An Article on Jo Jung-rae (Taebak Mountain Range)

Over at Korea Times. A little self-congratulatory, but good. Taebak Mountain Range has not been translated into English. I have previously posted about it here.

The Other Side of Dark Remembrance by Lee Kyun-Young

The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 10 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul

The Other Side of Dark Remembrance begins in the middle of a fugue state as a Korean salaryman wakes up and springs to his feet in perfectly unfamiliar surroundings. Hungover and thirsty he searches for something to drink and considers his usual morning ritual:

“He considered this darkness he enjoyed with his eyes closed during this blank waking hour a perfect ritual of peace for him. That’s why he made a point to relish this darkness during the morning hours when he was supposed to hurry, and eventually he would sometimes be late to the office or fail to keep an appointment.”

He quickly realizes he has misplaced a satchel containing which contains documents representing an economic windfall for his company. The narrator adopts a nearly third-person tone as he roots around in the memories of other characters to unearth his own actions. This is amusing, and his alternating panic and sense of acceptance about the loss of the satchel are also amusing to read. The novel is also an amusing introduction to the old-fashioned drinking culture of Korean salarymen (and ajeoshi). When the two men move from 일차 to 이차 (from “round one” to “round two” of drinking establishments) “just to gargle out the soju taste from the palate,” a reader with knowledge of Korean culture will chuckle in recognition.

As the narrator torturously recreates the steps of his previous night, he gradually realizes he is seeking not only the papers, but clues about his past (and he had been doing so on the drunken evening as well), the family from whom he was separated by the War--even his proper age, a particularly poignant thing to be missing in a culture like Korea’s, in which age determines all social relationships among men. In fact, in his drunken excesses the previous evening, he had remembered some elusive fact about his past, a fact that had led him on an unsuccessful journey of exploration.

As in most Korean novels of this kind, that elusive fact or memory relates to a tragedy of war and the narrator’s interrupted, now resumed, search to redeem a pledge and restore his family. The novel ends with a minor redemption and a reunion of sorts. Just what sort of reunion is kept intentionally vague, and the ending contain just a hint of the concluding plot of Oldboy. The redemption is not the necessarily the redemption the narrator wants, but it certainly seems to be the one he needs.

The translation is workmanlike, though it could have used one more line-edit. There is at least one sentence that is missing enough words to be completely free of meaning, and there is also at least one case of a sports allusion destroyed by a supernumerary preposition (“matters … he had to tackle with.”). But in general the translation is good, and I have to admit it was only on second reading that I caught the second of these errors.

The last thing worthy of mention is the canniness of the title, which is apropos on three levels and lends itself well to college level analysis of textual symbolism – if someone were to teach this book. First, of course, it applies to the narrator walking up, hung-over, the morning after he has remembered his past and then obliterated it with booze. In this granular sense the narrator wakes up on the other side of dark remembrance, although the memories have again been buried. This leads to the titles relevance to the larger story in which it is revealed that life has obliterated important memories that, inevitably, come back (despite the narrator’s ‘heroic’ drinking). Finally, of course, it is also a reference to the larger process that society undergoes in dealing with historical traumas.

The Other Side of Dark Remembrance is engaging enough as the narrative of a man having a very bad weekend, and its clever introduction of traditional Korean War themes, does nothing to dent this appeal.

Rodney Dangerfield and Literature

Some Prof from Hankuk argues that:

The relatively low status of language specialists in Korea has had significant ― and readily observed ― consequences in everyday life.

and those consequences are bad.

I have to say he does a pretty good job of light Korean-baiting both by explicitly comparing Korea to Japan's relative success and arguing that one of the bad consequences is that Korea is handicapped in the race for the Nobel Prize in Literature (a recurring motif for Korean literateurs).

Get Yer Red-Hot Korean Literature and Poetry!

KLTI has printed its second annual (if it's not a bit cheeky to call something that is two years old "annual?" Heck, by that standard the USFL was an annual football league. I suppose that comparison won't work for non-US citizens) collection of translations of recent Korean fiction and poetry, "New Writing from Korea 2."

