family. The son, however, mistakenly kills the boss’s brother, who is similar in appearance. Even rough justice is, apparently, random.

At the local level Cho’s style is tight, brightly observant, and features blunt-instrument sentences. Cho is terse, sometimes to the point of aridity. He rarely uses dependent clauses or adjectives. Even discussing enormous themes like death, love, and loss, he is brief and precise. When the dwarfs’ daughter attempts to come to terms with her loss of family, chastity, and honor she muses:

When I think of death a scene come to mind: a desert horizon. Around nightfall the wind gets sandy. At the end of the line described by the horizon I stand naked. My legs are slightly spread, my arms drawn close to me. My head is lowered halfway and my hair covers my chest. If I close my eyes and count to ten my outline fades and disappears. All that remains is the windy gray horizon. This is death as I know it.

These sentences are complex by Cho’s normal standards with linking “ands” and a colon, and yet simple, brief, evocative and explicative. Cho links loss of chastity (“naked”, “legs slightly spread” and “arms drawn close.”), loss of identity (“my outline… disappears”) and death in just eight sentences averaging barely over ten words each. This economy suits the generally undereducated characters without betraying their existence as thinking characters, adds an air of journalistic verisimilitude to his writing and directly suits a story that is, in part, a jeremiad against the blunt and unsentimental tactics of industrializing capitalism and governmental unconcern.

Paradoxically, this economy lends Cho’s writing an air of fantasy. By rendering the often fatalistic mini-narratives in the book as short and clipped, Cho removes them from the romantic, the overwrought, and the character-driven. These narratives are presented from a remote and distant view, regardless of the personal pain they contain.

Cho leaves his final question unanswered, except by symbolic implication. The Dwarf starkly delineates the emptiness of promises of “modernization.” But who is responsible and what is the future? The Dwarf blames capitalism as an historical force and goes on to suggest that the dystopia it creates might be endless. Two of Choi’s signature symbols in the work, the Mobiüs Strip and the Klein Bottle, focus on the interlocked and/or infinite. These scientific creations are both limited and local while at the same time looped and without boundary. They go on ‘forever and ever’ without delineation or distinction, without beginning or end. This circle of life and endless, but flat and repetitive, work is also suggested by the framed nature of The Dwarf. The Dwarf is doubly framed, first by the narrative of a math instructor and then by the narrative of two cripples, Squatlegs and Humpback. The ‘outside” frame is the story of a math teacher rendered impotent by the strictures of the system in which he teaches. The math instructor, without offering hope for change, explains to his students that their failure has been pre-ordained and without identifiable cause. When a student asks who is responsible the instructor replies:

“They … Who can be more specific than that? One of their characteristics is that until the day they die they won’t assume responsibility for a single thing. They all have plausible alibis. … It’s also a scheme to develop you gentlemen and your successors as human capital. Gentlemen, we are not the ends, you and I. Rather, we’ve become the means without realizing it.

There is no explicit responsibility, the evil “they” are unnamed and unnamable. The ‘internal’ frame is the story of the handicapped and murderous duo of Squatlegs and Humpback who, after even the ‘success’ of an initial murder and robbery of a property speculator, are betrayed and left alone. Their promise of savior, their “master,” turns out to be nothing but another one of the “them.” In The Dwarf there is no way out but the choice the dwarf himself takes – a futile attempt to scale the heights and a fall back to death. The Dwarf ends, without hope, instead with the promise (and curse) of endless repetition.

On a more prosaic note, the translation here is smooth. No English reader will trip upon unlikely metaphors or ludicrous phrases. In part this has to do with Cho’s simple sentence structure and vocabulary, but this is also a credit to the translation skills of Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton. These are experienced translators and it shows. Bruce Fulton is the inaugural holder of the Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia and has done a wide variety of editing and translating, often with his wife.

