London Korea Links..

A review of the history of Korean Literature, by Kim Hunggyu here

and a similarly brief review of Kyung Ran Jo's Tongue

Finally a review of a book about the Great Admiral Yi (he of the Turtle-boats) which I will include as partially fictive in that he has now become a legend. It is worth noting that this one is "Available free at www.koreanhero.net"

Blog Posts by "eastern writer"

Two posts I see by a new to me, blogger named "eastern writer"..

1) "The Character of Korean Literature" (from www.asianinfo.org)
2) "Private Life of a Nation by Lee Eung-joon" (from koreatimes)

The blogger links them, does not write them

First one ok, second one "nice-uh!"

"The Character of Korean Literature"

I dunno.. it seems to try to cover too much thought and history in too few thoughts and words.

Perhaps another way to think about it is as a Sijo....

Still, it attempts to include influences of religions, countries, and different alphabets, so it is at least worth a look.

I guess once I get past the fact that Shamanism is glossed over in this passage:

Korea's classical literature developed against the backdrop of traditional folk beliefs of the Korean people; it was also influenced by Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. Among these, Buddhist influence held the greatest sway, followed by enormous influences from Confucianism - especially Song Confucianism - during the Choson period.

I actually like it?

I'm a fickle bitch

Private Life of a Nation by Lee Eung-joon

A nice review of a book I will have to chase down and read.

Korean Museum of Modern Literature - Hangul Required

outside view of museum

Walking back from a dinner with Mona Baker, I happened to look to my left and see the Korean Museum of Modern Literature (the link is their home page). It was hiding in plain sight, right across the street from Dongguk University. It was closed, but this week I went to check it out. Interesting - it is completely tucked away off the street and I visited twice. The first time it was untroubled by visitors and the docent kind of wandered out of a back room, took one look at me and wandered back into her office and closed the door. The second time two young men were visiting, taking pictures, but for the most part the place is pretty desolate.

Rows and rows of ... literary stuff

While the museum focuses on "modern" literature, I'd estimate that 80-90% of the featured authors are dead. I did not see Park Wanseo or Kim Young-ha, really anyone who is still publishing.

Wall of Fame - Everyone long dead

Everything is exclusively in Korean (which is not a complaint, since this is Korean Literature), so I was reduced to scanning for what names I could recognize.

I did immediately recognize the rather large photo of Yi Sang which is stretched over the top of some kind of modern-art installation that I couldn't quite suss out; something about rows of clear boxes and numbers. It was opaque to me.



The museum is right next to Dongguk Station on Line 3 of the Seoul Subway. Go out exit one, walk about 150 feet and turn right at this sign (which I inconveniently snapped from the other side). Up a driveway, through a parking lot, and you're there.

The Red Room

While I have some issues with the kind of contents of The Red Room (i.e. more depressing separation literature) I did rather like the stories it contained. This is my review, which is likely to be in the next Acta Koreana. It is rather long. ;-)

In his short, but rather useful afterword to The Red Room, Bruce Fulton briefly discusses each of the three stories in that collection, and argues that their central thematic similarity is that they are narratives of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Fulton’s analysis is accurate, but can be even more localized and explicit: All three works in The Red Room focus on the interactions between personal memories of the trauma of recent Korean history, the resultant PTSD and how this interaction manifests in the daily life of survivors. In the case of these stories, memories are intentionally repressed, obliterated, and endlessly re-played, with drastically varied results.

Along with the central theme, the three stories also share some plot elements, primary among them that in all three stories protagonists are haunted by the death of close family members, with all deaths being related to political strife surrounding the Korean War. These stories range from the very good to the outstanding, and they are presented to us, perhaps intentionally, in order from the slightly hopeful to the utterly bleak.

Perhaps the finest of the three stories is Pak Wan-sŏ’s “In The Realm of the Buddha”, which is also shortest of the stories at a relatively slender twenty-four pages. It is also the narratively simplest of the three works. Pak Wan-sŏ, as demonstrated by other work such as Who Ate Up All the Shinga is a master of using the family-based generational stories to stand for history. Also, as in much of Pak’s other works the Korean War is not far away (though not the dominant theme), nor is the death of a sibling (Pak lost her own brother in the war).

