[_list: Books from Korea] Vol.25 Autumn 2014

A Literary Quarterly

Vol. 25 Autumn 2014

Featured Writer

Ko Un

Special Section

Literature of the Korean Diaspora

ISSN 2005-2790

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Interview: Ko Un

Readings: Ko Un

LTI Korea Trip: Busan and Tongyeong

The 13th International Workshop for Translation and Publication of Korean Literature

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Foreword

T

he news that the Swedish Academy has set the dates to announce the year’s Nobel Prizes heralds the arrival of autumn in Korea. As the weather gets cooler and cooler, the Korean people’s desire for the Nobel Prize in Literature becomes hotter and hotter. Korea’s history of political democracy and economic development over the last 50 years is complemented by its literature, which gives hope and comfort to the Korean people. They expect every autumn that a writer will be honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature as a reward for the endeavors and efforts of Korean writers during Korea’s turbulent 50-year journey.

These expectations are so tightly focused on Ko Un, the featured writer in this issue, that Korean reporters have been known to camp outside his home ahead of each year’s announcement. “His life is itself a poem, a poem filled with struggle, pain, contradictions, and agony …” as Brother Anthony of Taizé has said, “... he is not asking the audience to focus on him but to hear, through him, a voice expressing in vivid poetry the essence of what Korea has been obliged to suffer over the last 120 years.” In addition, poet Gary Snyder noticed both national identity and universality in Ko’s poetry, and recognized him as not only “a major spokesperson for all Korean culture, but as a voice for Planet Earth Watershed as well.” He went further: “Because of their purity, their nervy clarity, and their heart of compassion, his poems are not only Korean—they belong to the world.”

However, it is from the mid-1860s that Koreans widely dispersed throughout the globe.

This emigration has been unfortunately precipitated by the events of modern Korean history.

Despite a relatively short migratory history, around 150 years, and the involuntary nature of early emigration, presently over seven million Koreans are living in 170 countries. Nearly fourfifths of them live in just four regions: North America, China, Japan, and Central Asia.

In the special section of this issue, we explore the theme of “Literature of the Korean Diaspora.” We can meet the writers, descendants of early emigrants in each region, namely Cathy Song (U.S.), Lin Yuanchun (China), Yu Miri (Japan), and Anatoli Kim (Kazakhstan).

Although they write in different languages, we can hear the same voice—a voice that sincerely tells of the inscrutable destiny of their ancestors and constant search of their own identity, as well as the hidden identity of their host lands.

In Cathy Song’s poem, “Picture Bride,” she vividly describes a young bride’s journey across the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii to meet a husband whose face she has never seen. An attempt to gather a scattered family under one roof and reconstitute the true meaning of family is the challenge faced by the characters in Yu Miri’s celebrated novel, Family Cinema. The characters in Anatoli Kim and Lin Yuanchun’s novels embody the struggles for future self-actualization between their Korean origins and the reality of their host land.

It is my hope that readers truly enjoy this issue of _list.

Exploring the Dimensions of the Korean Diaspora

by Park Jangyun Editor-in-Chief

Vol.25 Autumn 2014

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Contents 04 08

2014 Seoul International Writers’ Festival ㆍIntroducing SIWF ㆍEssay: “There Was a Time” by Park Seongwon

28

ㆍMending Ties: Translators, Editors, and Publishers ㆍThe Specter of the Digital Agent ㆍTranslators as Scouts for Korean Books

Featured Writer

Ko Un

ㆍWriter’s Profile: The Poet Who Speaks the Dialect of the Universe ㆍInterview: Ko Un, the Shaman of Lyric Poets ㆍWriter’s Insight: A Dawn Soliloquy ㆍChronology: Ko Un At a Glance ㆍPoetry ㆍLiterary Works of Ko Un

The 13th International Workshop for Translation and Publication of Korean Literature

32

Special Section

Literature of the Korean Diaspora ㆍWriters Transcend Diaspora ㆍDiaspora in America ㆍDiaspora in Japan ㆍDiaspora in China ㆍDiaspora in Central Asia

60

The 8th Residency Program for Translation Research in Korean Literature ㆍFollowing the Vestiges of Illusion and Reality ㆍFrom Busan to Tongyeong: Tracing Fiction ㆍ8th Residency Program Overview

26

4

2014 Seoul International Book Fair ㆍInterview with Jo Lusby, General Manager of Penguin North Asia

_list : Books from Korea

Vol. 25 Autumn 2014 A Literary Quarterly

In Every Issue

01 52 53 64

PUBLISHER

Kim Seong-Kon

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

Kwon Sehoon

MANAGING DIRECTOR

Jung Jin Kwon

EDITORIAL BOARD

Kang Gyu Han Kim Jonghoi Min Eun Kyung Park Hae-hyun

OVERSEAS EDITORIAL ADVISORS

Choi Kyeonghee Oliverio Coelho Jean-Claude De Crescenzo Grace E. Koh Michael J. Pettid Andreas Schirmer Dafna Zur

DOMESTIC EDITORIAL ADVISORS

Brother Anthony Steven D. Capener Horace J. Hodges Jean-Noël Juttet Charles Montgomery Andrés Felipe Solano

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Park Jangyun

EDITORS

Kim Stoker Yi Jeong-hyeon

MANAGING EDITORS

Choi Hyein Park Mill

TRANSLATORS

Sophie Bowman Jamie Chang Koh Hyojin

ART DIRECTOR

Kim Aram

DIGITAL MEDIA EDITOR

Kim Eunhye

REPORTERS

Sophie Bowman Lee Sewon Theodora Yu

PRINTED BY

Choyang AD Com Co., Ltd.

Foreword Poetry Reviews Afterword

Excerpt: Spotlight on Fiction “The Story of a Ladle” by Jo Kyung-ran

Cover image and Contents photos by

ⓒSeo Heun-Kang Date of Publication September 30, 2014

All correspondence should be addressed to the Literature Translation Institute of Korea 112 Gil-32, Yeongdong-daero (Samseong-dong), Gangnam-gu, Seoul, 135-873, Korea Telephone: 82-2-6919-7714 Fax: 82-2-3448-4247 E-mail: list_korea@klti.or.kr www.klti.or.kr www.list.or.kr

Vol.24 Vol.25 Summer Autumn 2014

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2014 Seoul International Writers’ Festival

Introducing SIWF

T

he Seoul International Writers’ Festival (SIWF) brings together writers from Korea and all over the world to exchange and share ideas. The festival, which is held every other year, will take place in Seoul and Jeju Island from September 21 to 27. SIWF is a literary festival that works to dissolve the borders between genres and countries by providing a melting pot for writers to share literary works, give readings, and enjoy various types of art performances.

The festival, which launched under the title of “Seoul Young Writers’ Festival” in its first and second editions, was renamed as the “Seoul International Writers’ Festival” from the third edition in 2010, thus broadening the scope of participant writers and emphasizing the importance of Seoul as a city of literature.

2006 Seoul Young Writers’ Festival - Theme: Newness in Literature - 36 young writers, 20 from Korea and 16 from overseas 2008 Seoul Young Writers’ Festival - Theme: Communication + Inspiration - 40 young writers, 20 from Korea and 20 from overseas 2010 Seoul International Writers’ Festival - Theme: Fantasy + Empathy - 24 writers, 12 from Korea and 12 from overseas 2012 Seoul International Writers’ Festival - Theme: Reality + Imagination - 20 writers, 10 from Korea and 10 from overseas

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The 2014 Seoul International Writers’ Festival will mark the fifth iteration of this festival and will be held in Bukchon, the village that sits above Gyeongbokgung Palace in the heart of old Seoul. The theme is “Eros and Dream.” This year 28 writers from Korea and overseas will participate. The main program will consist of “Free Talks: Eros and Dream in My Literary Works” and “Reading” sessions, along with a welcome event on the beautiful island of Jeju and other activities such as a Seoul night tour where participants can take a peek at the city scenery after dark.

by Park Jee Won LTI Korea

Participating Writers 2014 Seoul International Writers’ Festival Cho Yunno Hae Yisoo Han Yujoo Hwang Jung Eun Kang Jeong Kim Haengsook Kim Miwol Kim So Yeon Kim Tae Yong Lee Jenny Lee Young Kwang Park Sangsoon Park Seongwon Yun Ko Eun

Denja Abdullahi G. Ayurzana Daniel Levin Becker Susan Choi Oliverio Coelho Dan Disney Lucy Fricke Akiko Fujiwara Riza Kirac Tarso de Melo Sinéad Morrissey Claude Mouchard Yoko Tawada Yuan Tian

For more details, please visit siwf.klti.or.kr

Vol.25 Autumn 2014

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2014 Seoul International Writers’ Festival

There Was a Time T

his essay was written for the Free Talks session, “Eros and Dream in My Literary Works” at the 2014 SIWF.

T

here was a time when folk music was all the rage. There was Neil Young, Nick Garrie, the Byrds, and Toni Vescoli. Of course, it was not my time. I was born much later than that. I just listen to their songs and think about them, that’s all.

There was a time I grew a sinsemilla plant in my one-room rental. There was just one reason why. I got it after I heard that it represented the female genitalia. My friends said what I was doing was plain stupid. I even thought it was stupid. But it seemed cooler than writing the name of the girl you secretly loved on a fogged-up windowpane.

You normally learn something, even from a stupid thing, when you invest 10 months of your life into it, but there was nothing I learned from this plant. I watched it for nearly 10 months, but I couldn’t figure out why it represented the female genitalia. I didn’t know if it was because of the shape of the leaves that slightly dipped down, or the barely open flower petals, or because of the subtle scent that it gave off so quietly. I wanted to ask the girl who had told me that it represented the female genitalia as she sold it to me, but it was long after she had sold the flower shop and moved away.

During those 10 months, I was introduced to a few girls. (Ah, lucky me.)

When they asked about my hobbies, I said: “I’m growing a sinsemilla plant. It’s supposed to represent the female genitalia. Ha ha.”

“Oh, is that right?”

And after that, I never heard from them again.

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If I think hard, the source of my imagination may be “sinsemilla.” The reason I bought the plant is obvious. It was because of the beautiful girl who had worked at the flower shop. I dropped by the shop often for no special reason. I just asked about different flowers and orchids. Because my main objective was the flower shop girl. Then one day I had asked about an unusual-looking plant and it turned out to be the sinsemilla.

“The leaves are quite interesting.”

“It’s called a sinsemilla. They say it represents the female genitalia.”

The flower shop girl had laughed shyly and I cracked open my emergency fund. As I headed back to my room, the early sunset was smeared across the sky like wine and a delicious smell filled the alley. The wind blew just the right amount, and the sinsemilla leaves that shook in the wind occasionally struck my cheek—I found it utterly refreshing.

The flower shop closed after that and the plant died. I saw the flower shop girl again because of my friend. This friend had a dilemma and it was that his girlfriend slept with him only when he gave her a present. If he gave her an expensive present, she would come on to him, even if he didn’t want sex. He said: It means nothing’s free in life. When I met his girlfriend, I realized that she was the flower shop girl. But she didn’t recognize me. She pointed at a type of sansevieria plant and asked if we knew what it represented. When my friend said that he didn’t know, she said, “It represents the female genitalia.” She said this with a pretty smile.

I sometimes wonder: If I had given her an expensive present, would things have gone well between us?

There was a time I grew a sinsemilla plant. People may not know now, but there was a time when folk music was popular. And there was a time when sex was free. When we had to huddle together in caves, hiding from wild beasts and the cold; sex had been free then.

And so we exist now. Naturally.

by Park Seongwon Novelist

Park Seongwon was born in 1969 in Daegu. He debuted in 1994 with the short story “The Will” in Literature and Society. He is a professor of creative writing at Keimyung University. He is the recipient of the Today’s Young Artists Award, the Hyundae Literary Award, the Hyundae Buddhist Literature Award, and the Han Moosuk Literary Award. He has published the short story collections Steal Me, We Run, What Makes a City, and One Day. Vol.25 Autumn 2014

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Featured Writer: Writer’s Profile

ⓒSeo Heun-Kang

The Poet Who

Speaks the Dialect of

the Universe

G

ood poets are always loved before they’re comprehended and explained. The language used in poetry is letters and words, but it must always be something greater than that, because the movement of every living thing is not only ranked above words, but must be bigger and deeper than words. Ko Un’s poetry gives dimension to life by virtue of making readers feel before they understand. It is fruitless to try to label him when his works transcend reason and logic, meaning and form, and travel freely through time, space, and things.

Even though Ko Un was once a monk well versed in Buddhism, trying to find keys in Buddhism to unlock his world will get you nowhere.

His experience with Buddhism does not explain why poetry, the true essence of Ko Un’s philosophy, led him back to the secular world. He was who he was when he sang of drifting at the peak of his life, and when he was a political prisoner fighting the

10 _list : Books from Korea

paradoxes of reality. He was not a pessimist when he attempted suicide, and he was not a Marxist when he was imprisoned. In his 56-year history as a poet, he has never once relied on scriptures. The spirit of his poems does not allow the use of the tools of preexisting discourses, ideological systems, or epistemological devices. It would be a great shame indeed if the words in the hundreds of books that he has written were read through the lens of preconceived notions.

For Ko Un, being alive is itself more important than truth or ethics. He never fails to capture a moment when a life is not trapped in the cubicles of civilization.

For Ko Un, scriptures are things that appear in unexpected moments—laughter he hears passing an alley, or the sound of raindrops on mulberry fields he’d heard when he was a child. These moments are neither right nor wrong. There are things in the world that must be accepted for the shape and color they are.

Existence is always in harmony with the unseemly and other things we would rather not see. And so he does

thousand drops of water.

What, then, is the philosophy this offers humanity? The Algerian writer Frantz Fanon saw the strength of a young Africa in the drumming of the Africans that echoed the resonance of the universe. He compared it to the sophisticated and harmonious Baroque music of the West and said neither is superior but each different and unique.

But civilization had already clouded Fanon’s eyes. A modern perspective of standardization, centralization, and structuralization was operating without his realizing. Also, the 400 years of Armenians and Slavs endlessly slaying one another on the Balkan peninsula is an act of painting absence on absence, an act of masochism where the marginalized search for an answer in the margins.

However, Ko Un knows no center or margins in such contexts. Perhaps Ko Un is a bearer of time that has yet to be discovered by humanity. Not one who travels from one battered land to another, but one who exists outside such realms. One who calls phantoms, ghosts, and the dead by name and summons them into our world, one who expels the modern values that fill our bodies. When he says that the prehistoric period, which exists not inside but outside civilization, is full of not knowing, it also means it is full of wonder.

How does Ko Un’s language contribute to humanity as a human collective? Animals go extinct when their last connection to nature is severed. The same is true of the human spirit. Ko Un sings of the loneliness a life feels as it walks away from nature, much in the same way a baby feels lonely when it is separated from its mother. Just as UNESCO is introducing horses back into the wild now that the wild horses which used to gallop through the Eurasian plains are in danger of extinction, Ko Un is operating a poetic project to restore our primitive humanity by sending the time of man outside the dogma of civilization—for the sake of the sublime human existence from before the analysis of civilization intervened.

by Kim Hyeong Soo Poet and Literary Critic

Ko Un

not refrain from marveling at the moments created by the movement of life.

There is, in fact, no moment that reveals everything in life. The magic of Ko Un’s language lies where awareness and ignorance operate in the same body.

What glitters between a crying bird during a moment in its short life and a star 70 million light years away is not a real star, but mere starlight that is the ghost of the star. So the complete absorption of the man who perceives the gloriousness of life in the starlight always sings of the dramatic moment of light when new things appear. Just as the primitive body unadulterated by civilization and the purity of primitive sentiments shackled by the notions of civilization renew life and the world, Ko Un is like a puppy frolicking in a snowy field or a bear deep in hibernation.

So if shamanism isn’t dependent on scriptures but rather on the secret meaning of the earth, one could say that Ko Un’s spirit shares properties with the power of the shaman that cures ailing lives, and if we define language that does not adhere to preexisting systems and frames as incantations, then his poetry is incantatory. And if an artist hears the pain of the world that he belongs to and his body dwells and ails with it, then his language cannot help but belong to the “here and now” that breathes with the substances of his true reality.

To Ko Un—who has remained a part of nature that exists harmoniously with a world independent of customs and systems, who sings of its marvels but does not rely on any knowledge, and who has never once upheld the discourse of the sages from the history of human philosophy—the world is a garden of living things more important than civilization.

The most wondrous thing of all is that Ko Un has developed these sensitivities in the backdrop of the political turmoil of the Korean peninsula. He was born in a village where one’s identity and one’s village were one and the same; he fled the ruins of war and wandered; he returned to the world and fought on the side of those marginalized in the process of industrialization; and he bemoaned the tragedy of a long-divided nation. This life created a magnum opus that is Ten Thousand Lives, a poetry collection that portrays the lives of 4,001 individuals. Even through this vast number of individual parts, he shows that the world is still a single ocean which consists of a

Vol.25 Autumn 2014 11

Featured Writer: Interview

Ko Un the Shaman of Lyric Poets Park Hae-hyun: You published the poetry collection, Untitled, to commemorate the 55th anniversary of your debut. It is a collection of 539 untitled poems. What is the theme of this collection?

Ko Un: The first draft of the collection was written when I was staying in Venice. I sometimes wrote 10 poems per night. The poetic meteor shower rained night and day. The reason I didn’t give any titles to the poems was because I suspected that poetry, which I consider to be the language of freedom and liberation, was being trapped in the titles. I wanted the poems to pioneer their own destinies. I was almost in a trance as I wrote these poems. In Germany,

someone referred to me as the “shaman of great lyric poets.” I feel as if the incantatory nature of my poems has been let slip through Untitled. I believe Untitled draws from my subconscious rather than my consciousness. The collection will be translated sometime next year.

Park: Despite being over 80, you have maintained your health and continue to attend poetry readings abroad. You’ve already held one reading in London in May and in Berlin in June. Do you plan to go abroad again in the near future?

Ko: I am immune to time zones. I am off to Macedonia in August to receive the Gold Wreath

ⓒKim Eunhye

ⓒKim Eunhye

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_list : Books from Korea

ⓒKim Eunhye

ⓒSeo Heun-Kang

ⓒKim Eunhye

Award. I’ll be attending a poetry reading held by the Poetry Foundation in Chicago and giving a lecture at the University of Illinois. If a forum that is being organized in Hawaii takes place, then I’ll do a reading and give a lecture there on my way back to Korea. I was invited to Italy in late October as well. I was also invited to the International Poets’ Festival in November, but I haven’t decided whether I’ll attend or not.

Park: It’s been a year since you’ve moved from Anseong in Gyeonggi-do Province to Suwon. How has the new environment affected you?

Ko: The 30 years I’ve spent in Anseong were very fulfilling. I had a prolific life as a writer there. It’s been less than a year since I moved to Suwon, so my life in Suwon is still in its infancy. Perhaps I’ll hit a growth spurt here. Untitled opened the first year of my Suwon Period. It seems my literary saga will meet its end here at the foot of Gwanggyosan Mountain. I recall the words of an American soldier who fought in the Korean War, “The hometown of a person is said to be the place of his birth, but the place where he dies is the true hometown.”

Robert Frost was born on the West Coast, but is a New England poet. And you also have poets like

Robinson Jeffers who was born in Pennsylvania but was known as a poet of the Big Sur in California.

Park: What are you working on these days?

Ko: I’m writing an epic poem called “Virgin,” which is a reworking of Simcheongjeon (The Story of Sim Cheong), a Korean classical novel. I plan to write a lyric poem about Sim Cheong coming down to earth from heaven, and then to the underwater world, back on land, and then back to heaven. It has the same structure as Dante’s portrayal of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. I want to depict the cycle of life and death through “Virgin.” Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism will also be incorporated into it. I think of Sim Cheong as a character who travels to many places but holds onto her virginity. She represents the purity of existences that does not succumb to the obstacles of her surroundings. Sim Cheong is my “idea” in the philosophical sense.

Park: Tensions are rising in East Asia these days due to the history disputes between Korea and Japan and the territorial disputes between Japan and China. You have once argued that the Vol.25 Autumn 2014 13

sea is where the three countries should look for common ground for the sake of peace in East Asia.

Ko: I once traveled to Japan and heard the fishermen there singing the reprise “senoya,” the same reprise you hear in the labor songs of Korean fishermen. Jang Bo-go, the King of the Sea who ruled over the maritime trade during the Silla Kingdom, is Korean, but he’s respected in China and Japan as well. Unlike land, the sea knows no borders.

How could you draw a line on the undulating waves? The three East Asian countries must embrace the sea as a space of solidarity. In order to do that, we must reexamine history from the viewpoint of maritime history and then reconstruct our history.

Ko: When the nation is under threat from outside forces, it is necessary to adopt such an identity.

But our identities in general are not set in stone.

When I return to my hometown, Gunsan, none of the old landscapes remain. But the landscapes of my childhood can be found in the American countryside. Then, that country village in America becomes my hometown. I respect the singularity of Korean culture, but I don’t like the confinement of a distinct culture. Physiologically speaking, culture is a volatile thing. To put it another way, it’s chemistry. The culture of a country is a mixed entity formed through contact with other cultures. Independence left undisturbed for too long turn into isolation.

I wanted the poems to pioneer their own destinies.

I was almost in a trance as I wrote these poems.

Park: You resist being identified as Korean.

