Morning Calm Has Been Moved

To a nice new (under design but running) WordPress site at

www.ktlit.com

Park Wan-suh's Weathered Blossom

After reading my way through the absolutely horrible Hong Gildong (again, not the Jimoondang fiction, but the folk-tale), I was a bit apprehensive about reading Park Wan-suh’s Weathered Blossom, even though I’ve liked everything I’ve read of hers. The fear was purely based on similarity – another small book with a lovely cover and.. maybe .. another crappy translation.

A closer look, however, reassured me that likely all would be well. I saw Yu Young-nan’s name as translator (Who Ate Up All the Shinga, Three Generations, etc) and I have yet to come across any of her work that was not seamless and completely out of the way of the reader.
Also, of course, Park Wan-suh has yet to disappoint me, and this work was no different.

Weathered Blossom is the austered story of a semi-love affair between two older people who meet on a bus to Seoul. The story is arranged in two sections of roughly equal length. In the first section the woman, disgruntled and out of sorts (and even slightly out of time in a hanbok) returns from a family wedding in which she feels she was mistreated. On the bus she meets an elegant-looking older man. This first section proceeds at a leisurely pace as the bus wanders through the Korean countryside.

Once home, the old woman finds occasion to look the old man up, and a kind of romance ensues. In the end, the old woman, bothered by her own marks of age and the lack of lust in an October relationship, breaks it off by flying to the United States to re-unite with her son.

That’s a plot summary that makes the book seem less than it is. In fact, it is a fairly bleak meditation on aging and what that means for emotional life, particularly in those places emotional life intersects with physical life. In essence, the old woman believes that without “lust,” love is unsupportable. Park hints at this conclusion throughout the book; the old ladies’ feeling of abandonment and betrayal at the wedding is a precursor of how she comes to feel about her body and emotions, at the end.

A rather remarkable preface (partly remarkable because it comes at the end of the book), chooses to conclude that Park’s conclusion is a ‘proper’ one, in a passage that is slightly contradictory to parse:

The lady believes that love is beautiful only with lust, as it is the only way to be blinded. Thus she realizes elders in love can not be anything by a charming façade, then humbly accepts reality. However to say her lustless love is not beautiful is incorrect, as she humbly accepts the limitation of age and reality.

This seems, to me, a bit of a surrender to Confucian notions of proper behavior for widowed women. The idea that this might be emotional/Confucian scarpering is buttressed by the fact that the old woman, while unhappy with her aged body, does not begin to chafe against the relationship until her family, and the family of her aged beaux, become aware of the relationship and, eventually, in favor of it. The relationship is fine as long as society is unaware. As soon as society is aware, the widow begins to consider where she will be buried, as though she is in some way betraying her eventual burial plot next to her deceased husband. All of which, I suppose, supports the argument that Park might agree with the preface.

Weathered Blossom also presents a rather bleak view of what one can expect in the emotional life of old age. I am also unclear on how an adequately performed charade cannot be blinding. Perhaps I am not yet old enough, although that seems unlikely from where I sit. ;-)

As usual, Park also charms me by what she leaves out. Discussing the bus ride on which she meets the old gent she says:

We didn’t talk about clichés, such as how old we had been when the Korean War broke out, what kinds of hardships we had gone through, where we had gone to take refuge. Instead we exchanged spontaneous remarks.

I don’t want to put too much pressure on this one passage, but to me it sums up why Park’s writing appealing to westerners. It is not that the things Park’s characters go on to talk about are not clichés – rather it is that they are not intra-Korean clichés; that is clichés that will mean nothing to a western reader.

The only thing that is a bit odd, is that rather than simply alternating pages of Korean and English text, this books lumps them semi-randomly in an effort to keep the rather longer English text somewhere near the Korean text. I would have preferred, perhaps, different text sizes to achieve the same end, but I really can’t complain too much about this.

Weathered Blossom is part of a Hollym series of translations that partly overlaps the Jimoondang series. But these are worth picking up because the original Korean is in them, the books are small but feel substantial, the covers and internal artwork are appropriate, and the books even have the little string bookmarks built into the cover.

A Rather Nice Overview of the History of Korean Literature

The AsianInfo site nicely divides Korean lit into three categories and then goes on to explain them:

1. The Character of Korean Literature
2. Korea's Classical Literature
3. The Modern Literature of Korea

It's necessarily a gloss, but a great place to begin if you want to learn the overall outlines of Korean literature.

At just less than 6,000 words, you might just want to cut and paste it into a Word (OR hwp!) document and print it out... ;-)

More on Horribility

I took Hong Gildong (the "Korean Classical Literature Institute" version) in to work to show it around the Translation Department, who all had a good hoot.

Over a delicious 갈바당 lunch the chair asked why I bought it, and I replied the cover was nice.

She took a look at the cover and said, "yeah, nice, but it really doesn't have anything to do the story, does it?"

I peered at it and joked, "Yeah, it's pretty generic, I bet they used that cover on all the books."

We returned to her office, because she wanted to photocopy the cover - she's going to buy a copy to use in an upcoming conference we will be attending; one about how translations miss their target.

She disappeared behind the screen covering her desk. In about three minutes an "aha!" came from behind the screen.

I asked why?

She said, "Like you said, they all have the same cover."

And, given a slightly different shade, they all do, as this picture depressingly reveals (that one on the lower right is from a different series):

Sometimes the Translation is Reaaaaally Bad!

As part of my ongoing project to review all of the KLTI/Jimoondang short novels, I have begun to read Hong Gildong by Seo Hajin. This is based on a Korean folk-tale of the same name. Thus I was ecstatic to find a translation of this work at the "Foreign Bookstore" (Right across from exit 1 of the Noksapyeong Subway Station on line 6). I had a lovely gift certificate from my fiancee, which I plopped down to purchase the thing.

It is published by someone called the "Korean Classical Literature Institute" and Baek Am Publishing Co.

The booksleeve of the thing is astonishingly lovely. I have included a scan of it there on the upper right, and that scan can't accurately convey how nice it looks, since it can't let you feel the 100 lb cover paper or see it's glossy shellac. The cover is also thick, and the paper is apparently acid-free and a semi-rough.

But talk about thick and rough? The translation, apparently done in 1999-2000 is disgraceful.

How bad? So bad it made me go rushing to Google, to see when Babel Fish was first publicly available, because I immediately suspected that this had been how it had been translated. Babel Fish did pop up just before 2000, but my quick search didn't determine if Korean was one of its first seven available languages.

It begins with the preface:

Also on the occasion of millenium period, with the view that our boastful Korean classical literature can be known all over the world, be even just a littl helpful to those who study English we had these series translated in English by professionals

Sure, professionals, but professional whats?

The inside is worse. On pages 3-4 of the English translation we find:

In the middle that Gildong reading a book, all of a sudden, he thrust desk, deploring.

I was pretty much deploring as well. It just goes on; it is a rare page that has fewer than ten errors:

Calming down his mind and watched it, a boy came up to him, riding on a donkey, after blowing the flute, rebuked.

Here is a brilliant paragraph:

And he gave an order of cancelling the seize of Gildong to 8 Provinces.

A websearch seems to indicate that the "Korean Classical Literature Institute" has only published the 10 books it lists (look down the page) on the inner sleeve of this book (although, threateningly, the Preface seems to warn us of the possibility of 19 other volumes). That is a very good thing, because this is bad work. Don't be fooled by the nice covers. ;-)

Finding Translated Korean Literature in Korean Bookstores

ADAPTED FROM MY UPCOMING ARTICLE IN 10 MAGAZINE ASIA

One drawback of living or traveling in Korea is difficulty finding English books. Good bookstores are rare, and if you only know one or two, you are unlikely to find the range of books you like. Many of us also enjoy browsing in used bookstores, which are even harder to find. Luckily, there ARE good “English” bookstores in Korea, you just have to know where, and how, to find them.

Bookstores come in three flavors. First are the chains; relatively easy to find through web searches. Second are mid-sized stores catering primarily to English readers; a bit harder to find, but many expats know where they are. More difficult to find, but fun when you do, are the small used-bookstores that dot traditional markets in Korean cities. These, you find at the expense of shoe-leather.

Let’s take a look at these by category

THE MAJORS In Seoul
Books from the bestsellers lists, books that have been or are about to be turned into major motion pictures, or classic literature, are available at any large chain including Kyobo, YoungPoong, or Bandi and Luni. Look for sections called English, Foreign, or even 외국인. In Seoul there is a cluster of chains in the Jongno-gu area. Kyobo Book Centre, Korea's largest bookstore, stocks about 2,300,000 books, and on weekends draws over 120,000 customers. For a truly surreal/jam-packed experience, visit Kyobo or YoungPoong the day before Christmas or any other gift-giving occasion. If you frequent chains, get a membership card, which offer various benefits.

Other Cities
Daejeon boasts a Kyobo downtown and a Gyeryeong Books in Eunhaneg-dong. Gwangju has pretty slim pickings; there is only a YounPoong and the ChungJang bookstore. ChungJang, described using a classic Korean direction-giving technique, as “right by the Starbucks,” has some classics, bestsellers from a couple months ago, and books about Korea and the Korean language. Busan has two YoungPoong and one Kyobo, Daegu has two YoungPoong and two Kyobo. Ulsan, Masan, Pohang and Gumi each have one YoungPoong. For more specific directions consult the YoungPoong and Kyobo websites.

Translated Fiction Conclusion: These are a great place to go to find recent and mainstream works of translatied Korean fiction. Most of the bigs have something from the Jimoondang/KLTI series of small novels, as well as recent publications.

THE MIDDLES
Mid-sized stores dedicated to the English reader are rarer. There are two excellent stores in Itaewon, What the Book and the Itaewon Foreign Bookstore. What the Book is in Itaewon, but is happy to ship books to your location in Korea. It has a solid selection of new books, a range of used books, and a stellar magazine section. You can browse What the Book online, using its excellent website and search function. The Itaewon Foreigners Bookstore is an old-fashioned used-book store. It features row upon row of books on shelves, which slide to reveal more shelves behind. In both stores, used-books are expensive. If you are going to buy something currently in publication, it makes more sense to purchase it new.

North of the chain bookstores, across from Gyeongbokgung Palace, is Seoul Selection, a smallish store focused on Korea and Korean culture. It sells new and used books, DVDs, and music CDs as well as hosting literary events. Seoul Selection has wireless Internet, seats and tables, a computer for customer use and publishes Seoul Magazine. As lagniappe, the clerks give away a packet of postcards with book sales. Seoul Selection has an excellent website with a great search function.

In Daegu, the newly opened, Buy the Book is a café that also sells used books. Buy the Book features international lunch, a clean spacious eating/reading space, and two walls covered in bookshelves of used books. Daegu Books is an online purveyor of used books, which has only been in business a short while, but has managed to build a stock of nearly 500 books.

Many smaller bookstores have selections of English books. If you walk in university neighborhoods you find these. Start with large, reputable universities, universities known for art or literature, and then work your way to smaller, less well -known ones. Hongdae University, in Seoul, for instance, is surrounded by a sprinkling of bookstores selling English books.

Translated Fiction Conclusion: The Foreigner's Bookstore by Naksapyeong Station is THE place to go to find older collections of translated Korean fiction. What the Book, also has a sprinkling of this kind of work, but they seem afraid to purchase "one-off" old collections of fiction.


THE LITTLE ONES
For bibliophiles, part of the fun of buying a book is finding it. For this, you need to be a bit intrepid. Many medium and larger sized public markets have a row of bookshops with books tied together in stacks, by colored ribbons. Most books are Korean, but English books can be found, and if you like the thrill of the chase, this is where to find it. In Seoul, to the right across the Cheonggyecheon from Dongdaemun Gate, is a row of little bookstores, a bit out of place amidst fashion outlets, but many of these bookstores have some books in English, and the Waegook Bookstore is completely dedicated to English books. In the Jung-Ang market in Daejeon, easy walking distance from Daejeon’s KTX station, there are street-side bookstores with vast rooms full of books, stored in the buildings behind them.

These semi-traditional markets are in every major city in Korea, and worth an afternoon’s walk, as they often reveal unexpected treasures. If you find a small store with English books? Make friends with the owner, because if you are a repeat visitor, they will start squirreling books away for you.

So get out there and get looking!

Translated Fiction Conclusion: Each store is different - get out there!


Top 10 Bookstores in Korea

#1) What The Book – New books, used books, a brilliant ordering system and a helpful staff that speaks good English. Its website is English and extremely easy to use.
http://www.whatthebook.com
(taewon Station Line 6, Exit 3; behind the Itaewon Fire House and up the hill, Seoul.


#2) The Foreign Bookstore –Small, cramped, but stuffed with books, this is the place to go to find an array of used titles spanning science fiction, humor, and psychology. It also carries used magazines and some tapes.
Noksapyeong Station Line 6, Exit 2; across the street, Seoul.

#3) Seoul Selection – If your focus is on Korean literature, or literature about Korea, this is your bookstore.
http://www.seoulselection.com
B1 Korean Publishers Association B/D 105-2, Sagan-dong, Chongro-gu Seoul

#4) Kyobo books (Chain) – So many stores and so many books!
http://wiki.galbijim.com/Kyobo_Books (the Kyobo website is 100% Korean, and can confusing – Galbijim is a better choice for locating stores)

#5) YoungPoong –YoungPoong has stores scattered through Korea and often a more relaxed vibe than Kyobo.
http://www.ypbooks.co.kr/kor_index.yp (store locator is at the bottom of the main page – Korean, but easy to navigate)

#6 and #7) Daegu Books and Buy the Book are new ideas in Korea. Daegu Books will ship anywhere in Korea for a small fee, and has rock-bottom prices on used books.
Buy the Book has space, food and an artsy attitude to share.
Daegu Books: http://www.daegubooks.com/
Buy the Book: Daegu joong koo samduck 1 ka dong 18-11 4th floor

#8) Waegook Bookstore in Dongdaemun Market. Lots of used books, and other bookstores on both sides.
Stall 27

#9) ChungJang bookstore in Gwangju. Not the biggest or best, but if you live in Cheolla, it isn’t a KTX ride away.
Chungjang Seolim 35 Geumnamno 2ga, Dong-gu (Near the Starbucks!)

#10) YeongChang Bookstore, Jung-Ang Marketplace, Daejeon. Difficult to find at the east side of the marketplace. But it stands for ALL the small bookstores waiting for you to find them!

Park Wan-suh's Who Ate Up All the Shinga?

Park Wan-suh’s Who Ate Up All the Shinga, originally published in Korean in 1992, is a brilliant book on at least three levels. First, it is the compelling narrative of a writer coming into being in the most trying of times. Second, it is a highly amusing and often bittersweet mother-daughter memoir. Finally, it is an unusually well-balanced novel – a remarkable cultural artifact, if one chooses to approach it that way - one that manages to utilize Korea’s extremely difficult history without making the novel itself about Korean history. This unusual combination has the beneficial effect of making Park’s novel enjoyable on multiple levels. Who Ate Up All the Shinga is one of the best translations, and choice of works to be translated, in recent memory.

Pak Wan-so was a relatively late-bloomer as a published author, writing her first novel just before she turned 40. In some ways this is not surprising, since it was only in the late 1960s that any substantial number of women entered the literary ranks in Korea. Since that time she has become the Grand Dame of Korean letters, in 1981 receiving the prestigious Yi Sang award for her novel, Mother's Stake. But as Who Ate Up All the Shinga an “autobiographical novel” reveals, the authorial seeds were planted young. Who Ate Up All the Shinga’s relation to fiction is not at all coincidental. Park tips her hand on this on the book-sleeve, where she calls her work an “autobiographical novel.” In fact, it is a compelling story of a young girl who seems, almost unknown to herself, to be destined to write and then finally reaches that conclusion herself.

There is a certain tension in that semi-oxymoronic phrase, “autobiographical novel”, and that tension reflects one of the books’ larger issues, identity. The larger sense of Park’s search for identity is mirrored elsewhere in plot. As I will discuss shortly, this issue of identity is also found in the Mother’s behavior. The Park family struggles with issues of identity, beginning with her Grandfather who adopted, often to comic effect, the airs of Yangban and continuing on to the families’ struggle over the assumption of Japanese names, through the Mother’s sometimes comical identity contortions, and even to political stances. The question is no different for Pak herself, who sometimes describes her youth in ways that point to a kind of otherness, an inbred and evolving narrative voice. This feeling first comes upon her when she is only four years old, she sees her village from an angle she does not usually see it and, “it looked completely different … I couldn’t bear it and burst into tears” (18). This is Pak’s first recognition that she is in some way an outsider, and observer. In a latter passage, Pak describes her first efforts to control her mise-en-scene as she observes swaying millet stalks that bring a similar sadness, “This time, though, I tried to find ways to accentuate my melancholy. What could I do to make that swaying sadder, drearier” (18)? These are the baby steps of an artist. A certain sense of being an outsider, “I always lagged on the periphery … From the fringe, it was easy to observe what was going on” (61), turns into a habit, “Walking to school alone for six long years had a significant effect on my character. For one thing, I learned to entertain myself” (135). These are the words of a narrator coming into being. Park’s awareness comes in fits and starts, and it is firmly placed in the context of the family, “Mother’s storytelling talent instilled in me a love of narrative (107)

This process culminates in a chapter entitled, “Epiphany” in which Park finally realizes who she is, and what she wants to be. “I felt as though I’d been chased into a dead end but then suddenly turned around. Surely there was meaning in my being sole witness to it all.” As Pak looks out upon a city she has made her own, she makes a final decision that it, and all she has endured, will be the fuel for both her physical life and her life as an author. From this epiphany “came a vision that I would write someday, and this premonition dispelled my fear … The clustered, vacant houses were now my prey. ... I already planned to steal from those houses.” (248)

Who Ate Up All the Shinga is also a touching tale of family loyalty - the story of a remarkable woman shepherding her family through difficult times. Park’s mother is the most remarkable character in the book and this is both because of and despite how she is portrayed. She is willful and humble; extravagant and penurious; affectionate and demanding. The narrating Park is often entirely confused by her mother. Readers will be alternately amused and aggravated by the mother’s actions, but she does what she needs to do to survive. Park’s mother is somewhere along that continuum of Korean fictional characters which includes Ch’ae Man-sik’s Master Yun, Chon Kwangyong’s Kapitan Ri, and Seo Giwon’s Ma Rok characters; navigators of uncertain systems. The mother is neatly caught between onrushing modernization – she is certain that she wants Park to grow up to be a “modern woman’ – and traditional cultural strictures based around gender and family ancestry roles. Some of the funniest scenes in the book feature Park’s mother as she uses the disparity between these two forces in her ongoing efforts to rise in society (whatever society might be nearby!). Park sums this up beautifully in a passage describing the families’ return to the countryside:

It was important to Mother not to look like we were returning because we
couldn’t make a go of it in Seoul Her attitude was perfectly understandable
given the difficulties she’d gone through to establish herself. She must have
wanted an appropriate excuse if we couldn’t manage a glorious, silk-clad
homecoming. (145)

In the end, as Park makes her declaration of authorial intent, a reader sees that the mother was, after all, successful despite the family enduring substantial trauma and heartbreak.