The Dwarf is a valuable addition to the small, but steadily growing body of Korean literature translated into English. It is a novel with relevance for most readers as the social and political issues it addresses are universal. More important, The Dwarf is a work of staggering imagination and technical control balanced by social realism and granular detail. Cho takes on a big story, perhaps the second biggest story of post-war Korean history, and manages to fit it into twelve short stories of one small man and his insignificant friends. In one way the work is a masterpiece of miniaturization and in another it is a sprawling epic. In either case, it deserves a very wide audience.

The Flower with Thirteen Fragrances by Yun Ch'oe

Earlier, I posted (after prompting!) a mention of the fact that I had read one story of Yun Ch’oe called The Last of Ha’nako. I really hadn’t liked it that much, as it hinged on a pretty obvious plot twist, although one that might have not been quite so obvious in Korea, at the time Yun wrote the story.

Today I read The Flower with Thirteen Fragrances and I read an entirely different author. With an omniscient third-person narrator, always a good way to deal with a fractured story, Ch’oe relates the story of two lost souls, Bai and “Green Hands” who meet each other in near tragedy and once joined, work together to create beauty.

As in The Last of Ha’nako the ending becomes clear about halfway through the story, but it is not based on sudden revelation (and one that comes as no suprise), but rather it flows naturally from the events of the story. Bai and Green Hands create the “Winter Crysanthemum” a new, beautiful, semi-narcotic, and potentially quite valuable flower. The flower is a result of their love, dedication to handcraft, and partly to their desire to flee society. As the fame of their flower grows, that same society naturally encroaches the couple, and they find their brilliant creation threatened by extinction. Take the “flower” to be symbolic of their love (or not, really) and you have the standard elements of the “us against the world” love story. The Flower with Thirteen Fragrances has a bit more to say than just that.

Ch’oe masterfully mixes her elements of fairy-tale with descriptions of the ‘outside’ world that very deftly navigate space between parody and hard-edged description. As the flower becomes popular, photographers arrive, pa-jeong stands pop up, and cheesy nicknacks begin to proliferate.

Outside the village here is a wonderful scene in a government office as officials attempt to craft, in 40 minutes, a complete program with which to deal with the horticultural, social, and medical implications of the thirteen different flowers. This meeting concludes with the farcical,

“our forty minutes are already up. We’ll make that the conclusion and close this conference.”
“But what conclusion do you mean?”
“What we’ve just come up with.”

I hear echoes of Alice in Wonderland there.

Finally, Ch’oe introduces three un-named characters (They are known as K, L, and M, but might as easily be Paeckche, Silla, and Koguryo) each of whom hope to profit from publishing credit related to the flowers. This section is an amusing commentary on personal pride, patriotism, and idealism, and the possible infamy that can be associated with each. Individually, the 'letter-men' muses on how they might steal credit for the flower and how their name for the as-yet unnamed blossom, is superior to that of the others.

In the end, only their hatred that someone else gets credit remains, and they successfully conspire to destroy the Wind Chrysanthemum. In fact, they proudly trumpet their venal reunion as evidence of their sincerity and probity. This is an amusing take on the traditional notion of modern Korean Literature that re-union, the end of diaspora, is innately a good thing.

In her clever way, in quite palatable text, Ch’oe delivers a message parallel to that of The Descendants of Cain by Hwang Sun-won, without the un-subtle “happy ending” of that story,* that loyalty and love have difficulty standing before treachery and evil.

The story ends in a romantic, or sad depending upon reader’s disposition, moment, with the two lovers setting out for the “North Pole,” and freedom.

As I noted in my previous comments on this work, it is available at: http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/klt/97wint/choeyun.htm

Of published in The Golden Phoenix: Seven Contemporary Korean Short Stories
Which you can find here http://www.rienner.com/title/The_Golden_Phoenix_Seven_Contemporary_Korean_Short_Stories

Definitely worth the short time it takes to read.

*Both works discussed are translated by Suh Ji-moon, who partners with Julie Pickering on The Descendants of Cain work

Of course Hamlet is Superior in the Original Klingon!