I dunno. I might work on jazzing up the title?

In any case, you can request one at mill@klti.or.kr.

The indefatigable Brother Anthony (who I believe was involved in the translation and editing?) says:

This year's issue is easier on the eyes than last year's, and rather less bulky, but it includes short stories by: Ham Yujoo. Kwon Yeo-sun, Park Min Gyu. Kim Aeran and Gong Sun-ok as well as extracts from novels by Kim Jinkyoo and Kim Yeonsu, and a lot of poems by about 11 poets including Shin Yong-mok, Ham Min Bok and Kim Sa-In . . . a bargain for the price (it's free)! The translations are good, too! (I hope)

Please do not blame me for the spelling of the names, KLTI prints writers' names as the writers wish to have them spelled.

I am particularly amused and bemused by his last comment. As though the world of Korean translation into English were such a monstrous success that participants should waste time attacking each other for 'deviant' Romanization.

Anyway, drop the KLTI a line - they continue to do the good work in the trenches..

And always remember you can check out their killer website at: http://www.klti.or.kr/eng/

"Three Days in That Autumn" by Pak Wanseo

The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 8 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul

Pak Wanseo’s (as her name is spelled on the book cover) Three Days in That Autumn is an austere, almost frigid account of the end days of a gynecologist (abortionist, actually) and her practice. The title is a clever one, as it refers both to the specific time of the story and the position of the narrator in her life. In fact the narrator, an abortionist, has lived in Autumn since her rape, many years ago. Now, she avenges/re-enacts that rape on a daily basis in her role as an abortionist. The doctor vacillates between a kind of wry guilt for “killing enough people to populate a town" and pride in her role as a provider of relief to sexually abused and exploited women. As is often true in Pak’s stories, Three Days in That Autumn begins in a national trauma – that is, the narrator is raped as a result of the war, and then quickly descends into a personal nightmare. Pak employees such a strategy in other translated fiction (In the Realm of the Buddha) as well as in her recently published “autobiographic novel” (Who Ate Up all The Shinga). Stephen Epstein has summed this feature up in Pak’s work:

[this] narrative strategy is employed frequently in Pak’s work: what may seem initially to be a story with public concerns then turns to center upon family relationships or vice-versa, as personal drama suddenly takes on wider implications

At the outset Pak sets the public line clearly, “The Korean War was the line common to us all, the barrier we had all confronted. What outrageous warping of fate had each one of us faced over that line” (Pak 12)? When the doctor says, "For me it's more important to know that a man is capable of rape than to know his last name," it is clear how profoundly the rape has affected her and as its result she chooses to open a “woman’s clinic,” or an abortion clinic. Her first patient is the only live birth that she ever oversees. Beyond that occasion, she never again overseas a birth, not even bothering to procure the equipment needed for birth.

Her decision turns out to be a canny one, as local prostitutes soon begin to make use of her services, and as the neighborhood changes her clientele moves on to housewives forced to follow the population control model of two children per family, only. The Doctor cannot develop personal relationships of any kind, even a madam refers to the Doctor as “a block of wood,” and she lives in a sort of dusty cocoon reinforced by her pretty close to complete contempt for the rest of the world. The doctor considers her prostitute clients “illiterate morons,” churchgoers to be hypocrites because the doctor “[knows] what sins they have committed,” and she is embarrassed by the closest thing she has to a friend, the madam.

As retirement approaches, is literally three days away, the doctor feels a strange longing to deliver a life, rather than the termination of life and this longing brings her back into contact with the madness at her core. This begins to manifest itself in bad dreams, peculiar (and unremembered) behavior in the clinic, and a sudden recognition that she has lived a life entirely without love. She begins to obsess on the notion that delivering a baby could be a small, but significant, way in which to re-establish her link with the life and love she had forfeited or had stolen, or some combination of both, some 30 years before.

Finally, unexpectedly, a chance for redemption occurs on the Doctor’s last day of business, and painfully projects the Doctor into the past, and memories of her own abortion.

