[_list: Books from Korea] Vol.27 Spring 2015 by LTI Korea Library

VOL. 27 SPRING 2015

Special Section

Korean Künstlerroman: Artist Novels Featured Writer

Kim Nam Jo VOL. 27

SPRING

Spotlight on Fiction

2015

The Youngest Parents with the Oldest Child by Kim Ae-ran

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

VOL. 27 9 772005

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ISSN 2005-2790

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Now Available in

E-book Format

20th Century Korean Literature Featuring works of short fiction by prominent Korean writers from the early to mid-twentieth century

The Literature Translation Institute of Korea introduces 50 short stories from 22 prominent Korean writers, spanning from the Japanese colonial era to the beginning of the Korean War. The E-books are available to download from the Apple iTunes App Store and Google Play by searching for “20th Century Korean Literature,” or by visiting the LTI Korea website: ebook.klti.or.kr.

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2015-05-07 오후 1:40:16

Foreword

“You don’t need to feel alone. We can all be friends.” – Kim Nam Jo

his spring issue of _list: Books from Korea features Kim Nam Jo, a poet acclaimed for her zest for life and love. The end of the Korean War, a catastrophic event that plunged Korea into the depths of pain and despair, marked the beginning of Kim’s career as a poet. From her first poetry collection, Life (1953), in which she expressed awe and wonder at life amidst the ravages of war, to her seventeenth and latest book, My Heart Aches (2013), Kim’s poetry has constantly revolved around themes like reflections on human nature, an unwavering affection for all life on Earth, and pain and healing. As is evident in one of her recent poems “Trees and Shadows” (p. 25), Kim’s conception of hope and despair, pain and healing, life and death, sin and salvation, and man and nature is that of inseparable Siamese twins who are aware of each other even in the darkness of night. She longs for and finds hope in the abyss of despair, healing in the throngs of pain, and salvation on the flipside of sin. She achieves this impossible symbiosis of contradictions in her poetry through a contemplative recognition of their coexistence and through man’s interaction with nature. This is why she calls poetry “hopeless Hope.” (p. 21) A true artist endures all hardships to achieve artistic fulfillment without compromising his or her standards or ideals. This issue’s Special Section entitled “Korean Künstlerroman: Artist Novels” (pp. 32–51) examines writers who have contemplated the meaning of life and inquired into the essence of the arts. We have sorted the long history of Korean literature into three generations: the first wave from the twenties to the sixties, the second wave from the seventies to the eighties, and the third wave from the nineties to the present. The first wave produced writers in the mold of the artist-genius celebrated in Romanticism who devoted themselves to raising their art to the highest level possible and did not have scruples about making sacrifices or committing murder, arson, and rape for creative inspiration. The writers of the second wave practiced their art in an age of industrialization and democratization. Yi Mun-yol, whom we featured in our last issue, depicts the artist as a social outsider or an ideological nihilist who pursues art for art’s sake while keeping aloof from social conventions and reality. New vistas have opened for the writers of the third wave with the emergence of new age technology like the Internet and social media. These writers are no longer interested in exploring the meaning of life or the purpose of art. Rather, they indulge in aestheticism and art for art’s sake. This spring issue also features two young wordsmiths who debuted after the nineties: Kim Yeonsu (pp. 52–59) and Kim Ae-ran (pp. 60–67). The former’s idea of a writer is someone who keeps on writing just as a marathoner keeps on running tirelessly. The latter aspires to stay young by writing works that will be loved by all generations. by Park Jangyun Editor-in-Chief

Vol.27 Spring 2015

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CONTENTS

A LITER ARY QUAR TERLY

V O L . 27 S P R I N G 2015

Featured Writer

Kim Nam Jo

10 Writer’s Profile A Voice That Sings of Dignity and Love 12 Essay The Poet Who Longs to Be a Sinner 16 Interview Songs of Life and Salvation:

A Conversation with Poet Kim Nam Jo

20 Writer’s Insight Living Inside Life, with Others 22 E ssay Graceful Hymns of Pious Love and Salvation:

On the Poems of Kim Nam Jo

Selected Poems 24 31 Translated Works

32 Korean Künstlerroman: Artist Novels Special Section

Overview

32 The Aesthetics and Modernity of Artist Novels

First Wave Authors (1920s - 1960s)

36 Discovering the Autonomy of Inner Consciousness “A Day in the Life of Kubo the Novelist” 38 Seopyeonje: The Southerners’ Songs 40

Second Wave Authors (1970s - 1980s)

42 The Significance of Artistic Salvation “The Golden Phoenix” 44

Third Wave Authors (1990s - Present)

48 The Artist in Post-1990s Korean Literature The Vegetarian 50

52 Kim Yeonsu Younger Writers

52 Essay A Writer’s Back Writer’s Insight My Small Steps 54 Towards Foreign Fiction

World’s End Girlfriend

60 Kim Ae-ran 60 Essay I Went My Way, with Someone Beside Me 62 Writer’s Insight Meeting You Face to Face “Sky Kong Kong the Pogo Stick” 65

WORDS FROM OUR ART DIRECTOR

BEFORE

Cover

Inside

NOW

Cover

Inside

From Paper to Pixel

line, its length, and color also vary across sections to demarcate each one distinctly. The cover features an image that is simple and yet manages

ith the launch of the digital edition for smart devices last

to capture the unique aura of the writer. The “Special Section”

year, _list now crosses diverse mediums, which calls for a

draws on images to relay the theme visually, while the “Featured

redesign that emphasizes brand identity and consistency. The new design is mindful of the particulars of each medium—print, mobile device, tablet, or desktop computer.

Writer” and “Younger Writers” sections take advantage of carefully chosen photographs and layouts that show each writer’s personality.