ALTERNATE TITLE: THE DIFFICULTY OF LANGUAGE - THE IMPORTANCE OF TRANSLATION

The video below, other than bringing me more hits than anything else I’ve ever posted, also got THE TRANSLATOR back to the blog.

It’s a win no matter how you look at it!

What we seem to have come up with, after a flurry of emails back and forth, is that, duh, languages are different. Part of this was also the result of a question my students asked about translating Korean poetry.

They said, 'in Korean we have so many (“too many” as they alarmingly put it) ways to say “yellow” but in English there is only one.' Of course that isn’t true – even in colors we have more than one yellow - ochre for instance. But I noted that in English we appropriate nouns (again, a "duh." English is a noun-based and taxonomic language in a platonic culture) as colors.

In the course of my conversation with THE TRANSLATOR he noted (although my students still disagree I have to accept that this is likely a result of my bad explanation of the question) that in Korean nouns can be used to describe colors. Still, there was something odd about his response and I think I tracked it down. Koreans can use nouns as colors, but they need to append "색" to it. In English this is not necessary as, in fact, some words for colors are exactly the same as the color of the noun to which the refer (e.g. "orange" or "buttercup" - no one even considers the physical critter, instead we know we are talking about color through the context of conversation. This is also true of things like "chocolate" or "banana." In context we do not need to indicate this is a color. This might be a linguistic feature, but to me it seems more like 'how' we describe color and should be added to the # of colors we have).

In some ways this discussion reminds me of the cultural confusion that underlie the one-time claim that eskimos had an unusually large number of words for snow. In fact, this claim (still bandied about) was based on linguistic misunderstandings and if you have time, this excellent debunking of the myth is also a good introductory primer on how and why these misunderstandings between languages occur.

But then THE TRANSLATOR went on to note something I consider far more important and that is that whatever differences there are between the languages, it is difficult to claim, as our behatted video-dude below does, that one language is objectively better than another.

In fact, THE TRANSLATOR'S response was so comprehensive and brilliant, and came with such a nice, similar, example from English, that I quote it nearly in its entirety. He begins by discussing the point the hated dude was trying to make about Hanguk-mal and sound:

What works in Korean is that vowel sounds carries certain quality other than its own sound. For example, "ㅏ" is much brighter, lighter, smaller than "ㅓ". "ㅗ" and "ㅜ" works in a similar manner, though not entirely the same. Hence, as in the brook example, "jol jol jol (졸졸졸)" is for a tiny brook, whereas "jul jul jul (줄줄줄)" is for a sizable brook.

Do you remember this passage from the article we translated for (Name Redacted)?

Another critical element unique to literature for children is the fact that adults often read the text out loud to children. Translating without fully understanding the significance of this may result in a text too tedious to ears because the phonetic and phonologic significance of the ST would not have been reflected appropriately to the TT. For example, let us consider Korean and English as the source language (SL) and target language (TL), respectively. If it were possible to implement similar rythmns, and the onomatopoeia and mimesis were equally developed in both languages, speakability would not be much of an issue in translation. However, English and Korean are utterly dissimilar in such aspects. Each syllable is pronounced with equal amount of stress in Korean language, whereas English employs pitch with stressed and non-stressed syllables. Fundamentally, English is tonal, dynamic and durational. Add rhyming to these and the rhythm becomes stronger. In Korean language, matching the number of syllables and utilizing onomatopoeia and mimesis are the techniques used to bring out its own rhythm. Precision in transferring the source text content is a must in translation, but it is also necessary in children’s literature translation to consider the rhythm the reader will follow when reading out loud the translated text to a child.

In the passage, (NAME REDACTED) points out the fact the onomatopoeia and mimesis are not equally developed in Korean and English, alluding that certain quality is more "developed" in one language over the other. English language has rhymes and stresses to create rhythm, whereas Korean language uses onomatopoeia and mimesis to create rhythm. Let's not get too technical about this, but IMHO description of an object's quality (color, volume, etc) is built into the vowel system in Korean language, which is not the same in English. Hence, it is more efficient to create onomatopoeia and mimesis in Korean.