Who Ate Up All the Shinga is an excellent translation choice because it conforms to multiple levels of understanding of Korean history, literature, and culture. It can be read for already noted the mother-daughter story, or the evolving writer story, but it can also be read as an introduction, in a most elegant and subtle way, to pundhan munhak and all sorts of political, social and economic themes. Without the overt violence and in-your-face political themes of much of Korean modern literature (e.g. Land of the Banished), Park’s work allows the political story to infuse the narrative, or to serve as explanation. This allows the story, first and foremost, to shine through and the reader can appreciate the “Koreaness” of the story as his or her knowledge allows. Park’s indirect political strategy means that a reader who knows about the Korean War can feel it’s inevitable approach and understand its meaning in that context, while a newcomer to Korean history can feel the same ominous approach, but understand it within the narrower context of the family. Who Ate Up All the Shinga (as well as the recently translated Toy City) is a novel that can be read completely on its own merits. Certainly it includes incidents and broad historical realities of the era, but these really only occur when they are coincident with the plot. History is not, as it so often is in translated modern Korean literature, the plot itself, rather it is a backdrop against which a far more personal plot develops. To go back to Park’s personal development in this story – it is primarily internal, despite all the rigors of the time, and this gives the character of Park a type of human agency that is often missing from Korean modern literature. Discussing some of Park’s previous work, Stephen J. Epstein (the co-translator here) notes, “[Pak’s] texts, though centered within domestic spaces, reach out to comment on larger social issues, but in such a way as to make the most meaningful aspect of the public sphere its impact upon private lives.” This is in some contradistinction to more conventional modern Korean narratives (particularly when they are situated in this time), which more often give us characters who are nearly passive, or reactive to the events of the larger political sphere.

Park’s writing is literary and clever. Her narrator’s semi-displaced and confessional style allows her to describe the cruelest hardships in an off-hand way that, peculiarly, makes the hardships seem all the more real: They are not part of drama, rather they are part of life. Park also has a way of linking long themes throughout the book with clever anecdotes. There are extended meditations on image and honesty, sprinkled through the book, and an aware reader will see them come to conclusion in the final passages of the last chapter.

The translation, by Yu Young-nan and Stephen J. Epstein is fluid and vernacular. This is the second translation I’ve read this month in which the translation was, to my mind perfect, and that is heartening. One final point, although it may seem a trifle. Who Ate Up the Shinga also has one of the most attractive covers I have seen on recent translations and that suggests to me that more thought is being put into the marketing of translations, which can only be a good thing.

Who Ate Up All the Shinga is a great read, on multiple levels, and will fit well on the bookshelf of a dedicated fan of Korean fiction and just as well on the bookshelf of the casual reader of general fiction.

It's great, but it SUCKS!

Man.. Korea still won't come to terms with the internet. And for once I'm not talking about out of date Active-X crud....

the brilliant LIST MAGAZINE, which I suspect I've talked about here before, is a great way to push Korean literature to the world.

Until you look at the website in which everything is a graphic....

"Why," you non-ex-webmasters ask, "would this be a problem?"

Because graphics can't be searched by search engines and there are not ALT tags (the way you make graphic content searchable) on the site.

And a quick look into the code reveals no useful tags....

You have really nice site.. full of content.. that no one will ever find...

siiiiiiiigh.....

Maybe I'm wrong

Random LOLs from an editing job

Working some incredibly clean text from the folks at Ewha...

The text is about family structure in Korea and the family thing is clearly on the translators mind.. well.. kind of..

The first one indicates the translator may not have like all family members equally:

In the meanwhile, bother-in law is considered the most uncomfortable family member to male respondents, followed by bothers, mothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, and fathers.

Well, no one likes a bother!

Then there is the issue of how to describe what the study found out about chilluns:

The conclusion is evident in the following foundlings.

Well, that's a tear in the social fabric!

Finally, I think we all know what the .. well.. translator's .. job is:

The Korean family is departing from translational family values

It's nice to edit something so clean that these rare examples are the equivalent of translational spoonerisms, and not nonsense.

Korean Blogger's Community Meeting in Seoul

~ Greetings ~

2S2 (2nd Saturday at 2pm) meeting for expats in Korea to get together and be jolly.

January Meet up Details:

• Saturday, January 9th 2010.
  
• 12pm: Meeting with the SeoulEats crowd at a dumpling Restaurant in Insadong. Confused on meet up area contact 2S2 Blog.
• 2PM: Both groups will move to the Twosome Cafe near Anguk station (walking).
  
• Book Exchange: Bring books you are finished with and trade them in for ones you would like to read. I am guessing you may not get the original book back...but you could arrange this.
• GoStop: play the game

Any questions or comments let us know. Thanks!

Secret Agency-Less, Man!

Reading an introduction to a collection of Korean short stories, I was struck by the introduction in which the editor attempted to explain why Korean fiction was sometimes unsatisfying for Western readers. His argument, essentially, focused on style, which I thought was a bit shallow, but he did mention something that I had already noted about Korean fiction; something that makes it a bit dispiriting from a Western point-of-view. That recognition is that there is no “tragedy” in Korean literature in the Western sense of tragic heroes. Of course, much Korean fiction is tragic in the prosaic sense of horrible things happening to people who don’t deserve it. But there is no heroic arc, in the Aristotelian sense, and without this arc, much of the fiction seems flat and affectless to my eyes.

One way to briefly summarize the problem is to note that Korean fiction is notably short on agency. The Wikipedia does a pretty fair job of briefly describing agency: Human agency is the capacity for human beings to make choices and to impose those choices on the world. Korean literature is quite short on this kind of approach. For reasons that I will detail in the next couple of posts (I hope), I think it is fair to divide Western and Eastern literature along these lines:

• Western concepts of "agency": the individual, action, will, intentionality, choice, freedom, Manicheanism.
• Eastern Concepts against which "agency" is commonly situated: structure, determinism, society, environment, inevitability, dialecticism.

Without agency, fiction must develop a different kind of plot. Certainly (and probably thankfully), agency-less fiction cannot go the Ayn Rand route, but neither can it go the Macbeth, or even the Great Gatsby route. As the tragic hero is the epitome of agency, it seems like an interesting character through which to approach modern Korean literature.

There are at least two reasons that Korean modern fiction necessarily developed without the tragic hero, one historical and one philosophical. Then, also, there is the result, the literature itself. Separating these ideas is a bit arbitrary, since each feeds the others, but I think it is defensible to achieve a greater understanding.

Because these are biggish ideas, I’m going to break this post up into three parts, with today serving as the introduction and historical record, a following post on philosophical influences, and then an exploration of what this makes Korean modern fiction look like.

History is, in many ways, the easy part. Korea has always been nation that sees itself as at the mercy of other nations. China, the Mongols (1231 - 1270), even Japan (1592–1598), have all at one time or another threatened Korea’s existence. China was such an important ‘influence’ on Korea, that when a Chinese King died, Koreans donned mourning clothes for three years, as though it were a Korean ruler who had died. As a nation, Korea has historically seen itself as at the mercy of the agency of others.

This construction has lived on into the modern Korean history of Japanese colonialization and then a nation split by Cold War forces, Korean fiction tends to focus on stories in which characters are tossed by the times. There is a classic Korean bit of folk-wisdom that sums up this history in a culturally precise way: “When whales fight, shrimp are crushed.”

I have recently been lucky enough to edit a Korean Studies textbook, and it is rife with examples of the authors describing the modern powerlessness of Koreans. The powerlessness comes with different historical reasons, but it remains constant.

Japanese colonialism is represented:

The liberation signified that Koreans were released from poverty, a result of Japan’s economic plunder, political oppression, and psychological incapacitation. Those who lived the moment when the liberation was announced stated what they witnessed:

The war is represented:

Obaltan is known as a work that represents realism and modernism in Korean movies. The movie is based on a fiction of the same title by Yi Beom Seon. The backdrop of Obaltan is Haebangchon, Seoul, bleak and impoverished in the post-War era. Typical of many houses built of dusty crates that once contained humanitarian supplies from America, the main character Cheol Ho’s house on top of the hill is too small for 7 family members to reside. Obaltan illustrates the tragic life of displaced North Koreans trying to settle in the South. Poverty and pain of the uprooted; cold reality that denies any comfort in life; instability, irony, life of frustration for the powerless; this was the depressing reality of Korean society.

Even when Korea ‘wins’, it is presented as an imposition:

Modernization:

For Koreans, modernization was not a national choice, but a shock that overtook them by surprise. …. As the colonizer, Japan held absolute power over Korea, and Japan’s plan to modernize Korea was to use it as a forward base to advance into the mainland. It is only natural that, as a result, Korea’s modernization has its deformations.

Industrialization:

Seopyonje is based on the Seopyonje, the Light of Sound in Namdo Saram, written by Yi Cheong Jun. Through the neglected lives of Korea’s forgotten artists of traditional pansori music, the disappearing sound of art in Korea is compared to the crumbling body of an artist under the modernization process.

By noting these things I don’t mean to belittle their impact on Korea, rather to explain that Korean history, and the Korean interpretation of that history, focuses rather directly on inability to have agency. This means its literature would innately have a much more difficult time using the idea of the tragic hero, which is essentially a fiction of agency.

And then there is the 300 pound historical gorilla – Confucianism. Korean history is even easier to analyze in an agency-less environment given Korea’s essentially Confucian nature. In Confucian thought the kind of agency that Westerners routinely assume to exist, does not in fact exist.

Which leads us to the next post – philosophical underpinnings of agency-less fiction.

LOL..

In his review of Kang Sok-kyong's The Valley Nearby (Found over at London Korea Links) Philip Gowman says:

The synopsis on the back of the book suggests a more action-packed plot than is the case

and quotes the synopsis:

Living in the country, Yun-hee is engaged in a solitary struggle. Her two worlds, that of a rural housewife and that of an advocate for equality, are at odds with each other. As her artistic, alcoholic husband increasingly cuts himself off from the world, Yun-hee must find a balance between what is and what could be.

I dunno, that first sentence kind of started the ennui settling in for me. ;-)

Gowman seems to be gingerlly dancing around the fact that not so very much happens in the book. The following passage really seems to outline the small-stakes prosaic nature of the book.

In the countryside, though, concerns centre more around how many of Hee-jo’s delicate punchong ware pots will survive the next firing of the kiln. Can the increased costs of firing the kiln be passed on to the purchasers of Hee-jo’s beautiful objects? Should he cash in an make a high-class range of tableware, or should he stay true to his life as an artist? Meanwhile, his well-educated, articulate wife tries to live close to the land, does her best for her family and tries to hold relationships together. A slight feeling of suspicion towards these former city-dwellers lingers among the local inhabitants.

Heavens forfend that the "slight feeling of supsicion" should blow up into an unquenchable fire-storm of ... of... of.. "more than just a slight feeling of suspicion!" After all, feelings (as well as ceramics) might get hurt.

This might just be a pass for me.

An interesting article in the Herald about what pushed Korean book sales last year..

It relates to my previous post about Shin Kyung-sook, inasmuch as one of the motive forces was apparently female authors.

The other motive force was the e-book:

Kyobo, the country's biggest bookstore chain, said its preliminary yearly sales rose 8.9 percent from 2008, helped by the stronger-than-expected revenue from e-book sales.

Interesting

TFYFQZ4RX8F5

Rolling out Shin Kyung-sook's "Take Care of My Mother" in 15 Languages

As reported over at the Herald,

The publication rights for the best-selling South Korean novel "Take Care of My Mother" have been sold in 15 countries, with the first overseas edition to be published in China next year, a local agency said Tuesday, according to Yonhap News.

I can't seem to find the article, but this book was credited for turning around the fiction publishing industry in Korea. It's a topical book, focusing on Alzeheimer's and according to an article at the times features the splintered narratives that modern Korean author's love so much.

The book consists of four chapters in which the narrators are the daughter, son, husband, and finally, the mother. In each chapter, the narrators tell of their memories and experiences.

As they look for her, they come to realize their indifference to her pain and loneliness. They realize their love for her because of their need.

Might make a nice chick-flick?

And, at least, it's another step away from political novels. ;-)

Deep Blue Night by Choe In-ho

Choe In-ho’s Deep Blue Night is one of my favorite of the Portable Library of Korean Literature translations, partly because it’s theme is so accessible to a western reader. It is a combination of a travelogue and that most quintessential American literary form, the buddy road-trip. The story begins with a scene reminiscent of the opening scene of Lee Kyoun-young's The Other Side of Dark Remembrance; an unnamed narrator waking up after a paralyzing night of drinking. He is shortly revealed to be Hyeong, a man on a road-trip with his friend Jun-ho, who has been exiled from Korea because of a drug arrest. They have traveled a pretty average Korean tourist arc, Disneyland, Grand Canyon, Yosemite, San Francisco, and now they are on their return trip to Los Angeles.

Hyeong frequently discusses seeing things that will be forgotten – what it is to see things that will never be seen again. This theme is actually a precursor to the main theme of the story, that of alienation from homeland. In Deep Blue Night we see something like the traditional Korean arc of separation and (with luck, the ending is ambivalent) return. Even in Korean modern literature set in the United States, you don’t have to scratch very hard to reveal pundhan munhak at the heart of the story. Hyeong eventually makes this explicit when he reveals that his visit to the United States is of no interest to him, “The sole purpose of his journey was not to see … His journey to America was a journey to a self-chosen land of exile.” (45)

Deep Blue Night is a fun read, Jun-ho is presented as a pretty clearly identifiable character, the amiable pot-smoking dolt. Choe’s writing is expressive (and often surprising) as in his description of sunset on the coast, “The army of the sea launches a concentrated fusillade against the disintegrating realm of heaven. Shells explode in a burst of sparks, illuminating the darkness on high with shards of light.” (57)

There are revealing cultural glimpses as well. In Buckwheat Season, one of the classic stories (particularly for Koreans) of Korean modern literature, there is a scene in which two friends play out an oft-repeated scene between each other as one retells an annoying story:

Cho had heard it often enough since making friends with Ho, but he could not bring himself to reveal his boredom. Ho, on his part, feigned indifference and went on as he pleased.

Choe updates this to the inside of an automobile

Jun-ho had a bad habit: he liked his music very loud … The idea was not so much to enjoy the music as to shower himself with it.
With the windows rolled up tight, he [Hyeong] himself felt trapped in a closet. In this small, speeding closet the piercing sound of the music was torture. But he made up his mind not to reveal these feelings. (29)

This is, of course, quite a Korean approach - a deeply respectful approach to kibun.

Choe uses automotive speed in a way quite similar to Kim Young-ha’s use in I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, as a metaphor for modern separation, each one of us endures. As their ability to deal with this anomic existence wears away, so does the mechanical capacity of their automobile. At the end, when Hyeong and Jun-ho are stranded, lost on a highway they hadn’t intended to follow, when their car has finally choked to a grinding halt, with Jun-ho’s secret misery revealed, only then can the characters come face to face with their essential isolation and exile. Lost and weeping, dazed and repentant they both promise/beg to return to their community. Conquered and weak, they long for return. Deep Blue Night concludes with Hyeong broken on the beach, his desires clear, but his future opaque.

Google shows me that this has been made into a Korean movie, although the poster is somewhat alarming in that it most prominently features a woman and child, and there are essentially none active in the story. And reading the movie synopsis it becomes clear that the written story was completely bastardized, alas.

The remainder of the book is filled out with a short story, The Poplar Tree. A kind of meditation, The Poplar Tree is 10 pages long and allegorically addresses issues of desire, transformation, and extinction. Distinctly Buddhist in tone, it interweaves the story of a boy and a blacksmith, and an apple and an oak tree. Somewhere between a koan and a story, it manages to be whimsical and bittersweet. In a way, it is a nice palate-cleanser after the jangled and unhappy tone of Deep Blue Night.

Two good stories, well paired.