The underscore symbol in the magazine’s title appears in various

I hope this reimagining of design sheds an exciting new light

forms and designs to emphasize visual identity by concurrently

on Korean literature, thus contributing to making it more widely

relaying a sense of change and consistency. The thickness of the

known.

Kwon Junglim

International Workshop for Korean Literature Translation 06 07 08 09

Atelier de Traduction Coréen-Français How Are You? “Yang-ui Mirae”: The In-between of Translation The Translating Experience

PUBLISHER EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

MANAGING DIRECTOR

The 6th International Translators’ Conference 76 Building a UK Readership for Korean Literature 78 Back-translating Race: On Dealing with

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF ASSISTANT EDITORS

Kim Seong-Kon Kim Yoon-jin Lee Jung-keun Park Jangyun Park Mill Yoo Young-seon

Racially Sensitive Language in Translation EDITORS

Kim Stoker Yi Jeong-hyeon

01 Foreword

James Godley

68 Poetry

PROOFREADER

69 Reviews

EDITORIAL BOARD

Agnel Joseph Kang Gyu Han Kim Jonghoi

80 Afterword

Min Eun Kyung Park Hae-hyun

Spotlight on Fiction

OVERSEAS EDITORIAL ADVISORS

Choi Kyeonghee Oliverio Coelho

The Youngest Parents with the Oldest Child

Jean-Claude De Crescenzo

by Kim Ae-ran

Grace E. Koh Michael J. Pettid Andreas Schirmer Dafna Zur DOMESTIC EDITORIAL ADVISORS

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

Cover image by Kim Minchan Date of Publication April 10, 2015 All correspondence should be addressed to the Literature Translation Institute of Korea 32, Yeongdong-daero 112-gil (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

ART DIRECTOR

Kwon Junglim

DESIGN DIRECTOR

Yoon Eunjung

DESIGNERS

Kim Eunji Kim Jihyun

PHOTOGRAPHER PRINTED BY

Son Hongjoo Gabwoo Printing Co., Ltd.

International Workshop for Korean Literature Translation

The Korean Literature Translation Workshop for International Universities was launched in 2014 to provide foreign students with the opportunity to receive professional training in translating Korean literature. The Workshop is held in collaboration with international universities that offer courses related to Korean Studies.

Atelier de Traduction Coréen-Français I

n autumn 2014, the Literature Translation Institute of Korea made a proposal to hold a Korean-French translation workshop at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO) in Paris. As head of the Korean Studies section from 2010 to 2013, when there was a significant increase in the number of students, I had been mulling over how to provide a diverse and in-depth education that was relevant to the job market. I thought that the Atelier de Traduction Coréen-Français was in line with my mission and accepted the proposal. The assignment for the Atelier, which lasted for three months, entailed translating a short story. I remembered that in the “Korean Literature and Translation” class, a number of students had been enchanted with the novelist Hwang Jung-eun and her realistic but unique literary world; hence Hwang was chosen and she suggested that the class translate “Yang-ui Mirae,” her short story published in Korea in 2013. Graduate students in the Literature Translation course were given priority to attend the Atelier and then two other graduate students and three undergraduate students joined, so in total, we had a group of nine. In the first workshop, students articulated their impressions of the work and came up with a timetable for translation. Regular meetings were held in which they compared their translations. Students went over the abstruse passages and analyzed the narrative structure, and discussed the difficulty of translating words and phrases and the various possible

_list : Books from Korea

approaches. The difference in perspectives was more of an impetus than a barrier for enhancing the quality of the discussion. Much time was devoted to reading, construing, understanding, exploring, and editing the text. Reading aloud in front of everyone, in particular, was a big help for each translator. As for the finished product, an emphasis was placed on the process of lecture-écriture according to Henri Meschonnic: to create an individual version of one’s translation. Eight different versions of the completed translation were compiled into an anthology so that the readers could see the various styles of each translator. There were different interpretations, as in the case of the title of the work, which has a multivalent meaning. One of the translations was chosen by a committee of outside judges and published in an online magazine called La Revue des Ressources. For most of the students this was their first experience translating, hence the Atelier workshop gave them confidence and catalyzed their interest in the difficult but appealing art of translation. As an instructor, it was a joyous occasion in which I was able to unearth some of the talents who might become actively involved in the translation of Korean literature in the future.

by Jeong Eun-Jin Associate Professor of Korean Studies Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO)

Essay

How Are You? I

t is at the moment winter here in Korea and I am waiting for spring. Paris is too far away and I recall my round trip flight being quite arduous. No matter how long, it felt like I was still flying somewhere over Mongolia or else somewhere in the northern hemisphere. I remember time passing in a very strange manner on my flight to and from Paris. Piercing through the night, flying in the direction of where the sun was rising, until finally, when I had arrived at my destination, I couldn’t help thinking how beautiful it seemed as I looked through the tiny window of the plane. It even dawned on me that perhaps I had flown all that way just to see this kind of beauty. But then, I wondered how the honorific language I write in Korean was being translated into English. Is it indeed possible to convey the particular tone in English or French? I give enormous consideration to the nuance of a word or a sentence when I am writing, and I am curious as to how it gets translated. Is it possible to capture nuance in translation? Since I participated in the workshop at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO) that was organized by LTI Korea, I often find myself wondering about this although I am not sure if such a reflection is necessarily beneficial to a novelist. Still, certain experiences keep coming back to me and make me think about them as I wait for spring in Korea. For example, there was a moment when I reflected on how the word, “geomda” (to be black) would be construed in a different culture. It is because of moments like this that I have become more thoughtful about the words and the language I have been using. I believe this tentativeness contributes greatly to the way I write. All in all, the Atelier was a valuable experience. The reason I chose the short story, “Yang-ui Mirae,” for the group translation project was that I was curious as to how the students of Korean Studies at INALCO would translate the title. Just like in Korea, there were a variety of interpretations in defining “yang.” It turned out that there were no two translations of the title that