Being the keen critic of culture and language that he is (and supergenius!) he immediately adds a similar example of a facility in English (to which he generally alluded above) that is difficult in Korean.

OTOH, Korean language doesn't understand rhyme because everything ends with either "nida" or "yo". Rap is still struggling to settle in Korea because Koreans find rhyming funny and awkward, particularly when Koreans rap in Korean language. Who wants rhyming when all endings are the same?

These are simply characteristics of a language. These qualities may compare with other qualities in other languages, but the do not compose any qualification that one language is overall superior to others.

Weird, rappers say "Yo" a lot, and it still doesn't translate well? ;-P

To keep me on the straight and narrow(!) about colors, and to put a concluding remark to the video below, THE TRANSLATOR concludes:

And that's what the guy in the video failed for me. He was quickly building up an argument that because Korean can do 24 different shades of yellow, but it's not so in English, that Korean language must be superior to English and thus translation into an inferior language is impossible, therefore Koreans don't get any Nobel Prizes for Literature. His leap of faith is full of holes...but that does not mean there are not 24 shades of yellow in Korean, excluding object colors.

Which is just right really. Languages aren't superior, instead they are different. This is why skilled translation is difficult and important - it takes a big brain to figure these differences out and to determine how to take something that has an easy linguistic meaning in one language and to translate it into a language in which the meaning can't be clear through the linguistic tool used in the original language.

Or, as THE TRANSLATOR puts it, in superior language (and in an argument that also applies to the original Japanese/Korean model):

What does this all mean? Korean language has its particularities and English has its own. That's all. Are there more words that describe various tints of "yellow" in Korean than in English. I think so. Is English more "precise" when it comes to "when" things happened, had happened, has happened, will happen, is going to happen, will have happened, etc?

I can probably name a few more.

Are these qualities evidence that one language is superior than others? I say it's comparing apples and oranges. We're equal, but not the same, right?

Be careful though; just because we want to argue that languages are not superior or inferior to others, ignoring certain particularities of a language is not smart, either!

And so, the conversation continues. ;-)

PS - If you didn't get the Star Trek reference in the title, you are insufficiently nerdy!

This may not be the way to increase Korea's chances of getting that Nobel Peace prize

This is a classic piece of jingoism - the reason Korea is not getting more Nobel prizes is that, ironically, its language is too good.

I far prefer Yun Cho'e's approach of doing good work.

BTW - because this seemed so combustible, the translator had a quick go at the language .. which I have reproduced below the video.




Translator Says:

Each language differs in depicting sound, and Korean is the most developed language in depicting and expressing sound. Korean is very developed in “sound symbolism (onomatopoeia)”. We have “red”, “clear(?)”, “dark red”, “rust (and opaque) red”. There are more words, right? And a brook flows “jol jol jol”, “jul jul jul” “jil jil jil”, “tjol tjol tjol”, “zjual zjual zjual”, “qual qual qual” and we can feel by only listening the volume of water flowing. There is no other language but Korean that is developed in this fashion. I’m an English instructor, but I am also a Korean enthusiast. My principle is that one must speak Korean well to speak English well. (Personally,) I devote much effort to speak better Korean, as much as the effort I put into further studying English. And I love the Republic of Korea. Truly I do. You need to speak English well, and you need to speak Korean correctly. Korean language is extremely superior. (Because of that,) Translating Korean into English is too difficult. Hence, there has not been a Nobel Literature Award for Koreans. Did you know this? Why are you chuckling? You are chuckling because you feel dumbfounded, right? You are not laughing at yourself (for your own inability?), right? How many Nobel Literature Laureates are there in Japan? A factoid for you: 2 (Laureates). One time, late Midang, Seo Jung Ju, contended for the award, but the honor went to Japan. Then, why Japan has…. In fact do you know how substandard Japan had been? If we had not introduced our culture to them during the Baekje Dynasty in the 4th Century, they might still be living primitively even today. Then why is that we have not received the Nobel Literature Award with all this superior culture and heritage, while Japan won it 2 times? Why? It’s the translating Korean (literature) is difficult. In case of Japanese, the language is shabby and that’s why it is very easy to translate it into English. However, Korean is too superior to a point where no other language on earth can compare. Hence translation is (nearly) impossible. It’s not my own claim. It’s the truth. Do you know the poem Seungmu (Buddhist Dance), by Cho Ji Hun?