“Expanding the Frontiers of Comparative Literature”

An interesting conference to be held this August in Seoul. Unfortunately, the deadline for paper submission is passed, but some of the topics on the agenda look pretty good. Held triennially (what?why?) it is described as:

The Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) is the Olympics of literature. Held triennially, this monumental event brings together over 1,000 academics and writers from more than thirty different nations and provides a platform for lively exchange about literary studies, creative writing, and pedagogy. Transcending the national, linguistic, theoretical, and geographical boundaries which, more often than not, compartmentalize literature and its studies, the ICLA Congress also has an interdisciplinary approach to literature through an inclusive and extensive consideration of philosophy, politics, economy, science, technology, environment, and culture as they relate to literature.

And the Korean Comparative Literature Association sees it as an opportunity to "fix" something

KCLA would like to reestablish the status of humanities in Korea and demonstrate its potential to the international academic community. As president of KCLA, I sincerely would like to ask for your interest in and genuine commitment to the XIXth Congress of the ICLA in 2010 in Seoul, Korea.

If anyone is going to come and check this out, drop me a line and I'll happily tour-guide.

I am amused (which comes before "appalled" in your comprehensive dictionary) to see that they can't spell "abstract" correctly.

If You Happen to be in Hawaii

You might want to check out the Fulton's discussing " The Red Room: Stories of Trauma in Contemporary Korea" (and other tales of trauma).

OK then... translate some literature the world cares about..

I shouldn't be so cranky about this, but the Korea Times has an article about its translation contest winners in which, well.. read it..

Korea Times President and Publisher Park Moo-jong hoped more English translations of Korean literature would boost the chances of a Korean winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in the future.

"It would have been nice if a Korean won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. But with your participation and love, hopefully, we can have a Nobel Prize winner in the near future," Park said during the ceremony.

Yeah.. so stop translating so many works that have no chance...

Ahem..

rant over..

looking at what did win the translation contest I am pleased to see a work by Park Wan-suh's "Ode for Longing." If there is a Korean author whose subject and style resonate when translated, it is Park (Who ate up all the Shinga, There a Petal Silently Falls, etc..). I must shamefully admit that I don't know the works of the other writers whose translations won, which means over this break, I have tons of reading to do.

Win-win!

And stop obsessing about the prize.. holy cow... not everything in life is judged by the judges...

;-)

A Sporadic but Cool Blog

Here's a cool looking blog (Korean American Readings), apparently by a woman in the United States (I'm guessing from info and twitters on the site). She doesn't post a ton, but when she does it is quality stuff. She's apparently been at it for a while as the list of reviews on the right side of her site indicates.

There are cool things beyond reviews as well, this post on asian american book covers prompts me to think about covers of translations - the Jimmondang covers (sucky) and the cover of "I Have the Right to Destroy Myself," pop immediately to mind as anodyne...

Nice stuff.

The Dong-Ni Mok-Wol Literary Museum - Dateline Gyeongju

Down in old Silla (just outside of Gyeongju) with my family and on the way up to Seokguram grotto I spotted a sign to a literary museum. It said “Dong-Ni Mok-Wol Literary Museum” and with some struggle I was able to communicate to our cabbie that I wanted to see it on the way back down. He clearly didn’t see the reason for this desire, but I eventually prevailed upon him. ;-)

Still, we swung by it (actual address, Jinhyeon-dong, Gyeongju-si in Gyeongsangbuk-do) and it was cool. It pays tribute to the memories and the spirits of Kim, Dong-Ni and Park, Mok-Wol. Kim I already knew of, but Park was new to me. Since they were both born in Gyeongju, I guess, they got a museum. It was cool, one wing per man, and when I told the extremely friendly ajjumah that I taught at Dongguk, she just about went mad, rushing me from exhibit to exhibit, even taking pictures of me and the family. The museum was spacious, pretty, and had some cool exhibits, including electronic ones. The ‘Dong-Ni Mok-Wol Literary Museum’ is currently run by the Dong-Ni Mok-Wol College of Creative Writing.

I had read “Cry of the Magpies,” so I knew a little about Kim, but this place filled in the gaps with some stories that might be a bit over-colored. Or true, how would I know”

Kim, Dong-Ni was so poor as a child that he snaked booze from his father’s drinking glasses. He was the 3rd son of 5 children in Seonggeon-dong, Gyeongju-si in Gyeongbuk, and his name at birth was “Chang-Gwi”. He entered the Gyeseong Junior High School after graduating from the Gyenam Elementary School. A high-school dropout, his poem “A snowy heron” won the prize for the Spring Literary Contest of Chosun Ilbo in 1934, and he quickly became a serious writer. Laterr, he won the Spring Literary Contest of the Joong Ang Daily as well as that of Dong-A Ilbo and eventually became a professor at the Sorabol College of Arts.

Park, I don’t know so well, so I merely reproduce a fairly amusing clip from the “Worldyan,” which raises several questions including, ‘what is sedimentary poetry?’

The birth name of Master Park, Mok-Wol is “Yeong Jong”. He was born in 1915 at Moryang-ri, Seo-myeon in Gyeongju-si and was graduated from the Geoncheon Elementary School and the Gyeseong Junior High School in Daegu. In 1933, his children´s verses “Tong Dak Dak, Tong Zak Zak” and “Welcoming swallow” won prizes which enabled him to be introduced into the literary circles, where his life as a writer began to bloom.
In 1946, as he published a joint collection of poetry “Cheongrok-jip” together with poets Jo Ji Hoon and Park Du-Jin, the literary magnate Park, Mok-Wol began to get attentions from the literary world as a poet of so called Cheongnokpa. Afterwards, Park, Mok-Wol had his career as the core member of the Korea Writers Association, and a Lecturer of Seoul National University. He was also honored by winning the 3rd Asia Liberal Literature Award.
Park, Mok-Wol was mostly in pursuit of the sedimentary poetry exploring for the issue of historical reality and the matter of existence, as well as the nature of all things. Also as the writer of children’s verses and as a native local lyricist, he brought the serenity of heart into our people who were living in the period of barren emotions and was held in high esteem as the national poet.

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...

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.

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.

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..

Persuading Koreans of the Wisdom of the "Mojo Wire"

It's odd.. Korea is the land of the last minute, the just above spec, and the rush job.

Why then, will none of my Koroean academic friends accept the notion of the "Mojo Wire?"

is it that the "Mojo Wire" implies process rather than passed on product?

It was originally the fax, but in my head it is the ability to to transmit bits of information in real time.. let us just call it something like.. oh.. conversation?

But I seem to be in the minority about this opinion here, as everyone likes to finish their work (at the absolute deadline) and then send it to the translator or editor with 5 minutes to go to deadline.

"the mojo wire", Thompson used the new technology to extend the writing process precariously close to printing deadlines, often haphazardly sending in notes mere hours before the magazine went to press. Fellow writers and editors would have to assemble the finished product with Thompson over the phone.

Which resonates with me.. cause Gawd damn it... if you send me the "finished" work at the deadline? It won't get finished.. let us have, in this happy world, a little electronic conversation.. a bit of the old this and that.. we can hash out the things that need to be hashed, and re-assemble into pork the things that need to be porcine.

Or I can get something with 15 minutes to go, and the request that I make it "English."

Fark it dudes.. I'm from the US..

I don't do English (other than their beers)

But if you send me the bits, the pieces?

I can spend time on them.. I can suggest how they can be better linked to fit the Western version of Academic Writing.. I can..

I can finish the thing and go to sleep!

Ahem...

off to edit the last piece that came in (at least one of my corporate bosses seems to get my model!)

Kim Young-ha has an English Website (And a new short story)

Kim Young-ha ("I Have the Right to Destroy Myself," "The Photo Shop Murder," "Whatever Happened to that Guy in the Elevator") has not only moved to Brooklyn at some point, but also has a nice new website in English.

The site is here (you have to click on that random splash page to get to the menu)

The story, "Their Last Visitor" (PDF - 5 pages) is here.

There are also some interviews on the site.

A Priceless Online Resource - "Twentieth-Century Korean Literature"

This is a link directly to the PDF of "Twentieth Century Korean Literature." Less than 100 pages long, written by Yi Man-ho, U Ch'ange, Yi Kwangho and Kim Mihyeon (Edited by the irreplaceable Brother Anthony, the link is also to a document on his brilliant site) this work broadly covers Korean Literature from 1900 to the present.

The book divides the literature into 4 periods, all of which will be obvious to those who know Korean history; The Occupation, The War and Post War, Industrialisation, and Consumer Society.

I've read this work twice - once before I had read any Korean Literature and just this week. It made a lot more sense the latter time, but it is worth reading just for its outline of general themes and developments. If you have read even the limited amount of Korean literature that I have talked about on this blog, the book will be even more valuable as you will recognize the roles of particular works and authors in the development of modern Korean Literature.

I look forward to coming back and re-reading this book again, in another year, when I have even more readings under my belt.

Not being a particular fan of translated poetry, those sections were still a bit opaque to me, but this work is so short there is no point in skipping any of it.

Other exciting things are going on over here by Namsan, including a project to develop translation selection rubrics, but for now I have to run off to the bookstore, and leave a link to this free digital gem (and run!).

North Korean Literary Theory

In three recent posts the Translator and I discussed the political impetus behind Korean fiction and its serialization. Now, in an interesting article in the Korea Herald, Choi Yearn-hong talks about North Korean Literary Theory, which is not only intensely political, but explicitly so:

North Korean literature promotes socialist ideology, new technology and Puritan communist culture. Kim Jong-il has been criticizing North Korean literature as lacking philosophic depth, aesthetic sense, sensitivity and artistic craftsmanship, and thus as mundane, mechanical, repetitive and ``distant from life.'' His different theories, ``the seed theory,'' ``literature as a study of man,'' and ``Our Own Creative Works,'' attempted to correct weaknesses in North Korean literature. I doubt his theories have achieved what they were supposed to accomplish.

and

What is (or are) North Korea's literary theory (or theories) which guide North Korean literary works?

The North Korean government continued to indoctrinate its people with socialism until the early 1960s. It justified its initiation of the Korean War, 1950-1953, as a national liberation struggle, mobilizing all resources toward building a socialist country. Under the direction of the Communist party, literature and art were used to propagate revolutionary socialism. From the mid-1960s, writers and artists were expected to advocate the Juche thought of Kim Il-sung. History was rewritten from the perspective of Kim's Juche thought.

In the 1980s, North Korean literary critics started to discuss the ``seed'' theory, which originated from Kim Jong-il, the son of Kim Il-sung. In one of his speeches, Kim made the statement; ``All great writers should have good seed in their literary works.'' It is a commonsensical word, but it has stirred up North Korean poets and writers. They spent the first five years of the 1980s extensively discussing the meaning of the seed theory.

One critic said, ``Seed theory is searching for a balance between ideology and aesthetic sense or artistic craftsmanship.'' Another said, ``it is the philosophic depth of literary works.'' In order to settle the dispute, the North Korean Writers' Association attempted to find the seeds in their so-called classic literary works ``Blood Sea,'' ``Fate of a Militia Man,'' ``Flower-selling Maid,'' ``Traditional Worshipping Place,'' and ``Ahn Jung-geun shot Ito Hirobumi.'' The seeds, in their classic works are class struggle, national liberation, permanent revolution, Kim Il-sung's fight against the Japanese army and the U.S. army, and his victories.

In the mid-1980s, North Korean critics started to say that ``literature is a study of man,'' which originally appeared in Kim Jong-il's book, ``On Cinema,'' reported in the February 1992 issue of Chosun Munhak. Kim said, ``literature is a study of man. Literature should not come from an empty sky; it should come from real human life experiences.'' He emphasized that Kim Il-sung was the man who fought the Japanese Manchurian Army and defeated it, who fought the mighty U.S. army and defeated it, and who reconstructed the North Korean economy from the ashes of the Korean War. His speeches were made on the occasion of publishing a series of novels on the life of Kim Il-sung, his father, under the name of ``Never-perishing Literature'' series. ``Literature as a study of man'' includes stories about a lovely young woman who married a disabled veteran from the Korean War; the humble man who enjoyed equality under Kim Il-sung's leadership; a teacher who could not leave her countryside school for her fiance in a city; a worker who produced more than his assignments; a scientist who invented a new sophisticated technology in a steel mill; a prisoner of war; and an employee who produced his works ahead of schedule among many others. All these people are small Kim Il-sungs.

In 1991, the North Korean Writers' Association advocated ``Our Way of Making Creative works'' modeled after the party line, ``Let's Maintain our Own Socialism.'' They recognized the fact that the Cold War was gone, that the USSR was dismantled, and East European communist nations were converting to free market economies. Our own style of socialism never knows defeatism, it only knows victories.

It's worth checking out..

An Appointment with My Brother by Yi Mun-yol

The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 13 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul

Yi Mun-yol’s An Appointment with My Brother is a full-fledged political lecture wrapped in the garb of a short novel. Yi makes no effort to hide the fact that the central discussion is, in many ways, a minor part of the formal plot, although it is also quite clearly the important part of the novel. It is to Yi’s credit that he personalizes his protagonists so well that, even as they (The two step-brothers as well as a businessman who appears in the novel) argue what is essentially predictive political theory, both the story and the argument seem lively and important.

The plot is fairly mechanical. The narrator meets with his stepbrother, a child from their father’s second marriage. The father’s second marriage occurred after he defected from South to North Korea. This plot is reminiscent of Yi’s own life, which was substantially complicated, both economically and politically, by the fact that his father defected to North Korea. The meeting takes place in China and the meeting is between stepbrothers because their father, whom the narrator had initially hoped to meet, has died.

The meeting between separated brothers is an old trope in Korean modern literature, “In Korean popular discourse, the division of the peninsula into two separate nations after the Korean War is often symbolized as two brothers who, in the shadow of their parents’ death, are tragically separated across an artificially imposed national line.” (Wood 129) Presaged by political discussions between the narrator and, successively a businessman and a professor, when the two brothers meet the conversation becomes a nationalistic one with each brother retreating to the platitudes of his homeland. This leads to some fairly crackling interactions, including one of my favorite passages:

I heard that the traitorous plutocrats have millions of square meters of land, and that all the scenic places are taken up by their deluxe villas where they cavort with young whores.

That’s some funny writing and also does a good job of relaying the overblown oratory-style the North Koreans sometimes use when discussing the South at the same time it limns the lack of sophistication of the North Korean brother. Other characters have similarly vivid personalities and Yi does an excellent job of weaving them in and out of the story.

The brothers struggle to find common ground and in a very “Korean” scene, their differences are bridged by drinking soju, and the brothers perform a joint memorial service for their father. Nationalist sentiments never quite quit intruding, there is an amusing scene in which the brothers argue over the meaning of their offerings to their father, but in the end familial unity is restored and a sort of judgment seems to be reached, when the Northern brother accepts a gift of cash from the Southern one. This action also echoes one of the ongoing political themes of the novel, that re-unification may end up being an economically costly process. That is only one of the political/economic options the book explores with respect to re-unification, and it is one of the minor miracles of the book that Yi makes all the options/predictions stand on their own two legs; in most cases he is quite good at leaving judgments out of his text.

This is a suprisingly light and entertaining read.

"Inside Cloud Cuckoo Land: The Voice of Korea" Withdrawn..

UPDATE

"Inside Cloud Cuckoo Land: The Voice of Korea,” is NOT available for readers to purchase.

The author has informed me that due to publishing problems,the book has been withheld from distribution. The publisher, however, says that the book will be re-issued at a later date--a year from now!

When I contacted the publishers they agreed with this timetable:

At the moment we are waiting until the book can be reprinted before distributing it. I anticipate that the volume might appear in a corrected version in August or September of 2010.

Taebaek Mountain Range (needs to be translated)

Here's a review of a book that looks worth reading. This is stolen whole fromcuidadocomodalmat (I don't think I'm going to let that bother me as that seems to be stolen whole from here. ;-)) a site which seems to be primarily in Spanish, but has an English page. Looks like another book to put on my list, well if it ever gets translated into English! It is currently available in French, German, and Japanese.

Last interesting point? The author appears to work at the same University I do.

Taebaek Mountain Range portrays the tragedy of ‘liberation lost’; upon examining this tragedy closely, we see a common problem towards the end of feudalism — namely, the persecution of the peasantry at the hands of the land-owning class. Jo provides a compelling portrayal of life in South Korea immediately after liberation. Taebaek Mountain Range has had an enormous influence on its Korean readers. The work demonstrates the power of imaginative writing; Jo’s words have the power to move the hearts of his readers and have them look back on history to confront the realities of the hidden past. The narrative inspires with its anti-war message. The text overflows with humor and playfulness even when describing tragic situations. The central characters never give up their optimism, their belief that they will ultimately prevail, even while suffering through the misery of war. Jo provides a meticulous analysis of human behavior. He uses his honesty and awareness of reality as weapons, but he never tries to push forward his own judgment. He portrays mid-twentieth century Korean society using sensual and sometimes even extreme language. His work is rich with both satire and poetry. Professor Calvez says, “Some of the expressions are coarse and crude but there’s also much profoundness. The parts portraying Korea’s shamanist faith and traditional rites leave particularly lasting impressions on the Western reader.” Jo shows the shortcomings of the Korean people, as well as their joy and optimism, and their upright mentality. These are some of the reasons why this work is considered one of the greatest works of Korean literature.