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Park: You are also involved in the Dictionary of the Korean Language that North and South Korean scholars are collaborating on. With the tension between North and South, how is the project

ⓒSeo Heun-Kang

progressing?

Ko: The Korean language that came after division is damaging the one before. The language of an individual is still alive in South Korea, but collective language overwhelms the individual in the North.

On the other hand, the language of capitalism is violently unifying language into “market terms” in the South. We must make this North-South dictionary soon to stave off further division of our language. We have completed about 70 percent of the dictionary. The remaining 30 percent is the challenge we face now. I want to make a dictionary that comprehensively compiles the language used by ethnic Koreans who moved to Manchuria and Central Asia after the modern period. I want to find the newly formed words that appear in contemporary Korean literature and include them, too.

Park: You write the first drafts of your poems on the backs of used paper rather than a clean sheet.

Why is that?

Ko: I think writing consumes too much paper.

I’ve long since used the clean side of scrap paper to write on. I have yet to learn to type. When the day comes when my hand can no longer play the scribe, I will sit in front of a computer and founder.

by Park Hae-hyun Senior Staff Writer The Chosun Ilbo

To watch video highlights of this interview visit www.list.or.kr

Vol.25 Autumn 2014 15

Featured Writer: Writer’s Insight

A Dawn Soliloquy I

would like to cast off all reserve and start writing about my private life.

Recently I woke at dawn. I had come home very drunk the evening before, and the intense intoxication of the innocent drunkenness had passed but I felt very thirsty. I drank some water.

Suddenly I disliked asking the simple question, “Who am I?” So I began with a doubt whether perhaps someone once gave the name Ko Un to a Ko Un who never existed and so became the I who has now been living as a poet for nearly 60 years. Is it a false I? I felt a chill.

Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, there were a number of cases of false Ko Uns appearing in various parts of Korea. One acted as president of the jury at a regional poetry festival; one gained people’s attention by speaking in Sanskrit; one obtained money and valuables by saying that he was about to go on a journey overseas, which was something extremely rare at that time, but did not have enough for the fare. Worse still was that someone pretending to be Ko Un married a graduate from a women’s university in Seoul.

One of those false Ko Uns got arrested. I dropped the charges against him. After slapping him once on each cheek, I bought him a drink, encouraging him to go back to his own life. At that time I reflected that perhaps I might be the fake and that false Ko Un might be the true one.

Recalling those very bizarre incidents that happened to me in the past, I began to wonder whether I am really what I am and if not, whether, by turning an absent being into a present one, that fabricated I has become as solid as the true I. In that case, how could one speak about the poetic world and multiple literary works by a Ko Un who has gone through the ups and downs that I have lived through?

Just as Jeong Ji-sang, the poet-genius of the 12th century, argued that his poems were made in collaboration between himself and his friend, a ghost, my poems too might have been produced by someone or some ones in my name, working day and night, all through the years.

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I sometimes strive to confirm the reality of myself and the phenomena of my poems with a strict scrutiny. The more I do so, the more I shudder at the fact that I might be just a kind of outer cover, an outward appearance, an outer layer of skin, some kind of fabrication. Also, I cannot escape from the thought that the so-called modern self is nothing but an assumption of a vulnerable sense of selfhood.

Therefore, I cannot help but recognize the fact that no firm definition of my poetry is possible.

Categorical imperatives are invalid.

In the theories of the origin of poetry claiming that the poems and songs of ancient times were always anonymous and collaborative works that were finally established as authentic texts after generations of revision, there have been temporal environments that could produce a poetics of such self-abandonment or self-denial.

Even today, among certain ethnic groups of the Altaic highlands there still remain enormously long narrative poems that require several days and nights to finish reciting. In the nomadic life in the Gobi Desert, too, there are narrative poems, which after a whole night awake reach their last line and finish their task with the light of the rising sun on the horizon. Perhaps I am descended from the blood of the anonymous authorship that has been integrated into this perpetual movement on the continent, so that I too have written narrative poems requiring several days to finish reading. The seven-volume Mount Baekdu and the 30-volume Ten Thousand Lives for example.

In the narrative world before me, the author was ultimately a plural “authors,” not only in the process of a work’s production but there were also multiple people, not just one individual, who appeared in the work. Furthermore, not only the author of the poems but the people who enjoyed the poems were all individual persons, extending far beyond a few individuals at the royal palace.

In fact, the Mahabaratha and the Ramayana of ancient India and the Book of Odes from ancient China’s Yellow River basin are not the work of one poet. The Greek myths and epics that were borrowed

ⓒSeo Heun-Kang

directly from the poems and myths of India were undoubtedly collective compositions. The view of the cultural historian who saw Homer as “Homer Alpha” is a wise one. Thus the tension between self and society is even prehistoric, before modern political poems or poems of engagement.

However, despite this socializing of the fundamental poetic self at the very root, the name of an individual poet is clearly shown in a poem written on a Sumerian clay tablet from 5,500 years ago, so that we remember the first identified author. That name is Kanoche Kadro.

The existing form of a poem that bears a poet’s name on this planet of life in our solar sytem, as if it were a cosmic incantation, has meaning in the history of civilization, sustaining the poetic world on Earth.

Probably for that reason—despite the New Criticism theories that exclude the fictional relationship between writer and work, removing the poet from the poem and isolating the poem from the poet, as if concealing the name of the author in order to achieve a fair evaluation in some kind of contest—the poet always follows behind the poem and is linked by destiny with his own poems.

Here I refuse any kind of conclusion that poetry is enlarged to a whole or condensed to an individual. How, in modern physics, could the “Planck length,” the smallest unit, and the biggest universe become independent by each one’s physical concept only? These two ultimately have to be defined simultaneously, like the Buddhist Huayan concept “One is all, all is one.” The “one” or “all” as poetry’s raison d’être is reflected in the way language is expressed. I do not want Korean poetry to be isolated from the poetry of the world’s many regions by failing to transcend the destiny of being in its native language, and neither do I want it to be lost amidst the world’s poetic turbulence.

Nonetheless, poetry cannot be bound in a rural self-satisfaction, claiming that the poem’s original language cannot be translated. A poem cannot be restricted to a life that blooms only in the land of the language where it was born. Such a poem would stay fixed as a tribal canon only after a lengthy period of time. The poems of Persia’s Hafiz are an example.

Poetry is not only earthly, it is also heavenly. In addition, poetry has a heretical dream that cannot Vol.25 Autumn 2014 17

ⓒSeo Heun-Kang

ⓒSeo Heun-Kang

be lulled by the original blessing of having been born in one place on earth. Poetry is fundamentally restless and rebellious. Therefore, the poetry of one language is mixed with another language, that of a region nearby or distant, then enters into that language and is reborn.

Therefore, poetry is instinctively pregnant with the arduous rebirth from its original language into another language. Some interior world turns toward the land’s end of some exterior world, just as the hero Gilgamesh, in his namesake poem written 5,000 years ago, has an incomplete life and is obliged to travel to the ends of the land. This is linked to the notion that a poem is something individual but also a whole.

Despite the distrust that the French poet Michel Deguy has expressed against the translation of poetry into other languages, the translation of the American poet Gary Snyder’s poems and the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer’s poems into other languages is a liberation of their own language as well as a realization of friendship between one language and another. A poem’s self yearns for the poem’s others. Every cultural act is 18

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ⓒSeo Heun-Kang

a chemistry, a connection and a mixing of blood in mutual understanding.

Like the poems by my brother-poets, my poems too, having their originality in my mother tongue, have been reborn in dozens of other languages. This has made it possible for me to live in other places in the world. Being is being-in-the-world.

I am not only a poet on the Korean peninsula in East Asia but a pilgrim of poetry, venturing through the world’s time zones. I am an ancient South-West Asian Hotar and an Alima who roamed through ancient Egypt. I aim at the revolving and rotating freedom that makes no distinction between wilderness and altar. I am also a troubadour or a minnesinger in medieval Europe. I participate, day and night, in every place in the world where the soul or spirit of poetry continues to soar.

Poetry does not end with one place’s rhythm. My poetry will ultimately become the poetry of another.

by Ko Un Poet

Featured Writer: Chronology

Ko Un At a Glance F

or his keen sensitivity, outstanding powers of intuition, breadth and depth of imagination, and skillful use of language—as well as the maturity of his understanding of life—Ko Un is widely acknowledged to be Korea’s most prolific and revered poet. His is an immense literary achievement of 155 books, out of which almost 70 are poetry collections. He recently published Untitled Poems, a collection of 607 poems covering 1,013 pages.

Ko Un was born in 1933 in Gunsan, Jeollabuk-do Province, South Korea. He made his official debut as a poet in 1958 when he was living as a Buddhist monk.

In the 1960s he practiced Seon meditation and traveled throughout the country.

After returning to the secular world in 1962, he dedicated himself to nihilism full of desperation and alcohol, producing many striking works. He was awakened to the social reality of his country by the self-immolation of a poor laborer in 1970 and became engaged in political and social issues, opposing the military regime and joining the struggle for human rights and the labor movement.

For more than a decade, Ko Un was, many times and for long periods, persecuted by the Korean CIA, with arrests, house arrests, detentions, tortures, and imprisonments. In 1980 he was sentenced to 20 years in prison, but thanks to international efforts for his release he was set free with a general pardon in 1982, after serving two and a half years’ of solitary confinement.

After getting married at the age of 50, a period of productivity unparalleled in the history of Korean literature began, which one critic has called an “explosion of poetry.” The seven-volume epic Mount Baekdu, a 30-volume poetry project Ten Thousand Lives with over 4,000 poems, a five-volume autobiography, and numerous books of poems, essays, and novels came pouring out. “He writes poetry as he breathes,” a literary critic once said. Literary critics often call him the “Ko Uns” instead of Ko Un because of his incredible

ⓒSeo Heun-Kang

volcano of productivity.

Ko Un was invited as a visiting research scholar at the Yenching Institute at Harvard University and at UC Berkeley, and also, more recently, at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, Italy with the title of Honorary Fellow.

He has received some 20 prestigious literary awards and honors at home and abroad, and approximately 50 volumes of his work have been translated into more than 25 foreign languages.

Ko Un is currently President of the Compilation Committee of the Grand Inter-Korean Dictionary.

by Brother Anthony of Taizé Professor of English Language and Literature Sogang University

Vol.25 Autumn 2014 19

Poetry

First Person Sorrowful

I am sad. Enlightenment soon becomes a contradiction.

After the revolution early last century the Soviet poets decided they would only say ‘We’.

They decided they would only call themselves ‘We’.

They were enchanted.

Their decision held even when they could not go out into the streets, even when they lingered indoors due to heavy blizzards.

They took oaths saying ‘We . . .’ by themselves.

‘I’ had disappeared somewhere deep in the looking-glass.

Mayakovsky, too, one bright sunny day, dashed out shouting and shouting ‘We’.

He was a poet of the street.

‘I’ was not allowed anywhere.

‘I’ was wicked.

‘We’ ‘We . . .’

That alone had incantatory power.

First Person Sorrowful Ko Un Translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé and Lee Sang-Wha Northumberland, Bloodaxe Books Ltd., 2012, 152p ISBN 9781852249533

20 _list : Books from Korea

Little by little, a low-pressure front settled in.

Summer flowers kept being trampled.

Revolution devoured revolution.

The air went out of every child’s ball.

Likewise the taut round atmosphere of ‘We’ slowly went flat.

Someone boldly wrote ‘I am in love’, but still, as long the custom, it was read, ‘We are in love’.

Winter snows had not all melted.

Spring is always uncertain.

Late last century the Soviet Union disappeared.

Countries dropped out of the Warsaw Pact one after another.

Since then poets have nothing but ‘I’.

Starting with ‘I’ they end the day with ‘I’.

There is nothing except ‘I’.

God, too, is another name for ‘I’.

Today I bury the ghosts of ‘We’ and ‘I’ in the endless waves of the Pacific Rim Who will be born?

Who will be born, neither ‘We’ nor ‘I’?

Each wave is one wave’s grave, another wave’s womb.

Note: An earlier version of this poem was included in Songs for Tomorrow.

Visit www.list.or.kr to watch readings of this work by the author.

Vol.25 Autumn 2014 21

Poetry

Poetry Left Behind

If it’s possible, if it’s really possible, why should there not be times when we start over again from our mother’s womb as if a newborn.

Life always has to listen alone to the sound of the next wave.

Still, we should not turn back from the road once taken.

Tatters of the years while I wandered about are flapping here and there like laundry.

When I was poor even tears were lacking.

Some nights I warmed my cold back at a dwindling bonfire, then, turning cheerlessly, warmed my breast.

Some other nights I simply froze, and shuddered, trembling.

Whenever countless tomorrows became today I was often a stranger in a back seat.

At dusk the mountains were so deep that the road I had to take seemed longer than that which I had taken.

22

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The wind blew...

It blew...

Was that a spirit howling once, or poetry?

Sorrow is never something we sell or buy.

So, be sorrowful as a lamp standing far beyond.

There should be nothing that I have left, but feeling there was something I had left behind as fog was lifting, I rose quickly from the spot where I had been staying, likely on the west coast near the outermost tip of Tae-an Peninsula.

Was that a soul howling at some period of my life, or poetry?

Visit www.list.or.kr to watch readings of this work by the author.

Vol.25 Autumn 2014 23

Poetry

Request

How many a branch a branch there still must be on which no bird has ever perched.

Do not say I’m lonesome, lonesome.

Where could there be a branch a branch that has never been shaken by the wind?

Do not say I’m in pain, in pain.

Visit www.list.or.kr to watch readings of this work by the author.

24

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It’s

It’s a heart throbbing, tears dripping from the muzzle of a gun.

It’s a father dying ahead of his son.

It’s subtracting rather than adding up, dividing rather than multiplying.

It’s a mother tongue.

It’s listening.

It’s a bowl of rice.

It’s underground roots not having to worry about the leaves up above.

It’s someone’s childish fluting.

It’s every kind of life, each individual life not subject to other lives.

It’s the sight of harnessed oxen plowing fields in days gone by.

It’s one person’s blood warming another person’s blood.

It’s a mother for whom her baby’s crying is all.

It’s an archipelago.

It’s a person being a human for another human being, a person being nature for Nature.

It’s myself being finally abolished Ah, Peace!

Note: An earlier version of this poem was included in Songs for Tomorrow.

Alas! oxen’s millennial yokes.

Vol.25 Autumn 2014 25

Literary Works of Ko Un

T

hese poems represent my other-centered poems. So much modern Korean poetry is centered on the self; even if it is love poetry, the other person, the one I love has to come to me—or else it is the I who is there walking, it is I who is smelling the flowers. This “I-centered way” of experiencing life distorts; the others are there and they become the object of my poem. I have many other kinds of works, but if this were not in my body of work, somehow I would have failed in my task, not only in the matter of depicting others, but also in the way of somehow transcending the “self.” It is the obligation of the poet to celebrate each person. – Ko Un Ten Thousand Lives Translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé, Young-moo Kim, and Gary Gach Los Angeles, Green Integer, 2005, 364p ISBN 1933382066

T

he poems in Abiding Places, written after Ko Un, a poet from the South, spent two weeks traveling freely around the North, take in the full length, breadth, and heights of this mountainous peninsula with little regard for border posts but with great regard for its people in all corners and circumstances. – Sunny Jung and Hillel Schwartz

Abiding Places Translated by Sunny Jung and Hillel Schwartz Vermont, Tupelo Press, 2006, 142p ISBN 9781932195408

T

his book is a selection from the many volumes of poems Ko Un has written— out of a day’s work and human turmoil and delight in the countless little towns and farms on Planet Earth. Ko Un’s poems evoke the open creativity and fluidity of nature, and the funny turns and twists of Mind. – Gary Snyder The Three Way Tavern Translated by Clare You and Richard Silberg Los Angeles, University of California Press, Ltd., 2006, 153p ISBN 9780520246133

26 _list : Books from Korea

B

odhisattva of Korean poetry, exuberant, demotic, abundant, obsessed with poetic creation . . . Ko Un is a magnificent poet, a combination of Buddhist cognoscente, passionate political libertarian, and naturalist historian.

– Allen Ginsberg

Flowers of a Moment Translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé, Young-moo Kim, and Gary Gach New York, BOA Editions, Ltd., 2006, 105p ISBN 9781929918874

I

n a word, Ko Un is not only an eyewitness, but also an actor in the history of his time. His poetry incarnates it, an expression of both the suffering and the hope characterizing the indomitable resilience of modern Korea and the human spirit.

So here you have, on the surface of these bright pages, testimony whose ink is still drying, as it were. Bearing witness to an answer that is never yet to come. Songs for tomorrow, in the key of sun, rain, wind, earth, and your hearty attention.

– Brother Anthony of Taizé and Gary Gach Songs for Tomorrow Translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé, Young-moo Kim, and Gary Gach Los Angeles, Green Integer, 2008, 368p ISBN 9781933382708

T

hat 40 days’ journey to the North of the Himalayas was a bitter experience, well matching my reckless foolishness. But I had something to say quietly: I went there, not in order to sing about Himalayas but to sing about this world. I believe that being far from the truth is poetic truth. I do not say that just as a childish paradox. – Ko Un

Himalaya Poems Translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé and Lee Sang-Wha Los Angeles, Green Integer, 2011, 136p ISBN 9781557134127

To learn more about the literary works of Ko Un, please visit www.koun.co.kr

Vol.25 Autumn 2014 27

2014 Seoul International Book Fair

Interview with Jo Lusby, General Manager of Penguin North Asia

O

n Friday, June 20, the third day of the 2014 Seoul International Book Fair, Helen Cho of LTI Korea sat down with Jo Lusby, General Manager of Penguin North Asia, to discuss the current state of the international publishing industry. It was an invaluable opportunity to assess the present and future of Korean literature as well as its global readership.

bring great stories from different perspectives to the readership. We are aware that there is great interest in Korean contemporary culture around the world and this kind of interest may translate into an interest for Korean writers, but it’s more just about looking for great books.

I am interested in some contemporary fiction and also maybe some modern fiction, something that could go into modern classics. I’m looking for a really good story.

Cho: As General Manager of Penguin North Asia, how much potential do you see in Korean literature for breaking into the international market?

Helen Cho: Following the success of novels like Shin Kyung-sook’s Please Look After Mom with international readers, have you got any particular plans to publish Korean literature?

Jo Lusby: I have some submissions that I’m looking at and I’m very interested to try and find something but I haven’t signed anything up yet.

Cho: What sort of works are you looking for?

Lusby: That’s a difficult question, but basically I know it when I see it—ultimately a great story that will appeal to readers. As publishers we want to 28 _list : Books from Korea

Lusby: I see very good potential in the future. Often the types of books that have worked very well in translation have been personal stories, one example being Please Look After Mom. Personal stories are something I’m quite interested in because they speak very strongly, telling the story of history, time, and place. The fact there’s good potential for Asian and Korean literature internationally reflects the importance and relevance of Asia on the international stage. When countries become more a part of international business and culture, readers start to say “I want to know what these people are thinking, what they’re saying, what the cultural background is.”

This is all part of the overall integration of a country into the global community, and as countries become more outward-looking people become curious about them.

Korea has a strong literary culture, and that’s so important. You need people to be writing at a very high level because you need to have an amazing story

to successfully make the journey from one language to another. The first things you lose in translation are form and style. This means that the building blocks of plot, character, narrative, and emotional connection have to be really strong, because they can survive the translation process.

It may take time for Korean literature to reach its full potential but when it happens it may well happen suddenly—one book that takes everybody by surprise and changes everything. Nobody will be able to predict it, but I hope very much I will be the one to publish it.

Cho: Well, let’s keep our fingers crossed! Some people think that stories have to have something quintessentially Korean about them to be successful overseas. Is this something we should focus on or is being more universal actually better?

Lusby: If a British or American person writes a book and they are always then made to explain their book in the context of it representing America or Britain, they get quite angry. But while I wish it weren’t the case, many readers do expect that a book from a certain place is going to reveal something about that society. That said, there’s a book I bought in 2005 called Wolf Totem by a novelist called Jiamin; it has been very successful in English, and people often ask me why that is; well I think it has a very good balance of two important things. On the one hand it is a story that only a Chinese person could tell, it’s a really interesting insight into how Chinese people think about their own history. The other reason the book has been doing so well is that it also talks about universal themes, ideas, and values such as culture and modernity, history and memory. These are things you can appreciate no matter where you’re from.

The most boring thing for me, as a publisher and a reader, is if a book is trying to teach me about a place.

One of the big lessons in creative writing is “show, don’t tell.” Paint a picture. I need to care about the story, and have an emotional relationship with what it’s saying— that can only happen if it has some universal themes and values.

Cho: Could you tell us a little bit about the role of translators as well as literary agents, and perhaps suggest how these two groups could work together?

Lusby: Literary agents are important because they’re very good matchmakers. Getting published is not really a question of finding the publisher, it’s about finding the individual editor, and this is what good agents do well. Translators are the ones reading most widely and they’re the ones who get most excited first about certain books. Also if a book is going to be successful I often need the translator to join the author talk, talking beside the author or speaking on behalf of the author.

It’s important to create platforms where agents, authors, and translators can make connections, places where you can be very informal, like literary festivals where authors, agents, translators, publishers, and readers can all mingle.