were the same. That is how I remember it, although my memory could be inaccurate. I collected the printouts of the translations but I was unable to bring them home with me. In the course of rounding off my stay at INALCO and moving to another lodging, my bag was stolen. My eyeglasses, laptop, and the manuscript I was working on as well as the printouts of the translations were in the bag. All at once, I realized that I had lost the students’ translations, which they must have worked on with great care, and all the memos I took during the three workshops. It was a great loss for me. Meanwhile, I let my imagination soar: a man could be reading at home the copies of the translations he found in my stolen bag with the zipper and yellow ribbon while resting his legs on a windowsill, overlooking some narrow alley. He would see the nine names of the writers and nine titles on the first page. He would read them one by one, thinking perhaps one version reads better than the previous one and another is a little more tedious than the one before. When would it dawn on him that the stories were all translations of the same work? Could my imagination be real? I, who am illiterate when it comes to French, viewed the sentences that the students translated like pictures and supposed that they would all be different. There was only a single text but each one of the translators infused their own expressivity that reflects the way in which they have lived their lives. So back to my question: At what point would that guy notice that the stories were being repeated? Because I know nothing about translating, it is possible for me to harbor such a simple and amusing fantasy.

by Hwang Jung-eun Novelist

Vol.27 Spring 2015

International Workshop for Korean Literature Translation

“Yang-ui Mirae”:

The In-between of Translation

hen our literature teacher at Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO), Professor Jeong Eun-Jin first submitted the idea of a translation workshop, I did not know what to expect. I had never translated literature before, and the task seemed too big given my far from perfect level of Korean. But as we worked our way around Hwang Jung-eun’s short story “Yang-ui Mirae,” I soon discovered that this was precisely the thrill of translating: to plunge head-first into a text, without any clear idea of where it is going, and discover the direction step by step. It was like advancing in a maze, getting lost again and again while looking for the meaning of the words, until you knew every corner by heart and could, at last, understand it as a work of art. At first glance, “Yang-ui Mirae” is a simple story. The narrator-protagonist is a young girl who seems to pass through life quietly without any goals or dreams, with no other future in sight than the endless string of part-time jobs she takes on to support herself and her parents. One day, a girl disappears in the neighborhood of the library where she works. This incident ripples through her life—raising new questions and pushing her boundaries—but life still seems to move on in endless repetition. As a translator, you get involved more than usual with the story because you have to live with it for a long time. Some of us grew angry with the protagonist: Why couldn’t she make any decisions? Or why would she react to certain things? As the story unravels, time and time again she chooses inaction. It doesn’t seem at first to be of consequence: not breaking a wall; not telling an old lady what she wishes to say; not getting out of the library to check on a young girl alone with two men. But the scariest thing was the subtle sense of numbness that her story conveyed—how easy it seems to forget how to live, to

_list : Books from Korea

become a detached spectator of life. One of the central questions of “Yang-ui Mirae” is legacy. When life is tiring and meaningless what can, and what should, one leave behind? “When you are alone and poor, it is better not to have children,” writes the narrator. But at the very moment she affirms her will to not leave anything in the world after her death, she hopes that those words will survive— that, even in this slight way, she will leave her mark. While developing a pessimistic vision of the present generation and its bleak future, this novel still manages to give the reader a feeling of hope. The very personal nature of reading and translating appears in the way each of us translated the title, “Yang-ui Mirae,” as it can be interpreted in different ways in Korean. When we asked the author, Hwang Jung-eun, about the “real” meaning of the title, she told us that every meaning could be correct. “The future of the lamb,” “Miss’s future,” “The Yin and Yang future” were all meanings that made sense in light of the story. I chose the third, translating it into “Futur clair-obscur” (Future of light and darkness) because the text had most impressed upon me its visual quality: descriptions of the sun’s light and of the dreamed tunnel’s darkness created a sense of constant inbetween—in-between dream and reality, light and darkness, action and inaction. This resonated with me as, for the first time, I discovered a text through the inbetween languages of translation.

by Marianne Godefroy Student of Korean Studies INALCO

Essay

The Translating Experience I

n Hwang Jung-eun’s short story, “Yang-ui Mirae,” the main character is a lower class young lady who faces great financial hardships. Through the use of a refined literary technique, the author conveys the loneliness that comes with hard work and the struggle for life imposed by the restriction of life choices due to poverty. For example, the emptiness felt by the main character is depicted through the silence of the stars at the end of several paragraphs. The poverty she has to endure takes away her liberty and denies her the vision of future prospects. Although many of Hwang’s novels include fantastic elements, this story takes a more realistic stand and reveals Korean society’s tendency to smother the poor and not offer any escape from their condition. The main character makes the conscious choice not to have a child for the only reason that she does not want another soul to experience a destitute life. But even her will to find a way out eventually disappears, which conveys the fact that she seems even more powerless. It appears that she is not the master of her life as the sentence “bright days as cloudy days were on the other side of the window” suggests. Throughout the story, her reactions unveil a very humane personality. Angry at her parents for being poor, and eaten up with remorse, she shows her humanity. This creates proximity with the reader who can easily identify with the protagonist, although the extent of her misery might be somewhat of a stretch. As a sociology student, opportunities to translate a novel from beginning to end are few. This was a great first experience. The workshop constantly put our work back into question; endless hours were added to the original translations until our work was fine grained. As it is impossible to reach one perfect translation, with a one-to-one correspondence between two languages, there were always uncertainties about what