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 (ably edited by the redoubtable Kevin O’Rourke) pulls off this unlikely trick in his The Ma Rok Biographies. In three short stories (stories 2, 3, and 5 from the original work) , all featuring protagonists named “Ma,” Seo handily 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. In the course of this he also passes judgment on individual humans: He finds them powerless, feckless, and silly; flotsam and jetsam on seas of indeterminacy. Finally, he also passes judgment on human systems, our war-making and our political systems particularly, and finds them wanting.

FALLING UP – THE MA ROKSOM BIOGRAPHY
The first profile (the second in the original text) is perhaps the most random of the three stories. In it a hapless political-science student is battered about by events surrounding the North Korean advance down the Korean peninsula. In hopes of escaping the North Koreans, Ma Roksom swims the Han River and is immediately arrested as a North Korean spy. By a bit of luck, he is recognized by a friend and instead of becoming a prisoner of war, or being killed as a spy, begins a long and perambulating series of events in which, until the end, even his most ridiculous behavior is eventually rewarded. After his swim across the Han, Ma heads down to Busan, far away from the encroaching communists.

In, perhaps, an intentional parody of the odd position of power that English sometimes confers in South Korea, Ma Roksom’s limited ability to say random English words gains him a position as interpreter. This position causes him great psychic and physical strain, and he is almost happy to lose it and move to a position as an interrogator closer to the lines. There, Ma ‘attacks’ two prisoners, in fact he is more or less trying to reason with them, but he gains a reputation as a tough-guy that follows him even as he is transferred to a job even closer to the front. Again, he is a translator, and again he fails. This results in his move to the Military Patrol, by now all the way up near Pyeonyang where he is given command of a POW camp. A reader can’t help but notice that as soon as Ma Roksom starts “winning” through his inexplicable tussles with reality, he moves closer and closer to just that which he had endeavored to escape.

At the POW camp, Ma recognizes old friends who he knows are not communists. At this point Ma makes his second act of personal will (the first being his swim across the Han) and directs a fraudulent execution scene that allows his friends a clean escape.

In a universe of random absurdity, however, directed deeds – even good deeds – represent a tear in the fabric of life, and of course Ma is caught and punished for his attempt to instill some kind of sense into his life.

The punishment is also absurd. Ma is forced to strip down to his underpants (although the translation also says “naked”) and run across a bridge in the dead of winter. Ma thinks about the absurdity of crossing two rivers only in his underpants but his final thought is that “The scene when he reached the neck of the bridge was gratifying: he was like a sprinter breaking the tape.”

As a comment on the war itself, Seo is clearly arguing something that could only be argued in a farce: that decisions were being arrived at arbitrarily and that the situation outstripped the ability of any understanding; so reason was tossed out.

FALLING DOWN – THE MA JUN BIOGRAPHY
The second profile (third in the original book) features Ma Jun, a “conscientious official” who is actually officiates nothing. This story likely takes place in the late 1600s, as it is placed in the middle of the historical power struggle between the Noron and Soron political parties during a period in which the Noron control the country that is also an “end of the century culture.” (p 52)

In any case, the Ma family has been in decline for several generations, are associated with the out of power Soron, and if Ma does not receive an official position, his family will be stricken from the ranks of nobility. Certainly Geo presents the test for an official position as rigged, but Seo is never a writer to suggest only one “reason,” because ultimately he is arguing that reason has little to do with outcome. So, Seo adds another burden to Ma - unfortunately, generations of bad luck and malnutrition have taken a toll:

The presumption was that a hole had been bored in the Ma family brain. The tragedy of the father and son was their complete failure to realize this.

Seo’s breezy and clever style is evident in this passage from the absurd image of the family sharing one brain, to the notion that the damage done from boring into it is so great that the damaged themselves cannot assess it.

Before his death Ma Jun’s father counsels Ma Jun to assiduously court a local politician, Lord Kim. Unconvinced, Ma Jun seeks advice from his friend Choe Chiyol, who recommends steadfastness in the Soron cause and studied indifference to base political power. Ma Jun eventually rejects Choe’s advice and insinuates himself into the house of Lord Kim. As the story comes to its climax, Ma Jun is given a family-saving magistracy in Jeongeup at just the time that his feckless friend Choe leads a hopeless attack on Lord Kim’s court.

This is an act of suicidal rebellion and in the course of it Choe reprises Geo’s estimate of the Ma family as have a “hole ... bored … in the … brain” by braining himself with an axe. This senseless act by Choe causes Lord Kim to,whimsically give the magistracy of Jeongeup to Choe, who Kim rightly identifies as a useful idiot. In several strokes of a pen (“the bespectacled recorder’s writing brush moved diligently”) the Ma family line is destroyed by random, absurd and farcical events.

If the first biography revealed the farcical nature of the Korean war, this biography shows the farcical nature of the feudal political system and neo-Confucian social system that pre-dated Japanese colonialism.


FALLING FOR IT – THE MA YEONG BIOGRAPHY
The third profile (fifth in the original book) begins with an absurdist introduction: “I propose to detail one undocumented case, a man by the name of Ma Yeong.” From this technically impossible opening salvo to the (almost) happy ending of the short story Geo paints the picture of a rather charming collaborator named Ma Yeong. This profile takes place during, obviously, the Japanese occupation of Korea.

The story is of two father-son relationships gone bad. First is that of the collaborator, whose son hates school, because the other children tease him about his father’s job. Ma Yeong responds with the “everyone else is doing it” argument, and I found this the only slightly weak section in all three of the stories. The bigger problem is to be found in the household of Mr. Kim, a far larger collaborator who serves on a puppet governmental agency of the Japanese. Mr. Kim’s son loathes him and becomes an anti—colonialist.

Ma Yeong is being pressured by his handlers to produce something actionable, and the plot revolves around his efforts to both ensure that Mr. Kim’s son is not killed by the Japanese and that Ma himself can turn something useful over to the Japanese. It would ruin the story to reveal the clever stratagem the Yeong uses, but he does manage to navigate the Scylla of the Japanese and the Charybdis of Mr. Kim and get out of the situation with a bit of aplomb.

This is an amusing story, but it has to be noted that it breaks the mold of the other two in the sense that this Ma is able to use information, reason, and planning to arrive at a reasonably sensible, and to some extent remunerative solution. As a non-Korean reader I suspect that in this story Seo was not able to resist the urge to tell a B’rer Rabbit type story in which the humble Korean outwits the colonial Japanese. The absurdism in the third profile is not carried to its, if it is not misusing the word, logical conclusion.

A good story, entertainingly told, but not precisely of the same cloth as the previous two.

The translation is quite good, getting the randomness and stupidity of Seo’s universe across with appropriate verve. One example: In the third/fifth Biography the translator gets bureaucratese exactly right:

The background to his becoming that most hated of entities, a police informer, was not without its own extenuating circumstances. However, a prolix introduction of such trivialities at the beginning of this account is not to the purpose. Suffice it to say that the noble ambience emanating from his single character name indicated that he was the seed of a family line of some substance.

That’s just brilliant stuff by Seo and Kevin O’Rourke, with the language simultaneously amplifying and deflating the bureaucratic pretensions of the narrator.

The liner notes, on the other hand, seem a bit suspect to me. They claim:

Ma Rok, which stands for the various protagonists with the surname of Ma in this series of five short stories (of which only three are included here), actually means “the horse and the deer” in Chinese. This odd combination of the two animals refers to a classical Chinese anecdote in which the powerful can coerce others into seeing a horse as a deer.

I’m honestly not sure how this applies to the book I was reading as this particular anecdote is more about the coercive power of the state, and the stories in Ma Rok are much more focused on randomness. I'd be much more likely to attribute the title to another Chinese anecdote, the race of the horse and the deer, in which a horse and a deer who are friends are brought to death and slavery by their absurd envy, and the power of the fox. In addition, “marok” is the Japanese word for idiot, which also seems a bit closer to the mark. I have a suspicion that the liner notes are in some kind of error here, although only Seo could know for sure, and I'm not sure how to get in touch with him to find out.

And Now, a Word from a Sponsor!

A cute video of the Korean Literature Translation Institute booth at the recent International Book Fair at the Coex. The video is by Hyunwon Soo who says:

I went to International Seoul Book Expo 2009 and visited the booth of Korea Literature Translation Institute and received a warm welcome from the staff.

http://klti.or.kr/eng/

Check out their website if you want to learn more about Korean literature!

The Wounded, by Yi Chongjun

The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 4 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul

In The Wounded Yi Chongjun deals with issues of identity. As in An Assailant’s Face that identity is tightly connected to the question of a face, in fact in both stories the question of what and who the face is, and to what extent it is important to know one’s face. Obviously, face is used here in the symbolic sense of identity

The Wounded is a complicated story, featuring a story within a story – really layers of stories within stories, and then a revelation of a final fiction that sets the entire story on its ear. The key characters are two brothers, with two peripherally related female characters serving more or less to show the outlines of the personalities of the brothers. One brother is a doctor and the other an artist. The artist suffers a “wound” that makes him faceless, while the doctor suffers a wound that he feels defines his face. In an intriguing philosophical sub-plot, the faceless artist argues with himself (although considering his brother) about cowardice/omission and action/commission. The former is associated with facelessness and the latter with a ‘defined’ face. As the story works its way through, it becomes clear that Yi believes that without defining the ‘unknown’ face of evil, morality or even just functionality, cannot be achieved.

The doctor has just lost his first patient and the artist has lost a potential wife. The doctor’s response to his trauma is to begin a piece of fiction, based on an event in his life (and related to a childhood trauma), in which a soldier (the doctor), trapped behind enemy lines, kills one of his compatriots. The doctor, unfortunately, cannot bring himself to finish that story. In a doubly unfortunate event, the artist, who is struggling with a painting, reads his brother’s story and somehow finds its inability to conclude to affect his own ability to complete his painting. This painting is intended to be his first painting that includes a human face. That the painter is attempting this is implicitly tied to the fact that Hyein, one of his students, to whom he was attracted and with whom he had a brief physical relationship, is marrying another man.

The doctor’s fiction is of three men trapped behind enemy lines. The first character is the ‘narrator’ of the story within a story, and that is the doctor. The second character is a hapless, and perhaps masochistic, soldier named Private Kim. The final character is the sadistic Sergeant Gwanmo, who is also a homosexual rapist. With Private Kim wounded, and all three trapped behind enemy lines, the captain decides that there are not enough supplies for three characters and that Private Kim should be killed, “when the first snow falls.”

Upon writing the scene in which the first snowfall does fall, the doctor is seized by writer’s block and cannot write the critical scene of the murder, what he has written ends with the doctor, saying, “it was then I thought it was alright for him to die.” As the doctor has already admitted to the painter that he committed a murder, it is clear that the doctor killed Kim, although Gwanmo’s role in the murder is unclear at the outset.

The painter, exasperated beyond patience, takes it upon himself to conclude his brother’s story, hoping to bring them both closure. This is a clever plot development from a purely writerly point of view, as it creates a story within the story within the story. The painter has his brother pull Private Kim from the cave and shoot him in the snow.

This leads the Doctor to reveal the “real” story he intended to write - I will not spoil this, as it is the beginning of a brilliant run up to an event in the present that shatters every story previously told. Suffice it to say that the tightly wound plot releases in a most unexpected way.

As I mentioned at the outset, the face is the key symbol/metaphor of The Wounded. Towards the start of the The Wounded the doctor looks at his brother’s painting of the faceless person and muses:

“… depending how you look at it, it could be a finished piece even through the face has no features. It could be God’ most faithful son – with no eyes or ears, living by merely following God’s will. But once it gets eyes, a mouth, a nose, ears, it’ll be different, won’t it?”

Why the doctor associates an unfinished face with goodness becomes clear as his story-within-the story ends, the doctor saying, “I saw a smiling, blood-covered face. It was mine.”

The painter argues that this final revelation will be give the doctor the strength to continue, as he will have defined himself. The painter feels that he is crippled by NOT having a face and at the end of the story, after the doctor has destroyed the faceless painting, the artist reflects:

My work, my canvas lay in pieces like a broken mirror. I might have to lose even more before I could start over again. Perhaps I would never be able to find a face. Unlike the one behind my brother’s pain, there was no face in mine.

While Yi suggests, in this pairing of stories, the difficulty of putting a single “face” to victimizers or victims of the Korean War, he clearly also sees the necessity of confronting the ‘faces’ involved in it, if only to provide a platform from which to go forward. . frame

Yi echoes this theme in the sub-plot of the painter and his student Hyein. Hyein sends a letter (yet another framed device in this multiply scaffolded work ) to the painter analyzing him as having a “war wound” despite the fact that it is his brother who was actually in the war. Hyein writes:

You … have a wound with no origin. … Your symptoms are more serious, and your wound is more acute because you have no idea where it is located and even what kind of wound it is.

In other words, it is the undefined face with which the painter struggles. Again, this is thematically linked to An Assailant’s Face, making this pairing of stories both evocative and explicative.

Technically speaking, Yi Chongjun is a talented writer, as carrying off his ambitiously multi-framed novel suggests. He is also quick and skilled (and so, I should add, is his translator) at drawing a character. A reader learns all he needs to know about the Doctor’s wife in two quick passages in which the painter describes her as:

The kind of person who enjoys humiliating actors by applauding when they miss their lines.

And

My sister in law disliked complicated stories

Which is a doubly judgmental line when placed in a novel of such labyrinthine nature.

The combination of Yi’s skill as a writer and the powerful story he tells, makes The Wounded an excellent short novel for a beginning reader of Korean literature. It is modern in the telling, has existential themes that resonate without requiring particular knowledge of Korea or its most recent war, and it also evokes the psychological damage caused by the fratricidal (it is no coincidence that the characters here are brothers) war.


NEXT: The Ma Rok Chronicles: A much lighter look at the absurdities of war.

A book that ought to interest both fans of literature and translation

Via an article over at the Korea Times I find a collection of works by a man who must surely be one of the true pioneers of Korean modern literature, and also seems to have been quite interesting entirely on his own account.

The review begins:

The new book, ``Inside Cloud Cuckoo Land: The Voice of Korea,'' is a compilation of essays in English and translations of modern Korean poems and short stories by the late professor Lee In-soo.

Lee pioneered translating Korean literature into English in the 1940s and the works included in the book were made during his professorship at Korea University from 1946 to 1950.

A combination of prose essays and translations of both poems and fiction it should be interesting both for what it contains (and some of the essays sound fascinating) as well as what the translations look like.

The reviewer in the Times says:

The most noteworthy work is the translation of ``The Wing'' authored by Yi Sang. Although it was not completed and remains in fragmentary manuscript, it is regarded as a rare but important attempt for a Korean scholar to translate one of the most complicated and abstruse pieces of Korean literature into English targeting overseas readers when Korean writing was almost unknown to the world.

And that should prick translator/fan ears up, since "The Wings" has been translated (in the excellent Jimoondang collection) and so comparison will be possible. I also reviewed it here.

Unfortunately it isn't quite clear yet where you can order this book from - it has not appeared on any online bookstore that I can see. I have an email in to the reviewer from the Times, and with luck contact/purchasing info for this book will pop up here in a day or two.

OK.. maybe "LAND" would be better

than another collection of horror-stories?

From an article on the website of the University of Hawai‘i Press:

Modern Korean fiction is to a large extent a literature of witness to the historic upheavals of twentieth-century Korea. Often inspired by their own experiences, contemporary writers continue to show us how individual Koreans have been traumatized by wartime violence—whether the uprooting of whole families from the ancestral home, life on the road as war refugees, or the violent deaths of loved ones. The Red Room: Stories of Trauma in Contemporary Korea

Can a brother get something translated that won't scare people away from Korea?

Not Exactly about Translation - but great (FREE) online book @ Korea

Props to Gusts of Popular Feeling for finding the 1950 book The Epic Of Korea, by A. Wigfall Green (Whose name alone, should earn entry into the pantheon of writers about Korea).

GoPF notes:

He provides a helpful introduction, but one which would probably not get published today:

Korea, to some Americans, is a land of gooks. Every one knows vaguely, but no one specifically, what a gook is. Perhaps a gook is any one other than a North American, but he is, more especially, an Oriental: a native of any of the South Pacific islands, a Filipino, a Japanese, a Chinaman, or a Korean. He is one whose turn of mind is not Western or American. He is one whose culture is so different that the average American cannot understand him. Gook is sometimes used to belittle; but it is also used to express familiarity and even fondness, as "Hello, Joe!" is used by the American in greeting the Filipino, or the Filipino the American.

Still, the entire text of the novel is available at the internet archive and I've already cut and pasted the text document to a Word file on my desktop.

Why South Koreans should be careful deciding what Literature is Translated

This article from "Sound and Sight" in 2005 reveals that:

If there is one piece of South Korean literature that should be translated into other languages, it has to be Pak Kyong-ni's novel cycle "Land" (book review here). That's the result of a survey conducted in South Korea a few years ago.

This doesn't sound insensible on the fact of it, until the article goes on to reveal:

"Land" ... (is) ... a national epic of almost overwhelming magnitude: the Korean original comprises 21 volumes and tells of the great revolutions in Korean society in the first half of the 20th century. Japanese, Europeans and Americans all forced their way into the country, putting an end to its isolation. ... In the entire epic, more than 700 characters are introduced, 150 of which are central figures. The demise of tradition, the annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910, the collaboration with colonial rulers and the resistance against them are all reflected in the lives of these characters, each possessing his or her own personality, experiential horizon, and views. "Land" is a Korean masterpiece, which Pak Kyong-ni worked on for 25 years.