At the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) they run an annual summer school where they have 12 language groups. In each group there is an author and a professional translator and they spend a week together with students working on something by that author. We set up the same program in China, and we also discuss some business skills with the translators, talking to them about contracts and how best to negotiate terms and conditions. BCLT do workshops in Singapore and Japan too. I think the workshop model is so successful because it’s intimate —people get to know each other very well.

Cho: Where did you first find out about LTI Korea and what do you think about the work we do here?

Lusby: I first found out about LTI Korea from colleagues, and I now have a subscription to your magazine _list. I think what you’re doing is great, and it’s very important because ultimately it’s about giving people the opportunity to read and understand what’s going on and get enthusiastic.

by Helen Cho LTI Korea

For the full interview, visit www.list.or.kr

Vol.25 Autumn 2014 29

The 13th International Workshop for Translation and Publication of Korean Literature

F

or the world to experience and appreciate Korean literature, two preconditions must be met: translation and publication.

For Korean authors to gain international acclaim, skilled translators, renowned publishers, and competent literary agents are indispensable. Nobel Prize winning authors in Japan and China benefit from celebrated professional translators, and their works are distributed by prominent publishing houses.

Mending Ties: Translators, Editors, and Publishers M

ore than 350,000 new books are being published annually at the United States. Yet only 0.006 percent of them fall into the category of translated literary works. Even though the number of translations in the American market may seem small, it is still important to acknowledge that a crisis in translations is, after all, a crisis in the overall literary culture.

One of the hidden costs for publishers in translations is finding a “good” translator, as they have to invest time and effort in an exhaustive hunt for a suitable translator for each work. Yet the main question at stake is: what defines a “good” translator?

A common problem that arises throughout the editing process is the editor-translator relationship. Even though such relationships should be characterized as collaborative, they are often based on suspicion and, at times, outright combat. There are two conflicting views to consider: the translators feel as if there are only a few flagrant errors to be fixed, while the editors, who read the text as readers, often point to changes in syntax, word choice, and the overall language of the text.

This is what we might call a struggle between the text and the reader.

As a solution to the conflicts that arise during the editorial process, Dalkey Archive began a program for young translators in collaboration with the University of Illinois. Their program grants translators a real-life experience by allowing them

30 _list : Books from Korea

to personally observe the editing process. By working closely with their editors, such individuals eventually become better qualified as “right” translators. As a result, the editor-translator relationship is also restored to be much more cooperative, as the two parties go through each step of the editing process together.

A “good” translator should also be able to deliver the spirit of the translated book in a language that rings true to the readers, bringing forth the culture and the tone of the original text. Regardless of the commonly-held view that translations should only be done by English-language translators, “good” translations are often accomplished by native speakers who can translate texts into high quality English without breaking away from the original meaning.

Since competent, “good” translators are invaluable, the American market most definitely needs more of them. Yet as the translator-publisher relationship has never been without conflicts, closer cooperation and recognizing each other’s value should be the key in creating more qualified, “right” translators and, thus, improving the American literary market as a whole.

by John O’Brien President, Dalkey Archive Press

This article is an abridged version of “Translators and Publishers” presented by the author at the 13th International Workshop for Translation and Publication of Korean Literature.

The Specter of the Digital Agent W

hile the early literary agent was just as likely to represent publishers as authors, it has come to be the agent’s primary role to advance the interests of the author by working to expand the author’s livelihood and readership by making the author’s work available in as many languages, territories, and formats as possible. The agent has the first-mover advantage to establish, extend, and protect the value of the author’s work in the global publishing market, and in doing so allocates intellectual and symbolic capital to players in the publishing industry.

While self-publishing has always been an option for authors, until now the path to commercial success was many magnitudes more difficult and expensive.

It has never been easier to hire the freelance legal, editorial, design, marketing, and publicity resources to produce a book, and to then publish it instantly both digitally and physically, making it available to anyone anywhere in the world. However much the big five houses of international publishing continue to monopolize the bestselling authors, theirs is now one platform among many. If the cumulative effect of the selection, manufacturing, and marketing processes that go into publishing a book is to “make an author’s work public,” in many cases that act may now be accomplished by the author.

Just as the author has never had greater optionality in publishing, never has the author had greater connectivity with the reader, and the combined effect of these two desirable states is to empower the author in an unprecedented way. Since the author brand resides with the author and not the publisher, when an author accumulates singular prestige and recognition independent of the publisher, the direct connection to the reader is even more significant.

Harnessing the distributive power of the Internet, the amplification of social and other online media, and turnkey e-commerce, the author platform may evolve from being a set of relationships the publisher may use to its advantage to a direct bookselling platform for the author.

One of the first observations a person makes about the business of literary agents is that it is one of relationships, and it is entirely accurate. The agent must negotiate a global web of relationships with figures ranging from authors, complex estates, scouts, and fellow agents, to publishers, producers, app developers, publicists, booksellers, and distributors to birth the commercial life of their authors’ work.

Of these many relationships, the one with the author is paramount, and being conducted at the nexus of creativity and commerce, it is an intimate one. The personal connection—the depth of conviction that this agent appreciates your talent, understands what you want to accomplish, has the experience and vision to help you realize such things, and has your best interests at heart—is the deciding factor when an author has to choose from a field of equally capable agents.

Agents have long provided services that exceed the management of copyright, and are closer to career management. With trade editors acquiring and editing more fully-formed ideas than nurturing nascent ones, agents provide developmental editing services to authors, either in-house or through freelancers. While publishers generally dedicate marketing and promotion resources on a per title basis for a set time period, over the long term agents draw on their own press Vol.25 Autumn 2014 31

contacts and engage publicists to build awareness and community around the author’s work. As the author brand individuates from the publisher brand, the agent may extend the brand by proactively licensing rights across as many media platforms as possible, leveraging the symbolic capital of the author to guarantee distribution and publicity (and to gain margin share yet again).

Beyond advising on self-publishing and crowdfunding models agents have begun to exceed management altogether and add production, distribution, and fulfillment of frontlist, backlist, or out-of-print client titles to the mix, contracting with publishing platforms to provide “full-service” e-book and print-on-demand publishing services on a fee or commission basis.

As publishers adapt their core business to the digital environment, there is opportunity once again for agents to assert control over aspects of publishing that more properly belong in the longterm control of the author. Being at the beginning of the chain, the agent is in the best position to capture important, permanent information about the author and the author’s work, yet for the large part that capture happens among discrete systems of record keeping and the data set is inaccessible and unusable to network partners, not to mention to the author. Created and edited on a computer, printed from files or displayed on-screen, the life of the modern book is digital. While most of the current crop of agents came to the business through the love of books printed on paper, agenting is and always has been a data business—data in the form of the actual texts by authors, titles, author and rights information—and the native platform for a data business is now digital. Just as the publisher must pivot from a business model based on the printed book, so too must the agent, and use technology to advance the interests of the 32

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author in the digital age by providing data services and empowering toolsets for author websites, social media, and digital asset management.

As we contemplate the specter of the digital agent, we must not be seduced by feats of software engineering or opportunities for rent-seeking by posing as gatekeepers, but rather measure any act of evolution against the very relationship of trust we have with the author, in which we hold their economic and moral interests before our own. Just as our income derives from theirs, so does our honor and reputation, and we must first consider how any change to our role benefits them. The analog agency must be reimagined as a digital one that leverages data to achieve maximum optionality and connectivity for the client, and revise the agent’s role once again.

by William Clark President, WM Clark Associates This article is an abridged version of “The Role of the Literary Agent” presented by the author at the 13th International Workshop for Translation and Publication of Korean Literature.

Translators as Scouts for Korean Books F

oreign publishers and their translators played a key role in breaking out a literary writer that we represent at William Morris Endeavor (WME): Mohsin Hamid (author of the novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and made into a critically acclaimed movie). Quality translations were crucial to establishing Mohsin’s strong international presence. For an author like Mohsin, quality translations of his works were important and critical, as he writes with nuanced language about sensitive topics.

Another example is Tim Burton and his book The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories, which has been published in more than 30 languages.

In several languages, the quality of the translation was cited as a major component to its bestseller success.

For example, in the French edition, the translator was a poet who was able to perfectly capture Tim’s spirit.

Foreign publishers and translators will be essential for international readers to be able to completely appreciate another one of our clients, Academy Award winning director Quentin Tarantino and his fastpaced dialogue.

Particularly for our literary writers, we recognize that a literal, word-for-word translation is not what is needed. WME believes a translator must truly understand and feel a text in order to translate it properly. Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro is a perfect example of this.

WME is extraordinarily collaborative and one author can be represented by more than a dozen agents, each with their own specialty. As an international agency, WME is interested in bringing Korean literature to a global readership, particularly the English language market.

Books in the thriller/suspense/mystery categories (both commercial and literary) are usually the ones that can break out most easily into other languages.

We are seeing it now with several Italian crime writers that are branching out into other European territories. Scandinavian thrillers in translation, for example, have also become massive bestsellers throughout Europe and the U.S. For Korean literature to become established in the U.S., the first wave will need to be in these mainstream categories, such as those dominating The New York Times bestseller list. Other types of Korean fiction (literary fiction, fantasy, or experimental fiction) can follow.

The Investigation by Lee Jung-myung—a story that follows a young prison guard who has been ordered to find the killer of another guard and stumbles upon a sinister conspiracy—has received a strong reception in foreign markets. This is a great example of strong crime/thrillers that can work internationally which we would love to see more of.

We as an agency could work with a translator that would first identify (or “scout”) a strong piece of fiction that originates in the Korean language.

The translator could help us establish contact with the rights holder. They would translate a sample from Korean into English. WME then would focus on agenting the property in all areas including U.S. publishing, international publishing, film, and TV.

by Tracy Fisher Director, Foreign Rights at WME This article is an abridged version of “The Relationship Between Literary Agents and Translators and How They Can Work Together to Bring Korean Literature to the English-Language Markets” presented by the author at the 13th International Workshop for Translation and Publication of Korean Literature.

Vol.25 Autumn 2014 33

Special Section: Literature of the Korean Diaspora

Writers Transcend Diaspora

America

34

To America and Beyond: Diaspora in Korean American Writing

36

Cathy Song’s Picture Bride and Transpacific Immigration

38

Two Poems: “Picture Bride” and “Untouched Photograph of Passenger”

Japan

40 42 43

Identity in the Literature of Zainichi Koreans Creating a Place for Myself Exploring “Family” in Yu Miri’s Works

China

44

Beyond Ethnic and National Identity in Chaoxianzu Literature

46 47

Pride as an Ethnic Korean in China The Enduring Influence of “Ragged Skirt”

Central Asia

48 50 51

Koryo-saram, Nostalgia, and the Love for Hangeul Finding the Author’s Spirit The Many Voices of “We”

34 _list : Books from Korea

W

hile there is no shortage of expressions that reflect this new era of globalization, the world as one global village, one word has become imperative when discussing the current state of the Korean people.

Diaspora, a term derived from the Greek meaning “scattering” or “dispersion,” is most notably used in reference to the Jews who were forced to live outside their homeland for most of Jewish history, while retaining their ethnic identity and religious practices.

The nature and scope of the diaspora, however, is similar to what has happened to the Korean people since the late 19th century, many of whom left their homeland to survive the turbulent history of modern Korea: the forced occupation of the Korean peninsula

by Imperial Japan and the subsequent Korean War that divided the nation into the South and the North.

The Korean diaspora includes the ethnic Koreans who moved to China and the Soviet Union in search of a better life; to Japan, drafted into the military but unable to return; and later as exported labor to the United States.

The literatures of the two Koreas, developed and accumulated separately since division, as well as what has been written by ethnic Koreans in the U.S., Japan, China, and Central Asia, are commonly referred to as “diaspora literature of the Korean people.” They are grouped together not only based on literary concepts but also because they each share in the sense of being in-between two worlds, heavily dependent on their adoptive culture while also maintaining a separate identity through their connection to that from which they originated.

Mass migration from the Korean peninsula to China and the Soviet Union began in the late 19th century.

Currently there are around two million Chaoxianzu, or ethnic Koreans of Chinese nationality, in China, and around 500,000 Koryo-saram, or ethnic Koreans of Russian nationality, living in the post-Soviet states, each having formed their own unique culture, which includes literature. Among them, many fiction writers in the Koryo-saram community, including Anatoli Kim, and the Chaoxianzu community, including Jin

Xuezhe and Lin Yuanchun, base their work on their people’s history of diaspora. In other countries as well, numerous writers of Korean ethnicity continue to write in the Korean language.

In Japan, there are currently over 600,000 Zainichi Koreans. The number of fiction writers from this community that have made a reputation for writing in either Japanese or Korean is also significant including Kimu Tarusu, Kimu Sokubomu, Lee Kaisei, Yan Sogiru, I Yanji, Yu Miri, Gengetsu, and Kaneshiro Kazuki.

In the U.S., there are over two million Korean Americans, of whom a large number of fiction writers write in either English or Korean, including Yong Ik Kim, Richard Eun Kook Kim, Nora Okja Keller, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Chang-Rae Lee, Susan Choi, and Cathy Song. Some of the most recent works include The Piano Teacher

by Janice Lee, Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee, Edinburgh by Alexander Chee, and Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun. This new generation was mostly born and raised in the U.S. and, unlike the first generation of Korean American writers who wrote autobiographic tales or stories about the past, their works are accessible to a wider audience in this new multiethnic, multicultural world by exploring the universal question of what it means to be human.

Born between two languages and two cultures, writers from the Korean diaspora had no choice but to balance their lives in the borderlands in between.

Their works portray persuasively the joys and sorrows of living away from one’s homeland in multiple layers such as ethnicity, nationality, and gender. As such, Korean diaspora literature refers to a wide range of writers and their works of fiction, and yet there are also many writers of Korean ethnicity and nationality in Korea who write in Korean about experiences of “transnationalism,” expanding the realm of diasporic writing, as was covered in the previous special edition of _list.

What is important, however, is the fact that such diasporic use of language, the temporal and geographical setting of the stories, and narrative structures do not merely express the diverse possibilities of how to write fiction. Instead, they verify how an ethnic people, who share a common tradition and customs, express those values with an awereness and objective of life. At the same time, the goal is not to remain within that group of people, but go beyond, resulting in a greater level of understanding across different peoples and cultures.

Based on the trends in Korean diaspora literature mentioned in this issue of _list, the related writers and their works of fiction from around the world exist in the form of “scattered seeds,” to borrow the expression of another article in this special edition.

The writers have composed fiction, each bearing their own wounds from living in-between two distinct worlds, truly belonging to neither. As plants that sprout in arid land bear the sweetest fruit, I hope that the brilliant literary fruits produced by the painful experiences of the diaspora can soon receive a well-deserved positive assessment.

Writers from the Korean diaspora had no choice but to balance their lives in the borderlands in between.

by Kim Jonghoi Literary Critic and Professor of Korean Literature Kyunghee University

Vol.25 Autumn 2014 35

Special Section: Diaspora in America

To America and Beyond: Diaspora in Korean American Writing T

he currency of diaspora as a critical term in literary studies dates back to the early 1990s when literary critics such as Stuart Hall and Rey Chow began to use it as a key concept in their respective analyses of Caribbean cultural identity and diasporic Chinese intellectuals. Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, an academic journal devoted expressly to the subject, was launched in 1991. By the early 2000s, major collections of critical essays on the subject, such as Theorizing Diaspora (2003), were being used in classrooms. The critical moment of diaspora coincides with the spread of other linked critical discourses in the literary field, such as postcolonialism and transnationalism.

Together these critical discourses point to the insufficiency of nation-based definitions of political and cultural identity for understanding the complexity of contemporary culture in the wake of the mass migrations and transnational flows of the late 19th and 20th centuries.

What are the advantages, we may ask, of talking about literature of the Korean diaspora in the U.S. instead of, for instance, Korean American literature?

This question will depend on the position from which one asks this question. For a Korean American, the category of Korean American literature remains important for U.S. minority politics and the fight for civic and political recognition on American soil.

From this vantage point, talking about Korean American literature as diasporic Korean literature may seem politically recessive. However, talking about Korean American literature as part of a larger body of literature of and from the Korean diaspora can also have many advantages. It can reconnect the early history of Korean migration to the U.S. to other early 20th century histories of Korean migration to Russia, China, and Japan. It can also contextualize the Korean American immigrant experience within a larger global history of international migration and interrogate the comparative cultural hegemony that can be enjoyed by Korean American writers today as

36 _list : Books from Korea

citizens of the most powerful nation in the world.

The sense of a diasporic connection to Korea is very strong in the earliest works to emerge out of Korean America. Writers such as Younghill Kang and Richard Kim (Kim Eun Kook) wrote works that were set in Korea, featured Korean protagonists, and described alternately a lost Korea from an autobiographical past or ongoing political turmoil on the Korean peninsula.

Kang’s The Grass Roof (1931) and Kim’s The Martyred (1964) express a continuing diasporic connection to Korea as the writers’ native homeland. Already in Kang’s later East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee (1937), however, we see Korean identity being held in acute tension with the dictates of American culture and citizenship.

A strong diasporic Korean identity is evident not only in these works written by first-generation writers, but in many “1.5 generation” (born in Korea but raised primarily in the U.S.) as well as second-generation (born in the U.S.) Korean American writers who, like Kang, have chronicled the historical, socioeconomic, political, and cultural challenges of living in the U.S. as a member of a racial and cultural minority.

The 1980s saw several important literary achievements by Korean American writers. In Clay Walls (1987), Ronyoung Kim (also known as Gloria Hahn) provided a narrative of a family’s multigenerational experience of migration and settlement in Los Angeles, one of the largest and most important sites of migration from Korea. The award-winning poetry collection Picture Bride (1983) by Cathy Song brought to the fore the history of Korean women’s emigration to Hawaii in the form of “picture brides,” or marriage spouses selected on the basis of photographs by Korean migrant men who had already settled there as sugar plantation workers. Arguably the most challenging Korean American writer to date, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha defied generic conventions to produce in DICTEE (1982) a rich pictorial and textual collage of material drawn from her personal and familial history in sites as various as Yong Jung (Manchuria), Seoul, and San

Francisco. In these works, Kim, Song, and Cha limn the gendered contours of Korean American experience in powerful ways.

Since the 1990s and 2000s, many other voices have emerged to tell yet more diverse stories of the Korean diaspora—stories long suppressed in both the Korean and the Korean American consciousness. Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother (1996) narrates a young boy’s experience of growing up as a mixed-race child on a military base in Korea. Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman (1997) describes the traumatic history of Korean women forced into sexual slavery during the Japanese occupation of Korea through a dialogue between a Korean mother and her American daughter.

Finally, Jane Jeong Trenka, who has emerged as one of the most important voices of her generation, offers in The Language of Blood (2003) a searing testimony about growing up as a transracial, international adoptee in Minnesota. These works remind us of the dangers of imagining that evoking the category of the Korean diaspora is a transparent act. The Korean diaspora has never been all-inclusive as a category. Even within the Korean diaspora, there have been groups and populations who have been marginalized and silenced.

That said, we should note that there is no reason to single out diasporic consciousness as the overriding criterion in judging and evaluating works by Korean American writers who may or may not be comfortable with the label of “Korean American” or “diasporic Korean.” As the history of Korean American experience grows, it is likely that Korean American writers will find new ways of defining themselves and produce eclectic works that will challenge, bend, and perhaps even burst the already flexible definitions of the Korean diaspora.

Today novelists such as Alexander Chee, Sook Nyul Choi, Susan Choi, Willyce Kim, Chang-rae Lee, Don Lee, Marie Lee, Min Jin Lee, Gary Pak, and Linda Sue Park have achieved both critical and commercial success in the American publishing market that is increasingly receptive to Asian American writers. Their work as a whole defies categories: they write not just about

familiar characters such as first-generation Korean immigrants but also about lesbian adventurers and radicals; they write not only autobiographical fiction but also mysteries and thrillers. Poets such as Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Lee Herrick, Cathy Park Hong, Myung Mi Kim, Suji Kwock Kim, Walter K. Lew, Ishle Yi Park, and Sun Yung Shin are breaking new ground in their heterogeneous work. Playwrights such as Julia Cho, Mia Chung, Young Jean Lee, Sung Rno, and Lloyd Suh are expanding the Korean American cultural repertoire in unexpected ways as well.

To readers interested in exploring the broad range of English writing from Korean America, I would recommend, in additional to the writers mentioned above, the following collections: East to America: Korean American Life Stories (1996), a rich collection of Korean American oral histories, and Kŏ ri: The Beacon Anthology of Korean American Fiction (2001). It would be interesting to compare the histories and narratives that have emerged out of Korean America with the stories of the diasporic people of Japan, China, and Russia. Today there are many Korean migrants in Europe, South America, and Southeast Asia. Their stories are beginning to be told as well. A recent issue of Words without Borders introduced a young writer, Larissa Min, who was born in Brazil, emigrated to the U.S., and now travels the world, photographing and writing about Antartica, the Amazon, and other far-flung places.

The Korean diaspora gives us one way to meet new writers who are showing us how to write across not one or two but multiple borders and languages.

The original meaning of diaspora, let us recall, is “scattered seeds.” We are today witnessing a rich harvest.

by Min Eun Kyung Professor of English Language and Literature Seoul National University

Vol.25 Autumn 2014 37

Special Section: Diaspora in America

Cathy Song’s Picture Bride and Transpacific Immigration A person’s life story is not automatically marked in history; it gains its cultural and historical weight when someone re-makes the private story in forms of writing. Without writing, everything is gone, forgotten. It is quite tempting to say that only the person who experienced a certain event has the official right to inscribe it. But imagination and empathy make it possible for another to write about a certain event, through fragments of memory, even after it has been forgotten and erased. A literary form born in the process of a courageous alternative can take the role of cultural and historical agency. Cathy Song is one of the poets who took agency, quite successfully, by marking the immigration stories of her Korean grandparents through poetry.