The conclusion is dramatic and subject to a literal or symbolic interpretation, depending upon the reader’s inclination. Either way, it is extremely powerful.

Koreans like to imagine the day that a Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to a Korean, and there are certainly few candidates in Korea who can step up to the level at which Pak writes.

The Irredoubtable Brother Anthony

Has an excellent page with links to his own translations of Korean fiction. This includes a range of short stories, but the bonus is three novellas and full novels by Yi Mun-yol, either still unpublished or out of print

• Winter that Year
• The Poet
• Son of Man

And two novellas by Yi Oryong, the former Korean Minister of Culture

• The General's Beard
• Phantom Legs

Regular readers will know I'm not as keen on translated Korean poetry (for a couple of reasons) but Brother Anthony also has a page of his translated poems, if that floats your literary boat.

It's also just worth poking around his site, as he has been in the translation game a very long time, and has excellent links and takes.

Three Brilliant Books, Currently Available in English

I am lucky enough to be reviewing three recent books of translated Korean Literature. Because I am reviewing them for journals, I can't really tip my hand here, but I can say that if you are interested in Korean Lit, and you want to see how Korean Lit may be passing through the end of one of its cycles of trauma, these are all interesting works.

While they all deal with the historical traumas of Korea, they generally manage to do so in the context of plots that are interesting in and of themselves, and while the historical traumas cannot be ignored, they merely serve as triggers for the real personal interactions of the plots (I'm thinking that Land Of The Banished might have been the first of this kind of book - certainly the first that I've read so far). With no further ado, head to the intarwebs and purchase:

Toy City by Lee Dong-ha and brilliantly translated by Chi Young-kim. Amazon sez:

Toy City, a poignant coming-of-age story of a fourth-grade boy named Yun, depicts the life of a poor family struggling to survive in the years immediately after the Korean War. An autobiographical work, the novel is written entirely from young Yun's point of view. While the political ramifications of the Korean War are suggested throughout, they do not take center stage in this tale of a boy forced to grow up quickly to support his family. Yun copes with tremendous losses, but manages to find joy in everyday occurrences. Lyrical, passionate depictions of hunger, shame, and frustration are interspersed throughout the descriptions of children's games, Yun's budding sexuality, and the kind acts of neighbors, illuminating the conditions under which poor Koreans lived after the War. Vacillating between bitterly ignoring his family and remaining close to them, Yun struggles to come to terms with the sudden realization that he cannot depend on his mother, father, and older sister for anything. Stunningly capturing the wishes, hopes, and anger of a young boy, Toy City is a graceful study of the vulnerable toughness of a child thrust into a chaotic early adulthood.

Who Ate Up All the Shinga by Park Won-suh. Amazon sez:

Park Wan-suh was born in 1931 in a small village near Kaesong, a protected hamlet of no more than twenty families. Park was raised believing that "no matter how many hills and brooks you crossed, the whole world was Korea and everyone in it was Korean." But then the tendrils of the Japanese occupation, which had already worked their way through much of Korean society before her birth, began to encroach on Park's idyll, complicating her day-to-day life.

With acerbic wit and brilliant insight, Park describes the characters and events that came to shape her young life, portraying the pervasive ways in which collaboration, assimilation, and resistance intertwined within the Korean social fabric before the outbreak of war. Most absorbing is Park's portrait of her mother, a sharp and resourceful widow who both resisted and conformed to stricture, becoming an enigmatic role model for her struggling daughter. Balancing period detail with universal themes, Park weaves a captivating tale that charms, moves, and wholly engrosses.

Finally, the RED ROOM: Stories of Trauma in Contemporary Korea (which is traumatic, but hopeful, and I can say no more til my review is out). Amazon (somewhat melodramatically, as they swiped the boilerplate from the publisher) sez:

"The Red Room" brings together stories by three canonical Korean writers who examine trauma as a simple fact of life. In Pak Wanso's "In the Realm of the Buddha," trauma manifests itself as an undigested lump inside the narrator, a mass needing to be purged before it consumes her. The protagonist of O Chong-hui's "Spirit on the Wind" suffers from an incomprehensible wanderlust - the result of trauma that has escaped her conscious memory. In the title story by Im Ch'or-u, trauma is recycled from torturer to victim when a teacher is arbitrarily detained by unnamed officials. Western readers may find these stories bleak, even chilling, yet they offer restorative truths when viewed in light of the suffering experienced by all victims of war and political violence regardless of place and time.