This is exactly the kind of thing that should NEVER be translated into English unless by an obsessed student of Korean Literature/Culture who understands that he is only translating for a handful of similar obsessives who will read the work once, then return it to its dusty library shelf (perhaps "shelves" in the case of this voluminous work). Translating a work like this, insanely complicated and long, is a manifestation of what Charles La Shure calls "cultural evangelism" as opposed to what translation should (largely at least) do, which is "literary evangelism."

"Land" is a social history primer which the author admits is "of almost overwhelming magnitude" and thus unlikely to be read for the mere reading of the thing. The desire to translate such a book is actually the desire to translate a culture; to say, "look, this is Korea and this is who we are and how we bot there."

In no way do I mean to say that this message is not a proper function of literature, rather I'm saying there are more succinct, portable (21 volumes!), and friendly (150 main characters? This makes Russian literature seem downright accessible) ways to accomplish the same thing. Even "Three Generations" by Yom Sang-seop, which arguably sets itself the same task as "Land," is only 476 pages - a reader could consider carrying "Three Generations" around without risking some sort of spinal cord injury!

Please -- in translation pick works that are of average length and interesting for literary reasons and not cultural ones. When Star-Trek days are here, and all literature can be translated instantaneously by a "Universal Translator" (So, that picture to the right is not some kind of nasty electronic novelty, ok?) we can work on 21-volume sets. For now can we translate things that we think readers will look at?

The rest of the article discusses translations into German. This is useful to see what has not yet been translated into English, but not much more for an English reader.

UNSRC Korean Cultural Society - picks up my article on translated Korean Literature

UPDATE: and the Literary Saloon mentions me as well. ;-)


The United Nations Staff Recreation Council has a webpage and they've taken my article whole.

This is their mission

1. The purpose of the Society is to promote and disseminate Korean culture and traditions among its members and among members of the United Nations (UN) staff and diplomatic community.

2. The Society shall fulfill its purpose through the organization of a range of activities related to Korean culture, including, but not limited to, cultural, social, recreational, charitable, scientific and educational activities.

3. The activities organized by the Society shall be consistent with the purposes, principles, dignity and good name of the UN and shall not be motivated by political and/or commercial purposes.

Lost in Translation

I hate it when the Korea Times does this (although I know the Times is also for Koreans reading in English):

They write, in English, about a completely cool program that is completely NOT in English

Renowned Korean writers will meet their fans and share their views on literature and nature on the scenic trekking courses in Jeju Island through a rare program that combines literature with green tourism.

Munhak Sarang, a literary event organizer, said the "Green Literature Tour" program will provide a fresh chance to appreciate the beauty of nature and its relation with literature against the beautiful backdrop of Jeju Olle (www.jejuolle.org), one of the best known walking courses in Korea.

I know.. I know... it's for Koreans, but a guy with bad Korean skills can dream.... ;-)

Yi Chongjun "An Assailant's Face"

The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 4 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul

Yi Chongjun's The Wounded (and the included An Assailants Face) has had me a bit stumped.

(Parenthetically I should note that Yi, unfortunately, died last year of lung cancer)

Together are important works, they deal with the traditional modern Korean fixations, war and bifurcation, but they are also a bit of a move out of the grim and on-the-ground realism of that genre of modern fiction. The latter is a reason I should like them, and I guess I actually did like them.

But they pretty much halted me from writing for reasons that had more to do with my preconceptions than the works themselves.

First, I was put off by the (to me) predictability of the back flap, which begins:

The civil war between the North and South left both physical and psychological wounds and the permanent division of the nation still haunts those families separated by the 38th parallel.

I originally thought, cripes, here we go again. In a way, I just didn’t know what to do with these stories.

I’ve backed off this stance a bit. As I work through my ever-expanding reading list I realize that my response to these Korean themes, that they are repetitive and self-reflective to the point of solipsism is grounded in my western upbringing, particularly coming from the US. My reaction of, “why do they keep harping on this stuff,” would be no different than a Korean reading US fiction and wondering why we focus on automobiles, neurosis, and infidelity in our short fiction. It is an identity that the things important to a culture are repeated and a reader (by “a reader” I mean me) should look at this fact as important cultural evidence and not as some chore to wade through. Unless it’s Russian literature – then it’s just too bloody long to wade through!

But second, I think I was trying to assess all the levels that Yi writes at in these works, because he is a fairly skilled writer and I could sense that there was something in the stories that I just wasn't getting.

To break myself free of my little blockage I’m going to review each story in this volume individually, beginning with the second one, An Assailant’s Face. I chose this first, because both stories, really, ask questions about the face of the 'other.' So even though An Assailant's Face is the second story in The Wounded, here it goes!

An Assailant’s Face is technically clever in several ways. Yi is a tactical writer and he does a variety of things to slowly bring his real story into focus. His first tactic is to break the story into three sections, which are delineated (besides chapter numbers) by increasing technical focus on the characters. What does that mean? In the first section there is only one named character, and that character is the one who has already disappeared - one who will never actually be seen. Characters are, the boy, the sister, the man. In this way they also become generic, or perhaps more accurately, symbolic characters for all of Korea at the time. This is in important strategy because it ties in which Yi’s broader argument about the effects of the war. In the second chapter Yi brings a bit more focus as the boy (although explicitly never losing the generic wounded boy within) becomes a professor. Finally, in the final chapter, everyone gets names, although Yi introduces a key character, Kim Sail’s (the Professor) daughter in the same way he has previously handled specificity; at first she is just “the daughter” and only later does she get a name.

Additionally, there is Yi’s fluid an naturalistic representation of conversation. This is particularly important, because in the third chapter Yi presents some relatively thick ideological arguments, but he does it in a way that does not seem forced or heavy. In fact, the first time I read An Assailant’s Face I sped through the ideology without it hindering, at all, my attempt to see how everything ended.

The title is also a clever one. The theme of the book is the impossibility of “delineating between victims and victimizers,” or maybe even the irrationality of it. By titling the book An Assailants Face and with so many victims and victimizers in the story, Yi is opaque as to who the assailant actually is, and even at the end, when an assailant is named, it is an unexpected name and the power normally implicit in the word “assailant” is stripped from it. I wonder, given that Korea does not have articles in the way that English does, how this subtlety was handled in the original Korean? I hope it is there, because its ambiguity matches up nicely with the issue of how you judge who is guilty of what in a circumstance in which assailants and victims have multiply traded roles.

The story starts with a plot straight from Hwang Suwon's Descendants of Cain. In the chaos of the war, innocent people are forced to align and re-align themselves as alternating waves of troops overwhelm them. There is, as usual, a trade in betrayal, and the story begins with an amusing parody (if that can be said about a game in which the stakes are life and death) of idealogues and non-idealogues converting, re-converting, and killing the heretics.

In some ways, the start of this novel is a homicical version of the “splitter” scene in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” in which ideological splits become so ridiculous that they can scarcely be kept track of. A young boy’s brother-in-law disappears in the war (in a welter of betrayed beliefs) and later, when the brother-in-law’s partner in escape gets back to the boy’s house, the boy turns the partner out. The partner is turned out in the politest way possible, but he is nonetheless sent off to his death.

The story then follows the boy as he grows up and joins the southern intelligentsia, but can never entirely leave behind his history and assumed guilt. As an adult, the boy/professor realizes that he passively betrayed his brother-in-law’s friend. Unsure how to deal with this, he assumes guilt, “he willingly exchanged his comfortable position of innocent sufferer for the painful position of guilty participant.”

The professor becomes afraid his brother-in-law actually will return. His return would seal the professor’s guilt for putting out the friend – the one who should have died, returned; the one that should have been given succor, dead. There is a beautiful passage midway through the story in which the boy/professor attempts to explain what happens and argues that his brother-in-law might have stayed alive longer than expected because, trapped between two ideologies contesting over bodies, both dead and alive, the brother-in-law was like a rabbit. One eagle would have shortly dispatched him, but with two eagles fighting the rabbit had a running chance. The rationalization of a survivor perhaps, and the story is consumed with survivor’s guilt, but a beautiful metaphor for a kind of survival in political ecotones.

The professor keeps his shabby house because it is the only link his brother in law might have to find him, though as noted above he sincerely hopes that moment will never come. The previous bifurcations eventually replay themselves in the professor’s relationship with his daughter and their arguments over reunification – she sees it as a meeting of victims, he sees it as a meeting of aggressors.

This generational disagreement about the basis for reunification contains a quite good (and easy to digest) conversation about possible approaches to the issue. To a western eye, Yi’s narrative stacks the deck against the father when he, for example calls the daughters conclusions “spare and simple” and her father’s argument a “retreat.” However, the general conversation on the distortions and contradictions attendant to reunification is an important one and done as even-handedly as I have ever read.

In the end, the daughter makes a remarkably selfish decision that even the narrator cannot seem to completely endorse, and as the mother notes, reduces her father to a “pitiable assailant.”

An amazing story in which everyone is an assailant and a victim, and very few seem to have the conscious choice of their role, rather they are like marionettes, or shadowy hand fingers on some distant wall, performing roles that seem to come from above, or below, with only the consciousness that they are being pushed by forces that they cannot completely comprehend.

A Nice Short Interview With Brother Anthony

When you begin learning about translations from Korean to English, you can't get very far without running into Brother Anthony. London Korea Links has done a nice short interview with him in which he manages to neatly tie together the lack of proper translations and the fact that Korean 'marketing' often manages to miss its audience entirely. Toss in some trash talk about Romanization, and steep. ;-)

Serial Democracy, Newspapers and Novelizations: Only in Korea? (Part I)

Korea’s first newspaper was the Hansŏng sunbo, which published three times a month, but only for one year. More newspapers quickly followed (Lee 338). In the modern era, Korean newspapers have generally been far more literary than those in the US – in fact quite consciously so. Newspapers have sought out links with authors and prior to 1945 this was the standard way for novels to get into print (Yu 156) and Yu notes, with respect to the West:

To write serial novels for the newspaper would seem to outsiders almost tantamount to a form of artistic prostitution. In the Far East, however, this practice has been around for as long as the history of modern journalism itself (Loc cit)

Yu notes that this came with at least two costs: First in pressure from the newspapers to crank out prose, perhaps at the expense of craftsmanship and, second, quite public censorship of the newspapers by Japanese censors prior to 1945 and then government censors after.

Post 1920s the newspapers also published a variety of literary magazines, which also published Korean serial novels:

The newspaper companies published monthly magazines such as Sindonga (New East Asia), Chogwang (Korea's Light), and Chungang (Center) that expand ed the arena of literary activity, and general literary magazines such as Munjang (Literature) and Inmun p'yŏngnon (Criticism of Culture) produced new writers.

This continued well into, at least, the late 1970‘s as “The Dwarf” although technically a one-man yŏnjak sosŏl, was also serialized across several magazines (although not in exact order).

Then, mysteriously, the serialization seems to have died out (this conclusion is drawn, at the moment, only from English texts and thus may be subject to change). Professional writers and professional publication techniques may have replace the more traditional serialization.

1. Did serialization go out of style?
2. Did book-publishing replace it?
3. Did newspapers get smaller?
4. How did this work, was the serial released daily, weekly, monthly?

I hope to chase down answers to those questions, but for now it’s off to work on

PART II: The Re-Democratization of the Korean Novel

Anyone in New Zealand: KIM SEON WU COMES TO WELLINGTON AS WRITER IN RESIDENCE

From Beattie's Book Blog

The New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation at Victoria University, Wellington, will host its first writer in residence in September and October this year.
It is noted Korean poet and essayist Kim Seon Wu. Ms. Kim is being sponsored by the Korean Literature Translation Institute, a Korean government organization designed to introduce Korean literature to the world.

Ms. Kim's books of poetry include If My Tongue Refuses to Stay Locked Inside My Mouth (2000), I Fall Asleep Under the Peach Blossoms (2003) and Who Sleeps Inside Me (2007).
She has also written several collections of essays and a book of fables for adults entitled Princess Bari (2003). She has received the Contemporary Literature Prize and the Chun Sang-byung Poetry Prize.
In her works Ms. Kim treats themes of the karmic chain of being in Asian philosophy and the dignity of life. Her compassionate, world-embracing and ecologically aware viewpoint has made her representative of a new generation of feminist poets in Korea.

For further information, please contact Stephen Epstein (stephen.epstein@vuw.ac.nz).

Where to Start With Korean Lit (on spec for the Herald)

The summer heat continues to beat down on Korea, and with the promise of relief still weeks off, it is an excellent time to stay inside by the air-conditioner, or outdoors in shade by a river, and catch up on your reading. Last week the Herald surveyed Korean books for summer and this week we take a look at Korean literature that has been translated into English.

The good news is that, in the past few years, partly due to good work of the Korea Literature Translation Institute (KLTI), the number and range of Korean translations has increased dramatically. Until recently most translated novels focused on the harsh realities of occupation, war and division. Given Korea’s modern history, this made sense, but it sometimes made for rather grim reading for English-speakers who were looking for a diversion, rather than a history lesson. Many literary works still focus on these issues, and many of these are extraordinary, but more recent translations extend the scope of translated Korean literature. So, if you’re looking to read some good, translated Korean literature, where should you start?

To begin with, you can’t go wrong by looking through the Portable Library of Korean Literature (PLKL) from Jimoondang Publishing. The PLKL consists of over twenty slender books of short stories by authors of classic Korean modern literature such as Yi Sang (“The Wings”), Kim Yu-jeong (“The Camellias), Cho Se-hui (“A Dwarf Launches a Little Ball”), and Ch'oe Yun (“The Last of Hanako”). While many of these works do focus on “older” issues of modern literature, they are nonetheless quite interesting and a quick way to be introduced to a range of Korean writers.

In terms of short story collections, “Land of Exile” remains the accessible standard. Recently re-released to include more modern stories this excellently translated work is a good starting point for a reader interested in understanding the general outlines of Korean post-war literature. It is organized chronologically, which helps demonstrate the general lines upon which Korean modern literature has developed and expanded.

Yi Mun-yol is an interesting writer whose work bridges the gap between the more traditional concerns of modern Korean fiction and what might be called the cutting edge. “An Appointment With My Brother” is perhaps his most predictable work, telling the story of a family bisected by the Korean war. Yi’s classic “Our Twisted Hero” is a meditation on the uses and misuses of power while “The Poet” tells an even older story of poet Kim Sak-kat who dishonors his grandfather and suffers considerably for it. But Yi is also capable of stunning modern work as his “Twofold Song” ably demonstrates with its explosive mix of surrealism and a love story.

Kim Young-ha writes for readers interested in something with a more existential edge. His dreamlike, “I Have the Right to Destroy Myself,” asks questions about sex, identity, and death, while his dead-on laconic creation of a policeman in “Photo Shop Murder” (published in the PLKL series) is well suited for anyone who likes the true-crime genre. Currently Chi Young-Kim (who translated “I Have the Right to Destroy Myself” and Chi Young-Kim’s “A Toy City”) is scheduled to translate Kim Young-ha's latest novel, “The Empire of Light.” If Kim’s previous work is any indication, this should be well worth the read.

A longer novel, but quite easy to read due to its episodic structure, is Cho Se-hui’s “The Dwarf.” This is the tremendously affecting story of a dwarf’s family and their ongoing struggles to survive industrialization and urbanization. “The Dwarf’ was tremendously popular at its first publication, and its key chapter “A Dwarf Launches a Little Ball” has been reprinted in Korea 245 times.

Ch'oe Yun first came to the attention of English readers with the publication of “Last of Hanako” which was initially published by the PLKL and later added to “Land of Exile” in its latest edition. The story of youthful friends who are torn apart by circumstance, “Last of Hanako” depended on a plot twist that might seem obvious to a western reader. But with the release of "There a Petal Silently Falls" Ch’oe steps firmly into the forefront of international Korean writers. The novella from which the book draws its title is a horrific story of family tragedy (based on real events in Kwangju in 1980) along the traditional plotlines of Korean literature, but Ch’oe invests the story with such surreal tragedy and a hallucinatory writing that the reader is pulled along. “Whisper Yet” is the slightest work in the book, and “The Thirteen Scent Flower” is a surreal, happy-yet-sad, story of an unlikely romance enmeshed in the coarse fabric of larger life.

The authors and books mentioned here are just the tip of the translated iceberg. A trip to “What The Book” in Itaewon, or Kyobo Books in Gwangwhamun can lead a reader to a treasure trove of new fiction, while just around the corner by Noksapyeong Station, The Foreign Book Store often stocks out of print collections. For readers out of Korea, many of the works discusses here are available on Amazon.com and Kindle. I know it’s hot out there, but all of the bookstores have air-conditioning and once you’ve bought a stack of books you have a good excuse to stay in out of the sun.

Bonus Land: Deluxe Version

Working on a comparative translation bit for my Uni. It's on "Potatoes" (titles vary) by Kim Dongin.

I come across an older post on the Korea Times in which Lim Sunjae (and, oh yeah, I emailed the dude) translates 24 super-short Korean stories.

His translations (based on the ones I know) can be clunky in the corners, but generally bring the stories through with vigor.

Happy Days!

And props to Lim Sunjae.

When Technical Editing Goes Way Wrong

Yowch,

Last night I get a call at about 10.

"Are you available for an emergency? A client just rejected our translation and we need to get it back to them tonight."

This is a question in a way, but I've answered it by picking up the phone. We talk a bit more and it seems that the problem might be in the editing and not the translation. In technical translation, our translators are rock solid. Technical translation is more like brick-laying than art, so there really shouldn't be problems unless the source text is worthless.

I ask to see both the original translated text and the edited version.