According to one interview, Song had chosen the title of her first book of poems as “From the White Place,” at first, highlighting her artistic kinship with the painter Georgia O’Keeffe. The editor, however, strongly recommended changing the title to “Picture Bride,” the most appealing point for American readers. And the editor’s expectation was indeed correct. Song’s first book became a landmark of Korean American poetry.

Song has long been considered as a poet who represents the passive beauty of East Asian culture and recalls tribal memory. Born in Hawaii of Korean and Chinese descent, Song attended the University of Hawaii and Wellesley College. In 1981 she received an MFA in creative writing from Boston University.

Her first poetry collection, Picture Bride (1983), which won the Yale Younger Poets Award and a National Book Critics Circle award nomination, is frequently regarded as the work of personalizing the process of female assimilation into American society.

Poems such as “Picture Bride” and “Lost Sister” were compiled in various anthologies and widely taught in English literature classes in the U.S. Critics agree that her poetry conveys the delicate, colorful voice of a third-generation Asian American with no glimpse

38 _list : Books from Korea

of flirtatious, linguistic awkwardness of the first- or second-generation of Korean immigrants.

Picture Bride, a rich text for the study of relationships between memory, culture, and writing, needs to be reinterpreted as a text that articulates the subversive power of gazing. Song’s poetic blends of deceptively quiet self-reflection and the inner force of a female subject continuously invite readers to rethink the nature of seeing and drawing. On the front cover, you encounter a woman wearing a white hanbok in the oval looking glass beneath the title. Then a few pages in, you see the title “Picture Bride” elegantly inscribed in the same oval mirror. The final line of the last poem of the collection reads “someone very quiet once lived here.” The very act of facing the glass, of gazing at oneself is a rather quiet act. The entire book is arranged in five sections, each named after a flower painting by Georgia O’Keeffe. In this way, Song cautiously shares with her readers her appreciation of art and history, and her keen sensitivity to the act of gazing. In its form, Picture Bride is a kind of perpetual commentary on testimony, on transpacific migration, on memory and remembrance, on seeing and gazing.

In the title poem, Song traces the route of her Korean grandmother who arrived in Hawaii as a picture bride. There were so few women among the early Korean immigrants to America that in 1910, for example, the Korean male to female ratio was six to one in Hawaii and nine to one on the mainland. In the 10 years before the “Ladies Agreement” ended picture bride immigration from Korea in 1920, over 1,000 Korean women chose the picture bride route. Song’s grandmother was one of them. “Picture Bride” can be read as the vivid spot of the process of searching for her grandmother, restructuring the history of the first generation of Korean immigrants to America.

In “Picture Bride,” Song muses on how the act of gazing forms the space of resistance as a transformative force, beyond proving the process of assimilation of alienated subjects or intercultural identities. At first, she

declares that her grandmother was “a year younger than” she, just 23 when she left Korea. And then Song asks, “Did she simply close / the door of her father’s house and walk away.” Following the reminiscent eyes of remembering the long and difficult process of immigration, Song reconstructs the story of her grandmother in between two far-different lands.

The process of restructuring the route from Korea to Hawaii is exactly overlapped in another poem, “Untouched Photograph of Passenger” when the poet recalls the route of her grandfather. In a sense, “Picture Bride” and “Untouched Photograph of Passenger” are twins reorganizing and reinterpreting the process of Koreans’ transpacific immigration. To think of the writing process of the third generation of Korean immigrants, it becomes crucial to read the different faces of immigration, the different sparks of interior spaces.

Interestingly, in “Untouched Photograph of Passenger,” a reader might sense that the overall mood is bright and promising. This poem, compared to “Picture Bride” seems to foretell of a better future. The boy’s passage out of the “deteriorating” village in Korea is luminous in a dream of his unborn grandchildren. It becomes crucial not to miss the different aspects of immigration as represented in this collection - the distance between a man and a woman, the different colors of the ocean.

In a sense, Picture Bride is kind of translation—a translation of Koreans’ transpacific immigration, a translation of artistic gazing and engagement. How does the poet enter the white place with words and colors?

How does the act of gazing form the frame of reference, if I borrow from Homi Bhabha here, as “the ‘inter’— the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the inbetween space—that carries the burden of the meaning of culture”? “Memories, Gallery 291” the second part of the poem for Georgia O’Keeffe begins with a scene of the typical male gaze and desire; O’Keeffe’s first encounter with the photographer Stieglitz as a nude model.

He wanted to show her the space between a man and a woman, the oceans and plains in between: she endured the inspections of her bones and wrists.

The first touch surprised her; His lens felt like a warm skull.

For Cathy Song, the act of writing poems is to re-draw her tribal memory developing into an artistic recognition through the process of exposure.

The process is not easy, sometimes the first breath “would hurt” her. But in her endeavor to find artistic independence, to form a kind of communion with words, energies, and colors, the “white place” is reborn as a creative spot where her artistic vision is formed. This is Song’s vivid interpretation of O’Keeffe’s artistic developments and achievements, and of her own ancestors’ transpacific immigration.

Song’s interesting method of combining colors and words derives from her keen observation on the objectification, (mis)recognition, and commodification of images in prints, paintings, and photos. Song’s strategy is to engage with the resemblance and difference of faces—of the amalgamated memory of transpacific immigration. If I return to the cover of Picture Bride, meshed in blue is the portrait of a family—faces of a man, a woman, and children, and we see the face of one woman framed in white—she is at once a mother, a grandmother, a picture bride, or a youngest daughter.

According to Jacques Aumont, “every representation begins with the desire of imagining a face.” A face is the only part that we can’t see without the help of a mirror. Even the face we see in reflection is different from the face others see. What we call representation is a kind of pendulum swinging from this face to that face, between extremes of resemblance and difference. Exploring the different dreams of transpacific immigrants—of the first generation, the second, the third—of man and woman, Cathy Song faces all the different reflections.

Reading Picture Bride is to translate the dialectics and distance between the two titles: “From the White Place” to “Picture Bride” or from “Picture Bride” to “From the White Place.” And now we see the distance is not that far.

by Chung Eun-Gwi Professor of English Language and Literature Hankuk University of Foreign Studies

She sat waiting, unafraid, … (73) Vol.25 Autumn 2014 39

Poetry

Picture Bride

by Cathy Song

She was a year younger than I, twenty-three when she left Korea.

Did she simply close the door of her father’s house and walk away. And was it a long way through the tailor shops of Pusan to the wharf where the boat waited to take her to an island whose name she had only recently learned, on whose shore a man waited, turning her photograph to the light when the lanterns in the camp outside Waialua Sugar Mill were lit and the inside of his room grew luminous from the wings of moths migrating out of the cane stalks?

What things did my grandmother take with her? And when she arrived to look into the face of the stranger who was her husband, thirteen years older than she, did she politely untie the silk bow of her jacket, her tent-shaped dress filling with the dry wind that blew from the surrounding fields where the men were burning the cane?

Picture Bride Cathy Song London, Yale University Press 1983, 89p, ISBN 9780300029697

40 _list : Books from Korea

Copyright â“’Yale University Press

Untouched Photograph of Passenger

by Cathy Song

His hair is brilliantined.

It is black and shiny like patent leather.

He cannot be more than twenty: his cheeks are full, his face is smooth as a baby’s, though one pockmark above his right temple about the size of a rice kernel is detectable.

His mouth appears to be curved over something almond shaped.

Perhaps, he is sucking on a sweet plum.

His suit is puckered at the seams.

The shoulders are too narrow, fitting badly; probably stitched in a lamplit tailor shop hovering in a back alley.

But the necktie adds the texture of rawsilk; the added touch signifying

that this is meant to be a serious picture; the first important photograph he has ever had taken.

This will document his passage out of the deteriorating village.

He will save it to show his grand children.

As if already imagining them, his eyes are luminous.

He is looking ahead, beyond the photographer in the dark room crouched under the black velvet cloth, beyond the noisy cluttered streets pungent with garlic and smoke chestnuts.

Rinsing through his eyes and dissolving all around him is sunlight on water.

Copyright â“’Yale University Press

Vol.25 Autumn 2014 41

Special Section: Diaspora in Japan

Identity in the Literature of Zainichi Koreans T

he designation and scope of the literature written by Zainichi Koreans, or ethnic Korean residents of Japan whose roots trace back to the forced occupation of Korea by Imperial Japan, defies categorization. It is sometimes referred to as “Zainichi Chōsenjin Bungaku,” “Zainichi Kankokujin Bungaku,” or “Zainichi Korean Bungaku,” but strangely the most common term in Japan is simply “Zainichi literature” (Zainichi bungaku). The title of an 18-volume collection of the literary works by Zainichi Koreans published in 2006 was An Anthology of Zainichi Literature (2006), and when Shakai bungaku (Social Literature) and Shin nihon bungaku (New Japanese Literature) published a special issue on the subject in 2007 and 2003, respectively, the term used was also “Zainichi literature.” The lack of either “Kankokujin” or “Chōsenjin” to explain their works is a result of the ideological conflict amongst Zainichi Koreans following the division of Korea into the South and the North. It is as if NHK, Japan’s national public broadcasting organization, were to air Korean language lessons under the program title “Hangeul Lessons,” which would only indicate a fraction of what was being taught.

As such, the literature of Zainichi Koreans shows the complex and various aspects of their lives by dealing with the themes of diaspora, identity, minorities, nationalism, the subaltern, racism, as well as of nationality, language, fatherland, ethnicity, ideology, and division.

The first generation of Zainichi Korean writers, including Kimu Saryan (Kim Sa-ryang), Kimu Tarusu (Kim Tal-su) and Chan Hyokuchu (Chang Hyokchu), wrote in Korean, still their mother tongue, and were acutely aware that their motherland was Korea.

The second generation, including Lee Kaisei, Kimu Hagyon (Kim Hak-yeong), and Kimu Sokubomu (Kim Seok-beom), found distance from the Korean people and language, and assimilated into Japanese society. While the first generation had to merely adapt to a new society, the second generation had

42

_list : Books from Korea

been born into that society and was confused about whether they belonged to Korea or Japan, or North or South Korea.

By the third generation of writers, including I Yanji, Yu Miri, and Gen Getsu (Hyeon Wol), the questioning of ideology, nation or ethnicity, as well as any hint of nostalgia for their motherland, all but disappears from their work, focusing instead on depicting one’s torments as something universal. Four works by Zainichi Koreans have received the Akutagawa Prize, one of the most prestigious recognitions of literary acheivement in Japan presented by the publishing company Bungeishunjū: Lee Kaisei’s The Cloth Fuller in 1972, I Yanji’s Yuhi in 1988, Yu Miri’s Family Cinema in 1996, and most recently Gen Getsu’s Where the Shadows Reside in 1999.

The question of identity in Zainichi Korean literature is most often asked based on the typical themes of one’s nation, or people, and family. National or ethnic identity appears in the form of devotion to one’s nation and one’s people, sometimes demanding the sacrifice of an individual. For the Zainichi Koreans who wished to maintain their ethnic identity in a country that strived to establish a strong sense of national unity, the national assimilationist policies backfired, thus intensifying the sense of otherness and strengthening ties within the ethnic Korean community. Kimu Saryan’s Into the Light and Celestial Horse, as well as Kimu Tarusu’s Korea Strait and The Trial of Paku Tari, recreate the dismal lives of the Joseon people under colonial Japan, and criticize the intellectuals who betrayed their own people. Lee Kaisei focuses on the question of ethnic identity throughout The Cloth Fuller, while Kimu Hagyon captures what it means to be marginalized through the tormented soul of a frustrated individual whose existential status as a Zainichi equals the absence of national identity. With Volcanic Island, Kimu Sokubomu shed light on the April 3 Jeju Incident, a subject that had been avoided in the literary circles of South Korea. In Yuhi, the story about a young Zainichi Korean woman who goes to Seoul to

study, I Yanji explores the inner world of being an alien in one’s homeland. In Yu Miri’s work, however, the homeland does not exist. The characters often seek a third way of life that entails neither returning to one’s homeland nor naturalization. On the whole, crisis, torment, and resistance regarding ethnic identity, i.e., aspects once considered unique to Zainichi Korean literature, have almost vanished, nullifying any reason for maintaining a separate category for works

by Zainichi Koreans beyond the distinction between Korean and Japanese literature.

Zainichi Korean literature also explores what it means to be a family by examining the reasons families exist, family values based on Confucianism, and issues of domestic violence. The first generation of writers had a strong sense of heirarchy influenced by the Confucian traditions from Korea and the history of feudalism in Japan, which led them to think of family as the basic unit that makes up a people or a nation. Kimu Tarusu and Kimu Saryan depicted the family as something inseparable from one’s people and homeland, using the themes of ideological conflict, resistance against ethnic discrimination, and the Confucian ideal of family that was brought over from Korea. The second generation begins to question the traditional notions of the Korean family, rejecting the father’s sense of entitlement to near-absolute power based on the Confucian culture of patriarchy, even though the structure of the household is somewhat preserved through the continuation of customs such as gathering to perform ancestral rites.

By Lee Kaisei’s The Cloth Fuller, the question of ethnicity had already faded away, the emphasis now being a criticism on the tyrannical father, while the mother appears as a symbol of the fervor to educate one’s offspring. Kimu Hagyon’s Alcohol Lamp is a tale of the torments of a young mind caused by a family history of conflict and violence. For third generation writers, the family is no longer in mere conflict or discord, but rather utterly destroyed with no signs of recovery. The father is depicted as an oppressive figure who intensifies the conflict about nationality within a

family caused by marriage. The families in Yu Miri’s Full House and Family Cinema have been broken to the point where it is difficult to say the characters constitute a family. The main character of Gen Getsu’s Where the Shadows Reside eventually cuts all ties with his family. In Blood and Bones, Yan Sogiru offers a glimpse into the life of a man driven by primitive impulses and greed that results in the selfdestruction of his family, each member thinking of the others as an enemy to be defeated. In this sense, each work contains a personal trauma of the author from growing up, including the psychological and physical abuse by one’s parents, bullying at school, loss of speech, attempts at suicide, and dropping out of school.

The fact that many of the writers direct their Japanese readers to look down on Zainichi Koreans by employing as a main subject the painful history of their families, as well as the overall autobiographical nature of their stories, remain as problems to be solved. An image of brutal conflict between father and son does not represent the average family of ethnic Koreans. While the first generation was problematic in their xenophobic stance based on too firm an identity, it is also cause for concern if like the third generation all identity is lost and the void is filled with pure egotism.

by Chang Sasun Professor of Korean Literature Hongik University

Vol.25 Autumn 2014 43

Special Section: Diaspora in Japan

Creating a Place for Myself I

t has been 28 years since I chose to write as my occupation.

My parents divorced while I was in elementary school. During junior high I lost my mental balance and was no longer able to go to school; at 15 I was expelled from high school.

Ever since I was young I’ve liked reading books and writing, so I decided to make writing my work.

At 18, I made my debut as a playwright with “To My Friend in the Water,” and after composing 10 plays, began to write novels.

In 1997, when I was 28, I received the Akutagawa Prize for my novel Family Cinema. The Akutagawa Prize is Japan’s most famous literary award.

Receiving the award itself was something to be pleased about. However, men calling themselves right-wingers made threatening telephone calls to four bookstores in Tokyo and Yokohama where book signing events to mark the award had been planned, saying, “Cancel Yu Miri’s book signing.

She is Korean, and making a fool of us Japanese.

If you do not cancel we will harm your customers.

We will plant a bomb. It is nothing to kill one or two people.” Meetings were held between the publishers, the bookstores, and the police, and the book signing events were cancelled.

I held a press conference and made a statement in protest against the despicable threats that go against freedom of speech and expression, and pledged to determinedly fight against them.

The threatening telephone calls from men calling themselves right-wingers were also made to the editors of the journal in which my regular essays were published, with repeated and persistent threats that “if Yu does not change her way of thinking, we will continue complete obstruction.”

In order to show our stance of not yielding to the threats, the publishing company and I went ahead with the book signings. We randomly selected 200 people from those around the country who had sent in application postcards to participate, confirming

44 _list : Books from Korea

their addresses and names. The events were held under strict security, with police carrying out ID and body checks with metal detectors.

For several years after, my book signing events and lectures or discussions in public places could not be held, with venues such as bookstores and halls refusing on the grounds that “we cannot guarantee the safety of our customers.”

My home was also guarded by security. When I went out I had to inform them where I was going, and there were police waiting at my destination. As a result of this ongoing tense situation, I developed bald spots, and was hospitalized for erosive gastritis and duodenal ulcers.

While in the hospital, I thought about “my place.”

Since I was a child, I felt that in reality there was no place for me, and that living itself was something I could not bear.

Born in the gap between Korea and Japan, unable to stand my parents’ quarrels at home, being severely bullied by Japanese students in elementary school— in order to endure the reality in which each moment felt like a trial, I read stories, and began to write them myself.

No matter how close a story may be to reality, in the world of the written word there is a utopia which does not exist in reality. “Utopia” is a coined word, from the Greek “ou” (not) and “topos” (place), meaning “a place nowhere.” Stories are what create this nowhere place.

I wrote stories in order to create a place for myself.

However, as a result of what I wrote, I was threatened by people in the real world.

by Yu Miri Novelist

Exploring “Family” in Yu Miri’s Works N

ineteen years ago, just when I was starting my career as a fiction writer, one of the hottest topics in the Korean literary world was undoubtedly the translated works by the Japan-born author Yu Miri. Before her novel Family Cinema had won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1997, translations of her previous novellas Full House and Bean Sprout, as well as other earlier works including essays and plays, seemed to be pouring into Korea. I had spent those years of my life reading the works of Yu—like myself, a 20-something writer—but at the time Yu was already referred to as a member of the young writers of “pure” literature at the helm of the Japanese literary world. And that is why even now when I come across her name, I immediately think of her as a “writer of our time.”

The reasons Yu Miri had gained so much attention at the same time in both countries was because she was a Zainichi Korean, an ethnic Korean residing in Japan, who wrote fiction in Japanese, and perhaps also, and more importantly, because of how she portrayed the theme of family found in many of her stories. Although I have yet to meet her, Yu’s portrayal of family may also be the reason why it feels as though I have personally known her all these years as a fellow writer. I especially cannot forget the refreshing jolt I had when I first read Full House, the story about a father who goes beyond his means to build a single ramshackle home to reunite his scattered family. The characters of this story reappear in Family Cinema.

When the narrator’s younger sister insists that they should shoot a documentary, the scattered family members reunite. Once upon a time they had formed what could be called a real family, but now each plays his or her given role in front of the camera, as the mother, the father, the daughter, and the son. But events do not go as smoothly as they should since each has lived on their own longer than they did as a family. Even if it were not for the painful line, “Still, in the end, any family is all just an act,” Family Cinema is a brilliant story in how it places a family in a situation of such irony. Referring to herself as writing from the periphery between Japan and

Korea, Yu seems to be aware that her role as a writer is to build literary bridges connecting the two worlds.

For a writer, the theme of their writing is not something to be created from scratch, but rather to depict what already exists, like the idea of family.

Many writers, I believe, start to write precisely because they want to explore that theme, but even if that weren’t the case, what writer doesn’t want to write about the human condition? It is impossible for someone to write a work of fiction about family, especially one based on her own experiences, without a strong desire to explore what it means to be human.

As far as I am aware, at least in the genre of the family story, there is no author who writes with such tenacity, reason, and poignancy as Yu. The purpose of her fiction seems to be to reveal the heart of the family story, that is, to show that there is hope in the darkest of places.

by Jo Kyung-ran Novelist

Vol.25 Autumn 2014 45

Special Section: Diaspora in China

Beyond Ethnic and National Identity in Chaoxianzu Literature C

hinese literature in general, and more specifically the literature of the Chaoxianzu, or ethnic Koreans in China, has undergone drastic changes since the state-wide economic reforms that were initiated in 1978. No longer burdened to partake in ideological war or oppressed by the Cultural Revolution, the Chaoxianzu began to embrace the new mainstream of the Chinese literary world as well as produce works exploring their own experiences and emotions in the form of elegies, scar literature, self-reflection literature, reform literature, and root-searching literature. In fiction, Jin Xuezhe, Li Genquan, Lin Yuanchun, Liu Yuanwu, Li Yuanji, Zheng Shifeng, and Piao Shanshi broadened the horizon of Chaoxianzu literature. In poetry, Li Yu, Ren Xiaoyuan, Jin Zhe, Jin Chenghui, Zhao Longnan, and Li Shangjue drew the attention of the Chinese literary world with poems of various forms including lyrical poetry, prose poetry, lyrical epic poetry, and long epic poetry. In literary theory and criticism, Zheng Panlong, Quan Zhe, Zhao Chegnri, Cui Sanlong, Quan Guoquan, Jin Fengxiong, Jin Dongxun, Zhang Zhengyi, Piao Hua, and Han Chun launched Chinese Chaoxianzu Literature, a new magazine on the history of Chaoxianzu literature.

