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.

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.

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"

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.

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!).

"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.

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?

“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.

Wow.. a complete literary smackdown..

Cheryl Miller puts the hammer of the Gods to Paul Fisher.

She attacks, rightly, the modern notion that it it useful to attribute all the sins a critic can find in their own head, onto the artists that they review. A sample passage of the review.

Fisher is convinced that he is on the cutting-edge of literary interpretation, that his "intimate portrait" of the Jameses is new. The introduction is full of such self-congratulation. "Few people talked or wrote about the most intimate issues in the Jameses' lives: mental illness, alcoholism, love, sex, homosexuality, money"; "there has been little frank discussion about the Jameses in love," etc., etc. Previous biographers might have done "superlative," even "meticulous, monumental" work, but none of them is the bold slayer of myths our author claims to be.

And that is the polite bit!

She massacres this book so profoundly that it might actually cause me to purchase the thing to see the wreckage.

Marketing by assassination.

Fucking Brilliant!