the author had in mind when writing such and such expression. Discussing different options helped us make smarter choices about our translations. We proceeded in such a way that each student would translate the story separately, and we would meet after that to talk and to see how we understood the text and what kind of method each one of us used. Some would choose to enhance the translation and erase language particulars of Korean that just could not be translated into French, while some would prefer to stick more to the Korean way of speaking, thereby requiring more of an effort by the reader. This is the reason why the eight translations are so different even though they come from the same Korean story. Then we would work separately again to revise our writings. The next step was meeting with the author, Hwang Jung-eun, where we learned even more about what we thought we had understood. Before meeting her, we all thought that the homonym yang (which is an important key word of the novel, present in the title) meant “sheep,” but she told us that it was a derogatory term referring to a young lady. It made us revise our translations once again. That’s how I learned that translation is a neverending process and though it cannot be perfect, the translator’s work is to bring the ideas in the original work alive through coherent choices. As Michel Leiris said: “To translate is to be honest enough to limit ourselves to an allusive imperfection.”

by Marion Gilbert Student of Sociology/Korean Studies INALCO

Vol.27 Spring 2015

Featured Writer Kim Nam Jo

Kim Nam Jo 10

Writer’s Profile: A Voice That Sings of Dignity and Love

Essay: The Poet Who Longs to Be a Sinner

Interview: Songs of Life and Salvation: A Conversation with Poet Kim Nam Jo

Writer’s Insight: Living Inside Life, with Others

Essay: Graceful Hymns of Pious Love and Salvation: On the Poems of Kim Nam Jo

Selected Poems

10 _list : Books from Korea

Writer’s Profile

A Voice That Sings of Dignity and Love K

im Nam Jo was born in Daegu in 1927 and attended a girls’ school in Kyushu, Japan. She graduated from the College of Education at Seoul National University with a B.A. in Korean education. Kim made her literary debut with the publication of her poem, “Lingering Image,” in Yonhap News in 1950 and launched her career as a poet with her first collection of poems, Life in 1953. Kim’s poems express a subtle and feminine sensibility that carries on a lineage of female poets such as Moh Youn Sook and Noh Cheonmyeong from before Korean liberation from Japan. She is grounded in the Catholic faith and her writing gravitates toward the realm of love and life, with themes of maternity and peace. Her early works pay tribute to the dignity of life. In Life, she writes affirmatively about human nature and delineates the world of passion derived from the fullness of life’s vitality. In her collections A Flag of Sentiments and The Winter Sea, she refined her poetic world with increasing emotion. Her later works became more contemplative and explored the fundamental dimensions of humanism. The poet has confessed she received a mandate to delve into the depths of “love” and “poetry,” and accordingly, has chosen erotic and agape love as the themes of her recent poetic exploration and expression.

With a voice emanating from deep within, Kim Nam Jo has sung about the ultimately positive aspects of life and achieved a beauty of both form and rhythm through fluid language. She has established herself as an eminent writer in Korean modern literature who has become renowned for her poetry about the inner strength that elevates the human spirit. Kim is at present a member of the National Academy of Arts of the Republic of Korea. The English translation of her poetry, Selected Poems of Kim Namjo, was published in 1993; the Christening of the Wind in Japanese in 1995; the German translation, Windtaufe, in 1996; and Antologia Poética in Spanish in 2003. by Yoo Sungho Literary Critic Professor of Korean Literature Hanyang University

Vol.27 Spring 2015 11

Featured Writer Kim Nam Jo

The Poet Who Longs to Be a Sinner I

s this how Jean Valjean felt as he stole the bishop’s silverware? Or is this what passed through Faust’s mind as he made the pact with Mephistopheles? When my mind is familiar less with lofty words such as love or life and more with words of pain such as despair and futility, how am I to look into the fortress of the poet Kim Nam Jo who is revered as the “poet of love and life?” That fortress, where peace overflows, is filled with a sublime hymn. At its essence it is symbolized by water, fire, and flowers—a blinding brilliance. At any moment when I steal a glance into the fortress I could be rendered blind. And yet, it is not entirely impossible for me to safely take a glimpse. Try as I may to conquer the poet Kim Nam Jo in the manner in which she has done—and still struggles to do—I

12 _list : Books from Korea

must confront Mary Magdalene. A woman with a heart in flames, burning like a brazier for two thousand years: with long, black hair, a Jewess, barefoot, she follows the Lord constantly, everywhere.1 Above is a glimpse taken from Kim’s poem “Mary

Kim Nam Jo, Selected Poems of Kim Namjo, translated by David R. McCann and Hyunjae Yee Sallee, Cornell East Asia Series, no. 63 (Cornell Univ. East Asia Program, 1993), p. 79.

Essay: About Kim Nam Jo

“ Then, what sin has poet Kim committed to feel the need to repent, as Mary Magdalene did when she anointed the feet of Jesus...”

Magdalene 3.” Mary Magdalene whom Kim refers to as her “ultimate textbook”—someone she will never manage to reach—is the manifestation of the absolute values Kim pursues as a woman of faith; a person one would find in the final stage of enlightenment. If she were to achieve the status of Mary Magdalene, Kim would become one of God’s perfect creations, made to fully serve the Lord. That effort of overcoming the futility of life, a dominant tension of her own spiritual constitution, is an act that fulfills her reason to exist. Therefore, the path along her arduous journey toward those absolute values is a path as clear as day. This is because Mary Magdalene endured during her journey “with her soul seared by burns,” thus clearing the way for Kim to follow on her own journey in life. Then, what sin has poet Kim committed to feel the need to repent, as Mary Magdalene did when she anointed the feet of Jesus with pure nard, a fragrant oil, on the streets of Capernaum? Of course there is none. In other words, Kim herself desires to be a sinner. The sin of a person without sin—such a sin is not of this world. It is also not a sin of the flesh. It is rather a sin committed in the world of souls who strive to reach closer to the heavens, and therefore a sin that longs for more punishment and penitence. Here, the expression “longing for punishment” refers to atonement, an act like self-immolation, in which one tries to prove one’s true heart by taking the extreme measure of setting oneself on fire. So then, what does Kim mean when she speaks of practicing the art of true love through which she will prove by setting herself on fire? Without a doubt, it is the act of overcoming Mary Magdalene.