Lin Yuanchun’s “Ragged Skirt” is a short story that depicts the conflicts and attachments that form between the Li family with vivid realistic detail. It also introduces a new type of Chaoxianzu woman based on a strong sense of ethnic identity through the conflicting characters of the diligent Lady from Tongfosi and the selfish Lady from Chaoyangchuan.

In Geneology, Lin provides a glimpse into the perilous lives of the Chaoxianzu who had to survive in the foreign land of China during the Korean War, throughout the Cultural Revolution, and later as China opened its doors to the world.

Li Yuanji’s The Heart of the People is a tale about the noble life of a Chaoxianzu peasant suffering from severe poverty, ending with the message that the true owners of the state are its people. In his

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poetry “Characters of the North,” Jin Zhe projects the characteristics of the Chaoxianzu by borrowing the motif of azaleas from the eponymous Korean poem; while his long epic poetry The Tale of Saebyeol, based on a Chaoxianzu folktale, tells of Chaoxianzu peasants’ indomitable resolve to resist outside pressure and remain loyal. Jin Chenghui’s You People in White projects the ethnic characteristics of the Chaoxianzu using the motif of white clothes—“people in white” being a common expression Koreans use to identify themselves—while his Dear Changbaishan, Speak retells the history of great suffering and bloody sacrifice when the Chaoxianzu fought against Imperial Japan.

The History of Chinese Chaoxianzu Literature by Zhao Chengri and Quan Zhe is a compilation of the characteristics of the literary activities and works of the Chaoxianzu residing in the Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang Provinces, based on the perspectives of positivism and nationalism. In 1958, in order to write down the literary history of ethnic Koreans in China, Quan Zhe, at the time a professor of Korean Language and Literature at Yanbian University, and his students Zhao Chengri and Cui Sanlong, started conducting a full-scale investigation on the Chaoxianzu communities across the three northeast Chinese provinces. The resulting masterpiece follows 30 years of research.

While the economic reforms were a policy-based effort that changed the lives of every Chinese, the establishment of diplomatic ties with South Korea in 1992 likewise had a profound influence on the lives and literature of the Chaoxianzu as an ethnic minority in China. The new diplomatic relationship encouraged many Chaoxianzu to think of South Korea rather than the North as their homeland, and provided the community with opportunities to experience capitalism through individual and state-level interactions.

However, while the money sent home by migrant workers in South Korea greatly improved the economic status of the Chaoxianzu, it also caused the breakup of families and the questioning of traditional values. In their stories, many Chaoxianzu writers including Piao

Shanshi, Cui Hongri, Li Huishan, Xu Lianshun, Piao Yunan, Cui Guozhe, Wu Guangxun, Li Rutian, Zheng Hengxie, Piao Chengjun, Piao Caolan, Nan Yongqian, Shi Hua, Jin Xuesong, Jin Kuanxiong, and Jin Huxiong depict South Korea as a land of opportunity that raises the question of what it means to be a member of two disparate groups—one based on citizenship, the other on ethnicity—as well as what it means to be of the same people.

Chaoxianzu literature, whose main source of inspiration is the lives and culture of the ethnic Koreans in China, can be said to be engaged in a detailed and practical search for a way to establish their ethnic identity. Xu Lianshun’s Who Saw the Nest of Butterfly uses the motif of stowaways into South Korea to show the impoverished conditions of rural Chaoxianzu communities, along with the daily joys and sorrows of life as a peasant—especially as a peasant woman—during the economic reforms and following the establishment of diplomatic ties with South Korea.

In Apple Pears, Shi Hua likens the Chaoxianzu to apple pears, and thereby raises the question of how the Chaoxianzu have come to define themselves as they adapted to a foreign land. Cui Hongri’s The Tumen River Flows with Tears and Nan Yongqian’s poetry about ancient totems of the Korean people reveal a strong sense of ethnic awareness. Wu Guangxun’s works thoroughly explore the question of defining oneself as a member of two disparate groups. Jin Kuanxiong has pointed out that the Chaoxianzu are like missing children who have grown up but still haven’t found the home they hope to return to. Jin Huxiong refers to the Chaoxianzu as victims of a modern diaspora, as the decendants of a people who had to cross a border, i.e., leave their homeland, and were unable to return. These works all succeed in painting a vivid symbolic picture of the painful memories the Chaoxianzu share as an ethnic minority in China.

This shared identity is characteristically selfdetermined, developed as a result of efforts to make sense as both ethnic Koreans and members of the

Chinese state. It is therefore meaningful that the establishment of diplomatic ties with South Korea necessitated a new phase for Chaoxianzu literature concerning ethnic identity, fostered by an international environment and interactions with their homeland. Before, the otherness of the Chaoxianzu and their literature was only recognized for its role within the framework of Chinese nationalism, but ever since formal diplomatic relations between the two countries increased, that otherness began to transcend the confines of Chinese nationalism, and was activated within the relationship between the Chaoxianzu and their homeland. As a result, the focus on the Chaoxianzu has shifted from their similarities with other ethnic Koreans or ethnic minorities of China, to their otherness as an entity that has grown unfamiliar to both their homeland and China. To borrow the expression of Professor Rey Chow of Duke University, the Chaoxianzu have reached a state of being not “both Chinese and Korean” but “neither Chinese nor Korean,” enabling the ethnic identity of Chaoxianzu literature to take on the truly borderline position of a clearly transnational nature. In the future, I hope to witness Chaoxianzu literature not settle with being defined by national uniformity or by ethnic homogeneity, but instead transcend that definition in search for a new deterritorial identity and develop into a process that makes manifest a detailed picture of the new identity.

(Excerpted from the keynote speech “On the Question of Ethnic Identity as Expressed in Chaoxianzu Literature” at the 11th International Symposium of the International Association for Literature of Korean Residents Abroad.)

by Song Hyun Ho Professor of Korean Literature Ajou University

Vol.25 Autumn 2014 47

Special Section: Diaspora in China

Pride as an Ethnic Korean in China W

ithout pride in his/her people, a writer will never be regarded by them as a great writer, and a people that has no pride in its members will soon disappear from the stage of history. This has been true in the past and is equally true today.

Where I live, in the northern Jiandao region of China, bordering North Korea to the south and Russia to the northeast, there are memorial stones in every village, on every hill. They serve as a final resting place for the Korean people who settled down in northern Jiandao. Ninety-eight percent of anti-Japanese fighters and 93 percent of those who participated in the National Liberation War are buried in this place. As such, northern Jiandao was once red with the blood of countless Koreans who had fought for their nation on Chinese land.

I am first and foremost a Korean writer, a proud descendant of the Korean people.

The stories I write reflect the entire history of Koreans in Jiandao, how we were uprooted and displaced, how we settled down in a foreign land, and how we continued to fight for our people. That is, I would not be a writer if not for that history, and now I hope to speak for my fellow Koreans.

In 1984, chosen to receive a state prize for my short story “Ragged Skirt,” I was faced with the dilemma of deciding what to wear to one of the most prestigious award ceremonies in Beijing. I wanted it to be obvious that I was Chaoxianzu, that is, an ethnic Korean in China. The three Chinese characters that form my name, if not pronounced in Korean, were not enough to convey that fact. To make it known across China, and throughout the world—that a Chaoxianzu has won a prestigious award alongside members of the 1.3 billion Han Chinese majority—I had to wear a hanbok. At the time, however, it was difficult to find anyone dressed in traditional Korean clothes in Yanbian Prefecture, except when worn as a stage costume. I searched every single performance group and art school in Yanbian. There was not 48 _list : Books from Korea

enough time to order one made from scratch, and it was difficult to find a hanbok that would fit me, but in the end I managed to borrow a men’s hanbok from an art school costume department. At the award ceremony, I stepped onto the stage wearing the symbol of my proud Korean heritage, and was greeted with a thunderous burst of applause. It was as though the whole of China was congratulating the Chaoxianzu.

Born into a poor family, I had always suffered from hunger as a child. When I was nine years old and attending elementary school, I started preparing my own meals, and later had to walk everyday to and from a middle school that was 35 ri (approx. 13.7km) from home. I had never seen a relative come visit us until much later when my older brother started teaching at Yanbian University and I became a reporter at the local broacasting station.

Relatives near and far would suddenly show up, acting as if they had always been there for us in times of need. That was when I first realized that being rich or poor could decide whether you gain or lose a relative.

“Ragged Skirt” is a story about the tragic fate of the Korean people that stems from being either rich or poor.

Even now, as I am nearing the age of 80, I still write for my people, the Chaoxianzu, sharing their emotions in times of both joy and sorrow.

Today, the Chaoxianzu are undergoing a time of great hardship with regard to the question of “assimilation.”

The Chinese economic reforms initiated in 1978 and resulting market-based economy has encouraged many ethnic Koreans to leave Jiandao in search of work overseas or in the special economic zones in the south.

This outflow caused the breakup of our once tight-knit community. In addition, many problems such as a low birthrate, rapid decrease in the number of students, schools closing down, and a cultural slump are reducing opportunities to use our native language. As history is our witness, the assimilation of an ethnic group begins with the assimilation of language. Culture, along with education, is one of the strongest and most reliable bastions against the assimilation of language.

With brush in hand, I shall defend this bastion to the end.

by Lin Yuanchun Novelist

The Enduring Influence of “Ragged Skirt” A s soon as it was published in the literary magazine Yanbian wenyi in 1983, Lin Yuanchun’s “Ragged Skirt” created a sensation within the Chaoxianzu community of ethnic Koreans in China. It also became the first and, to this day, sole recipient of a national prize for literary achievement when it was awarded the National Outstanding Short Story Award the following year.

The story was later translated into English, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, and French, adapted for television and aired on the state network CCTV; it continues to be taught in Chaoxianzu high schools.

One reason a single short story has led to such unparalleled success was its strong sense of ethnic identity and regionalism. Described by Vice President Feng Mu of the China Writers’ Association in 1984 as “a beautiful painting of Chaoxianzu folklore,” Lin’s story is set against the background of a Chaoxianzu community in the late 20th century, where a wedding and 60th birthday celebration take place, offering a comprehensive look into the traditions and customs of the ethnic Koreans in China. Drawn into that painting are subtle changes of attitude within the family that reveal the cruel reality of shifting dynamics within a group of people caused by changes in their financial and social status, resulting in a stark portrait of human nature and the ways of the world. In the 1980s when most writers were still focused on discourses about society and the times, “Ragged Skirt” gained attention as the first novel of manners on the daily lives of ordinary Chaoxianzu since the beginning of the economic reforms that began in 1978.

Another reason for the success of the story was the positive personality of the main character, Lady from Tongfosi, a hard-working Chaoxianzu woman from the countryside with a kind heart and good manners. Even though she is the wife of the first son’s first son, Tongfosi is not given the appropriate respect because they are poor, and while her in-laws demand she work at various family events, she is always forgotten when it is time to feast on the food and drinks for which she helped prepare. At a wedding or birthday celebration of an in-law, she always wore a ragged black skirt that barely covered her knees, and would never leave the cooking hearth, taking care of the most physically and mentally demanding tasks.

Later when the husband of the narrator “I,” and deputy

manager at the local industry department, is accused of being a Korean nationalist and exiled from their rural home, only Tongfosi continues to show them kindness, bringing over food and clothes, while the other relatives turn a blind eye. Whether she is poor or rich, whether others flourish or are in decline, none of that matters to Tongfosi.

Many readers were moved by how Tongfosi treated everyone equally with goodwill, refusing to discriminate against those inferior to her in social status or financial means, and never giving up throughout a difficult life full of obstacles and adversities. She is the embodiment of the traditional virtues of Chaoxianzu women, being gentle in appearance but strong in spirit.

The writer’s decision to set the first-person narrator as a young woman who had just married into the family—while the protagonist is Tongfosi, the wife of the narrator’s husband’s cousin—was another factor that influenced the story’s success. Tongfosi only appears on the day after the wedding as the narrator meets her for the first time, making her curious about the woman who has suddenly appeared to help in the kitchen. Readers share in her curiosity, and empathize with the narrator as she observes and gains a deeper understanding of Tongfosi. The narrator is therefore given the ideal perspective to introduce Tongfosi’s character.

Tongfosi’s optimism is emphasized even further with the contrasting character, Lady from Chaoyanchuan, a woman who changes her attitude towards people based on their social or economic status. Nuanced descriptions of the characters’ appearance, especially Tongfosi’s ragged skirt, and the use of repeated motifs throughout the story are also memorable.

As such, “Ragged Skirt” is a literary monument to Lin Yuanchun’s own brilliance as a storyteller as well as to all of Chaoxianzu literature.

by Wu Xiangshun Professor of Korean Language and Literature Minzu University of China

Vol.25 Autumn 2014 49

Special Section: Diaspora in Central Asia

Koryo-saram, Nostalgia, and the Love for Hangeul E

ver since the final years of Joseon, when ethnic Koreans moved north to the Russian territory of Primorsky Krai, the Korean diaspora has continued to disperse throughout the 20th century. The poet and novelist Poseok Jo Myeong-hui voluntarily joined the exiled community in 1928 in order to teach literature written in their mother tongue to those fighting for the independence of their homeland while struggling to survive in a new, unfamiliar home. To this day, Poseok is considered a pioneer amongst the literary community that writes in Korean outside the Korean peninsula. His poem “Koryo, Trampled Over,” which exposed the atrocities committed by Imperial Japan across the Korean peninsula at the time, was one of the reasons ethnic Koreans in the post-Soviet states started calling themselves “Koryo-saram,” meaning the people of Goryeo.

A group of Koryo-saram, who studied under Poseok for nearly a decade and published their works in Korean on the arts and literature pages of Seonbong (The Vanguard), began the small but flourishing culture of writing in Hangeul in the landlocked region of Central Asia, where many ethnic Koreans were forced to migrate in 1937 by Stalin. Leaving its first location in the Kazakh town of Ushtobe, the Korean newpaper Renin gichi (Lenin’s Banner), which was now renamed Koryo Ilbo (Koryo Daily), relocated to the city of Almaty and became a mecca for diaspora literature by ethnic Koreans in the postSoviet states. Through the Korean newspapers and books published and distributed by the Communist Party, Koryo-saram were able to maintain their unique identity and develop a strong sense of unity.

The Communist Party published literary works by individual writers: selected works by Poseok, who has sacrificed himself in Primorsky Krai; poetry collections by Kim Jun, Kim Gwang-hyeon, and Ri Jin; a novel by Kim Jun; a collection of short stories

by Kim Gi-cheol; a collection of various works of fiction by Yeon Seong-ryong; and a collection of plays by Han Jin. Numerous collections of various

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works were also published by the Communist Party, including Joseon Poetry in 1958, October Sunlight in 1971, Melody of Syrdariya in 1975, Sunflower in 1982, Homeland of Happiness in 1988, The Land Where Flowers Bloom in 1988, and The Light of Today in 1990. The steady publication of such works by ethnic Koreans using Hangeul was the product of the collective effort to preserve the culture and identity of a people struggling to survive away from their homeland.

Even in a harsh environment of enforced ideology and state censorship, these Koryo-saram writers strived to express their love for Hangeul as a way to appease their souls, distraught with nostalgia, by continuing to write in the Korean language. In his poem “I Am a Person of Joseon,” Kim Jun, who was forced to migrate from the Russian Far East, wrote: “In Russia, the Far East, / near the Iman River, I am a person of Joseon. / That is why the Joseon word for ‘mother’ / has deeper roots in my soul than any other.” And in the poem “Mother Tongue,” the poet and North Korean defector Maeng Dong-uk speaks: “My mother tongue is my companion. / So I am never lonely. / Never sad. / Happiness lifts me high.”

Meanwhile, there is also a list of poems that sing their deep longing to return home, to escape from lives as wanderers in an unfamiliar land. One of the most controversial was by Gang Taesu, a poet who was incarcerated for two decades for composing “To the Maiden Who Was Plowing the Fields.” Gang was accused of expressing nostalgia for his homeland in public just when the forced relocations had begun. In “Arirang,” Gang asks: “Arirang, arirang, / that hill, that ridge / I cry out with yearning, / is it in the South? / Is it in the North?” And then, in “Blood Ties,” the Sakhalin-born Jeong Jang-gil sings: “Does one’s homeland begin at the door of one’s childhood home? / . . . What one longs for in times of pain / is to see one’s mother. / Is that why one’s homeland is also called one’s motherland?”

Another poet and North Korean defector Yang Wonsik expresses his nostalgia in “Full Moon”: “The full moon I saw yesterday, / do I have an unusually strong

affection for it / because even though I have drifted so far from home, / it has followed me all the way? . . . The unforgettabele mountains and rivers back home, / can I see them reflected on the surface of the moon?”

Works of fiction also show efforts to preserve traditional Korean customs and holidays. Kim Gi-cheol’s novella The First Year After Migration is a story about the first wave of Koryo-saram to be relocated. During their difficult lives working at a kolhoz, or a collective farm, trying to cultivate the barren lands of Central Asia, the community of Koryo-saram preserves their Korean customs, getting together on Lunar New Year’s Day to share rice cake soup, perform ancestral rites, and bow to wish each other good fortune in the coming year.

The short story “Fear” by Han Jin is based on a true incident about the early, horrific days of relocation. The Jewish provost of a university orders a collection of ancient Korean texts to be destroyed. The protagonist Professor Ri goes inside kiln where the texts are about to be burned, and sends them to the National Library in Almaty to be preserved as cultural assets. In another short story “What Is That Place Called?,” Han includes a scene where a dying mother teaches her daughter, who does not speak a word of Korean, how to conduct traditional Korean funeral rites, explaining each step in Korean, including how to dress the dead with specific burial clothes and how the family of the deceased should be dressed.

Plays have been written and staged since the time prior to relocation in the Joseon Theater in the Russian Far East, and more recently in the Koryo Theater in Almaty, with traditional Korean folktales being adapted for the stage as a way to continue their search for their cultural identity. Some of the plays are Heungbu and Nolbu, adapted for the stage by Tae Jang-chun; The Tale of Chunhyang, adapted for the stage by Yeon Seong-ryong and Yi Jong-rim; Hong Gil-dong, adapted for the stage

by Kim Gi-cheol; Arirang and The Tale of Sim Cheong, written and adapted, respectively, for the stage by Chae Yeong; and The Tale of Minor Official Bae, adapted for the stage by Maeng Dong-uk.

Recently, however, with most of the first and 1.5 generations of the Koryo-saram writers in Central Asia having passed away or no longer capable of continuing their work, an increasingly fewer number of their literary efforts are being written in the Korean language. Instead, the later generations are gaining attention with literary works written in Russian. One third-generation novelist Anatoli Kim, born in 1939 in a Koryo-saram community in Kazakhstan, is currently one of the best known throughout the world. Having graduated from the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute as an aspiring artist, Kim published his first piece of fiction in 1973, and was later recognized for his literary talent with The Squirrel, a novel about the identity crisis of a young man orphaned during the Korean War, and Father Forest. A descendant of the Kim clan of Jincheon in Gangneung, the author considers the Korean peninsula as the motherland of his soul.

His works thus reflect an East Asian spiritual world against the backdrop of Russian-speaking countries, telling a story not by using the traditional linear notion of time, or Soviet realism, but instead by creating a romantic fantasy of unique polyphony.

The mystery writer Roman Kim was born in 1899 in Primorsky Krai, studied in Japan, and returned to write historical novels including The Assassination of Queen Min, The Maiden From Hiroshima, and The Memoirs Discovered in Suncheon. Yuliy Kim, born in 1936 in Khabarovsk, is famous for writing poetry as the people’s protest against the system. Once considered an idol of young students with his song “My Mother,” Kim expressed the pain and difficulties of the diasporic life of the Koryo-saram even in his works that were filled with wit and humor.

by Rhee Myung-jae Literary Critic and Professor Emeritus Chung-Ang University

Vol.25 Autumn 2014 51

Special Section: Diaspora in Central Asia

Finding the Author’s Spirit I

am a third-generation Korean born in Russia.

I studied in Russian schools, and used the Korean language only at home with my parents.

When I decided to become a writer, I had no choice in what language to write, because the only language I knew was Russian.

However, when I started my journey as an author, I faced another serious problem, a problem that every writer experiences no matter in what language they write—to find their individual style. I found myself quite well read, I developed a taste for good language, but in my first attempts to create literature I tried to imitate the styles of others. It felt like my real life experience and my spiritual self did not want to dwell in those works. They seemed imitative, without any hope for originality. I could not stand the fact that my stories were lifeless, so I destroyed them without hesitation.

Once I started to write about Koreans, about my friends and colleagues from Sakhalin, whom I met on this wonderful island and who were moved here by the finger of fate, suddenly I felt that something alive and undoubtedly mine began to appear in my stories. An original, genuine, true language of prose was flowing from my pen. As soon as I tried to look at the sea with Korean eyes, listen to the Sakhalin wind with Korean ears, perceive the human world with a Korean soul, I found my own full-fledged language of fiction in Russian.

I found out that the language of fiction, the language of prose, not only presents an author’s writing skills, but most of all expresses an immortal spirit of one’s own people. It is not the language that is important but the spirit, whether it is expressed through the language of Koreans, Russians, the French, or Native Americans.

A Native American, Mato Najin, hereditary 52

_list : Books from Korea

chief of the Oglala Lakota Sioux, wrote a book titled My People, the Sioux in English, and the book conveys the true Indian spirit. That Indian spirit influenced the language used in the book, endowing it with a sense of tranquility and nobility. Similarly, in Irish author James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, he expressed the mystical rage of the Irish soul, and considerably uplifted the expressive qualities of the English language.