This thread fair-white peaked hat
Is finely folded (into) a fluttering butterfly

“Silently a flower falls” by Ch’oe Yun

A rather long article on a writer of whom I had not heard. It sounds like Yun uses a pretty dramatic narrative technique:

The story is divided into eleven sections. Ch’oe Yuns creates through the application of modern techniques and instruments a chaotic atmosphere that reflects the effects on the baffled society during and after the Kwangju massacre. Ch’oe choice to implement such different and dissimilar figures in her story is perfect to restruct the confusion of the massacre. The created structure of several voices is a unique technique, to give the reader an insight in how far the events have influenced the lifes of different people.

I'll have to try to find this and see if that reads as confusing as it sounds here.

One of her other works, The Flower with Thirteen Fragrances is available here with a short biography of the author. There is also an interview with Yun, here that includes a funny comment on the current Korean obsession with winning a Nobel Prize for literature and a mention of Cho Se-hui's A Tiny Ball Launched by a Dwarf, which is next in line in the PKLT list of books I need to review.

The "Sparkling" Widget, new and improved

Readers of my other blog know how I felt about the "Sparkling" widget (NOTE: That post now features the new and improved widget!) when it first came out. But the KTO has revamped the thing, and now it presents Korea, and the idea of a trip to Korea, in a much better light.

Props to the KTO for listening to the original responses to this thing.

Sky Nest, by Choi Jongyoll

Sky Nest is not a work in Korean, but it is very much a Korean work. Jongyoll Choi lived in the United States for fewer than two years and published just this slender volume of poetry in English. Choi has also published a Korean collection entitled A Bullfighter Leans on the Morning Sunshine, and has translated several Korean works into English. But Sky Nest is a landmark work. Interesting as verse it is also intriguing as an opportunity to see poetry that is only “partly translated” from Korean to English. Choi’s work is excellent Korean poetry at the same time it is excellent English poetry. It addresses issues, uses images, and features poetic devices that are common to both languages but which rarely completely, or largely, survive translation. Choi’s ability to render Korean tropes and literary devices into English as an integral part of his writing process is extremely rare and this renders his poetry valuable for the artistic insight it can bring to English readers.

Conceptually, Choi sets his sights on a goal that is often common to Korean and English poetry; to describe the shared language, or perhaps the simultaneous translation, of humans and nature. This kind of task has been the task of traditional Korean poetry as well as many genres of English poetry (e.g. Romantic).

Thematically, Choi’s poetry is not radical. Nature, writing, and communication feature in most of it. In the Abstract of his Master’s Thesis, for which most of these poems were first written (of the ninety poems in Sky Nest, Choi had seventy-three in his thesis and of these most are nearly intact in the book), Choi noted that he wished to, “show a poem as organic being in which every thing in the world can communicate with each other’s language.” This task might well interest a man navigating dual cultures - the issue of communicating from one world to another. Choi also noted that, “this collection may show that writing a poem is just a process of transferring non-human beings’ words to the readers.” As one reads that line, one wonders if Choi is not making a sly anti-anthropomorphic reference to working between one culture/language and another. While the introduction to Choi’s thesis is missing from his published work, I believe it is useful to a reader who wishes to understand the (once) explicit task of Choi’s work.

In the first poem of the volume, “A Book of Snow” Choi sets his topic, metaphorical field, and writing style:

A book of white words
someone has written on the field
an epic of wind or a legend about winter

In March
The sun opens the book and tells a story
under the eaves and through the ditch

In just one day
sunshine has read
through the winter’s bulky book.