And so it is. Overcoming Mary Magdalene must be a journey of desperation that culminates at the side of Jesus; to get there, it is necessary for a ceremonial ritual to take place which transcends the limitations of human faculty—that is, there needs to be excruciating pain as in self-immolation. For most, Kim Nam Jo is considered a poet of love, or a poet of life. Here, “life” refers to the essential elements that constitute the universe, where “the universe” refers not to the astronomical or scientific concept but rather to the universe of suffering embraced by the heavens. The characteristic of this notion of life makes it a life conceived in the womb of the “mother of life who arrived with her cold body,” and is a form of life (like the budding of spring) that becomes polished during the painful process of trimming its own body with a cold blade as one would cut a winter tree. Even truth, the willful form of all phenomena, has become refined only after significant bloodletting. In that sense, Kim’s notion of winter deviates with Christian imagery. If the ordeals of Jesus as he climbed to Golgotha carrying the cross to which he was later nailed, were a suffering in darkness, then his blissful resurrection emerges as the manifestation of a bright life. From Kim’s perspective, the former is a process of hardship such as self-immolation, while the latter could be seen as the resolution of longing in which Mary Magdalene is overcome through that hardship. Here, the resolution of longing must refer to the fruits of practicing true love, so the nature of Kim’s love becomes that much clearer. On Kim’s notion of love, the poet Ko Un once said, borrowing the medium of poetry, “To the poet who remains unchanged for a lifetime, however, love is not a mere plea for love. It is

Vol.27 Spring 2015 13

Featured Writer Kim Nam Jo

an act of penance, and another word for refinement.” The depth of love is proportional not only to a sense of longing but also to the weight of agony. Indeed it is penance for the guilt of failing to love one’s beloved to the fullest extent that allows one to feel an aesthetic sense of bliss. However, love in the real world sooner or later reaches its existential limit. This is because such love is for another sentient being. As long as the object of love is human, it becomes impossible for any practice of love to overcome the sense of futility. In her poem “Wind,” Kim grumbles that when the wind blows, she would go with it and “be its bride,” but here, wind is not the physical flow of energy, but rather a correlative of her noble and pure beloved (Jesus) who was portrayed “as a being that came to visit wearing a coat and hat without staying anywhere round the borders of the orchard.” Then where does such confidence come from? It is already a sin to have such affections towards her beloved, much less the confidence that allows her to make a forward gesture towards her beloved as someone she would follow anywhere just to become his bride? This is because her desperate prayer to commit sin has grown. That is, the physical struggle to sublimate bitter grief and gut-wrenching sorrow into a pain that transcends limitations has, in effect, resolved the longing of the one who is in love. No matter how fulfilling a task, if one becomes too tired, one’s emotions naturally unwind, and it is that very unwinding that triggers the hope of resolving one’s sense of longing. Then let us first clarify the meaning of sin. Ultimately, here the notion of sin refers to the psychology of self-torture. The preposterous desire to love that which cannot be loved is indeed the sin of sins that calls for repeated contrition, and that sin is self-torture. Below is an excerpt from “Face” that hints at how sin is the psychology of self-torture. By following the poetic vessel that begins with her earlier

14 _list : Books from Korea

poem “Face” and leads to the later poem “Wind,” one can get a glimpse of the transcendental sublimation of self-torture. The tangible sense of death in the poem “Face,” from when Kim was still young and full of hope, must be an inborn attribute; it may even have been inevitable that she later wrote a poem such as “Wind” that can be understood in a similar context. In short, the connection between “Face” and “Wind” is not a coincidence but a fatal link that was spontaneously generated. The white flag defeated The white blank of the will The white of the funeral flowers Like those matured pure white of the veil Here I plan to cover. * Thanatos, the death instinct, or that which covers the face of the living with death, cannot have been created if not for the poet’s fundamental feelings of solitude and futility. Therefore, the poet’s awareness of death is not a product of despair or renunciation, but rather a pure white veil that longs to commit the gravest sin. Here, the poet stamps a seal with the prediction that the consciousness of death is the lofty mindset of one who is “mature.” This means that because she must commit a grave sin, and because that grave sin is self-torture, the poet becomes obsessed with tormenting herself by covering her face with death. As the only possibility of transcendence being achieved is through self-torture—even that too is considered an a priori wisdom of Kim’s—it is that very wisdom that is an omen for her grand “unrequited love” for an absolute being. The following is an excerpt from “Mary Magdalene 4”: Your body became a shrine of sounds Of driving nails and those echoes. *

Essay: About Kim Nam Jo

“ The depth of love is proportional not only to a sense of longing but also to the weight of agony.”