Thus, it sometimes happens that an author gains popularity and finds his niche far away from the motherland. However, his literature’s spirit, rhythm, originality, and aesthetics are truly interesting to the world if they express the genuine spirit of the author’s origin.

If this happens, an author’s talent is appreciated on the world’s literature stage, and the elements truly valued in his works are themes, aesthetics, and poetics of his cultural heritage.

My works have been written in Russian and translated into 30 languages. Most are dedicated to Korea-related topics. My literary style, aesthetics, and philosophy are considered by critics to be an essential part of the culture of “the Orient.” I can say that I agree with this definition.

If somebody asks me whether I am a Russian or Korean writer, I will answer without hesitation that I am a Russian author, since this is defined by the language I write. However, Mato Najin, who wrote his book in English, cannot be considered an American author. He cannot be even considered a professional writer or historian of his people. His book was not written to please the public but was a knell of his people’s sad history. It was written in order to be heard by his enemies who annihilated the Sioux, Delaware, and other tribes of free Indians. Mato Najin’s book is a proud, mournful song of Native American Indians created in the English language.

Therefore, I am a writer of Korean origin, but whose books are written in Russian in the Russian language. Also, I am, without a doubt, a Russian author.

I am a person whose father is the great Hanguk and the mother, boundless Russia.

by Anatoli Kim Novelist

The Many Voices of “We” A

natoli Kim’s 1984 controversial novel The Squirrel, subtitled a “roman-skazka,” or “novel-folktale,” uses an East Asian metamorphoses myth as a motif to reveal the inner nature of human beings as well as a glimpse into the Soviet art world. At the time of its release, the chairman of the Union of Soviet Writers died after collapsing during a speech criticizing the novel, thus bringing even greater fame to Kim in the West.

What is unusual about this story is that there appears a succession of first-person narrators, who all study art in college, including Innokentij Lupetin, Georgij Aznauran, Dmitrij Yakutim, and an anonymous hero who calls himself “the Squirrel.” The novel starts out with “I” being the Squirrel, who was orphaned during the Korean War, raised outside his homeland by adoptive parents in Sakhalin, and now attending an art college in Moscow. Then the narrator transforms into his three friends: Innokentij, Georgij, and Dimitrij. The “I” changes abruptly into another “I” without notice. The subject is always “I” yet the thoughts of “I” move between Innokentij, Georgij, and Dimitrij. The narrator sees the multiple first-person narrators as the result of “a global error that occurred when the world was first created” as well as “a grave mistake that was made when the walls of the human world were being built.”

The atmosphere of chaos that is created by the multiple first-person narrators also serves as a device to emphasize the collective title “us” or “we” that is written in bold type throughout the novel. That is, the use of “we” indicates either their collective existence, or the consciousness inherent in their collective existence. However, when the narrator shifts to the perspective of Georgij, it is uncertain whether the voice is actually still that of the Squirrel mimicking his friend Georgij, or if the mic has in fact been passed on to Georgij, summonned to the stage by the Squirrel, who has finished his monologue and is now absent. In other words, the different “I”s that appear throughout the story, sometimes changing voices in a single paragraph, and even within one sentence, blur the lines between the distinction between the “I”s and the collective “we.” And as the lines continue to fade and

scatter, the “I”s and the collective “we” merge into a single entity. Such ambiguity creates a narrative paradox, resulting in a sense of there being instead one third-person narrator.

In the end, even though he has the special ability to transform himself into different beings, the anonymous hero kills the beast within himself—the Squirrel—and loses his special powers altogether. Considering how the earliest memories of the nameless protagonist are about squirrels rather than his mother, and that whenever he tries to think of her, he can only picture squirrels, the murder of the Squirrel is reminiscent of the story of Cain and Abel. By freeing himself from his transformative state as a beast, a mistake that was made during the creation of the world, the anonymous man finally chooses to live the life of a human being, and as a result his voice is joined with the voices of the other “I”s into a collective one that is “ours.” In the epilogue, “we” speak, “So if at this moment there occurs the miracle of our spiritual unity, that would be the doing of the honorable Squirrel who, taking advice from the spirit of his forest, correctly guessed the true nature of human beings. That is, we had existed, still exist, and will go on existing.”

The “we” mentioned here refers to the accumulated positive energy that results of the spiritual activities of human beings. In an interview that took place in Moscow in 1986, Anatoli Kim stated that he bases his philosophy on “the pursuit or establishment of an image of a person of the future.” He also emphasized that “a person of the future is not superhuman, but rather is someone who is infinitely good, and today does not exist as an entire entity but only in bits and pieces, and therefore the best qualities of human beings must be joined together for such a person to emerge. For human beings, goodness means freedom from the ego, and thereby accomplishing a greater life.”

by Jung Cheol-hoon Poet and Novelist

Vol.25 Autumn 2014 53

Poetry

Beside a Chrysanthemum

by Sŏ Chŏngju translated by David R. McCann

To bring one chrysanthemum to flower, the cuckoo has cried since spring.

To bring one chrysanthemum to bloom, thunder has rolled through the black clouds.

Selected Poems of Sŏ Chŏngju Translated, and with an introduction by David R. McCann New York, Columbia University Press 1989, 129p, ISBN 0231067941

Flower, like my sister returning from distant, youthful byways of throat-tight longing to stand by the mirror: for your yellow petals to open, last night such a frost fell, and I did not sleep.

54 _list : Books from Korea ⓒSeo Heun-Kang

Reviews

Pavane for a Dead Princess, Park Min-gyu Nocturne d’un chauffeur de taxi, Young Generation of Korean Writers Another Man’s City, Choi Inho One Day, Then Another, Kim Kwang-Kyu Lauf, Vater, lauf, Kim Ae-ran Korea’s Ancient Koguryŏ Kingdom: A Socio-Political History, Noh Taedon

Vol.25 Autumn 2014 55

Reviews Questioning the New Era Pavane for a Dead Princess Park Min-gyu Translated by Amber Hyun Jung Kim Champaign/London/Dublin Dalkey Archive Press 2014, 208p, ISBN 9781628970661

56 _list : Books from Korea

T

he premise of Park Min-gyu’s 2009 novel—now appearing for the first time in English in Amber Hyun Jung Kim’s excellent translation—is apparently simple: a young writer, a lost

soul, whose film-star father has abandoned him and his mother, falls in love with the ugliest girl he has ever seen.

For those familiar with Park’s work, this will seem like standard fare. Known as a literary refusnik, it is only natural that the story of a love affair in which the heroine is hideous should flow from Park Min-gyu’s pen.

But Pavane for a Dead Princess is more than simply an enfant terrible kicking against the pricks. From the outset, Park creates interest. What about this girl overrides her unattractive qualities? What about this young man draws him to someone so spurned by the rest of the world?

As this apparently conventional love story about unconventional people continues, the reader is then prompted to ask: Why am I rooting for the success of this affair; and why does this poignant tale have such an air of tragedy about it?

Looking towards the periphery of the novel—at the frame, the supporting characters, and the setting—begins to answer these questions.

The novel is told by the young man in retrospect; and, now middle-aged, he begins his story with the ill-matched pair’s parting scene. The reader therefore experiences their story in the knowledge that it will end in sadness, but also in the hope that there will be some final reversal of this expectation. By skillfully manipulating our emotions, Park both creates narrative drive and engenders audience sympathy for his characters.

Yet, despite bringing the reader so close to these principal actors, Park never names them. The only time the reader is even close to discovering what the narrator is called, is when another, this time very pretty girl, calls him by the wrong name. The narrator, of course, corrects her, without divulging his real name to the reader.

It is not until after the book’s tragic climax that the reasons for this anonymity begin to become clear. Key to this unravelling is the main supporting character, Yohan. The narrator’s closest friend, he is the novel’s conscience, its chorus, its guiding force, and ultimately its deus ex machina.

It is in the narrator’s conversations with Yohan that Park lays out the substance of his work, and in which that other instructive element of Pavane—setting—most obviously comes into play.

All the main characters work in a department store, located in the Seoul of the 1980s. This was a time, vividly recorded

by Park, when South Korea’s capitalist motor was running at full power, bringing to its population the disposable income and consumerism previously only seen in the West and Japan. Beauty, clothes, makeup, celebrity, superficiality, and, crucially, nameless homogeneity, are all imported along with the Western music that pervades novel. The palaces of old Seoul, visited by the unnamed pair, are deserted, the abodes, one could say, of a dead princess.

Yohan expounds on the failings of this new society, but suggests to the hero that “We have to get used to it.” Yet it is Yohan’s inability to face this new era that instigates the novel’s central crisis and, perhaps, the final surprise that turns the whole tale on its head.

For in Pavane, Park Min-gyu not only defies literary convention, he also sets up reader expectations only to pull them down.

Not for the sake of pure iconoclasm, but to question the obsessions of his native Korea, and, indeed, of the capitalist world as a whole.

by West Camel Editor, Dalkey Archive Press

Ten Stories Dazzle the French

T

he French translation of Nocturne d’un chauffeur de taxi (Night Over There, A Song Here), an anthology of contemporary Korean short stories, was published in April this year by the Philippe Rey Publishing House. This independent publisher, established in 2002 and specializing in French and foreign literature, boasts a catalogue featuring such established authors as Patrick Chamoiseau, Taslima Nasreen, and Joyce Carol Oates.

The compilation whose title was inspired by a Kim Ae-ran short story is a collection of 10 short stories

Nocturne d’un chauffeur de taxi Young Generation of Korean Writers Translated by Choi Mikyung, Jean-Noël Juttet, etc.

Paris, Philippe Rey Publishing House 2014, 232p ISBN 9782848763941

showcasing a young generation of writers, most of whom are women.

Boldly and without affectation, they discuss the most intimate aspects of social life, which are generally overlooked by the media. The 10 stories open windows into people’s daily lives: brief stories or simple portraits, with tragic, pathetic or comical undertones, which, similar to a mirror, reflect the lives of ordinary people, who in many ways actually look very much like us.

The common thread linking these authors is a unique ability to highlight the striking aspects (heroic, tragic, or comical) of Koreans’ daily lives.

In her deeply moving account of the love story of an immigrant Chinese woman and a Seoul-based taxi driver, Kim Ae-ran incidentally tackles the topical societal issues of the day, those marking the lives of immigrants in Korea, as well as economic hardships facing common folk, such as waitresses or taxi drivers. In Kim Yeon-su’s “Bonne année à tous!” (Blessed New Year to You All), a man questions his wife’s friendship with an Indian immigrant whose language she doesn’t even understand.

In “Semailles” (Sowing), Jo Kyung-ran looks at frictions within a family in the context of rather peaceful relations between Koreans and Japanese. Yoon Sunghee in “La maison en Lego” (The Lego House) paints a gripping picture of the emotional misery suffered by a young girl in a completely chaotic family.

The cashier at the supermarket in Choi Jin-young’s “Mon mari” (My Husband) wonders in a tragi-comical conversation whether the man she has been living with is really whom she thinks he is.

Paik Gahuim in “Rumeurs” (Rumors), presents a plot depicting the stir caused Vol.25 Autumn 2014 57

Reviews in a small countryside town, by the simultaneous disappearances of the pharmacist’s daughter and a refugee from North Korea. Another disappearance, discussed in a satirical yet dry-witted manner, is that of the manager of Pyun Hye-young’s “La fabrique de conserve” (Canning Factory), an amusing description of factory work. The Busan film festival serves as setting for the romances of the inconsolable heroine of Park Chan-soon’s “Stoppie à moto” (Stoppie Motorcycle). Ahn Yeong-sil’s “Amour impossible” (Impossible Love) is a masterpiece in malice, an archaicstyle miniature portrait, and Han Kang’s “Neuf épisodes” (Nine Episodes) are equally beautiful and fine-spun prose poems, each singing in turn about childhood nostalgia, the dream of eternity, and the journey towards destiny.

The French press, notwithstanding its ever scant enthusiasm for all nonAmerican foreign literature and more so when it comes to short stories, gave the collection a warm reception. The daily Le Monde, in its April 25, 2014 edition, ran a column whose title “Dix perles coréennes” (Ten Korean Pearls) expresses their enthusiasm: “The authors, the columnist concludes, imprint their bitter sweet outlook on the real world at its very core, unveiling its dark and light shades, blending the different tints, not without some jubilation as gradually, out of existential emptiness, they spin a succession of humorous or simply quirky skits. As sensitive onlookers, they capture attention not only by their adept profiling but equally by their outlook which is at once enchanted and enlightened, poetic and poignant.”

And J.M.G. Le Clézio, a winner of

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the Nobel Prize for Literature and a great connoisseur of Korea, treated Le Figaro to yet another rave review, long enough to fill half a page: “Hurry up, buy, share this little book replete with emotion, rage, laughter, it is a key to taming the challenging realities of daily life, an antidote to the gloominess of our all too quiet days.” (Le Figaro, May 14, 2014) Lastly, I would like to point out that these short stories were translated as part of the workshops that are hosted every year by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. They were done by joint teams of young Korean and French women who combined their knowledge of French and Korean with their passion for literature to provide the French public with the best literature coming out of Korea today.

by Jean-Noël Juttet Translator

A Parallel Life

C

hoi Inho(Ch’oe In-ho)’s last novel was written as he struggled with the cancer that finally killed him. And, as Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton tell us in their translators’ note to this, the first English version of Another Man’s City, Choi wanted to be remembered for the book, not for his celebrity in his native Korea, and not for the disease from which he suffered.

It seems apt, then, that the Fultons chose to name this novel Another Man’s City, rather than the more literal “The City of Familiar Others.” Just as K., the protagonist of this strange and uncanny work, begins

Another Man’s City Choi Inho Translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton Champaign/London/Dublin Dalkey Archive Press 2014, 391p, ISBN 9781628971019

to sense that he is living someone else’s life, Choi himself perhaps wanted to be another man. And, maybe, as his death loomed near, he felt he wanted to pass the cup.

For, read in the knowledge that it was written by a dying man, this novel takes on a very particular meaning.

The hero, K., wakes up to find that key elements of his life—his aftershave, his pajamas (or lack thereof), even his wife— have subtly changed. Over the following days, the intimation steadily grows that somehow, through some strange agency, he has stepped outside his own life, and into that of another, parallel K. It takes no great mental leap to imagine that this may be what it is like to know that one is facing death.

This speculation appears to be

confirmed, when, towards the end of the book, K. actually meets the “other K.”; he feels “autoscopic, believed the appearance of a doppelgänger presaged imminent death.”

Faced with “imminent death,” the existential and spiritual wonderings of K. and, by extension, his author, that fill much of this thoughtful and often playful book, seem natural, poignant, and in the hands of this master storyteller, beautifully honest.

by West Camel Editor, Dalkey Archive Press

Robot of Loneliness

O

ne Day, Then Another, by Kim KwangKyu cannot be simplified into a few themes or concepts. Rather it ranges widely across the world, and through time and space. Kim takes us on a journey through loss and grief, war and shame, death and meanings/iterations of life. His poems take the reader through occupation/insurgence, historical periods of peace/prosperity, to the ever-silent present whether in cityscape or countryside. He is magnificently aware, open, receptive/perceptive. Though deeply complex, I want to focus on the textures of silence, loneliness, failure, and pain throughout these poems.

Kim takes us to the transit station and shows us a brief and silent meeting, “…We were each in a rush, so we briefly / clasped hands then parted. That / was it.

We’ve never met again, although / we both live in Seoul day after day.” (“At the Transit Station”). Touch, so very integral to the human experience, but there is only time for visual recognition, to briefly touch, to let go, to depart. Kim recognizes that both this meeting and life are brutally short/long, and yet we fill it with “empty parenthesis”: job,

money. Of time Kim tells us, “… the rest / is granted to the living, / who continue inside empty parenthesis, / unaware of the monotony therein.” (“One’s Dying Year”). Our ability to recognize and connect has failed. In turn we fail to fill the parenthesis with anything but minutiae to pass the

One Day, Then Another Kim Kwang-Kyu Translated by Cho Young-Shil Buffalo, White Pine Press, 2014, 106p ISBN 9781935210542

Vol.25 Autumn 2014 59

Reviews time.

Still there is need for survival in the most painful and lonely situations.

As people flee to the city Kim shows us who is left behind. “Father passed on thirty long years ago; / mother spent the rest of her days in that house, alone. / A crumbling country house, / … / A house you can’t sell: / everyone has left for the cities.” (“Vacant House”) The countryside is thrown into abandoned silence as its residents leave for the cities. Nothing is left but this crumbling house, the pain of death, the guilt of abandonment, and the inability to let go. “Every year I receive a property tax notice / for this vacant property, / a house on its way out, flickering like a straw fire / in a corner of this aging orphan’s heart / this sinner, who against his will, has two homes.” (“Vacant House”) Even at the most basic level of survival, sadly, we are still ruled by money. “Like A Petty Thief,” we bury the dead shamefully, silently, drunkenly, so as to save on the cemetery fees. Perhaps that money buys the food to keep the petty thief alive, but he must live with the ingrained memory and enduring shame.

These are poems for survival. Poems that pull at the raw strings that are what it is to be human. To suffer such loss and how to live with such guilt: “flowing in the veins of memory / coming upon the retinas of closed eyes / drumming, even in silence, through the ears / ineffaceable shame multiplies / … / and leads me, I surmise, to live one day, then another.” (“One Day, Then Another”) Kim Kwang-Kyu gives to the voiceless, but the voice is often steeped in a deep, heavy silence. His observations are astute, detailed, and speak volumes

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about the people who inhabit those scenes/spaces. Through these poems he recognizes the silence, failure, and depths of human loneliness that exist in all lives. Both at once global and intimate—these poems span languages, cultures, genders, age, and hold us against what makes us all so very human.

by Kim Koga Freelance Writer and Editor

In Search of Normality

F

athers play an important role in these nine stories. One of them runs away from his family without a word the day before his daughter is born. Another one abandons his child in an amusement park. A third one, after years of absence, suddenly knocks on the door of his grown-up daughter and settles in with her, just to nonstop watch TV. A forth one promises his son a pogo stick if he shows his pee-pee. A fifth one treats his little son to an expensive meal of pufferfish, only to tell him afterwards that he will have to stay awake through the night to not be killed by the poison of the fish.

All these fathers seem to be cruel, but more than that they are lost and forlorn, far more than their offspring who mostly accept their fathers (and mothers) the way they are, showing understanding, and even care. Still, in pursuing their own lives, they constantly keep looking for what they were deprived of: normality.

In depicting her characters’

search for normality and love, Kim Ae-ran is at her best—highly imaginative, funny, and, at times, touchingly tender. One fine example is the pogo stick boy who hopes to hop ad astra to get a better view on the world and his own emotions. Another one is the pufferfish kid in “Feuerwerksspiele am Strand” (Fireworks on the beach) who makes his father cut his hair and tell him never-ending stories of how he, the boy, came into life. Stories as comical and bizarre as full of truth. Reading them is a sheer pleasure, due not least to the easyflowing, sensitive translation by Park Inwon.

Lauf, Vater, lauf is the first book by Kim Ae-ran translated into German. We eagerly look for more to come.

by Jürgen Stalph Lexicographer, Free University of Berlin

Lauf, Vater, lauf Kim Ae-ran Translated by Park Inwon Löhne: Cass, 2014, 223p ISBN 9783944751023

Delving Deeper into an Ancient Land

T

he publication of Korea’s Ancient Koguryǒ Kingdom: A Socio-Political History sponsored by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea is a welcomed addition to Korean studies.

This is a translation from Korean of Noh Taedon’s 1999 manuscript Goguryeosa yeongu (Koguryǒsa yǒngu). The translation, expertly rendered by John Huston, was completed in 2007 but was not published until 2014.

This important book discusses much more than Goguryeo (Koguryǒ) as it offers considerable information on Baekche, Silla, and the kingdoms of northeast China. Noh Taedon, one of the leading Goguryeo specialists in South Korea, has researched and written extensively about Goguryeo and the Three Kingdoms for many years. As John Huston notes in his introduction to the translation, found in this volume “are fastidious analyses covering the legendary and formative periods, the development of the social and administrative structures, the various involvements with other states in the region, and a thorough examination of the century-long build-up to Goguryeo’s ultimate demise after over 700 years of existence.” (xi) Goguryeo has long begged for deeper study and Noh has done just that. The book, divided into four parts, first examines the reliability of the sources, and then early Goguryeo’s political and social evolution. His subsequent sections consider Goguryeo’s external relations and its development into a central, aristocratic state. Although students may often find

the narrative too complex to fully comprehend, specialists will greatly benefit from Noh’s erudition.

Translated exceedingly well, John Huston generally remains faithful to the original as he clarifies what are potentially complicated descriptions.

I discovered only occasional minor indiscretions such as spelling the name of the famed Goryeo author Yi Gyu-bo as both Lee Kyu-bo (291) and Li Kyu-bo (299). The volume uses a modified McCune-Reischauer system for Korean and Pinyin for Chinese. In addition to an index, it also provides maps and reign titles for Goguryeo kings. Students and scholars who cannot readily read Korean will benefit immensely from this publication. I hope that LTI Korea will bring forth similar volumes in the future.

by Edward J. Shultz Professor, Sogang University / University of Hawaii at Manoa

Korea’s Ancient Koguryǒ Kingdom: A Socio-Political History Noh Taedon Translated by John Huston Boston, Global Oriental, 2014, 441p ISBN 9789004245716

Vol.25 Autumn 2014 61

The 8th Residency Program for Translation Research in Korean Literature

Following the Vestiges of Illusion and Reality T

he translators participated in a field trip to Tongyeong and Busan with novelist Ham Jeung Im. Participants visited places of literary significance, such as the region of the writer’s literary background and the setting of one of her stories. Ham joined the participants for in-depth discussion about her work.