The story is a historically based tragedy, depicting the personal impact of the politically inspired double-murder of the narrator’s Brother and Father who are unnamed (but capitalized throughout in a successful attempt to universalize the characters). The narrator and Mother witness these killings, and they initially respond by attempting to cover up the reality of the events and to suppress their memories.

Pak is skilled at revealing the reality of life in short, nearly throwaway dialogue and descriptions. When, at a temple, Mother and daughter receive a shabby offertory table, all they can afford, Mother shrugs, “I begged them to keep it simple. After all, it’s the heart that counts.” The daughter notes, “My only response was a faint smile” (12). This nicely limns the jaded but affectionate relationship between the two women. Similarly, the narrator neatly describes her knowledge of Buddhism as enough to earn her, “A score of 50 out of 100 on a test. It was like looking at something through glasses worn on the tip of ones’ nose” (6). Even the title is clever, at the same time reflecting the reality of the narrative - most of which takes place in a Buddhist temple – and the relatively happy ending, which features the promise of at least some kind of release.

The narrator’s metaphors of memories are purely digestive – she says that she and Mother, “had consumed the dead” (15), and that she “always felt them in [her] innards; they were something indigestible in the pit of my stomach” (16). For a time, the narrator does attempt to tell her tale, but for various reasons can never get the tale just so, or heard in the way she desires and needs. In the end, however, with the promise of generational change in her mind it seems she finally does “digest” the lump in her stomach and “In the Land of the Buddha”ends on what can fairly be seen as a note of optimism.

The other two stories in the collection do not end on similar notes. O Chŏng-hui’s “Spirit on the Wind” proceeds from a similar personal/historical tragedy, but the nature of that tragedy is not revealed until late in the story. Like “A Visit to the Buddha” this is a family story, in this case a family horribly and inevitably broken down by history and psychological forces beyond its control.

“Spirit on the Wind” alternates between the first-person narration of a husband, Se-jung, and the third-person narration of Ŭn-su, his wife. When we first ‘meet’ Ŭn-su, she is absent. Ŭn-su’s initial absence and the difference in narrative person signify that Ŭn-su is not as tethered to social ‘reality’ as those around her. As the story begins, Se-jung ponders the latest in a series of his wife’s disappearances, the first of which occurred a mere six months after their marriage. As
Ŭn-su continues to wander off all of those around her, including her mother, become increasingly incredulous and troubled by Ŭn-su’s behavior, which they see as an abandonment of her family. Ŭn-su herself is unhappy. She vaguely identifies the root of her wanderlust in the fact that she was an adopted child, but this never quite seems reason enough and she is, “tired of wandering, tired of feeling that the home in which she was living was temporary” (57). Ŭn-su’s continued betrayal of the family bond strains everyone, yet she is unable to control the winds that drive her. Worse, she cannot seem to summon up the memories that might explain it, “Everything before that [her 5th birthday] seemed hidden behind a dark curtain: none of it had surfaced in her mind” (55-56).

The consistent and obvious metaphor in “Spirit on the Wind” is the wind itself, which is explicitly tied to memory: “Whenever she heard the wind, Ŭn-su would nod as if some long forgotten memory has just then surfaced“ (50); and she is left with only, “her anxious quest for identity to be stirred up and given wing by the slightest breath of wind” (56).

The wind can also be a symbol of illness as when Se-jung complains the Ŭn-su has, “the post horse curse. You’re like an untamed pony the way you roam about free as the wind” (54). O uses the wind freely but with a particular context and thus when the son, Sŭng-il says, “Mommy, why does the wind blow? I wish it didn’t do that” (59), a reader might intuit that trouble that lies ahead. It is here perhaps, that O loses a bit of the stories’ unity as Ŭn-su endures a gang rape that seems forced into the larger plot. Admittedly, the rape does provide the pretext (though in a way most readers might not expect) for Se-jung to bar Ŭn-su from their house, and thus furthers the plot. The rape also allows Ŭn-su to present a foreshadowing of what will be revealed about her past, “I’ve experienced something no one should have to experience, something so horrible I can’t even remember it. But I’m going to make sure I don’t remember it” (98-9). But in general the rape seems both too large and random an incident to occur when it does, and it seems played off quite too lightly after it does occur.