Finally, one hears the sound of hammering, nail after nail. The “shrine of sounds” must be that of Mary Magdalene’s body as well as the body of the poet. The poet is now placed in a moment when death and love become one. It is the moment when a finite life and a variable love are sublimated into eternal life and invariable love. In one’s heart, an intense light and heat rages like the sun. The essence of love becomes visible. It is as if one can feel the precious blood of Jesus. Tears begin to stream down. Those tears are products of perseverance during which red blood is bleached and overflows as a river of distilled water, and that is why they are not tears of sadness, but tears of joy earned through the endurance of pain. The strongest thing in the world Is pain. *

A prerequisite for humankind’s love for God is eternal punishment. However, to indulge in the ensuing pain is now inexorable. After she persists in insisting that it is enough “if one closes the sliding paper door of the soul,” she also commits the cardinal sin of making a pathetic appeal to God to visit her in the form of man. She cannot rise to the heavens herself, so she asks him to come down to her! However, because the impudent desire to commit that cardinal sin is none other than absolute bliss, Kim Nam Jo’s challenge against the heavens can only be seen as all the more reckless. But who knows? God might really come down, or perhaps Kim herself might become a god! by Kim Yongman Novelist

The above line, which Kim has confessed is the common theme of her poetry, proves that the source of life and love in her poetry is pain. Therefore the fact that Kim longs to commit sin is a communicative weapon with which she aims to assign an eternal quality to her love by intensifying that love, that is, to serve Jesus Christ by his side. The poem “God Comes as a Human,” offers a glimpse into her bold attempts at such love. Let us realize the mystery Which because of love, God comes as a human. *

* Translated by Sunny Jung

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Featured Writer Kim Nam Jo

Songs of Life and Salvation: A Conversation with Poet Kim Nam Jo

I met poet Kim Nam Jo in her study in the picturesque environs of the Eocheon Lake Farm in Hwaseong City, Gyeonggi Province. It was an invaluable opportunity to listen to the poet share insights from her long and distinguished career. Poetry was at the heart of our conversation as Kim spoke with great candor and warmth about humanity and the world.

Yoo Sungho: In a world of perpetual war and endless natural disasters, I believe it is all the more necessary that we as a generation think about literature and the arts in greater depth. First of all, what do you think is the role of literature in the current state of the world, or to put it differently, what do you personally consider to be the proper path of literature? Kim Nam Jo: In an age when difficult surgeries are performed with the aid of robotic devices, there is no doubt that there have been drastic changes in the status of humans and the function of literature in society, but there is still a need for us to discuss the expansion of the meaning of literary truth and human nature. When I was in middle and high school during the Japanese colonial period, the Korean language,

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both spoken and written freely in the home, was strictly forbidden at school. Subjected to such acts of injustice, I had no choice but to think about how human dignity and human rights must be protected at all costs. In that sense, the starting point of modern Korean literature was contradiction and suffering, and a literary person should therefore set out on a lifelong journey based on truth in search of a language that enables one to retrace the agonies of the time, protect human nature and decode the true meaning of life, and ensure that the language is widely available. Yoo: That reminds me of how Martin Heidegger referred to Fredrich Hölderlin as “a poet in a destitute time.” If I were to think about it in terms of Korean literature, I couldn’t help but wonder if in this time of

Interview

destitution, now is not the right time to redefine what in fact a poet is. I would also like to ask about your world of poetry. You must have gained much insight now that you’ve been writing poetr y for over 60 years, and you must have noticed how recently poetry is becoming increasingly marginalized. And yet I still believe that poetry has an aesthetic value that is not transferable. Can you tell us about your long career as a poet who continues to steadily write poems in her mother tongue? Kim: A poet must walk a few steps ahead of other people, but also follow at the end of the line, that is, she must play both roles simultaneously. In addition, a poet must offer insight and linguistic finesse through her poetry, and must make it known, and see that it

gets published on paper. For instance, the early spring scenery of February that still feels chilly can be referred to as “the young day of spring which does not even have a name.” I personally decided to pursue a literary career at a time when the use of my mother tongue was forbidden, and since then I’ve written a little over 30 collections of poems and essays. However, this should not be the end of literature, but its beginning. It should keep its roots firmly in the soil of human nature, and bear in mind its calling to understand, embrace, and heal the wounds of human beings, and should continue on its journey, slowly and humbly, and to the farthest possible distance. Yoo: Your poetry is literally like water from a spring that has grown deeper amid extreme pain. In that

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Featured Writer Kim Nam Jo

aspect, I believe one can learn a great deal from your understanding of art on a more theoretical level. In your view, what aspects of our lives should be further developed in order to experience the true value of art?

fundamental of values such as love and life. In the poetics of love that has continued from your early poems up to your most recent works, I wonder if love has developed within such pain.

Kim: There are more urgent tasks in the twenty-first century in which we live today than ever before. For instance, despite the astonishing developments in medicine, new forms of intractable diseases are being discovered every year. In fact, in professions that provide humanitarian aid, it is demanded of them to have the wisdom to immediately pull out persons from a disaster-stricken area and save their lives, so in comparison the function of literature can only come second. However, literature can inflate the feelings of love, hope, and belief inside one’s heart, and allow one to share those feelings with others. That is, I believe it is a field that allows humans to be human and makes us aware of the full value of our existence.

Kim: I am aware that I frequently use the word pain in my poems and essays. However, that pain is less my own, but rather refers to the pain of the whole of humanity, and has been used as a concept that is directly proportional to the positive sides of life such as love and hope. The first level of my poems is sensitivity, and I think of sensitivity as the feelers of all things. As the depth of pain is identical to that of love, the person who loves more hurts more. In the series of poems titled “Mary Magdelene,” I wrote: “Thus for you / Even at any dawn or any night / The driving nails into hands and feet, the pain / Never stops.”1 A poet must excavate to the deepest depths of her sensitivity, fill it with the various circumstances of other human beings, and in the process avoid becoming tired but rather share warm words of consolation.

Yoo: Of the many metaphors you use in your poems, those for pain have raised various thoughts in my mind. The imagery of Mary Magdalene or Sisyphus brings life to your unique sense of pain through metaphor. I wonder, does the world of your poetry flow out from these types of pain? Despite the presence of agony, your poems have advanced toward the most

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Yoo: People often read love and salvation as the two main themes of your poetry. And to that extent, you

This excerpt is translated by Sunny Jung.