Choi writes about a near literal transcription of nature into the world. This combines his main themes of, nature, communication in general, and writing in particular. Choi explicitly ties literary forms to nature (“epic .. wind” and “legend …nature”). Choi’s writing style seems simple and traditionally Korean, particularly to an eye that is used to Korean translation. But there is something unusual, even in this restrained and reflective start. The first stanza, though recognizable as ‘Korean’ also contains a subtle, but unusual, use of alliteration (both explicit and created “w” sounds); the second stanza concludes with a ghostly echo of Lydia Child’s “Over the river and through the woods,” and; the poem concludes in alliteration. These are literary devices uncommon to translated works and it is here an attentive reader’s inner ear might first prick up to note a profoundly Korean sensibility clad in comfortable English clothes. Choi’s work is profoundly Korean in one way and profoundly in English in another.

When Choi uses traditionally western literary devices, such as alliteration or assonance, the hop sharply from the page precisely because we have not previously seen these devices in works translated from Korean. In Sick Choi’s verse slithers and slides with a serpentine aspect and repetition one might expect to find in Walt Whitman: “The sky swallows the sunlight / the sky swallows the moonlight / the sky always fills itself with a smile.” This kind of sensuous alliteration is rarely found in translated poetry, no matter how skillful the translator.

A Rock Chair stands out, for good reason, as one of the most “Korean” of Choi’s works, containing strong thematic and structural similarities to poems found in classic Korean works like “Yi-Saeng Peers Over The Wall.” Compare Choi’s verse to a verse from that work:

To the left,
Bukhan mountain with a stone-grey façade
glows more redly;
A Rock Chair

Around the twelve peaks of Wu Mountain fog closely lays,
A half-exposed apex is surrounded in red and blue rays.
Yi-Saeng Peers Over the Wall

These passages are more than 500 years apart, and surprisingly similar. Notably, "A Rock Chair" lacks the interesting literary devices of most of Choi’s other works and this is partially responsible for how completely traditional it seems. This poem also contains lines that are surprisingly constructed and rhythmically uneven such as, “The dew is the first to sit on it every morning.” Not surprisingly, conversation with the author reveals that this is one of the poems the Choi first wrote in Korean and then translated into English. It reminds us of “Korean” poetry partly by nature of its translated state. It is by no means a poor poem, but it seems written in amber - not as loose-limbed and graceful as many of his other poems.

The only dissonant notes in this collection (and this may be less a reflection of Choi’s work than my reading) are rung in a five-poem digression during which Sky Nest turns to poems about the birth and early life of Choi’s son. These poems stand apart from the remainder of the collection in theme and subject, and interrupt its natural flow.

On other occasions, though, when Choi is addressing issues not directly related to the natural world (normally when considering issue of culture or language) he is either incisive or uses clever natural metaphors. In "Understanding Another Culture", writing about translation between cultures, Choi considers currency and comes to a realization. “I count the number / and begin to understand America / / Culture is numbers!” In "Brown Dog", Choi crafts an extended metaphor about a dog, mysteriously borne of cats who, even when he fails, defines his success in his attempt to erase barriers, “For a moment he thought / “I am somebody.”” Running through each of these lines is the recurrent question of communication between cultures.

Choi fluently navigates this communication between cultures. Choi is not bounded by one language as he suggests in the following lines from "Brown Dog": “The brown dog began to go bow-wow. But he meowed while he was barking.” Choi’s poetry is a unique opportunity for an English reader as it offers a partially obscured window through which Korean poetry can be glimpsed. Choi’s poetry draws from dual poetic conventions while simultaneously melding them. In interview Choi says, “writing in English … gives me a freedom to change and interpret my own poems.” Choi’s language is revealing here. “Freedom to change” is a function of writing and distinct from the translator’s necessity to change, while “interpret” is at least one degree closer to language/thought than ‘translate.’ Choi knows, and the reader knows, that his work is writing and not translation.