In any case, Ŭn-su’s marriage collapses. Ŭn-su is finally reunited with her memories, but by the time that comes, it is too late for a happy ending. Ŭn-su remains in search of that wind that can blow her clean. Unlike the narrator, from “In The Realm of the Buddha”, Ŭn-su is still in search of a way to come to terms with her memories.

Like “Spirit on the Wind”, Im Ch’ŏr-u’s “The Red Room” features dual and dueling narrator-protagonists. The first is a mild-mannered everyman/salaryman O Ki-sop whose casual act of kindness many years before, and slightly suspect family background combine to bring him to the attention of the Korean state security apparatus. The second protagonist is Detective Ch’oe Tal-shik who can say, like Macbeth, “I am in blood, / Stepp’d so far, that should I wade no more, / returning were a tedious as go o’er.” The story is that of Detective Ch’oe‘s attempts to break O Ki-sop down.

Not only does “The Red Room” feature dual narrators, but Detective Ch’oe also has his own internal narrators that represent the voice of his traumas (one voice from his domestic life, the other from his distant past). This internal narration gives an inner dialogue to Ch’oe that is sometimes problematic. He is a man of contradictions, perhaps more contradictions than one character can conveniently contain. It is not that it is unlikely that a man of high standing in his church could also be a torturer (cf. The Inquisition), rather that such a character should also have such clear inner awareness of the sources of his own trauma, be so able to connect those traumas to his existence in his daily life, also be aware of their outcomes, but then draw no conclusions from them. Despite this slightly puzzling aspect, the inner voice is terrifying and tells visceral tales of terror (the internal narration is italicized): “Look, Tal-Shik! He shouted at the top of his lungs, pointing at the bloody corpses. You have to see this. Those sons of bitches are Reds” (140). The Detective’s position is clear – he relentlessly relives his trauma, it cycles around in his head, and consequently he cannot relieve himself of it. Ch’oe’s internal retelling of his trauma is intense and relentless, he cannot make it cease, in fact draws a perverse kind of justification from it.

O’s writing is clear and direct, as befits a tale this blunt. A clever reader will spot a graceful nod to George Orwell and perhaps, in the title, to H. G. Wells’ short story, “The Red Room” and its conclusion that mankind is haunted by fear itself.

In “The Red Room” there is no hope of escape from trauma, the cycle is burned in too deeply, and recurs to frequently to break. At its conclusion Detective Ch’oe enjoys/endures an epiphany of revenge featuring the disturbing and vivid sanguinaryimage “A blood –colored sea filled the room ….As I prayed, I felt with vivid clarity a sacred joy and benevolence envelop me with warmth, before beginning finally to fill the Red Room” (189-90). Even O Ki-sop, the mild everyman becomes a vessel of hatred. As O Ki-sop finally wanders home in a daze, he accosts a stranger, “Something is rising inside me, something hot and burning. It’s spreading hot throughout me, building an enormous heat – It’s my rage” (188). So the cycle of trauma continues.

It is nearly supernumerary to note that the translation here is excellent. When an experienced reader of translated Korean literature sees Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton’s names on a translation, it is a guarantee of high quality. Still, with sloppy translation still occasionally going to print (The recent Aunt Suni, perhaps being the exemplar), it is worth noting translation that goes beyond workmanlike. The Fultons are brilliant at this, from accurate use of idiom on the granular level (“Next it was my brother-in-law’s pet theory”) to their ability to stay out of the way and let the stories tell themselves. In 190 pages of translation, there was not one “gotcha” moment, that moment in which a reader finds an infelicitous phrase, poor grammar, or other error.

The only slightly dissonant note in The Red Room is the foreword, which seems to stray from the subjects of the fictions. Written by noted historian Bruce Cumings, it accurately points out that the stories are “the fruits of the popular struggle for democracy in Korea” (xi), but the rest of his introduction seems oddly off track, focusing on resentment towards the United States and United States’ lack of understanding and knowledge of Korea. Certainly those realities exist, but they seem tangential to the stories themselves and at times the foreword seems to have been written for another book entirely.