Here is a lovely graphic of the first few paras:



Good Spaghetti-Monster in the Everlasting Cosmos! The editor went mad --

verify = look into
graduate from university or over = with college degrees

Is to begin by changing two meanings in the short first paragraph.

Then there's the writing style, full overblown academia.

The phrase, and into what "educational philosophy" is grounded on their supportive activities not only adds spurious quotes and turns "support" into "supportive" but it is also practically impossible to parse.

Editing in these cases is not to create a new work of literature, but to re-arrange the flesh on the bones you have been given.

And don't randomly change perfectly good phrases that people are using for their meaning

In the third paragraph changing "since" to "as" is purely random switching and dropping a phrase like "connotative educational viewpoints" is sure to piss off the translator and the client. "Interpreted" is not the same as "uncovered" and changing the word is, again, a purely random move as if to say, "hey, look, I'm an editor so I can slice and dice anything!"

That is all, of course, detail, what is far worse is that the editor took sharp, if ungrammatical, text and turned it into someone's abstract for a Ph.D. Not just any Ph.D., but a Ph.D, in critical sex-role theory in some egghead (but 2nd-rate) university on the East Coast of the US. By which I mean it became just a tad stuffed with emptiness ("It is presupposed in this study" WTF?).

Cripes.

It isn't poetry (and it shouldn't be), since it was part of a larger piece and I had a midnight deadline, but here's how I approached it, using every bit of the original framework, phraseology and vocabulary (I even left the relatively nonstandard "Gang-nam" as I was, at this point, trying to minimize any changes) of the original:



That is pretty blunt, but it was accepted.

Korea Journal Book Reviews

Good news on the lit-front.. Looks like I will be reviewing two books for the Korea Journal

Toy City: Lee Dong-Ha, tr.Chi-Young Kim, (St. Paul)
Who Ate Up All the Shinga?: Park Wan-suh, tr. Yu Young-Nan and Stephen Epstein, (Columbia)

Which will be good for the CV, among other things....

I've already discussed Toy City on this blog, but as I look back on how I treated it, I'm not particularly happy with my level of analysis and will take a different tack on it. One thing I note is that I was unhappy with the particular translation I read, and this edition is by a different translator. So that should help.

Who Ate Up All the Shinga, looks fun, though I have a slight conflict of interest in that I know one of the translators. ;-)

Unrelated, I just got back from ICAS 6 where I was the organizer/discussant and presenter on a panel (Through the Looking Glass – Korea and the Western Gaze) which included Charles La Shure's excellent take on multiple translations. I was so happy to look at three translations of "Buckwheat Season" but Charles found six!

Next Reviews for 10 Magazine

Only notable, I suppose, because of how I lightened up my criticism of the translation of Aunt Suni (which I first talked about here)

THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY
By Ann Shaffer and Annie Fiery Barrows

The “Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” focuses on an eponymously named book club. The club is the part fanciful and entirely necessary creation of a moment. Caught out after curfew by Nazi occupiers a character creates the book club as a cover.

Shaffer researched the occupation of the Guernsey Islands; tales of privation, cruelty, a concentration camp, collaboration and bravery, and weaves the lives of occupied and occupiers to reveal the moral confusion the occupation raised, while also celebrating local resistance. The book club becomes a functioning one and helps the locals deal with their painful situation. Love stories anchor the book, which is written in epistolary style. In the post-war passages this style seems slightly contrived. The book is serious, lighthearted and entertaining at the same time, and by virtue of its epistolary style, probably like nothing you have recently read.
(288 pages 18,200W)


MY SISTER’S KEEPER

“My Sister’s Keeper”, by Judy Picoult has a plot that might seem far-fetched. Anna Fitzgerald is an intentional genetic doppelganger of her sister Kate, and has only been brought into the world to keep that sister alive. Beaten down and unhappy as a result of her ‘replacement’ status and years of ‘donation’ of body-parts, she seeks revenge in the most modern of ways – she sues. Not just sues, but hires a lawyer who has already sued God!

Like The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, My Sister’s Keeper is told from multiple points of view. This is a wise approach, allowing the depth of each character to be revealed and characters who might otherwise have seemed unsympathetic are given full personalities and understandable justifications: The mother, in particular, emerges as a sad but sympathetic character. A good read, My Sister’s Keeper carefully balances science, philosophy, morality, law, and finally fate.
(448 pages 20,800W)




AUNT SUNI
By Ki-young Hyeon

Ki-young Hyeon’s “Aunt Suni”, is a troubling story that rewards a determined reader with a glimpse of unfortunate Korean history. The narrator returns to Jeju to attend his grandfather’s funeral only to discover he is also “attending” the death of his Aunt Suni. As Suni’s story unwinds, we realize that she - tragic, insane, a suicide - was a battered relic of historical crimes.

The story is a series of conversations, allowing multiple narrators to explain the tragedy. A sub-plot brings Suni to Seoul where, in the smallest things – accent, rice consumption, burned fish – Hyeon reveals Suni’s trauma. Where the bones of plot and muscles of story-telling show through, Hyun’s strength as a writer shines. A potential reader, however, should know that the translation is sometimes difficult: A must-buy for fans of Korean history and literature, “Aunt Suni “might be a ‘maybe- buy’ for more general readers.
(123 pages 10,000W)

Maybe a Little Self-Serving, But a Good Question

Is asked here in the Korea Times. Will Kern asks when the KLTI runs their annual translation contest.

Why is drama not considered a suitable category for the translation award? Why are there categories for novels, novellas, short stories, and poetry but not one for drama?

This is just another form of the question that many of us have about why the KLTI picks the (generally uninspiring) works that it chooses to translate.

Of course old Will is also publicizing his own play with his contact info at the bottom:

His play ``Mothers and Tigers'' premiered at the Seoul Arts Center in December. He can be reached at will@willkern.com.

I would know nothing of such shameless self-promotion!

A Dwarf Launches a Little Ball, by Cho Se-hui

The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 2 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul

Those who dwell in heaven have no occasion to concern themselves with hell. But since the five of us lived in hell, we dreamed of heaven… Each and every day was an ordeal. Our life was like a war. Everyday we lost a battle. (Page 7)

This passage is drawn from the first paragraph of Cho Se-hui’s A Dwarf Launches a Little Ball, and it aptly sums up the tragic story

A Dwarf Launches a Little Ball is the keystone story, of 12 total, in the larger work The Dwarf. This short story introduces readers to the main “character” in the larger work, a dwarf and his family. The dwarf is physically handicapped, only 117 centimeters tall (roughly 4 feet), and 32 kilograms in weight (roughly 70 pounds). The family: father, mother, Yeong-su, Yeong-ho, Yeong-hui, stand for the entire Korea working class of the 1970s; oppressed, marginalized and if needs be, discarded, in the new economic structures of production, consumption, and distribution that the Korean state is avidly building.

Worse, they have built their house in an unauthorized area, and the house is now due to be razed. The government offers “recompense” for the loss, but it is not sufficient for the dwarf’s family (or any of the other displaced families) to rent new housing. The family is sundered, the dwarf becomes ill and dies in a factory smokestack (in my previous post I said he had committed suicide, but this is not made entirely clear by the text, and it can be read either way), the children are forced to go to work in soul and body-crushing factories, and the daughter eventually prostitutes herself in order to get the deed to the families’ property back.

This is one of the translated works that makes me wish I could read Korean, because I feel that certain elements of the story are floating beyond my comprehension. One example of this is a “book within a book” motif that Cho uses. He mentions a book The World after Ten Thousand Years and it sounds like he is referring to a real book (whether real or not, this is another clever authorial stance – creating a fantasy within the dingy fantasy of the larger story), but the translation of the title turns nothing up on Google and I can’t refer to the original text to track it down. Similarly, the dwarf launches an airplane and a ball towards the moon and in translation I’m not sure if he see (or if there actually is) some symbolism in these phrases. Is the “metal ball” a spaceship? I simply can’t tell. Perhaps I’m not supposed to be able to tell, but it is a bit frustrating. ;-)

Technically speaking, he book is divided into three chapters, each one told by one of the children. This is the first indication of Cho’s atomized writing style, a style that is ideally suited for the description of an atomized society such as the one he writes about. Shin Soojeong notes, about Cho’s general style:

Cho opened up a new history in the form of Korean novels by renouncing the standard of realism, experimenting with sentences, and by being bold enough to draw a fantasy-based reality based on fables into the narration of his novels. He brought about a turning point in the history of Korean novels, which allowed for the yoking of realism and anti-realism, and the unity of social and aesthetic aspects in literature. As long as the questions proposed by A Dwarf Launches a Little Ball remain current, its meaning will not be diminished. And therein lies the power that enabled this book, first printed in 1978 … to go through over 240 printings up to the present.

I have read that there are now over 245 printings of the book. It is very brief, only 84 pages in print, and if you are interested in reading it, you can find it in downloadable PDF (only 24 pages!) from from the fine folks at the Korea Journal.




References:

Shin Soojeong

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 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

“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".

I think this might be doomed to fail ;-)

Because I'm guessing the United States isn't "ready for Sijo."

Harvard Professor David McCann clearly shares an interest in Korean Literature, but I'm afraid he is a popularizer who doesn't get what is going to sell to the US public. McCann wants to try to sell Sijo (A form of Korean poetry) to the US public. I'd like to go to pains to point out that I'm glad he's trying it, and since it is his thing, he shouldn't stop, but the results he seems to envision seem rather unlikely.

He begins with a great point about how initial experience to a culture can pave the way for substantial additional contact later.

“Students who have a haiku day, when they grow up and see a Japanese novel, they’ll be interested,’’ McCann says. “There could also be a sijo day. Children might find sijo something they can try, then one day see a Korean novel translated and say, ‘I can read it.’

Although it is a point that skips over the tremendous numerical disparity between translations of Japanese and Korean novels.

But Sijo, really? To take on Haiku and consequently lead to reading literature?

I doubt it for several reasons

First, Haiku

a) Already owns this spot
b) is shorter (thus easier to write)
c) is a more didactic form (thus both easier to judge the “success” of and less complicated to think about)
d) Is way simpler. Sijo is a traditional poem of 43 to 45 syllables whose third line contains a twist on the theme developed in the first two.

These are massive advantages that the Sijo probably can’t overcome. Haiku is just about perfect for school kids (and it is at school kids that McCann partially aims).

Second, and far worse, Sijo translation or marketing of Sijo is a repetition of the essential translation or marketing failure that Korean Literature has perpetrated upon itself for years. It focuses on very narrow academic niches that have little or no impact.

Third, if the market for the novel is shrinking, the market for published poetry in the West is shrunk. At least books can still become bestsellers, or better, turned into movies, which is really how culture (alas) is currently translated. One “The Host” or "Oldboy" is worth twenty volumes of poetry in terms of getting the name of Korea out there in the world.

I can’t find at the moment, but need to dig up, the Korean critic who overdid it a bit by saying that Korea needs to publish an international “Da Vinci Code.” The guy was aiming low, but at least he realized that it is the mass market that Korea needs to address,

Also, I have grave doubts about this claim

Now, McCann posits, Korea’s time has come. A so-called “Korean Wave’’ of exported television shows, movies, and musicians is attracting attention across Asia and beyond. “Winter Sonata’’ has been a TV hit around Asia, pop singer Rain has played Madison Square Garden, and Park Chan-wook’s “Old Boy’’ won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004.

Since it seems (Note - this is, as the Violent Femmes once sang, "only a guess") to be coming clear that Hallyu (The Korean Wave) may have crested.

http://www.nationmultimedia.com/2008/03/28/opinion/opinion_30069377.php

Or worse, check, out Korea's own website on the "wave" which by page 2 is reduced to touting the fact that movies shown in Korea, have English subtitles, and counting US citizens of Korean ethnicity as part of the wave (Really, Sandra Oh is part of a Korean wave? Denzel Washington must be part of the African wave, by that logic).

Finally, the article itself notes three similar, quite unsuccesful, attempts at the same popularization in the last 17 years.

With all that said, good luck to the Professor, and I certainly hope he proves me wrong. ;-)

That's Right, test your knowledge of Korean Literature!

Well, at least three or four famous authors.

Maybe I should be the idiot who does the Facebook version of this test?
...


.....



........



Nah, I'll cut it short (as it is Friday night) and just be the idiot.

Improved in Translation?

You rarely see this claim, and it is a very narrow one, but in Choi Yearn-hong's review of Poetess Moon Chung-hee’s 'Woman on Terrace,' he claims that one line in the English translation is "better" (if funnier means better) than in the original

‘The distortion of a text,’ Freud (not writing about translation) says in Moses and Monotheism, ‘is not unlike a murder. The difficulty lies not in the execution of the deed but in doing away with the traces.’ In this case, it seems that the traces are advantageous.

Also, I suppose, this is support of the contention that translation is an art, or at least a craft, and not a mathematical process of creating equivalency.

Hatred, Rage, and Aunt Suni

I suppose it is a general credit to the level of translation of Korean literature into English that I have read quite a few works and have just now come upon my second example of atrocious translation.

This case is particularly unfortunate as the story is a classic one – Both classically Korean in that it involves the psychic amputation of part of a people (Dae Han Min Guk is a principle evoked, in this work, to justify the mass murder of Koreans) and also classically global in that it explores the contexts and mechanisms by which massacres become an almost inevitable outcome of political warfare (both intellectual and physical).

The work is Hyun Ki Young’s Aunt Suni, and it is a testament to the story that if a reader perseveres through the bad translation, internal inconsistency, and horrifying typography, that reader is rewarded with a glimpse of Korean history with international meaning and better, is privy to the kinds of psychological accommodations and examinations that follow tragedy.

The story is brilliant on a technical level. The narrator is putatively coming back to Jeju (from Seoul) to attend the funeral rites of his grandfather.

When he arrives he discovers he is also “attending” the death of his Aunt Suni.

As we hear Aunt Suni’s horrific story, we realize that she, tragic, insane, a suicide, is a mangled relic and symbol of historical crimes. She returns, some 30 years later, to commit suicide in the killing field from which she once, ‘luckily,’ escaped.

Suni’s story is revealed in a series of conversations between her one-time confederates, and by structuring the story this way, Hyun allows the multiple narrators to also inject their understandings of the mechanisms of the tragedy as well as of the multiple approaches to the understanding of and/or forgetting of it. Hyun weaves a clever mix of showing and telling in which each 'speaker' reveals some aspect or interpretation of the time, the crime, and the aftermath.

A sub plot brings Aunt Suni to Seoul and here, in the smallest things – accent, rice consumption, burned fish – Hyun reveal Aunt Suni’s psychic trauma. The rest is well-written exposition presented as discussion.

Where the original writing can be discerned, it is brilliant. The narrator muses, as he returns to Jeju, that a 50 minute flight seems too quick a return to a land he has left some 8 years ago and constructs a powerful fantasy of how his return should have been affected.

When he lands, we see why he might well have wanted his journey extended and his destination avoided. Where the bones of plot and the muscles and ligaments of story-telling can be perceived, Hyun’s strength as a writer shines through.

There is a powerful story here.

Unfortunately that story is buried under poor translation. The name of the story is rendered three different ways. Phrases with no English meaning crop up. At one point Aunt Suni “picks a crow” with someone, and later a family is “slain to death.” Each apostrophe is followed by an extra space, and that same extra space regularly shows up between words. Personal pronouns are used without antecedent; articles are used randomly, and modifying clauses are place with daring disregard for the words they are supposed to modify. Grammatical errors are everywhere (e.g. “My hometown was something I had shun from”).

This is an extremely difficult book to read.

The translator, who I will not name, thanks two English speakers for proofreading the text.

If I had not read those lines I would have strongly argued that no native speaker of English had seen this work prior to its publication. The translator was done no favors by his English speaking… well.. the correct word is “accomplices.”

This bothers me because, as I mentioned, Hyun has (to the extent a reader can play literary archeologist and see past the wreckage left to view) done a brilliant job of creating a blessed (survives the massacre) and doomed (in some ways does not survive the massacre) character in Aunt Suni. Aunt Suni’s story is compelling enough that, after cursing the translation out, I ran to the internet to find the historical background of the Jeju revolt. It is a tangled and horrible story and wikipedia has an adequate summary of it.

After digging through the story and the history, I have a feeling that Hyun’s story, retranslated, or merely edited, would be an outstanding read.

For now, it is so difficult to navigate the text, just as text, that I wouldn’t pass this book along to anyone.

The good news is that my research turned up another book, apparently not available in Korea, titled “Dead Silence” which is 8 short stories about the Jeju imbroglio. And Amazon has it. ;-)

Hybridity and translation styles

Some notes I wrote up on multiple translations of Buckwheat Season - The quotes were translated by my supervisor and I wrote the notes up from the perspective of an English reader, so that she could use my input in a presentation.

As I looked over multiple translations, notably of Buckwheat Season (by Yi Hyo-Sok and the original translation is available for pdf download here) and Kapitan Ri/The Constant Doctor (by Chon Kwangyong with Kapitan Ri available for pdf download here ), I thought that I could see three broad strands of translation.

I have, somewhat arbitrarily, named these translation styles Traditional, Modern and Hybrid. As I looked at these two stories I also noted that they are different types of stories. Buckwheat Season is a traditional Korean tale, rooted in specifically Korean environments and rhythms. Kapitan Ri/The Constant Doctor, on the other hand, while set in a Korean environment, is in fact the very modern story of a “company” man who is intent on getting ahead at all costs. As I thought more about this, it became clear in my head that there is a relationship between what type of stories are being translated and how they should be translated.