Check them out.. all worth your time.. and when the review comes out I'll have a long piece on how I think they signal the beginning of a long overdue shift in what kind of Korean literature is translated.

Excellent Resources on the KLTI Site

I've been looking around the Korean Literature Translation Institute website and they've quietly created quite a powerful research tool. I'll look at aspects of this site over the next few days and will begin with what I think would be an excellent classroom resource for teachers outside Korea who are teaching Korean culture, or for listening or culture classes taught to Koreans in Korea.

One part of the site is called Journeys in Korean Lit and it can be found here:

http://www.klti.or.kr/LetterApp?mode=6005&language=eng

features 66 movies (with versions in Chinese, English and Spanish) each one of which briefly (all that I looked at were under 10 minutes long) explores a Korean author through his work. The authors include such modern luminaries as Lee Dong-ha (Toy City) and Park Wan-suh (Who Ate Up All the Shinga?) and older works such as The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyeong.

Unfortunately, the movies are somewhat haphazardly organized, so you'll have to sort through them to find the authors or subjects you are interested in, but it is quite worth checking out.

The other 3 areas (look for a menu towards the upper left) of the site are equally great:

• Author Introductions - allows you to search for the name of an author and pull up a brief biography of that authors.
  
  
• Interviews with authors - I think this speaks for itself!
  
  
• Readings of works - Currently 25 authors are represented here
  

Definitely worth checking out!

Three Interesting Critical Essays By Kim Hunyoung

Wandering around the intarwebs I came across this site by Kim Hunyoung, who seems to have led quite an active life, both politically and in literature. He has written a great deal of critical prose, and three of his essays are reproduced on the site:

	The Korean Novel in the Eighties
		The Meaning of the City in Korean Literature
		POETRY IN THE 1980s - A Booming Decade

Here's a taste (from "The Meaning of the City in Korean Literature") to give a sense of what he is all about:

If we understand the whole process of opening of the ports, modernization, and urbanization as one, connected sequence of the infiltration routine of the monopoly capitalism and evaluate the entire phenomenon from the nationalist perspective, viewing this process as directly conducive to the annihilation of nationalist consciousness, we are bound to arrive at a position critical of urban culture. It is the truth that even among our writers and poets who were not equipped with the knowledge of social science, the city failed to ever be recognized as the ideal setting for the national life, as we can see illustrated in many literary works after the modernization period. Kim So-wol, a leading modern poet of Korea, for instance, sings in "Night of Seoul"

They say streets are good in Seoul
They say nights are good in Seoul
There are red lights
There are blue lights
But in the hidden bottom of my heart
The blue light shines all by itself
The red light shines all by itself

This little fragment makes Kim sound stridently political, but he isn't at all, this is just one part of his covering his theoretical bases. The rest of the essay is all about literature.

All three essays are worth reading, even if they take a bit of time to digest.

Two "Totally New Beasts"

I take my title from Corinne's comment on my last post about poetry and translation.

After the last post by The Translator, I took a shot at doing a different kind of 'translation.' That is I took the enjambed blank verse version and translated it into two other styles..

High-School Romantic



and

Limerick (Thankfully not of the "Nantucket" ouvre - but also not completely in Limerick 'voice;)

An amusing interview with Kim Young-ha

This is from KBS global, and it claims to be only a few days old, but it still has him living in Seoul and not Brooklyn and his own website seems pretty clear he's in the US...

The interview is primarily interesting because the interviewer is laying it on with the proverbial trowel, and the translation is so .. uh... idiosyncratic .... that it is in that weird spot between hysterical and painful:

As a writer who secured his world view, I will prove that the universal matter is the most world-beater. I will reward my readers with a new novel based on a profound and fresh technique without relying on the advantage of the Orientalism.