W

hy did she not have a name?

She did not have a name. The protagonist of the story we read for our trip to Busan and Tongyeong did not have a name and neither did the other characters of the story. The only one who had a name was the protagonist’s older brother, Ha-rin.

She did not even know him; she did not know where he was or if she could find him, but he had a name.

She and her companion left to find him in the far south lands of the Korean peninsula in a place called Tongyeong. They did not know if they could find him there but they departed, open to the unknown. They believed what they heard from others and without fear ran towards the adventure.

Somehow we, the members of this year’s residence program of LTI Korea, were like this woman in Ham Jeung Im’s “Gokdu,” the title piece of her short story collection, and one of three connected stories. We left Seoul towards the south to meet and talk with the writer, open to discover the mysteries that her story had for each one of us. We met Ham after arriving in Busan and she welcomed us with a big smile, ready to walk together along the footsteps of the protagonist of “Gokdu.”

As Professor Nguyen Thi Hien from Vietnam told us during her presentation introducing Ham’s life and work, the writer can be considered “the writer on the road,” a writer who walks together with her characters through the journey of life, a journey of

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self-discovery, looking to the past, present, and future.

It is a path of life where the real and the imagined always walk hand in hand. Our lives are all stories of moving, stopping, and once again going forward.

Let us for a moment grasp the hands of Ham Jeung Im and the protagonist of “Gokdu” and together search for her lost brother.

She called him more than four times by phone but he did not show up at their appointed place. They had never been together, never lived together; he was only a name that she heard. He was just a fantasy without a face. But he had a name. Unable to find him, unable to meet him, unable to see him, but we could feel connected to his path of life. He had to pay back the debts of his father, a house builder. He went bankrupt and lost everything. He had three stepmothers. He was in Tongyeong. He was in a village for artists and now his sister, the narrator, heard he was at Dasolsa Temple.

He ate migi soup, learned finger painting… His life was shown completed upside down unexpectedly. We cannot see him, we cannot hear him, but we can know what he did and where he was, thanks to the guidance of our escorts.

We were walking in search of Ha-rin knowing about his life and his comings and goings, and, at the same time knowing the reason why she, the one without a name, was so eagerly looking for him. Her not having a name ceased to be important. The only important thing was “why” she was looking for him. Every time

she thought about getting married, she needed a man to acknowledge her, a man who could grasp her hand and take her to the altar of the wedding ceremony… He was the person who could corroborate her own existence although she had yet to meet him even once. That is why she had to meet him, she had to follow his footsteps, and she had to know where he was… But every time she went to meet him, he did not appear, he was not there—gone to a different place.

Finally, she could not meet Ha-rin. Neither could we. It was already time for her to go back without meeting him and we too had to return back without encountering him. All our footprints in the soil and snow of Tongyeong will vanish under the rain and the snow. Our entire journey together with her and her unfound friend will fade with the passing of time.

Perhaps our lives are nothing but an unending search for what we cannot see. We are always looking for something to long for, something to do, something to get, something to throw away. The woman in “Gokdu” was also longing for something, searching for something, and finally she returned. What did she receive? Probably what she received is not itself important. The most important thing was the journey itself, the road where she walked, the footprints she left along the way that vanished with the passage of time.

As we walked along the same road on the islands of Tongyeong, who knows if her spirit may have walked with us as we followed her footsteps, eating what she ate, drinking what she drank, and searching what she could not find. But we were open to the unknown, to follow her vision, the unseen. Nobody knows what we can meet and find on the road. She made us to be open to the “illusion” of life.

As we walk along our own path of life, probably someday we will forget about the journey we took with the characters of “Gokdu.” We will not be able to distinguish whether what we lived in Tongyeong was real or an illusion. But is that even important? What is important is that we met those people, we walked that road, we made that journey, and we left those footprints along the way…

Reading “Gokdu” left all of us with so many questions about the life of the characters in the story, questions about the writer Ham Jeung Im. Questions about what is real or illusion in the story, why the characters are nameless, why the story occurred in Tongyeong, why this title for the story, why the places in the book are important for the author, why did she go back without meeting her brother, why was the older brother so important for her life—but the most important questions were the ones about our own lives and our journeys in life, a life where the real and the illusion blend together.

We had the chance to share our views about the story with the author and she talked to us about the importance of the individual and his or her own journey in life, independently of his or her position, family, or even name. Each one has a life to walk. A life where places like Tongyeong and the people we meet on the way guide us on a journey towards selfdiscovery and self-understanding.

by Antonio J. Domenech Professor of Korean Studies University of Malaga

Vol.25 Autumn 2014 63

The 8th Residency Program for Translation Research in Korean Literature

From Busan to Tongyeong: Tracing Fiction T

opophilia refers to the special love one has for a particular place. For four days from August 6 to 9, along with a group of translators from abroad, I visited Haeundae in Busan and the city of Tongyeong, the two places for which my feelings of topophilia were expressed in my collection of short stories titled Gokdu (Illusion). We began our journey around lunchtime on August 6 in Songjeong, which is located beyond Dalmaji Hill, “the hill where one greets the moon,” on the east side of Haeundae Beach.

Songjeong is the stage for “A Refreshing Night,” a short story in a three-part series that includes “Gokdu” and “Plum.” While the narrator of “A Refreshing Night,” Ha-rin, does not physically appear in “Gokdu,” he still serves as the character that propels the entire series. In “A Refreshing Night,” Harin is at Gyeongju Station, waiting at the platform to take the northbound train to Seoul, when he sees on the other side the train to southeastern shores coming in, and on impulse takes that train all the way to Busan. He gets off at Songjeong Station, where his mother had many memories of her youth. To Ha-rin, the place in the black-and-white photo is strange and unfamiliar. Just as his half-sister, whom Ha-rin has never met, visits Tongyeong to ask him to attend her wedding in “Gokdu,” he instinctively follows the traces of his mother of whom he has only the faintest of memories in “A Refreshing Night.”

Our group held a seminar on Gokdu at Bibibidang, a traditional teahouse on Dalmaji Hill. Between the Hill and Haeundae Beach is a small inlet called Mipo, meaning “tail port,” named so for its resemblance

64 _list : Books from Korea

to a thin tail. Along the coast spanning from Mipo and Dalmaji Hill to Songjeong spreads out a long, dense forest of pine trees. There are numerous narrow paths that go through this forest, connecting the coast to the railroad that runs alongside. The paths, together known as the Moontan Road, is where I set two of my stories, “A Single Cloud” and “Warm Welcome.” I explore the notions of beauty and misery, one’s duties as a human being, and sense of ethics through the fictional tales about taking one last journey in this world.

On the second day of our trip, we left Busan, Beomeosa Temple being our final stop there, crossed the long Geogadaegyo Bridge, and drove along the west coast to Tongyeong in Namhae-gun County. “Gokdu” takes place in this fishing town, in the Seoho Fish Market, Restaurant Sujeong, and at the Gangguan Port, places where Ha-rin had once visited, and where his younger sister tries to find her elusive, illusory brother.

We left our luggage in a hotel near the market, and went to a nearby silbijip, where all alcoholic beverages are served with a table full of free food, to try some of the local delicacies. After a satisfying dinner of fresh fish, we strolled over to Gangguan. The port was filled with ships resting from their long journeys out to sea. As we walked along the port, quietly taking in the night view, for a fleeting moment I could see Ha-rin standing there, gazing at the white sails, fluttering in the wind like flags toward the sea.

by Ham Jeung Im Novelist and Professor of Creative Writing Dong-A University

8th Residency Program Overview L

TI Korea recently held a special gathering for its 8th Residency Program for Translation Research in Korean Literature, which invites literary translators from abroad. LTI Korea provides opportunities for topnotch translators overseas to visit Korea for short-term periods, so that they can grasp a better understanding of current Korean society and Korean literature. LTI Korea believes that this program benefits translators in creating high-quality translations.

Only those who have published more than one translated work or have won a translation award can join this program. This year, the honor went to Maurizio Riotto (Italy), Jeong Eun-Jin (France), Yuan Yingyi (China), Mahmoud Ahmed Abdel Ghaffar (Egypt), Nguyen Thi Hien (Vietnam), Antonio Domenech (Spain), Philipp Haas (Austria), Han You Mee (France), Yu Hsin Hsin (Taiwan), and Hoo Nam Seelmann (Switzerland).

The Residency Program held five events called “Meet the Author,� where the translators met Korean authors and took some time to discuss their work. Starting off with Han Kang, author of the recently published novel The Boy Is Coming, seven translators met four other distinguished writers: Kim Seung-hee, Park Min-gyu, Kim Ae-ran, and Jung Young Moon. In every meeting, one or two translators participated as mediators to briefly introduce each author, and they raised all kinds of questions related to challenges in translation.

by Lee Sewon Reporter LTI Korea

Vol.25 Autumn 2014 65

Afterword

A Master’s Poems Reborn

I

first met Ko Un at Université Paris 8 many years ago.

Invited by some Korean students, Ko Un came to sit in on a course I was teaching on translating and reading works of foreign poets. That day, he recited his poems and sang to the students who were either French or international. All at once, everyone felt Korea was present in the form of poetry.

At the dawn of the 20th century, Osip Mandelstam, the Russian poet, dreamt, in a poem, of “faraway Korea”; in the ensuing decades Korea’s history assumed—through tragedies whose consequences have not yet been entirely addressed—global proportions. Better than any speech, Ko Un’s poetry makes this universal peculiarity tangible to any human being. Thus, be it in France or in Korea, the publication or ongoing translation of Ko’s Ten Thousand Lives has been widely acclaimed.

The work depicts, in a myriad of colors, the great modern Korean epic. As a French reader, my mind is thrown back to another collection of “small epics” which I conversely have been acquainted with since childhood: La Légende des siècles (The Legend of the Ages) by Victor Hugo.

Ko Un’s multi-layered, multi-sectioned epic speaks to his country’s tragic destiny. Those French who have not forgotten the “noise and rage” of their own 20th century history will relate to the last lines of the poem in Ten Thousand Lives, devoted to the Korean historian, Kang Man-gil:

In the midst of the storm, someone is asking

Is history a beautiful thing?

He simply cleans his glasses, not answering.

Ten Thousand Lives describes a realistic utopia which is at once painful and tender. Ko Un seeks to capture the poetic mind of every human being, man or woman, young or old, healthy or sick—and possibly poor, rather than rich. “The portraits which make up the fabric of this work are not abstract, general concepts of the human being; rather they are frescos portraying each person’s face, feet, and back,” he said.

For any reader—however far away from Korea—the humblest individuals become unforgettable figures. For instance, “Daegil, the farmhand, . . . used to heavy tasks/. . . . but his dark eyes shone more brightly by night than in daylight.”

Ko Un tells us: “I learned my ABCs / Under the lamp I Iearned from him our language.” The poem then adopts a strong historical and political tone: “After thirty-six years under Japanese rule, I was the only kid who knew how to read and write our language: ka-kya-kŏ-kyŏ.”

In painstaking detail, the poems in Ten Thousand Lives describe the experiences of a multitude of individuals in the depths of Korea, and immediately infuses them with a power that reaches universality. Hence, their special appeal undoubtedly invites translation. “Poetry,” Ko Un writes in the collection’s preface, “is initially blessed within the confines of the village or region which speaks the language in which it was written. Then, one day she begins to travel, to dream of another land’s language. A Middle-Eastern language belatedly soars into the sky, borne on Western winds. On the day she is re-born in another language; my night will have been no less than a wedding night.”

by Claude Mouchard Poet

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The Story of a Ladle

by Jo Kyung-ran translated by Kari Schenk

1

For years I’ve been thinking about balance. Not in the sense that both humans and animals prefer symmetrical facial features, and not about the kind of actual, rational balance that must be considered when climbing onto a balance beam and getting ready for the next move, but about people’s private lives. They look like they’re just barely able to get by, preserving life’s rhythm by keeping their day-today routine free of disruption. So when my maternal uncle invited me to live with him, I didn’t think about it much. I spent just twenty-four hours wondering whether it would be better to control my mind or my environment. I’ve never lived alone. The main reason is that I haven’t wanted to, but I’ve come to realize that I only feel like myself when I’m with others. It doesn’t have to be family. But I’ve lost a lot and been on my own for several months now. My uncle’s the only person around to take care of me, so I really have no options. I started thinking about balance when wondering whether people inevitably hurt each other. When I blurt something out, I feel the words turning mean. If my father has left me anything, it’s an awareness of the difficulty of speaking and a sense of responsibility for words spoken too fast. I want to vent my feelings sometimes, but whenever this happens his voice comes thundering at me like music at full blast: “Aren’t you ashamed? Don’t you feel guilty? Don’t you regret what you’ve said?” So instead of venting, I’ve taken to performing various repetitive actions like reading or taking a walk at a certain time, or picking up pieces of glass. These actions have taken hold of my life and given it a rhythm, and I’ve come to feel they’re very important, the only things of true value. They give me a sense of regularity and direction. They work like magic in helping me adapt to circumstances. The moment I start doing them, my inner tension and anxiety temporarily ease. I can’t stop. I call it balance, but people familiar with psychology would call it obsessive-compulsive disorder—although no one calls it an

obsession if you can’t get a pleasant thought out of your mind. Still, I can’t stop picking up bits of glass. There are pieces scattered everywhere. I have to pick up what I can.

Once I spent the whole day lying down without moving or doing anything. My tension and anxiety grew into fear, and my body began to tingle all over. I’m scared of things like cutting my feet on pieces of glass hidden in corners of the house and getting covered in blood and ending up unable to walk or even crawl, although I know it won’t likely happen.

But when I think of the possibility, I can’t help but engage in repetitive behavior. The more anxious I become, the more I feel the need. I lived with my uncle once before when I was very young. At that time, he had nowhere to turn. Maybe that’s how I look now, in his eyes. What’s more, I’ve been unemployed for so long, there’s no guarantee I’ll ever work again. Spending some time together with my eight-year-old cousin isn’t such a bad idea, all things considered.

2

I need to be with someone, but I don’t have a good reason for it. Maybe when I say this, it’s just an excuse.

The idea came to me suddenly the night before I moved. No one is perfect. Although I know I have irrational thoughts, rather than deal with them directly, I can reduce my anxiety by repeating certain actions. Really, this is a way of ignoring the problem and getting by. One reason I need to be with someone is because that person can assist me. “There aren’t any pieces of glass there?” Or, “I really locked the gas valve before coming out?” It’s reassuring when someone’s around to answer these questions. I have difficulty getting by without this kind of help. But it’s possible there are other factors involved this time.

A long time ago I knew someone who couldn’t stop collecting things. With a peaceful but tired air, he would sit in the middle of the junk that filled his home, crouched in a space so small there was no room to walk. We met just often

enough that we could remember each other’s faces. A few years went by and I tried going to his house. He looked as if he’d been in the same spot forever, dressed in worn-out clothes, standing in the negligible space that existed in the middle of all the junk. He announced he could no longer live there. I still haven’t forgotten the way he looked. Though the day was warm and mild, I could see the white outline of his breath as if it were very cold. Of course, I had to make allowances for him since he had he had suffered a lot. We had to dig through the piles of junk to find something he needed for a long journey. Obsessed with objects people regard as old and useless, he’d gathered mountains of things, but ultimately he was unable to find what he was looking for in them. That day he was searching for a slender, flat, dark green passport that blended in with the background.

I didn’t hear any news of him after that. Maybe he’d gone.

A few times I paced back and forth in front of his house.

Who knows if I couldn’t have lived together with him at one time? In the end, I didn’t. Now, once more, I’m looking at a mountain of junk in front of me. Even if there’s something I want to find, it will be impossible in such a large, dark, solid mass. I feel like I’ve been struck, as if someone has clapped me on the shoulder with a bamboo fan. Perhaps I want to find out what it is I’ve really wanted all along, since well before I started obsessing about balance. Would I ever find it living alone? Opening up the environment: maybe that was my reason for deciding to move.

3

The atmosphere inside the house was not how I imagined. I heard my aunt left three years ago. Although I wasn’t there to see her go, I can see the scene vividly in my mind because my relatives talk about it whenever they get together. Once when I came out of a large building downtown with the white snow falling thickly and the darkness rushing in, when the bus home hadn’t come in a while, and I felt cut

off from everyone, it seemed that on that Friday evening, something dramatic was called for, and I saw the silhouette of a woman walking in the storm. Was this person my aunt?

When she walked out—just a short, insignificant slip of a woman—she took a comforter with her. I heard she slid her bare feet into my uncle’s rubber slippers and went tottering down the alley with the comforter balanced on her head. The neighborhood dry cleaner was the one who told us. Seeing my aunt approaching with the comforter, he threw the shop door wide and came outside, expecting she was coming to see him. But he couldn’t call to her to stop after she passed by without as much as a glance. That’s how it happened, all right. She would have been oblivious, walking along a fixed route with the concentration one generally reserves for handling knives. Local gossips said she hid her bankbook and some gold nuggets in the comforter, and some of them even said she had a lover rolled up inside it. My uncle gave up looking for her. If she’d taken the comforter, she wouldn’t be long in one place. Just as no one knows what makes the sound in an old drum, neither my uncle nor anyone else knew why my aunt had walked out. I guess she felt tired and desolate, and the family she left behind felt that way too.

My cousin had grown a lot, and I looked at him for a long time. I’d been wrong to think my uncle was asking me to help raise him. My cousin’s face was flushed and glowing warmly; his eyes were dark, and he had a gentle manner of speaking. I could tell from his face that he’d never once been in trouble. In front of this boy who’d lost his mother, but whose face intimated an unshakeable faith in a world of wonder, I felt strangely choked with emotion. Something about his expression reminded me of my own look of patient suffering. That evening while drinking rice wine, my uncle sang: “I collapsed on the beach and opened my eyes. Your black sailboat swayed in the bright light and it looked like

your tired arms were fading in and out. I saw you motioning me from the side of the boat. But the waves were speaking, telling me you’d never return.”

4

My father said you can tell within seven seconds how a person was raised. For example, he’d say, “That guy grew up like a wild animal,” or “He was showered with praise, and his parents expected big things from him.” My father judged people along these lines, but sometimes it was those who were praised and held up to high standards that got together and drove him into a corner. My father was raised in poverty, and I was raised amidst sighs. So according to my father, my uncle and I belonged in a category: people brought up amidst sighs. Although my uncle has been working as a cook for 30 years, he’s been through a lot of hard times. Maybe it was during the Asian financial crisis that he was let go at the restaurant and started making his living by the Han River, which is where I will sit and remember him years from now. To me, this is not a peaceful land covered in primroses and river flowers, the home to kingfishers, herons, and white-cheeked ducks, but rather the place where my uncle lived in rags for a fall and winter one year. My uncle would catch more than thirty red-eared turtles a day there. This was when the easy-going domestic spotted turtle was threatened with extinction by growing numbers of red-eared turtles not native to the country. I heard that besides my uncle, there were more than ten other people who made their living catching turtles at the Han River then. They sold the turtles as pets or to be used in medicine. Although it wasn’t illegal, my uncle said he always had the feeling someone was coming after him. It’s different catching turtles, even foreign ones, than catching carp or mandarin fish. For half the day my uncle would lie on a tarp spread over the damp sand thinking about the ladle he’d left at home.

On his bookshelf is a book with a funny title: Research into the function and improvement of ladles: The capability of a superior ladle, and how it may be produced. The book is really no more than a collection of photocopied articles, and although I haven’t read them, they all deal with ladles.

Ladles for scooping or stirring. I giggled to see it. When I was very young and my uncle lived with us, he hit me once with a ladle. Cooking Chinese food, the ladle is like his right arm, no different from a body part. Working ten hours a day in the kitchen, he can’t put it down for a moment.

Unlike other cuisine, Chinese food is special in that it’s usually cooked instantly over a hot flame, and the ladle is used for a number of purposes, not only stir-frying but also measuring spices and mixing ingredients in a pan. So neither a kitchen scale, a beaker, or a measuring spoon is needed. A simple ladle can do it all. My uncle has used the same ladle for almost thirty years. It was passed down to him from a senior cook, and before that it had been owned by that cook’s teacher, so not even my uncle knows how old it is. Once I saw this ladle, which took my uncle from the local Chinese take-out joint to the kitchen of a fashionable hotel. I remember it as being ordinary stainless steel, with a long sleek handle and marks around the neck from where it had been soldered a number of times; the bowl was worn down so that it looked tarnished. But my uncle never dreamed of buying a new one or using an extra one lying around the kitchen. He said once he’d tried to replace it.

It wasn’t long before even his regular customers began to stop coming. The taste of the food was off. He threw out the new ladle that hadn’t suited him and ever after that swore by the old one. This happened twenty years ago. When I started living at my uncle’s house, I discovered that just as there are some people who closely identify themselves with things like books, music, cars or perhaps soccer balls, there are also people who can’t imagine their lives without

tools like ladles. My uncle thinks there’s nothing more important than maintaining consistency in his cooking, and without the ladle this would be impossible. I soon came to understand my uncle. One Sunday morning he was stretching, and as he moved back and forth, I discovered that his right arm resembled a ladle coming out of his body.