First, let’s take a look at the three styles of translation. The following grid pulls some illustrative quotes from Buckwheat Season:


What does this chart reveal of the styles?

The Traditional style is the oldest and it owes some of its features to the fact that it was the pioneering step of translation. It features peculiar word choices and a written style that seems somewhat borrowed from English colonial literature. It is florid and very expressive (it has the highest number of adjectives and features more complex sentences with more clauses) It also has the widest internal stylistic variances. This is predictable as it is embryonic translation, and as Stephen J. Gould has demonstrated in “Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin” systems tend to have their widest variances at their outsets. In terms of Buckwheat Season the first translation style has the fussy vocabulary and structure that one might expect from an Englishman speaking in colonial days. A phrase like “dissolute fellow,” “good scolding. “fated from birth,” or “admonition serves as a remedy” sound like some late-Victorian letter from an upset father to a reprobate son. It is also sometimes too literal – a non idiomatic translation like “as nondescript as you are” or the “Whenever ….. Five Days” locution. These are tendencies I associate with early translation of Korean literature. It is much more formal as well, as evidenced by the continued use of full names far into the story.

The second style, the Modern one, is characterized by extreme brevity of sentence and paragraph, but still has some anachronistic vocabulary (greenhorn?) for that tone. It is substantially less colorful (as assessed by adjective usage). Also, it reads, and this might be completely coincidental, as though the author had read both previous translations, and defaulted to them in some cases. It also seems more active (sometimes merely by beginning a passage with spoken words and not refection) and sometimes seems to have some of the color leached out of it.

This leaching/simplification can come at a cost, as the following excerpts demonstrate


The “Modern” version, by simplifying the initial phrase to colloquial English actually eliminates the elements of class-standing that are implicit in the first two texts and completely representative of Korean thought in Buckwheat Season. In this case the modern style strips Buckwheat Season of that thing that makes it interesting – its essential Koreanness. The Hybrid translation re-instates this Korean cultural content, but frees us from difficult phrasing such as the odd (to modern eyes) phrasal structure of the concluding sentence of the Traditional translation, as well as its clumsy double-negative.

Jeong-Heyong Shin, in “The Trap of History” assesses Buckwheat Season as a bit boring:

What is the primary action of the story? We modern individuals who have lost our mythic memory cannot help but wonder, for it is difficult to find intense and dramatic events in the story. There are no violent fights or deaths, no initiations, no recognitions, and no difficulties to overcome. Furthermore, the story is replete with stock situations and characters. On the surface level, the plot of "The Buckwheat Season" is so weak that to some readers it may seem to lack sufficient motifs and conflicts

But, Shin goes on to argue:

Hue, an itinerant vendor traveling around traditional Korean marketplaces, represents several complex aspects of the Korean mythic self that live deep in the Korean collective unconscious. Hue's life in the story compellingly tells of the moral and aesthetic values the Korean people have long created and of the ideals, wishes, and dreams the Korean people have long cherished. Hue is a Korean mythic hero who has created values and dreams in the Korean peninsula.

Basically, you have a story that is interesting to the extent that it can successfully communicate essential Korean meanings. Using the modern translation approach strips this out of the text in the service of, maybe, increased readability.

Consider another problem:


Again, here, the earlier translation styles are more suited to the story. At the risk of Orientalization, the Traditional style uses a parental phrase (admonition/remedy) and Korean metaphor (unlicked cub). This reflects traditional power relationships in Korea as well as using the most colorful metaphor. The modern translation matches the even least dynamic remedy (remedy>dose>medicine) with its mismatched partner “greenhorn.” Finally, the hybrid style lessens this impact (dose of) and pairs this with “young people.”

Consider another instance:



The modern translation is entirely inner-directed. Cho “could not bring himself to,” while Ho feigns indifference. This translation substantially weakens the sense of the Tradional translation which possesses a certain fatalism – that these personal paths, like the paths between towns, are the paths that Cho and Ho must follow and, like the universe, must repeat and repeat, one yin to the other’s constant yang. The Hybrid translation, similar to the Traditional one, focuses on personal responsibility or duty (“he couldn’t very well tell Ho he was sick of the story”) while simplifying the vocabulary (“sick of” for “weariness” and “innocently started” for “feigning indifference.)

Finally, consider



Again, the traditional is dense and includes Korean content (festivals and a wine house). The Modern reduces the detail of the Traditional courtyard to “littered” (and in doing so makes the text seem as though it refers to garbage, not a cluttered geography) and uses the word “tavern,” a translation which is far more western (and therefore suggestive of “bar” – which is the wrong word) than “drinking house” or “wine house.”

This examination brings us to the hybrid style, which attempts to rein in some of the wider variances of the idiosyncratic style, but it still includes translations that attempt to hew close to cultural realities and avoid the cultural lobotomies characteristic of the modern style. The hybrid is often characterized by slightly shorter sentences, but it is just about as descriptive (as assessed by use of adjectives) as the Traditional style, and it is more expressive in containing and transmitting cultural content.

What does this all add up to? The Hybrid style, being a somewhat dialectical offspring of the Traditional and Modern styles, seems to be a safe middle of the road approach, which avoids, on one side the Scylla of over-ornamentation and possible incomprehensibility, and also avoids on the other side, the Charybdis of flat, boring, de-culturated text. Still, the fact that it is a hybrid suggests that translators be ignorant of the other styles at their own risks. Certainly, it seems likely that some stories will need to get off the dead-center of Hybrid translation, and thus a translator should have all three styles in his toolbox.

Further, this analysis implies that translators should approach the translation of a particular work only after understanding what kind of a work it is. Essentially, a “one-size-fits-all” approach to translation style will not fit. Perhaps an artistic metaphor might be useful. I may be a very skilled cubist painter, but if someone asks me to draw a sketch of Caravagio’s Ascension (or, translate it, in a visual way) I will not do a good job if I render Caravagio’s romantic and light-based art into black dots. Similarly, if a translator comes across a particularly Baroque piece of Korean literature, it is time for them to reach back to Traditional translation and describe every curlicue and instance of chiaroscuro.

A Picture is Worth 1000 Words...

I'm doing the rare (first time, actually) cross post with info from my scraps blog.

And it has nothing to do with literature, but it is an amazing photo-essay on Daejeon (Then "Taejeon") after the Civil War.

From here on out is a duped post.....
--------------------------------------------------------------

Wow


Yvonne, the rare blogger at bulgogi (and, of course, my fiancee) found a slide-show of pictures of Daejeon in 1951, after the Civil War had left town. They are farking amazing pictures if you have ever been to modern Daejeon.



Boggling..



I'm not sure war left Dresden this flat?

You got to my site.. HOW?

You may need to click on that photo to see the details as they are rather small.. er... I mean.....

OK.. I quite

But it is one of the two cases in which a web search for "pederasty" got someone here to a website about Korean literature.

On a good day I get 15 hits, so I want to keep the buggery folks coming back.

Which is why I am relentlessly repeating words like sodomy, pederasty, and buggery.

But the first time someone got here with that search?

I'm buggered if I know how that could have happened. ;-)

The Next Review of to 10 Asia

I'm still troubled by the short format. ;-)

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES
Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

A romantic novel with brains (delicious human brains!), Pride and Prejudice and Zombies begins, "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more." With this truism established, author Seth Grahame-Smith is off, updating Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to a post-apocalyptic zombie-strewn landscape. This idea works brilliantly, and tension between the delicate novel of manners and the horrorshow zombies is played for broad comic effect, as in:

"The creature advanced, and Elizabeth landed a devastating chop … The limbs broke off, and the unmentionable fell to the ground . . . Elizabeth found herself … within view of the house … face glowing with the warmth of exercise.”

Published by the appropriately named, Quirk Publishing, Pride, Prejudice and Zombies is also available for kindle download from Amazon.com. Shamble out and pick this one up!
(320 pages, 15,160₩)

150 words


BROTHER ONE CELL
Cullen Thomas

Brother One Cell is a cautionary tale with an inspirational conclusion. Cullen Thomas illegally teaches English in Korea, and on vacation in Thailand mails hashish to Seoul. This scheme unravels and he is sentenced to 3.5 years imprisonment during which time he overcomes personal demons and comes to accept personal responsibility for his own fate.

Cullen’s flat, observational writing style is appropriate when he describes his entry into the Korean penal/judicial system, which appears largely opaque to him: What he does see tends to be depressing. Cullen’s descriptions of the psychic price of his double isolation (prisoner and foreigner) and powerlessness are matched with his growing appreciation of small pleasures, such as his joy at being given simple jobs.

A novel of personal growth in difficult circumstances, Brother One Cell also gives a peek into a side of Korean culture even expatriates rarely (thankfully) see.
(347 pages, 19,500₩)

150 words


OUR TWISTED HERO
By Munyol Yi

Our Twisted Hero is a retrospective meditation on power by narrator Pyongt'ae Han who was weak and bullied in elementary school. The bully, Sokdae Om, rules with an iron fist and keeps nearly perfect order. Han is not used to this arbitrary power, and rebels. For this, he is ostracized: Om has created an all-powerful cult of personality. Han not only works his way back into Om’s good graces, but even comes to perversely admire him. When Om’s reign crashes down at the hands of even greater power other students turn against Om, with only Han refusing to completely repudiate him.

Readers with knowledge of post-war Korean politics will particularly enjoy this work. Although it is simple and brief, it also clearly allegorizes political issues (dictatorship, the role of intellectuals, suppression of revolt) that preceded and surrounded its original date of publication in 1987.
(119 pages, 7,000₩)

Chinatown by Oh Jung Hee

The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 22 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul

The Portable Library of Korean Literatures’ twenty-second imprint is Chinatown by Oh Jung Hee. This contains three stories, the eponymous Chinatown, Wayfarer, and The Release. These stories have been translated by the reliable team of Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton.

Prior to reading these three short stories, Oh, was relatively unknown to me. The only story I had read of hers was the tragic Bronze Mirror in which an aging couple faces the legacy of their only child’s death in the Student Revolution. Bronze Mirror, which is available both in Land of Exile and another volume also confusingly named Chinatown (about which I will talk more, shortly), is along the traditional lines of post-war Korean fiction.

But Oh’s work in the Chinatown collection struck me as fresh and different from most of the other works in the PLKL in that they are not particularly concerned with political states, either the aftermath of the war, or issues related to historical Korean divisions.

Chinatown
Chinatown takes place, in Incheon’s (Once Chemulpo) famous Chinatown, a tourist destination in the modern era, but a slum at the time. Though the story is placed in the post-war era, and does feature the unavoidable fallout from the war, it is much more a coming of age tale than a tale about effects of the war.

Chinatown shares, with other works in the PLKL collection, descriptions of hardscrabble existences; the children scrounge from coal trains. Additionally, US servicemen are present, and portrayed as sexually suspect, a Korean categorization that to some extent lives on today.

However, the heart of the story is of a nine year old girl who comes to a greater awareness of sex and death. As the narrative moves forward, 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, and then drops a final graceful note in a one sentence paragraph with which the narrator concludes her story:

“My first menstrual flow had begun.”

Typically stories focusing on young girls coming of age are not my favored fictions. Oh, however, does such an excellent job setting the scene that when it became clear that this was a coming of age story, it was not only NOT a disappointment, but it came as a clever and happy surprise.


Wayfarer
Wayfarer is the sad story of a woman who has been abandoned (in a cruel replay of childhood trauma) by her family and society. After killing a burglar, and spending two years in a mental hospital, Hye-Ja returns to a world that wants no part of her. Family and friends have reframed the killing of the burglar as the murder of a man who may or may not have been somehow related to Hye-Ja. In other words, Hye-Ja is suspected of having killed her lover. Oh cleverly weaves metaphors of blankness, coats of snow, and inaccessibility to paint a picture of Hye-Ja’s isolation, an isolation so profound that Hye-Ja is spurned even by beggars. At the end, drunk and staggering, Hye-Ja walks down a road that she knows will never end.

The Release
The Release portrays a mother and daughter united by a shared but separate tragedy. Both women have lost their husbands at an early age, and in a culture that is historically inimical to widows, this is a social kiss of death. The pain they share is exacerbated by the mother’s intimate knowledge of what her daughter must undergo. As in Wayfarer Oh is clever in her use of symbols – a toothbrush, Artemisia, and in the end, three unlikely carp, combine to make this very short story (a scant six-pages) touching and troubling.


Two Chinatowns
Internet research shows that there is a second volume titled Chinatown, also by Oh and published by Hollym Press, which is hardback and contains seven stories (with only the title-story being shared between the volumes). As noted above, this volume also contains the excellent Brass Mirror and as the only overlapping work is Chinatown it is probably worth getting both volumes.

"Trap of History"

Jeong-Hyun Shin's The Trap of History should have been a contender. Instead it’s underlying reactionary politics render it worthwhile to read, but better to distrust.

The first issue is Shin’s palpable dislike of Korea, in the present and as a recent historical concept:

During the nineteenth century, however, the Korean people failed to transmute their energy to higher and more subtle levels; instead, they abandoned themselves to the national vices -moral, economic, and political corruption; factional struggles; and the inflating of the elite class, thus severely straining the political and social system of the nation. As a result, the twentieth century has been the worst of times for Koreans.

This is the oldest sort of complaint, the equivalent of an old man hollering to keep children off his lawn, then slumping back into his rocking chair and murmuring about “the good old days.”

Or as Cicero put it, “o tempora, o mores!”

The second issue is that this stain in his brain leaks, as stains do, out to tarnish what he thinks of modern Korean literature:

“Unfortunately, I cannot in these works find any intelligible set of ideas for how to transcend the present, how to move out of the pasts, how to reconcile the past with present life, and how to create a national self.” (xiv)

This is an interesting view of what literature should do and I’m not sure it is consonant with Shin’s claim, which is key to his dismissive attitude about current Korean lit, that previous Korean literature had been good.

Certainly what Shin describes (with approbation) as:

literature, old myths, religious rituals, and nursery rhymes were elevated to the form of hyang-ga, songs, si-jo, ga-sa, and finally the modern forms of the novel and poetry. (x)

do not seem primarily to be literature of transcendence, rather the literature of acceptance of the 'old days.'

Further, Shin’s ultimate point, “For more than half a century the literature has been largely concerned with the expression of some anachronistic foreign values in patriotic guise.” (xv) seems accurate but largely without importance since for the last half century the country of Korea has largely been concerned with the expression of anachronistic foreign values in patriotic guise and it is largely because of this approach that Korea has been able to remake itself in the remarkable fashion it has.

Historically, this is where Korea is, and that can’t be escaped by longing for the good old days.

Shin is a literary moralist in the old-fashioned sense. When he discusses “A Fire” by Jin-gun Hyun he concludes that the narrator’s final act of revenge is flawed because “the fire at Sun-i has discovered in the end should be used creatively and positively to break her own fetters.”(8) This borders on the absurd, given the already well-limned territory of control and pain that that the narrator is trapped in. If the story doesn’t have some notion of human perfectibility in it? Shin will pan it.

Shin also has an annoying habit, one I’ve detected in several other essays of Korean critics, of beginning his essays with tangential discussions of various theorists (From Umberto Ecco to Andrea Dworkin), before finally veering back to the literary work under examination. My favorite introduction leads off Chapter Five. Shin weaves Heraclitus, Macbeth, Achilles and Adam, Faust and Confucius, into a perfect cotton-candy of analysis, all of which leads up to a conclusion something like, “The Koreans have a different, and not worse way, of addressing fate.” To return, for a moment, to Macbeth, it is sound and fury, signifying nothing. As a new reader to Korean criticism I make the snap, and probably incorrect, judgment that this kind of writing is to prove some kind of minimum daily requirement of western literary thought. If that is what it is, it is pretty unnecessary.

Sometimes, also, his analysis is perverse. When Shin argues that the traduced maiden in “The Lunatic Painter” represents “how ordinary people become dead in the course of daily life” he seems to miss the actual point, that the death of her “inner light” is absolutely not in the context of daily life. Despite this, Shin begins there and builds a progressively more breathless argument that radically misinterprets part of the story. It often seems that Shin’s analysis precedes his reading.

Shin’s belief that Koreanness includes some kind of inherited racial history is clearly carried through his analyses. Reviewing Yi Saeng’s “The Wings” Shin argues that, “There is no denying that we feel some limitation in Sang Lee's use of interior monologue; because of the narrator's limited mental space the monologue does not reveal his cumulative memories and wishes.” (39)

That is, of course, nonsense, Yi presents his narrator as living in a permanent present haze as part of his presentation of the character and his numbed disconnection. Why Shin believes that each and every character in a story should be a walking talking representative of the cumulative social and political history of Korea is unclear, but it is an unfair and profoundly philistine concept.

Shin seems to know this elsewhere. When he argues that (about the narrator of “The Wings”:

There is an everlasting horror in the narrator's life. He may never become liberated, may never find utopia. He is confined in his wife's world.

Shin explicitly admits that this character is unnaturally bounded in, yet at the same time he wants him to be the vast canvas of Korean history. These thoughts are paralogical.

Moralist that he is, Shin gets in some good digs at narrator’s wife, and these are well earned. Shin is a good writer and often a skilled critic; but one wearing blinkers.

This blinkered condition is demonstrated in his analysis of “Kapitan Lee” which is one of the most amusing, if derogatory, stories of a collaborator in the canon of such stories (if there is one?)

Shin says:

on the way to be servile yet again to another foreign power -- he falls into a reverie on his long history of servility to foreign power

Kapitan Lee certainly serves any ascendant foreign power, but he is not servile in the dictionary sense, rather he is cunning as a weasel, and this is not a difference without a distinction.