Sure buddy, now put down the soju bottle and get some rest. ;-)

"The Land of the Banished" by Cho Chong-rae

The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 7 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul


Cho Chong-rae’s The Land of the Banished is one of the best of the “political betrayal themed Korean novels. At work we are attempting to taxonomize translated Korea literature by theme, and one of the recurrent themes we see is that of people and families torn apart as alternating waves of leadership followed political and military victories by the North of South.

Cho’s tale, however, is particularly compelling because he ties it to the sad story of Mahn-seok, a man who was probably never good, but was given extraordinary chances at evil and failure in the aftermath of the war.

Cho begins his tale with some clever bits of mis-direction. Mahn-seock is a destroyed old man begging an orphanage to take his young son. Mahn-seok is nearly prostrate with grief and guilt as he offers the orphanage his last money, and hands them his son’s pitiful personal belongings. The scene is a tender one, and it is followed immediately by a partial explanation of how Mahn-seok and his son have come to this unfortunate place: They have been betrayed by Mahn-seok’s second wife. Mahn-seok is portrayed as a bit ingenuous in this passage; he had lept into the marriage perhaps knowing better. In a bit of funny writing Cho describes Mahn-seok’s state when he met his second wife:

As soon as the woman took to wagging her tail like that, he should have mercilessly cut it off. But like a cat exposed to the odor of fish, he was intoxicated.

There is a lot going on in that passage – you have to love the cat/fish metaphor that nicely suggests the attraction was strongly sexual, and the “mercilessly cut it off” is a brutal foreshadowing of what we shall shortly learn about Mahn-seok.

Mahn-seok’s willingness to be lead does not lessen the betrayal he feels. After getting married he had put down roots (the reason for his previous rootlessness will shortly be revealed.) and tried to live the life of an upright man. This betrayal, Mahn-seok’s pitiful contrition, and his sons wails at the thought of separation, all combine powerfully.

This framing technique is repeated again at the book’s conclusion, which returns to Mahn-seok in his aged and weakened state. By framing the central story in this way, Cho builds substantial compassion in the reader for Mahn-seok, a compassion the reader will find need to draw upon as Mahn-seok’s back story is revealed.

A second way in which Cho builds compassion for Mahn-seok, and one of the reasons his book is such a skilled example of the genre, is to give Mahn-seok intensely personal and interpretable reasons for his hatred, anger, and the actions of his younger life. Mahn-seok is revealed to be a bit more than your average cad, as a very specific personal history and social history, combine to make him a very bitter and angry man. This differentiates Cho’s work from other similar pieces, in which the waves of politics are presented as nearly external to the characters.. the machinations of chess pieces sweeping across a board. It is evidence of Cho’s skill as an author that he achieves all of this in a relatively scant 86 pages.

After the first 23 pages of scaffolding has established the picture of Mahn-seok as a pathetic old victim, the next 8 pages neatly desecrate that picture by introducing the ‘real’ plot of the story, the social turmoil of the war and its aftermath. In a series of quick and violent scenes, all of which flow organically out of Mahn-seok’s personal experience allied to the dictates of shifting political power, Cho reveals the heart of darkness at the center of his story.

For the remainder of the story (which I largely elide here), Cho interweaves Mahn-seok’s political and personal history, his life with his second wife, his desire to return ‘home’ and his friendship with Hwang, an old man in his home village. When, returned home surreptitiously, Mahn-seok talks to Hwang, Hwang reflects on Mahn-seok’s history saying, “I may know know much, but it seems to me the times are to blame.” This is a partial benediction, but one that Mahn-seok, an active moral character to the end, seems unwilling to accept.

The Land of the Banished concludes neatly, though ironically. Mahn-seok makes one more trip to his home village, where he is believed to be already dead. The Choe family, Mahn-seok’s mortal enemies and social superiors, have been returned to power in the village, and the bones of Mahn-seok’s allies lie unmemorialized in pits. Mahn-seok staggers out into the night, and dies alone, after discovering that Hwang, also, has died.