Putting such minor criticisms aside, The Red Room is an excellent collection both for what it contributes in its approaches to and descriptions of trauma and memory, as well as revealing to Western readers the depth of the damage history has done to the social and psychological structure of the Korean psyche.

And Now For Something Completely Different: Expat Community

Saturday was the first 2S2 (Second Saturday, 2:00PM) meetup near Anguk Station. For those who don't know, this is an attempt to build to build some community and camaraderie between expats and, we hope, to create a stronger support system for incoming English teachers and professors. For more information you can contact Rob at his blog, Roboseyo. Here's what it looked like at one point:

left to right: Shannon Heit, Roboseyo, Chris Backe, Jo, Joy Iris-Wilbanks, Hayley who came in from Jeollanamdo, Yvonne from Daejon (Not pictured: Joe McPherson, Dan Gray)

This is also associated with a website, the Chatjip expat site which I urge all expats to check out and join. This site has information about 2S2 and is working to create the best online events calendar in Korea for English speakers. It also aggregates headlines and blog posts.

We were extremely lucky to have Shannon Heit, from the Seoul Global Center, attend the meeting and talk to us about what the Global Center offers expats and what she hopes to do in the future. In the past, the Center has focused on business initiatives, but now it is branching out in an effort to support all expatriates. In addition, Shannon hopes to expand the Center's support impact on the web. Shannon can be reached by email at shannon.sgc@gmail.com.

Everyone had a great time, and we will do it all again in a month.

Stay tuned...

Translating Classics?

An interesting but slightly off-base article the other day in the Korea Herald. It focuses on the need for an increase in the amount of Korean literature translated but, perversely, it focuses on classical literature. Perhaps the main ideas can be demonstrated in the following two quotes.

History shows that translations played a major role during cultural renaissances in various countries. According to Italian philosopher, astronomer and mathematician Giordano Bruno, all of the sciences originated from translations. In 18th-century Europe, translators were considered artists who possessed the moral responsibilities of both writers and readers, while during the 19th century translators were known as “creative geniuses.”

“In Western countries, they taught translation as a form of mediation, and so they taught Greek and Latin simultaneously,” Do-ol said. “That resulted in an enormous amount of energy coming from English literature.”

The problem is that this is looking at previous models - kind of the "classical education" model and this is pretty much a ship that has sailed. Continuing along this line is likely to result in the translation of more "Straight to the Asian Studies Library" works.

siiiiiigh?

Korean Nobel Prize for Literature Update: Ko Un?

According to Newsweek, Ko Un is in the running:

Ko Un—The South Korean poet has written short lyrics as well as lengthy epics, drawing his material from decades of experience in which he has seen South Korea’s struggles with Japanese occupation, the Korean war, and the transition to democracy. He’s also been a political activist most of his life, to the point of having been imprisoned multiple times for his activism.

And at least one site sets his odds as low as 20/1.

Top 10 "not about the country's divsion" Korean translations

As I have written elsewhere, translated Korean modern literature tends to cohere around a few themes, primarily those of colonialism, civil war, and separation. While this is completely justifiable from the perspective of the last 100 years of Korean history, it can also render Korean literature, from the outsiders’ perspective, a bit monochromatic. In order to, in one place, indicate some of the other colors of the Korean modern-fiction palette, I have here 10 works, all available online or in Korea, which move away from the common and history-borne themes. Many of these books have been reviewed elsewhere on this site, but I wanted to make list of books that escaped the ‘literature of national division’ (pundan munhak) and dealt with more universal themes.

1) I Have the Right to Destroy Myself by Kim Young-ha.
Kim may be the best current writer in translation (his other works in translation include Photo Shop Murder and I Wonder What Happened to that Guy in the Elevator) and I Have the right to Destroy Myself may be his best work. A post-modern meditation on meaning, art, and death, it features an artist of suicide and a tangle of modern love and art.