Interview

seem to have emphasized the ontology of love within the larger picture that you have been drawing about salvation. What is your opinion on the reading of your world of poetry based on love and salvation? Kim: I am intimidated by the mere mention of the words love and salvation. Both in poetry and in life, love and salvation have served as supreme indicators and symbols of completion. The human condition forces us to pursue these in all aspects of life, but the process can only be painfully slow. I only try my best to proceed in the common direction in which most of us, no, all of us, desire to advance. Love and salvation are the very tasks and prayers of humanity. Yoo: How many languages have your poems been translated into? My opinion is that translation is a major problem in making Korean poetry known to the Western world, but I do hope that your poetry retains its sense of universality and spreads out to the world through the inevitable device of translation. Can you tell us a little about your poetry in translation? Kim: My poems have been translated into English, Japanese, German, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese. It is said that approximately one percent of the global population can understand the Korean language. Although I am trapped inside this lonely language, I am grateful to be able to reach different readers on the other side of the globe through translation. If my poems can somehow resonate with their hearts, that would be because the similarities of our souls have allowed us to meet as writer and reader. Yoo: It seems Korean poetry has recently at times become too serious, and at other times too light. I truly hope that your readership accepts the years of poverty and life that you have lived through, and understands that your inner world is filled with great perseverance and repeated aspirations. In that sense, I wonder if your faith and your poetry are both acts that embrace life. Ultimately it seems that they follow a distinct

structure that converges with the word “life.” Can you tell us about your thoughts on the relationship between poetry and life? Kim: As you said, faith and poetry stem from the same root, and one ought to say that both are dedications to life along with the hope and affirmation of life, as well as the pursuit of eternity. Also, is not the purpose of poetry and life to duplicate what is real in life using the language of literature and thereby share it with others? Yoo: How do you view the future of your poetry? I believe that your poetry has many properties that will make it into the canon of Korean literature. For instance, they are significant as poems by a woman, poems about love, and poems about faith, and in terms of the “poetics of old age,” that is, in terms of how your work continues to improve in old age. Lastly, what are your plans from now on? Kim: I will continue the flow of what I have been doing throughout my career, but the expression “poetics of old age” makes me nervous because I’m now at the age when I am reading the last pages of the thick book that we all read in life. I wish to be a wise reader and hope to have more meaningful conversations with my increasing number of elderly friends.

by Yoo Sungho

Visit www.list.or.kr to watch video highlights of this interview (with English subtitles).

Vol.27 Spring 2015 19

Featured Writer Kim Nam Jo

Living Inside Life, with Others

Poetry is an intimate monologue. When poems are shared with readers, the poet is cut off from her own words and becomes a person who sits calmly in front of a new blank piece of paper. Therein lies the challenge, that only after tearing out the bark of the dark and destitute world, can one find a certain truth and the language of that truth.

was born during the shameful era of our country when Korea was forcibly occupied by Japan. I grew up a colonial child, and about the time when I graduated high school, I welcomed our independence. Even though we experienced an emotional uplifting from the regained usage of our prohibited Korean language, our prohibited Korean writing system, and our prohibited genuine Korean names—shortly thereafter, Korea was overwhelmed by a war that confronted and divided the South and the North. Due to Korea’s inexperience in politics, economy, and education, when Korea immaturely attempted to become a member of the modern state, many Koreans fell into the depths of poverty. Every household bore casualties and faced hopeless partings without promise

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of reunion. Korean poets began singing of this sadness; poetics which were most sorrowful—most beautiful— aroused popular sympathy, and it seemed like this agony became their food and water. This, however, was not a direction of despair. It was a massive national march towards hope. In 1953, during the Korean War, my first book Life was published. Readers empathized with lines like: “That is the life I wanted to have / only to not die / like a pebble I could fall anywhere, any mountain, any field.” Life is a school where everyone’s lives are listed in the school registry. When the time comes for graduation we, the students, will leave this world. In my recent poem “Old Soldier,” I wrote: “I am an old soldier. I enlisted when I was born, and now have

Writer’s Insight

“ What is the reason we humans long for safety yet search for danger at the same time?”

become the oldest soldier. . . . My military duty is life.” The most important affair in life is life itself. Life is a strong and strict parent. We the living people are its feeble children. I believe: “Longings, regrets, and poverty / And sufferings and such / Humans’ daily life / Broken into the water / Until becoming distilled water / As the wedding gift of life, suffer and suffer / Devoted / And life is truly / Worth this much.” Therefore, it is my unchanging belief that people must pay willingly, without discount, the price which life claims. Human souls often face questions. For these urgent questions that arise from the riding pulse of the heart, we often realize that silence which implies comprehensive truth is a better answer than words. A person becomes complete by firmly believing the simple truth that everyone together constitutes a fated community where each individual marches towards a united mankind and shares a similar destiny. Recently one of the things I have thought about is that humans possess the means to enjoy pain. For example, Prometheus, who defied zeus by bringing fire to mankind, was punished and tied up on the high Caucasus Mountain peak. Everyday his liver was pecked at and eaten by an eagle. Every night it would heal and he would prepare for the next day’s pain. If one day the eagle did not show up, and if on that long boring day the sun set, and if this kind of day continued for a long time until his daily life coagulated like a fossil, would he be happy? It is worthwhile to think about the people who risk their lives, their one strand of rope to climb the steep dangerous mountain of Earth. What is the reason we humans long for safety yet search for danger at the same time?