Shining in the morning sun, it waved from his shoulder with a gentle, flexible motion. I looked in astonishment at my uncle and the ladle together. There was no other ladle like it.

Lying on the damp sand thinking about the ladle, suddenly my uncle rose. His pain had seemed unendurable, but at that moment he realized that this pain was exactly what he had to overcome, and he could hardly believe his own strength at that moment. He added shyly that I wouldn’t have believed it either. The ladle he’d been using for so long reassured him that this had really happened.

Anyway, we both remembered it. One reason I could remember my uncle living by the river that season was because it was around the time my aunt had walked out.

That fall, the red-eared turtles had encroached on the Han River bank. For a long time afterwards, I kept dreaming that turtles were catching and eating each other, and there was something different about this than dreaming of carp eating carp.

5

I had to pause for a minute taking off my shoes, I was so confused when my cousin asked what scenery I’d passed on the street. It hadn’t really occurred to me that I’d gone somewhere and come back. That had been the awkward thing about living alone. There’d been no one around to tell me about what kind of person I was. My cousin told me I’d been away for three hours and during that time it had grown dark and he’d folded the laundry. Three hours.

I took off my creased black gloves and placed them on the kitchen table. They were still warm with body heat, as if to prove I’d been getting exercise. I liked walking. I believed that when I walked, I always knew ahead of time the exact point where I’d turn around and come home. I didn’t look in front of me, though; I looked back. It seemed like my cousin had been writing in his diary. Although he wanted to know about the streets outside, I hadn’t seen anything. I had nothing to tell him. I tried to remember where I’d stopped and turned back, but couldn’t remember that either. How far had I gone? Maybe there’d never been a turning point. It would be wrong to think I’d walked facing forward. To walk turned away is not to walk towards a destination at all, but to drift away from one, to get farther away from the vertex.

Perhaps walking didn’t have meaning for me anymore. But I didn’t stop. I practiced looking ten meters out at the sites and the people on the street so that I could tell my cousin about them. I couldn’t bring myself to mention the glass.

Sometimes I’d end up telling him, “Red things are red, and dark things dark,” because I hadn’t looked out. I’d been too busy worrying about pieces of glass. Another reason I walked was to test my willpower. In the beginning, I’d had a phobia of leaving the house. The streets were full of glass, and I couldn’t understand how other people failed to see that. Each step became harder as I went around picking up shards and putting them in a plastic bag. But this was the best way for me to adapt to circumstances. The people sauntered along obliviously, as if to show me there are times when you shouldn’t let on that you’ve stepped on glass. The child usually stared at me blankly with his mouth shut. I’d thought he had a soft and gentle speaking style, but maybe he just didn’t speak very much. And he, too, knew not to reveal that he’d been hurt. In a sad mood after drinking, my uncle rubbed my cousin’s back at night, muttering, “Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone.” This seemed melodramatic,

but my uncle didn’t usually exaggerate things. This was why I accepted the ladle story at face value. I sometimes looked down and asked my cousin, “What are you afraid of?” The question flew back at me, like an arrow a man shoots into the air while lying on his back. It was almost beyond my ability to ask, “Why don’t you ever go outside?”

My cousin and I needed to say precisely, in specific detail, what we’d seen and what we’d see. It would be our only way to commemorate my uncle and his ladle.

6

Although things like doing the laundry and preparing food didn’t matter much, gathering the required materials for my cousin’s first grade class was hard work.

Besides supplies that I could guess the use for, such as indoor slippers, yarn, colored origami paper, dice, and party hats, there were items like needles, mirrors, dried flowers, flour, and corn silk, which would be used only God knows how. My cousin did not list them item by item for me, but I quietly gathered them. If I couldn’t find something at home, I’d take pains to get it. Reading over a list of items my cousin told me he needed in two days, I came upon the word “eyeballs.” I carefully scanned the list again. Below eyeballs were “clay,” “wooden chopsticks,” “wire” and “dye.”

Of course “eyeballs” was the odd one out. But by the next day I had to have all of these things. Once I’d taken a bus to the traditional market and picked up millet, barley, and different colored beans. The list had specified only a few grains of each, but I’d made small pouches out of an old cloth and filled them up like beanbags and sent them with him. If he needed one apple, I got him three; if he needed ten colored pencil crayons, I sent twenty. Likely there were more things my cousin needed, but that was all I could do for him. A few days after that, my cousin presented me with a round clock drawn on a large sheet of construction paper. It had large-sized Arabic numerals on it, and each

numeral was filled with light-yellow millet and red, black and white beans. Indecisive but perfectionist, my cousin had a horror of making mistakes, and the clock he made had a commanding presence, looking both sturdy and exquisite.

I posted it up on the wall in the living room and each time I passed, I nibbled on some of the white beans pasted on the numeral three. The day three o’clock disappeared, a feeling of dizzying loneliness pervaded the house. I picked the black beans off the five and the red beans off the nine.

In the place we lived, for a long time the period from three until nine p.m. didn’t exist. It was awkward to buy these supplies that would be used in an unknown capacity, but each time I did I was filled with anticipation.

In the beginning, I didn’t know how to say I wanted eyeballs, but the owner of the neighborhood stationery shop told me he was sold out before I even finished asking.

I asked where I could get some. “Where do you think?” the shop owner said. He made it sound as if they were available anywhere. I walked the length of about three bus stops.

With visions of cat, dog, bear, deer, eagle and dinosaur eyes, I entered a stationery store in front of a neighborhood elementary school. The store had eyeballs, but they differed from the perfectly round ping-pong ball-shaped ones I’d imagined. The plastic eyeballs had black pupils rolling around between their flat backs and bulging fronts. They came in four sizes ranging from dime to quarter-sized, and I bought the largest ones. I’d wanted menacing-looking eyeballs the size of baseballs, not something coin-sized. My cousin would have to make do with these when making his large, sturdy dinosaurs.

That evening, my cousin wrote in his diary at the kitchen table while I did the dishes. I looked back without thinking. Curiously, the scene did not seem unnatural. I put a kettle on the stove, and it whistled, spouting warm steam across the kitchen. I brewed black tea and drank it with loud

sips. I hadn’t picked up any broken glass that day, but I wasn’t uneasy about the future or worried about negative consequences. Inside, the house was warm and peaceful.

My uncle arrived home at midnight, about an hour late.

I was scratching my cousin’s back as he slept. My uncle opened the door to my cousin’s darkened room. I saw his face, half covered in shadow. And I sensed something was wrong. I prayed it was something minor. At any rate, somewhere there was a lot of glass on the floor. I got to my feet.

My uncle said, “The ladle’s gone.”

I looked up at him again. He hadn’t said the ladle was missing. My uncle’s ladle was really gone.

7

There was a man. He didn’t stand out in a crowd or talk much or make many mistakes. If you didn’t watch him closely, he was no different from anyone. Indeed, he looked so ordinary, no one noticed when he was absent, or when he was there. The only unusual thing about him was his obsession with symmetry and balance. He always had to arrange things symmetrically, and when he used his right hand, he was sure to use his left hand too. Even when he drank water, he held a glass in each hand and took turns drinking out of them. He didn’t know why he had to do these things, but one thing was clear: if he didn’t, he became so anxious it was as if the earth would tear in two. There were mirrors all over the house to determine from every angle whether objects were properly arranged.

The mirrors could also be used to achieve a symmetrical and balanced looking body. This didn’t hurt anyone, but people hated it. Once, they formed a circle and pushed him into the middle. “Look around,” they said. “Wherever you look there’s perfect symmetry.” Sick with dread, he walked around and around in one direction, like a lab rat paralyzed on one side of the brain. “Are you feeling more

comfortable now?” the people jeered. They were holding hands and closing in on him, as if they were catching a mouse. I thought he would soon cry out, or burst into tears. He stopped and stood there, and shut his eyes tight; it was the best way of coping. Anyhow, with his eyes shut, it’s possible he found the world of perfect balance he’d been seeking.

Then someone called out, “You know what? Your face isn’t symmetrical!”

At that moment, I noticed some pieces of glass under my feet. The remark had exceeded the bounds of polite humor: it was dirty and unretractable, as if they’d spit on him; it was vicious and reckless, and it looked like dangerous pieces of broken glass. The people scattered. He gathered his things and went home. I watched him from behind as he pushed open the door and left. His right hand held a bag, and his left hand—which had always held something equivalent—was tucked inside his pocket. It looked like he’d stumble and fall at any moment, like someone who’d really lost all sense of physical balance, and I suspected that if he fell then, he wouldn’t be able to get up again. He never returned there. After coming home, he locked the door and looked into a mirror. His right eyebrow was slightly higher than his left, and his beard and the hair that reached below his ears was cut crookedly. He only discovered this then. He couldn’t hide his surprise. Soon after, he was flooded with anxiety, so he had to do what he could. He took a knife and shaved off all of his hair, including his eyebrows and beard.

Many vertebrates, including humans, have their heart and stomach on the left side and their liver and appendix on the right. This is because human outer appearance has evolved towards symmetry, but the internal organs have not. I still wonder whether it was lucky he never knew this. Presently he looked into the mirror with a smile of contentment.

But then his lips closed into a grim, horizontal line. He’d

discovered that his scalp was uneven. He hesitated for a second. And as if underscoring a sentence he wanted to remember forever, he took a knife to the side of his head that was noticeably protruding, and cut deeply into his own skull.

8

Perhaps my intuition was wrong. Nothing happened to me. That meant that nothing happened to my uncle either. At the time, I felt so attached to him it was as if I needed him to be complete. It went beyond a feeling of intimacy. He didn’t try to find the ladle. Just as usual, he left for work and came home at the regular hour. On weekends he spelled me off making dinner, or took my cousin to the zoo. While my cousin was at school, instead of scrubbing the floor, I did the exercises I’d learned watching my uncle.

Neither of us mentioned the ladle to one another. He looked exactly the same as he had before he lost the ladle.

But the fact that he looked like any ordinary man and not someone special gave me unexpected disappointment. If he could lose the ladle without losing his pride and something more, then it meant the ladle had never really been part of his body, and without it he didn’t exist, or didn’t have a special existence, which amounted to the same thing.

On the other hand, even as I was disappointed, I enjoyed a pleasant feeling that I can’t describe, because the ladle had been something for him, but not for me. I began to give him chores like cleaning the kitchen sink or the toilet, or telling him to go for groceries. If he brought back stale tofu or rotten clams from the market, I would send them flying because without the ladle he was no different from me or anyone else. Ultimately he seemed to acknowledge he was nobody because he didn’t object when I treated him badly.

He had the helpless look of someone who’d obey even if I told him to get down on the living room floor and lick my ear like a dog.

Not only that, but my cousin had changed too. When I’d first come to the house, I was sad to read in his face that he’d never been in trouble. But from some point, as if he could no longer hide anything, he’d reverted to being a normal eight-year-old boy who kept crying for no reason or locking himself in his room. He’d decided to remove the protective mask that had hidden anxiety behind wonder and dread behind maturity. Now I could tell by his expression that he lacked something he couldn’t have, and it was horrible.

I neglected giving him snacks and gathering his school supplies. He looked sadder and sadder, and his cheeks that at one time were full to bursting like ripe cabbages were thin and tear-stained. I was called to the school to meet his teacher, but didn’t go. I didn’t tell my uncle either. I was the only one who hadn’t changed. I only realized too late that the others had, and that my uncle’s sense of helplessness had started with the loss of the ladle. My intuition hadn’t been wrong. I’d only failed to see the truth. Some people are dead even though they’re alive. I realized this about my uncle too late, when the situation was already irreversible.

9

I woke from my sleep overcome with pain; it seemed my body would split in two. I buried my face in my knees and cried a little, not because of the pain, but because I was terrified of witnessing something bad that I couldn’t prevent. I left my room. My uncle was sitting bolt upright on a kitchen chair in the dark. I walked up and sat facing him. We didn’t try to look at each other, and even if we had, it would have been impossible in the oppressive darkness. I thought, You’ve got to do it, and If you don’t, you’ll only regret it. But I was always a clumsy speaker, and since words never came out the way I intended, I could only keep quiet. His eyes shone with tears in the darkness.

Suddenly our eyes met. He smiled. I wanted to enjoy the image for a while. One day I’d taken my uncle and cousin

to the playground, and we’d eaten dinner at a restaurant nearby. A plastic serving ladle was lying next to the bowl of stew, and it caught my attention. Instead of lying on the table like an ordinary ladle, it was standing upright on a serving saucer. Playing around, my cousin poked it with his fingertips. The ladle tipped towards the floor, but like a roly-poly toy, it jerked upright again. My uncle explained that it was a roly-poly ladle. “Oh? If it gets knocked over, it gets back up!” I exclaimed, thinking to myself of the ladle that was part of my uncle’s body. My uncle laughed too, and my cousin, who’d been playing with the ladle, watching it stand up whenever it fell, laughed right out loud. We could laugh and joke about a ladle then because it was before my uncle’s had gone missing. I felt nostalgic for that time.

If only we could relive it. But my uncle wouldn’t laugh at anything I said now. And I wouldn’t laugh either. We sat for a long time like people who’d never sat facing each other before. And I realized that it wasn’t only darkness that existed in the dark. Things that were hard to say, things you couldn’t usually talk about had a positive presence, and I’d never known. Suddenly, I felt the urge to tell my uncle about these things. My uncle rose first. He looked at me again vacantly. This time I didn’t have the courage to meet his eyes. He opened the door and went out. One of my tears hit the cold glass dining table. I quickly dried my eyes. Even though the door wouldn’t open again, and I’d never see him dressed in his neat white chef’s uniform with the Chinesestyle buttons cooking in front of a warm flame, or using one hand to scratch his rear as he slept in loose pajamas; and even though I had the feeling I was standing naked and frozen while someone pelted me all over with pieces of ice, I couldn’t call out to my uncle to stay. He wouldn’t have wanted me to.

Right after my uncle lost the ladle, I’d remembered the man obsessed with symmetry and balance. His story had

seemed to be a warning to me.

10

It had been a very long time since I’d rubbed my cousin’s back as he slept. I ran my hand over his desk. He didn’t know I’d been summoned to the school.

For the time being, however long it turned out to be, we understood that we weren’t going to speak to one another.

This wasn’t as inconvenient as I’d expected. But at night I couldn’t sleep because he was crying. It seemed like he’d forgotten how to cry quietly. Even when he went to school and I was alone in the house I’d hear crying sounds coming from his room. For all I knew, he didn’t go to school at all, but hid in the closet all day and cried. I didn’t go into his room and check though because I’d be of no help anyway. I was walking past the desks on my way out when I noticed a countertop at the back. The children’s clay animals were on display: a deer with antlers, a sharp-tusked rhino, a lion shaking his mane, a giraffe, a large bear, and dinosaurs. And stuck on their faces were the kind of factory-made eyeballs that I’d once bought. I approached. Although there weren’t any nametags and no one told me so, I could immediately tell which one was my cousin’s. Tucked away in the far corner of the table with the other clay animals that were the size of basketballs or soccer balls—even the size of live cats—was a figure hardly as big as my middle finger that looked as if it were the ear or tail of some other animal that a child had been making and accidentally dropped. I’d never seen anything so misshapen. When I was buying the eyes, I’d imagined them belonging to a large strong animal like a lion, eagle, bear or dinosaur, but here they were on this three-legged creature with a small horn dangling off its head and a stubby little tale. Glued to its tiny forehead were two quarter-sized eyeballs, overwhelmingly large for its body.

The animal looked like something that couldn’t possibly exist. It couldn’t even really be called an animal. It was like a

rotten egg that hadn’t hatched. I poked it. The unpleasantlooking creature had been supported on its three short, feeble legs, but just as I touched it, it fell to the floor with a thud. My dismay changed to anger. It was as if someone was spraying cold water on my face. I’m not responsible for this, I pleaded. But suddenly I felt that my life was worthless.

I was like an ice sculpture that had melted at the end of a banquet. I hurried out of the classroom and made my way towards the door. I felt uneasy, as if maybe my cousin was watching me from somewhere. I didn’t want him to see how I looked after my anger had cooled, with my hand covering my mouth, trying not to cry. I was confused by the sadness that hit me after my anger had passed. I’d never worried about sadness. I’d always worried about being scarred by fear or dread, or perhaps by disappointment or betrayal. But this sadness weighed down on me more painfully than any feeling ever had. I didn’t think I could handle it. It wasn’t like pain or fear that you can temporarily overcome. It was the purest emotion you can feel.

11

I sat on the kitchen chair my uncle had sat on that night. I thought of the things I couldn’t say then, questions which would never be answered. But I nodded my head quietly, sitting in the dark. That night, the silence between my uncle and me had been a kind of language that could have gone anywhere and reached anyone. I waited until 3 o’clock and opened my cousin’s door. He was pretending to sleep, and I took hold of his hand. He looked blankly at me, his cheeks stained with tears. The old wonder and expectation were gone, replaced by loneliness and fatigue on a face as familiar to me as my own reflection in the mirror. I bundled him up in a warm coat and led him up to the rooftop. I wanted to tell him about the things I’d seen in the dark that night, about other things that existed in the darkness. Perhaps I wanted his understanding. Throughout

the evening, beginning in the east, the seven stars closest to the North Pole would gradually emerge from where they’d been hiding below the horizon. My cousin was shivering with the cold, so I hugged him tightly from behind. He squirmed a bit, but quickly settled down. The stars were as much as eight million light years away, twinkling dimly. I pointed them out, beginning in the far north with the giraffe and dragon constellations and Cassiopeia and Cepheus, and passing over to Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, which included the North Star. Seven stars were shining faintly.

“That’s the North Star.” I whispered in my cousin’s ear.

“That’s the constellation that always goes round in one spot, as if its tail were nailed there, as if it were a light spinning in a lighthouse.” My voice was so soft I didn’t know if my cousin could hear. He was pressed up against my chest, looking up. “Ships far out to sea have guided their boats by this star, airplanes have followed it, and people travelling by land have used it to keep on course.” Together, my cousin and I gazed at it. The stars started to inch eastwards and our bodies turned with them. I wanted to show him that even in the dark we could see these stars, and the ten million light years’ distance that separated us from them, and the Milky Way moving in a large spiral shape towards us. Through this, I hoped to teach him about his condition, that within every small, worthless, wretched human there is a fight raging between inner consciousness and outside forces. And close beside us, he’d see light on the roof as bright and red as yew berries, winding roads that can lead anywhere, and unpredictable ups and downs in the Earth’s vast terrain. At that moment, my cousin pointed towards the sky where the seven stars were twinkling.

He said, “Look! They’re in the shape of a ladle.”

I looked at the eastern sky again. The seven stars were really in the shape of a ladle. My cousin was laughing as he looked back and forth at me and at the ladle. I had to laugh

too, as he was laughing with the pride of someone who has somehow jumped a long way after many failed attempts.

In order that my cousin would remember it forever, even if no one was with him, I went over the stars of the ladle once more. “Even when you’re alone, don’t forget. First, if you find the big ladle-shaped constellation called Ursa Major, and follow the two stars opposite the handle, the star you come to is the North Star, and dangling from this star is the small ladle-shaped constellation known as Ursa Minor. And from the North Star if you go a little ways in the opposite direction of the large ladle you just spotted, there’s a constellation in the shape of a house with a roof.

That’s called Cepheus, and from there if you go a little ways up from the rooftop, do you see a W shape? That’s called Cassiopeia.” But my cousin’s eyes were still fixed on Ursa Minor, and the part of the ladle extending to the North Star. Although my cousin was only a child, I thought that he understood everything. We were wrapped in each others’ arms under the stars, like two parts of a single body that had been divided. Again I felt a terrible sadness. I didn’t want my cousin to grow up amid sighs and sorrow. My cousin was precious; his father had called him flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone. He was still gazing at the ladle constellation.

Perhaps he’d remember it as his father’s star, and use it as a guide growing up. And who knows if the stars wouldn’t protect him, like Ajax’s seven-layered leather shield that no spear could pierce. But suddenly something occurred to me.

Perhaps when he was half-chanting “Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone,” my uncle hadn’t been referring to my cousin, but to the ladle. “Did you know that?” I whispered. For a while I hugged him tight, my cousin who was growing like a bamboo shoot. Ursa Major, the Great Bear, stood on its four legs with its tail in the air, cradling the seven stars in its arms, and with tears in my eyes I watched it twinkling.

I’ve been thinking about my obsession with balance

that I’ve been unable to shake for all these years. I follow elaborate rituals, but they only give me a temporary sense of stability, and in the past, they’ve pitted my inner consciousness against outer forces. But even as stars disappear in the morning, my obsession is passing. I’m more dependent than anyone, and I know I won’t change much in the future. Now, though, the reason I need someone is not to help me engage in repetitive behavior, but to help me find something I can believe in and depend on. With this, my life has already taken proper shape, and I can willfully invest it with meaning, and it’s all because of the value I’ve found.

Under the night sky, submerged in darkness and exposed to the cold, my cousin and I were standing together until morning like a speck invisible to the naked eye. The change in us that occurred that dawn cannot be described in words. Before, I’d never had my own ladle.

The Story of a Ladle Jo Kyung-ran Munhakdongne Publishing Corp.

2004, 294p, ISBN 8982819185

_list: Books from Korea is a quarterly magazine published by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea.

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