2) Deep Blue Night by Choe In-ho.
Choe sets his novel on the West Coast of California and puts his two main characters on that most American of journeys, the road trip. As Hyeong, the narrator, and his friend Jun-ho stagger down the California coast, exhaling dope-smoke and desperation along the way, they shine uncertain light on Korean-American culture, the larger culture in which it lives, and the emptiness of a life lived without meaning.

3) A Dwarf Launches a Little Ball by Cho Se-hui.
Dwarf is the classic tale of the price of Korean modernization and economic growth and in that theme, though set in a classically Korean setting and culture, Cho writes a book important to any country that is modern or in the process of modernization. A dwarf, already diminutive and insignificant, is slowly driven to death, his home stolen, and his family dissipated as “urban renewal” comes to Seoul. Powerful, political, and tragic.

4) Our Twisted Hero by Yi Mun-yol
Our Twisted Hero is a retrospective meditation on power. Narrator Pyongt'ae Han moves to a new school and is bullied by, Sokdae Om, who rules with carrots and sticks, keeping nearly perfect order. Han rebels. For this, he is ostracized: Om has created an all-powerful cult of personality. Han works his way back into Om’s good graces and perversely comes admire him. When Om’s reign crashes down at the hands of the even greater power of a new students other students turn against Om, with only Han refusing to completely repudiate him. There is an oddly tacked-on ending, but otherwise a powerful analysis of how power can work.

5) Who Ate Up all the Shinga by Pak Wan-suh
A brilliant “autobiographical novel” by Pak Wan-suh which not only follows her family history, but also follows the key events and decisions that made Pak into a novelist. From the country-side, not even imagining anything else, the narrator/Pak is pulled to the big city of Seoul, to school, and eventually into the nightmare of the Korean war. The focus, however, is on Pak’s family, and often her amazing/amusing mother and the kinds of vacillations and hypocrisies that were necessary to navigate life in that complicated and quickly shifting time in Korean history.

6) Rain-shower by Hwang Sun-won
Rain Shower is a short story by Hwang Sun-won (Hwang also wrote the seminal but monumentally depressing novel The Descendants of Cain). 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 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 they fall in love, and endure the tragic/romantic fate of many other teen lovers. This work is only available in collections, as it is very brief. It is available online at the extremely useful website of Brother Anthony of Taize: http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/Shower.htm

7) The Camellias by Kim Yu-jeong
Three stories in a slender volume that all focus on love and although the stories are not western in any sense, they all describe a love that seems, to a modern eye, a “free” one. In The Camellias love is chosen across class lines, in The Scorching Heat love is lost to a fate as simple as nature, and in A Wanderer in the Valleys we see a love that causes a wife to metaphorically risk every wolf in the human valley. Kim covers a wide emotional range: The Camellias is a pastoral comedy, The Scorching Heat is a bathetic tragedy, and A Wanderer in the Valley is a story of love and peril. A great book for the tortured romantic in any reader. ;-)

8) The Ma Rok Biographies by Seo Giwon
It is not easy to make Korean history, which has so often been tragedy, into a farce, but Seo Giwon pulls off this unlikely trick in his The Ma Rok Biographies. In three short stories, all featuring protagonists named “Ma,” Seo portrays the random, absurd, and farcical nature of Korean history in three different eras; the pre-Japanese feudal system; under Japanese rule, and; during the Korean war. Seo finds people to be powerless, feckless, and silly; flotsam and jetsam on seas of indeterminacy. Finally, he also passes judgment on human systems and finds them wanting. This is a kind of absurdist/zen take on history, and often had me laughing out loud a thing that is not common when reading translated Korean literature. ;-)

9) Chinatown by Oh Jung-hee
Chinatown is the story is of a nine year old girl who comes to a greater awareness of sex and death. As the book moves along, the girl observes the relationship, family, and eventual death of a prostitute named Maggie, as well as the sad death of her own grandmother. As backdrop to these events, Oh gives us the seventh pregnancy of the girl’s mother. Oh blends these stories into a collage representing the circle of life. Chinatown, although it clearly lives in a post-war era, is a very personal story and is well paired with…