Cho leaves open the question of what, if anything, was accomplished through the political upheavals of the time. Further, his careful deliniation of Mahn-seok as flawed, but at the core profoundly moral in many ways, and the reasoned judgment of Hwang (who acts something like a Greek-chorus) combine in an unsettling way. One concludes the book aware that one has just read the story of a monster, but it is impossible to entirely blame Mahn-seok for what he became. Mahn-seok, in the final analysis, is merely weak, and Cho makes us feel this weakness and traces its horrific, pathetic, and most likely useless results.

Heh.. the inevitable explosion begins!

There is another English-speaking blogger on translated Korean Lit (well, I think they are English speakers? They are Canadian so there is some chance they speak French or moose, but the blog is written, at least, in English).

Corinne over at 9,999 seas [to the] Left also writes on K-literature and other than having spotted Kim Young-ha as brilliant (a clear sign of critical skills), also seems to have a strong interest in poetry. She (I think, I also know that Canadians have three sexes, so it is difficult for me to figure it out by name alone) doesn't post at the OCD rates I do, but is worth adding to your feed/subscriptions.

Comp Lit #1

The Translator sends along an item of interest:

I was reading the pdf file (This is a link directly to the PDF of "Twentieth Century Korean Literature." ) and came across a poem on page 14.

I thought it would be interesting (for what end, I don't know) to translate it myself and compare

The Translator's version is superior, because it is more concrete and less conceptual. This preference has NOTHING to do with technical accuracy, because I am certainly not qualified to judge that (and don't have a copy of the Korean text at hand in any case).

NOTE: The Translator’s version is a first-draft and reproduced here entirely without editing, and I am certain Ko’s work was vetted at some point. The means there are a few small glitches in the Translator’s version, but ones that would have been worked out in about 5 minutes of process (and in the next version, perhaps we will do this) during the editing stage.

The work on the left is by Ko Ch'angsu, that on the right of the Translator



First a couple of things at the meta-level

• I prefer the broken up version because it allows conceptual chunking. The enjambment and two-verse format makes the Ko version of the poem seem more monolithic and less delicate.
  
  
• Their is a critical difference between who the poems addresses. The Ko translation is in the third person – focusing on the romantic concept of love in some cases and referring to “he” in others. By adopting the second person, the Translator’s version focuses more directly on the lover, the “you.” I should say I also prefer the Translator’s translation in this because it recognizes the tendency of Korean to drop pronouns, and the preference of English for using them.
  
  The “my love is gone” reminds me of middle-ages “woe is me-itry” that never impressed me as anything else than a dutiful discharge of the romantic requirement to feel unrequited.
  

The Translator is also better at choosing vocabulary and images, in order to create a feeling of specificity in the poem. Here are four examples:

• Breaking versus shattering of the light/tint – the Translator’s choice is more dramatic although I slightly tend towards "light" as the object.
  
  
• On a breeze of sigh(s) versus “a breath of breeze.” The Translator uses a specifically human image (“sigh”) while Ko prefers a more general and distanced one (“breeze”). For all I know that is a horrible mis-translation, but in English it makes the line much less diffuse and drills tightly down to the essentially human nature of the poem. This “human” nature is one that BOTH translations insist on (“love after all .. is human”) and thus I think the Translator’s approach is closer to the philosophical basis of the poem as I read it through dual translations.
  
  
• The Translator's metaphor of lost control (the "turned round" compass point of the individual) seems better to me than the more general conceptual notion of Ko (fate altered). I would alter the "turned round" to "spinning," but that is mere editing.
  
  
• Similarly the cliched "bursting heart" of Ko, is not nearly as impressive as the much more vivid, "the astonished heart explodes," which also has a nice touch of anthropomorphism ("astonished") to it.

There are several other examples of this that pop up in a comparison, but as I'm off to the bookstore, I don't have time to follow them all up. There are some slightly rough areas in the Translator's version, but I see those as a function of where that version is in terms of editing and polishing. All in all, the Translator's version is much more direct, expressive, and English, to my eyes..

More on this, I think, when I get back..