Shin wants to portray Kapitan Lee as a mere bootlicker. Lee certainly licks boots, but he is a cold-hearted opportunist, and that has an entirely different meaning than the one Shin tries to tack onto the horrible, but oddly attractive, Kapitan Lee.

It is a topic for another paper, but Shin also does an amusing job of assessing the narrator “behind” Kapitan Lee and how the two clash. Blinders on, Shin misinterprets that relationship, but it is clever that he detected it – I certainly didn’t, but the moment I read Shin’s analysis it came crystal clear.

Finally, there is Shin’s catastrophic misunderstanding of "Seoul: Winter 1964," by Seong-ok Kim. This is a classic story of the random anomic state of citizens (An and Kim) in a society governed by those with economic goals, and how this makes social, personal ties, meaningless.

Miraculously, foolishly, Shin says:

The setting is not delineated well enough; the characters are not fully developed; and their actions are not given enough motivation and conflict

This, of course, is precisely the point of the story, and Shin’s tin-ear for meaning is painfully revealed by his analysis.

"Tin-ear "might be unfair. But Shin’s moralistic streak, his desire for every story to show us some path from Gehenna to Paradise, shades his understanding of modern Korean literature, which has progressed far beyond simple stories of Good versus Evil.

Shin later claims that An and Kim are “are buried alive in history, which is painful in every sense.”

Of course the opposite is true – they are buried because they have no history, they float like leaves.

If you only have a moment to read “The Trap of History” this is the chapter to read, as Shin’s moralizing is most ridiculous and clear in it.

With all of this said, Shin is probably worth reading. I like him, well enough, merely on account of his dislike of the noise of modern life. He can sometimes see through a stories’ structure and get at the knotty issues below. The problem is that he might, with his prediliction for “good old day” Koreanisms, completely misunderstand what the problem is.

Still, Shin is brave enough to be a public intellectual critic in a culture in which that is not always a safe thing. Props to Shin for writing his work, demerits for his sometimes staid, if not regressive, analytics.

Joogang Daily on Korean Literature

This article seems to be saying that Korean literature (particularly at the level of the novel) is in some way schismatic and that this is even affecting domestic consumption of Korean literature in the Korean language.

It's the first I have heard of this, partly because I focus on translations, poor translation choices and poor translations when I look at Korean literature in translation, but Kwon Seok-cheon is pretty clearly claiming that the problem begins even before this stage.

I have no idea what the "controversy surrounding the novelist Hwang Seok-young" is, but I'm certainly off to check it out.

The article is brief enough to post in its entirety:

The cities and countryside have been devastated, the survivors forced to attack each other and steal what precious little food remains. Living just one day in this cold environment is such insufferable torture that a father and his young son set out on a road to find a new beginning.

“The Road,” a 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, describes sufferings of biblical proportions, similar to the Book of Revelation.

A detailed description of starvation and pain in the depth of winter’s darkness heightens the reader’s sense of reality. The detail in the narration reflects the poverty that the book’s author Cormac McCarthy suffered in his early years, living in a barn for eight years without enough money to even buy toothpaste.

Since escaping such miserable hardship, McCarthy has refused to give lectures or interviews that would net him a huge payday.

Instead, he has absorbed himself in his writing, without associating with other writers. His rare appearance on a television talk show was attributed to Oprah Winfrey’s constant persuasion. On refusing interviews, he said, “I preferred to do things my way.”

Kenji Maruyama is considered Japan’s most notable reclusive writer. He left Tokyo after receiving the prestigious Akutagawa Prize at the age of 22. He has since lived in his hometown with his wife and devoted himself to writing.

He decided against having children. He thought a child would interfere with the structured life he needs for writing.

Maruyama continues to live with such determination and discipline, his head shaven as if he were a monk. “Creation is an effort of penetrating into the depth of a spirit in a solitary manner,” he said. “As soon as I subordinate myself into literary circles and accommodate myself to popular tastes, my novels will be nothing but useless trash.”

Several days ago, the handwritten works of the late poet Kim Su-yeong, one of Korea’s most well-known writers, were published, nearly 40 years after his death. The photographic edition of his handwritten manuscripts reminds us of Kim’s painstaking reach for perfection in every detail.

However, it seems that today’s literary circles spend all their energy splintering into groups. The controversy surrounding the novelist Hwang Seok-young is a prime example, forcing us to think that Korean literature is in deep trouble.

Seeing that readers crave Japanese or American novels, we understand that the apathy for Korean literature can’t be attributed solely to readers’ reluctance toward reading novels.

If writers lack the determination to focus all their energies on their work, no one will ever be satisfied.

We hope our novelists and poets will get back to the basics and start working with renewed vigor to save our literary heritage.

Buckwheat Season at the Korea Journal

Yi Hyo-Sok's "The Buckwheat Season" doesn't impress me as much as it seems to impress Koreans. It is a pretty slow and predictable (SPOILER ALERT) story of a father and son reunion.

But Koreans like it (my Senior likes it and it has been translated into English three times that I know of) and so it must be of some importance to Koreans. I find myself among the category that Jeong-Hyun Shin identifies as believing that the Buckwheat Season" is so weak that to some readers it may seem to lack sufficient motifs and conflicts."

That alone hurts me to admit, since Shin seldom makes sense me.

Shin then goes on to compound his sense and sensibility by noting that the narrator is:

loyal to his love, his donkey, and his fellow vendor, Hue is also loyal to nature. He will never forget the mountain passes, rivers, moonlight, and buckwheat fields; he will forever plod along the buckwheat road viewing the moon in the sky.

This moment of clarity is, of course, drenched in a surrounding bath of anti-Japanese vitriol as well as some rather alarming racial posturing about the "essence" of being Korean. Still, it makes a rather nice Korean Sisyphus and armed with that approach, the story is a much better one.

Which is all prelude to the simple notice that the story is available, for free...

here

A "hidden" Kim Young-ha

I just noticed over at my e-buddy's site (Liminality) that he has a previously unpublished Kim Young-ha short story, Christmas Carol. Worth taking a look at, if you're in to Kim.

Korean Domestic Literature Continues to Flourish

Good news from the Korea Times, which managed to evade me when it first came out. The main point of this is that there is a powerful demographic of women in their 20s and 30s that is purchasing Korean Literature. I'd hope that the more they buy, the more is published and eventually, it will all trickle down to me in translation. ;-)

Korean literature is booming more than ever despite the economic downturn that has dealt a serious blow to the local publishing industry.

According to the Kyobo Bookstore, sales of Korean literature publications including poems, essays and novels dramatically increased by 35.7 percent in the first quarter over the same period last year. The number of Korean literature books sold in the same period rose 36.2 percent ....

.... New formats and patterns in Korean literature are attracting readers, especially younger women, who are the main buyers of literature books.

.

I Have The Right To Destroy Myself

Kim Young-ha’s “I Have The Right To Destroy Myself” is a short novel that attempts quite a lot and achieves almost everything it attempts.

A good story, cleverly told, and one that will prove very entertaining to a casual reader as well as a critical one.

The story features multiple narrators.

Perhaps.

Kim has a rather tricky way with narrators.

In the three translated stories of his I have read, and in “I Have The Right To Destroy Myself” he sometimes pushes narrator believability to Nabokovian limits. Like Nabokov, though, he does it in such a way that a reader puts blinders on, happy enough to go for the ride directly before their eyes.

Kim never directly lets his narrator lie, but he does give his narrator a certain approach toward versimilitude:

Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic. I learned at a very young age that it was easier to make up stories to make a point. I enjoy creating stories.The world is filled with fiction anyway.

“I Have The Right To Destroy Myself” features a “narrator within a narrator” structure, in fact it features some chapters of triply embedded narrative as the omniscient "author/narrator" writes a fiction using the internal narration of characters he cannot, in reality, be in the heads of . The meta-narrator is allegedly novelizing events in which he has participated and thus using his authorial power to represent the lesser narrators. Close reading reveals that similarities exist between the meta-narrator and one of the characters, C. They are both artists, the narrator is, in a sense, a performance artist and C is a video (fairly close to performance in one sense) artist. Both are also deeply interested in aesthetics, as artists would be. Then, there is the point that their lives overlap entirely with respect to the two suicidal women who feature in the narrative.

There is also the issue of the narrator’s job. He is, by his own account, a literate and friendly version of Dr. Kervorkian. His job, more of an artistic avocation, as he explains it, is assisting suicides. The meta-narrator goes to great pains to explain his techniques for acquiring clients, and these techniques represent an ultra-winnowing effort. In fact, the meta-narrator explains his winnowing techniques both as a moral and artistic tactic to … well… create art. The narrator remains, of course, unnamed, but he speaks with the smooth assurance of a true-believer – or one who wants you to believe.

A reader gets the sense that the narrator is a true believer, but by the novel’s end the reader might still be asking themselves, a “believer of what?”

The narrator, as noted above, is an omniscient one, and he only waits until page 10 to elevate his own status (as only the all-powerful narrator can) from omniscience to Godhood. It is Kim’s skill that this monomania seems perfectly sensible, given the geography of the novel. It is also Kim’s skill, that he litters the novel with clues that the narrator is untrustworthy.

The narrator begins his tales with an ellipsis in quotation marks. As a non-Korean reader I can’t tell if this is accurate translation, but if it is, it suggests irony in the inverted commas, and editing in the ellipsis. This is all before the tale is properly begun. Perhaps the most stunning assertion of narrative omniscience the narrator makes, and one I completely missed on my first reading of the novel, is that he narrates the stories of his clients’ deaths solely through the voices of the brothers, which only the clients have met. This is an epic jump of narrative stance, from outside the narrator, through the stories of those who he has met, and to the characters who they have met – and their story represented as that of the narrator.

Then there is the issue of how and why these two, of the narrators few suicides, are related to the brothers. If the brothers were marked off, in any way, as a common thread that would push women towards suicide, this might make sense, but as it is it seems verging on the conspiratorial. Judith, the first suicide, is a troubled woman who shares (sexually) the brothers. Mimi, on the other hand, seems to be a stronger character and her connection to the brothers is finally revealed to have been through the hand of the narrator himself – if the narrator can be trusted in telling his story at two removes from himself, and even then tossing in an obscurationist meeting of the two, “He went back to the gallery. At the entrance, he saw a very familiar man, but he couldn’t place him.” The two should be very familiar, because they are separate voices of the same narrator, placed in the same time and place.

It is brilliant writing, because it pulls this hall-of-mirrors self-referentiality in an effortless and naturalistic way.

There is a hint of Mishima in Kim’s work. He does not describe mere existential angst, rather it is the point that one should live the right way which includes, particularly if bored or pointless, dying the right way. In a perverse way the unnamed narrator of the book echoes John Randolph of Roanoke’s philosophy that “life is not so important as the duties of life.”

It should also be noted that the novel is bookended by discussions of paintings of two famous death scenes, The Death of Marat and The Death of Sardanapalus. My review is on Kim’s book, so I will only note that the world gained something when Kim went into writing, and lost nothing when he did not go into art-criticism. His reading of the visual pull of Delacroix’s work is dead wrong.

I end with one of Kim's concluding symbols – fake flowers. The author describes Mimi’s death and then says the novel he will write (the very book we hold in our hands) “will be a beautiful fake flower arrangement that will be place on their graves.” The fake-flower notion is introduced late in the novel and it, as Kim does throughout the novel, seems to interrogate the notion of the narrator as an artist and as someone whose aesthetic decisions can be trusted.

Still, you close the back cover of this book and you wish that, maybe, there had been a bit more. The clever balances, the counterpoised aesthetics, the omniscient narrator whose omniscience is possibly unmoored from reality, the brilliant narrative itself, the alternately propulsive and comfortably numb plot, all of these combine in a uniquely satisfying way.

One of the Grand Things about the Korea Journal

Is that it has a searchable database which includes a variety of cool short stories in the PDF format. A while ago I reviewed Yi Sang's "The Wings" and lo and behold you can download it right here. The "read this article" link doesn't seem to work, but the "Download PDF" link seems to work just fine.

I suppose I could have made the link to the PDF, but that seems a bit too deep-linked, if you know what I mean.

The general search function for any literature, review, or article, is right here...

worth checking out.

LAND OF EXILE

As I've expanded on some bits of this, I thought I'd blog the whole thing. It was first published in Acta Koreana in June, 2008.

The expanded edition of “Land of Exile” (first published in 1993, republished by M.E. Sharpe), translated and edited by the late Marshall Pihl, and Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, takes a very good, but slightly dated anthology, and with an infusion of four new stories improves the quality of the original volume while simultaneously bringing it into the twenty-first century. The new stories substantially broaden the brief of the anthology, expanding the narrative styles as well as extending the geography of exile that constitutes the main theme of the collection.

A reader of the first edition might be forgiven for assuming that all Korean fiction was about exile. There was a tension between the anthologies’ tight focus on exile and realism, and its self-proclaimed status as “the standard English-language anthology of post-1945 Korean short fiction.” The anthology still revolves around exile, but it has extended its purview beyond only the specific Korean exilic experience, and on to more generalized experiences of alienation. This expansion should make the collection accessible to a broader range of readers.

This new edition also brings the anthology current. The first edition had a balance of stories from the years between 1948 and 1984. This is an interesting symmetry, but one that left the anthology without representation from one-third of the post-colonial era. The new edition adds a story from the 1980’s, one from the 1990’s, and two from the new millennium. These additions allow “Land of Exile” to properly assume the crown Thomas Hughes grants it as “the richest, most comprehensive selection of postcolonial South Korean short fiction currently available.”

Two themes thread in and out of the short stories in “Land of Exile” – collaboration, and cyclicality. Collaborators stud these works and while collaborators are exiles in one sense, they are also a particular and protean kind of exile. These works show collaborators at work on all levels of society and with a wide range of intents. The consistent theme of cyclicality in these tightly drawn dramas suggest that they are merely showing one turn of the wheel, but that the wheel will continue to turn. Some of the pain contained in these stories is exacerbated because the author allows no possibility of future alteration. These stories dramatically remind us that the theoretical concept of contested terrain is an ethereal version of what contested terrain amounts to in the geography of real life. This is one of the powers of this fiction – although it never precisely happened, it gives us glimpses of the humane and the inhumane.

The stories published in the previous edition are largely powerful reading and primarily examples of the “tight” exilic theme. Three of the original works are not as substantial as their companions. “The Wife and Children,” by Ch’ae Manshik is a trifle of a story. With its ‘returning-only-to-exit’ husband, and confused wife and child, it is short on character motivation and of light emotional impact. Kim Tongni’s “The Post Horse Curse” also seems a bit light for the topic of the anthology. Its plot is a hoary “mistaken identity” one that seems heavy-handed and obvious even as it is read. Finally, “Land of Exile,” the story for which the collection is named, may be its weakest story. In attempting to concatenate subplots of an alternately bitter and sentimental old man leaving his son at a orphanage, going home to die, two instances of family betrayal, and several turns of the revolutionary wheel, author Cho Chongnae simultaneously attempts too much and too little. “Land of Exile” is overwhelmed by a soap-opera plot and clumsy dialogue.

Kim Sungok’s “Seoul: 1964, Winter” is much more successful and was recognized as something new in Korean Literature immediately upon publication. It is, as its anomic title indicates, existential, nearly ludicrous, and represents a first step away from an ultra-narrow focus on traditional exile. Two young men meet an older man and attempt to spend the money he has received for selling his wife’s corpse. After reading this story it comes as no surprise to learn that Kim studied French Literature and apparently, learned some of its lessons well. The three men meet as atoms might collide. Just as when atoms do collide, they create a short heat and careen apart. An outstanding work and one whose title, unfortunately, was not suited to be used as the name of an anthology.

The remaining stories are also excellent. Hwang Sunwon’s “Mountains” is an impressive and brutal tale featuring, in shifting third-person narration, multiple levels of exile and a relentless ending suggesting the cycle of exile is unbreakable. When the narrator receives the advice, “As long as you live in the mountains watch out for large animals – don’t even think of going near them,” neither he nor the reader cannot foresee that this exilic advice extends to the largest of animals, man.

“Kapitan Ri”, by Chon Kwangyong, is a remarkably cheery portrayal of collaboration. Dr. Yi Inguk is a collaborator with a “can-do” attitude extending to everyone except Koreans. He is exuberantly proud of past collaborations and the story is partly of his accepting his new collaborators. Yi reminisces on the fruits of collaboration with the Japanese, recounts how he came to terms with the Soviets, and realizes that the American “big-noses” are another such opportunity despite his discomfort that his daughter is marrying one. Yun Hunggil’s “The Man Who Was Left as Nine Pairs of Shoes” implies that anyone can become collaborator - the unfortunate character of the title notes that “There are times when you can do something you wanted absolutely no part of, and not even realize it …Just because you haven’t cooperated [with the police] in the past doesn’t mean you won’t cooperate [with the police] in the future”

Pak Wanso’s “Winter Outing” is a sobering mixture of personal alienation and a horrific story of the impact of political bifurcation. An alienated wife travels to the country and meets a heartbreaking victim of internecine Korean brutality. O Chonghui’s “The Bronze Mirror” and Im Cho’ru’s “A Shared Journey” are linked by their consideration of the cost of rebellion and ensuing exile. In “The Bronze Mirror” an elderly couple live with memory of their son, killed twenty years earlier in the April 1960 student revolution. “A Shared Journey” by Im Cho’ru, tells a story subsequent to the 5.18 Massacre in Kwangju. When one protagonist still on the run and another uneasily settled back into d