10) Toy City by Lee Dong-ha
Like Chinatown, Toy City takes place in the years following the Korean war and while it quite clearly references the war and its effects on society, it focuses tightly on a family forced from the countryside to the city. Yun, the narrator, is a fourth-grader. Yun’s father, a good farmer, is incompetent in the dity and Yun is forced to grow up quickly. Lee does a good job of sketching the “toy” city in which Yun’s family lives. This is a great story of a boy coming of age, and like Chinatown does for a young girl, Toy City does an excellent job of portraying what it is like to grow up, both in the specific circumstances of the city, but also just as a young man. You’ll want to make sure you get the new Koryo Press edition as it is more complete and translated a bit better.

Another Great Resource on the KLTI Site!

This is just brilliant.

10 pages containing nearly 50 downloadable texts (in PDF form) of Korean fiction and poetry.

Not all the texts are translated - If the listing looks like this:



There is NOT yet an English translation.

But if the listing has two pdf symbols, click on the second pdf symbol to open an English version of the work.



And away you go - more lovely free literature...

Noted with minimal comment: Goose is angry at Gander

While it was apparently splendid for Hallyu to spread from Korea to the rest of Asia, return business is not as happily accepted. According to the Chosun Ilbo:

Some experts fear that enthusiasm for Japanese pop culture is headed for a renewed domination of Korea.

Of course some of that stance is probably residual discontent with historical Japanese domination of Korea, but still, this comment seems utterly hypocritical:

Korean pop culture is at risk in the face of a Japanese Wave.

huh?

In the Korea Times, more Korean discussion about the need to win a Nobel Prize for Literature. Once again the focus is a bit off to me.. One of the women featured says:

"Jessica and I have always talked about the lack of English translations of Korean literature and movies. Although there are many good works, when they are translated in English there are mistranslations and even grammar mistakes. We felt this was so unfortunate,'' Han said.

And the general point might be accurate - to say that there is not enough translation over all, but then to jump to the many good works which are mistranslated or have grammatical mistakes (and of course they exist, I recently went ballistic reading a God-awful translation of Aunt Suni), is to ignore that many of the works that are translated are "good" to Koreans, but have little impact in the West because their topics are not appropriate. Just one example has been the fairly relentless tendency of Korea to translate its ‘literature of national division’ (pundan munhak or 분단 문학 if my Hangul isn't too cruddy) which has very little relevance to the West and is bleak in a non-existential way, and thus not very attractive to potential readers or voters.

If that sort of problem is not addressed, no amount of technically perfect translation is going to help Korea win its first Nobel for Literature.

And, to be fair, in other spots, the women's analysis was exactly correct, such as:

I think the Korean government should support the translation of Korean literature. People from other countries know a lot about Japanese literature, because there are lots of translated Japanese works in other countries. This makes people interested in Japanese culture too,'' said Han.

The link between Japanese literature hitting the US in 1970 and the cultural wave that followed shortly thereafter is pretty clear, and with Korean food about to take off, and its products already ubiquitous, it is time for the literature to get in position to do its part in globalizing Korean culture. Also, in this case, it seems that the work that the translators have been doing is spreading the thematic range of translated work, which is something that can't happen fast enough.

Having said that, however, and given Han's first complaint that there aren't enough works translated I have some trouble understanding her last claim that,

There are so many great works by Korean writers that the world should see. Also, I think that the best way of creating serious interest in Korean literature and culture would be to have a multitude of translations for each piece. Often you see just one 'definitive' translation of one work. Translation is an interpretative art and we need more than just one perspective,'' she said.

Surely, in a world in which there currently aren't enough translations in general, it is unwise to multiply translate works that have already been published?

A Cool Idea in Seoul..

A 'retreat' in downtown Seoul for Korean and foreign writers..

Seoul's first residency for writers, initiated by the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture (SFAC), will open on Nov. 5 in Yeonhui-dong.

The Seoul Art Space Yeonhui is the first writer-in-residence program in the capital, offering studios for writing, networking and communicating as a stronghold of Korean literature proactively contributing to world literature.

LOL.. that last sentence is a bit of a solipsistic tangle, but the idea is a nice one.