Why is this important at all? Because translation is a tricky business with the simplest source text. John P. Leavey Jr. posits the “requirement of contamination” in translation. Poetry, with its arbitrary conventions and love of specific-language based devices, is more difficult to translate than prose and must suffer more “contamination.” Choi’s generation 1.25 poetry (for lack of a better phrase) leaps entirely over this problem because while it is written by a Korean, contains Korean themes and tropes, and addresses traditional Korean subjects, it is also written in English and contains English themes and tropes. Choi’s reader is privileged to read a work that is not so much a translation between cultures, as a communication between them.

In the final stanza of the poem for which the volume is named, Choi reveals his ultimate wish: “In this nest / I also want to be a poem / written by fir trees / in front of my house.” In this book, Choi has created poems, written across culture, and invited English-speaking readers to peek into an entirely different house, indeed.

The Cry of the Magpies, but Kim Dong-ni

The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 3 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul

The Cry of the Magpies, By Kim Dong-Ni begins with an unusual literary conceit. The narrator tells us that what we are about to read is his retelling of a book he once came across that moved him as he felt “fraternal” with the author. Despite, apparently, having the story in hand, the narrator only promises to “stick to the author’s own words and expressions as much as possible.” This warrant raises a variety of questions, but without addressing them, the narrator jumps into ‘his’ story. We never directly see or hear from the narrator again, as the story ends without comment from him.

As typical in the Portable Library series, this story is a sad and perverse one. Bong-su returns from war after having shot his own fingers off. He is returning in search of his fiancée. Upon his return he finds his mother mortally ill, and his fiancée the wife of another man. His mother has internalized the cry of local magpies, and converted them from a symbol of good luck to a symbol of doom. Now, whenever the magpies cry the mother coughs and often begs for Bong-su to end her life, a request he frequently feels sympathetic to. Bong-su tries unsuccessfully to regain his fiancée, and by the end of the story he too has apparently gone mad, in a somewhat unexpected conclusion that features his fiancee’s sister. To say more would be to destroy the surprise of the ending.

The symbol of the story is the magpie, but Kim, perhaps suggesting something about the larger story, somewhat inverts the meaning of the magpie. Koreans typically think magpies bearers of good news and heralds of good company. In fact Wikipedia notes that the magpie “has been adopted as the "official bird" of numerous South Korean cities, counties and provinces.” Kim subverts this and turns the magpie into a more ambivalent symbol, one that can bring either good news or very bad news. Kim indicates this kind of inversion or yin-yang relationship in text as well: “The way I looked at it, “Help me” could very naturally become “Kill me, as suffering deepened into bottomless despair.”

At the end of the story Kim has left us with a similarly entangled message that only love can survive the war, but the war ensures that love can only kill.

As The Cry of the Magpies is very brief, Joomindang also included another short story, Deungsin-bul which is even shorter and of less consequential plot. As in The Cry of the Magpies, Deungshi-bul begins with a brief setup. A young Korean, conscripted by the Japanese army, looks for a way to escape. He sets his mind on escape to a Buddhist temple and here he finds a life-sized statue of a legendary Buddhist monk who burned himself as a sacrifice in order to redeem sinful and weak humanity. The young Korean struggles with the outward appearance of the Buddha, which is not traditional, and by the time he comes to peace with it, his superior seems to hint that the young Korean himself has some aspects of Deungshi-bul in him.


An amusing sub-plot, perhaps even closer to a theme than a plot, is that Deungshi-bul is partly revered because his self-martyrdom has been extremely remunerative for the temple. Kim works this in at sly angles, but it helps to keep the story grounded, and also adds a slight air of humor to the story.

Fewer than 400 books translated in a decade?

According to Arirang, by way of the Chosun Ilbo. That's only 40 a year, and I'd be interested to discover how many of these were books of poetry.

No surprisingly Yi Munyol leads the list with most books translated. Actually not a bad choice as "Our Twisted Hero" is a good novelette and "Two-fold Song" is also pretty cool as is "An Appointment With My Brother".