Not so long ago, I was asked in a magazine interview, “How do you view the future of your poetry?” I replied, “Let’s say there is one volume of a thick book which everyone will read throughout their life. Since I have lived long, I have both read quite far into the latter part and read profound sentences which brilliant youngsters have yet to read. My writing may progress more because of this.” Although I cannot say whether or not it’s natural, the ability of undying sensitivity and affection toward the diversity and profit of life is obviously a precious asset. Sometimes when I revisit my own writings, I see evidence that my latter works have reduced wasteful vocabulary and achieved more clarity in meaning. I want to believe that along with my introspection and thoughts about responsibility, as I come into old age, a degree of maturity has been added to my work. Where are the future poems? / Where and when will the future poets come? / The thoughts not yet written in this era / Thunder and lightning which God did not show us yet / Until the last day of Earth / Poets shall come and poetry shall be written / The chains of joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure / Supreme omniscient / Human truth revealed by anatomical knife / Poetry! Oh hopeless Hope! Today, I sing like this: In this tumultuous era that is in dire need of epoch-marking wisdom in every field I am living with one heart among the gleaners in the vast autumn field after the harvest is over. by Kim Nam Jo translated by Sunny Jung

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Featured Writer Kim Nam Jo

Graceful Hymns of Pious Love and Salvation: On the Poems of Kim Nam Jo Kim Nam Jo’s early poetry focused on honoring the invaluable nature of life. In Life (1953), her first poetry collection, Kim expressed her attachment to life by exploring various forms of human loss precipitated by war. Her affirmation of humanity, reverence for life, and the warmth of her poetry founded on spirituality have ensured her place in history as a great artist.

im started writing poetry in her childhood, a time characterized by the absence of her mother tongue, the devastating aftermath of war, and severe deprivation. In such conditions, she reflected on the human condition, and realized a healing amidst pain, and an aesthetic of spirituality and love. In her second collection, Fragrant Oil of Nard (1955), Kim introduced Mary Magdalene as a new character in her poems, where Mary Magdalene is described as a saint of sin and contrition, and a woman who embraced Jesus’s soul in its entirety. To Kim, Mary Magdalene, who has become a symbol of the greatness of motherly love along with the Virgin Mary in the Catholic doctrine, is an existence akin to a textbook that is difficult to understand. Kim once revealed that her world of poetry was able to originate through the presence of Mary Magdalene. The poet summoned into her poems a woman who has been alienated and subjected to discrimination, and raised her in the name of the holiest and most beautiful form of embrace. That is, the “woman, the one of sin, repentance, and pealing resonance,” arrived “with her soul seared by burns” and was reborn into an existence that renders the poet into someone who “cannot approach such a woman” and whose “spirit [is] faint as [she] kneels in prayer.”

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On such a religious foundation Kim unearths the deepest depth of poetry that sees through the dichotomy of extinction and generation, death and life, pity and love. Her representative poem “The Winter Sea” is about a yearning for the will to live, to rise back on one’s feet after the futility and despair of reality through the medium of soliloquy and prayer. In this poem, winter and sea both have the dual meaning of extinction and generation. Where it is cold enough to freeze one’s tears, the only way one can endure one’s own existence is through fire. As such, the intensity of one’s sense of futility also grows stronger. In such a hopeless reality, the poet confesses that ultimately it is only time that enables her to endure. The winter sea then transforms into a space for prayer and yearning in order to obtain the ability to endure the ordeals of reality. The repetition of the line “The days remaining may be few” emphasizes how the poet pursues a life of truth within the limitations of being human. In her poem “Life,” nature is depicted as the mother of life who arrives with her cold body, and prepares for the green fields of winter barley. The beautiful piece of crystal hidden inside the poem is the place where life enters with its cold body to brighten our surroundings. Kim, holding her uniquely delicate gaze,

Essay: About Kim Nam Jo’s Poems

continues to sublimate from a religious perspective the primitive power that elevates the human soul. For Kim, poetry is an omnipresent principle that enables existential discoveries as a poet, and at the same time is a fundamental discipline that completes her own life. Poetry is something that blossoms in the feelings of pity and love for a weak and finite existence. A s such, relig ion and poetr y for K im are simultaneous acts that envelop life and ultimately take a distinct form that converges towards life. Around the time when her collection Love’s Cursive (1974) was published, the theme of Kim’s poetry focused on love, and while she was able to overcome the emotional dimension that was visible in her earlier works such as burning passion, feverish longing, anguish and despair, her poems began to express a more fundamental scope spanning religion, spirituality, and emotion. Here, Kim began to strive towards an existential exploration of life by continuously inquiring into the nature of love, the source and driving force of her life. Many of the poems in her collection Companionship (1976) are about trees, and the poet discovers the acts of mercy and blessing that God pours over all forms of life, offering a prayer of gratitude. In this regard the rapturous joy for the mystery behind the life force of nature expands into a type of sacred territory. By this time, the poetics of love, which Kim has consistently pursued, appears as a mature form of pity; and the eyes that gaze with pity in her poetry have expanded their field of vision from the initial focus on love between humans to include the relationships between God and man, God and nature, and man and nature. As the poet later expressed in Companionship as well as in her two subsequent poetry collections Christening of the Wind (1988) and For Peace of Mind (1995), she intentionally “wrote in a voice which she personally considers to be consistent, to suggest that we practice reconciliation, rest, and consolation.” This writing process has continued and is also

visible in her most recent collection My Heart Aches (2013). It is impossible to deny that the poems in this book are real examples of a wide range of voices, from the lyrical ones raised in the postwar ruins to the delicately low ones audible in the twenty-first century—voices that contain the numerous yet harmonious layers of sustainability and homogeneity. In this collection, Kim sings elegantly and piously of how those who exist, in their deep and pitiful lives, depend on and compete against each other through the words and glances they exchange. U ltimately the theme that K im has sung throughout the years is unique in that eros and agape barely manage not to let go of each other’s hand. Whether it is a human lover or God, the object of love in Kim’s poems is not an impassionate or unconscious object, but a living entity that shares the same level of self-consciousness as the poet herself. Therefore, the love that we experience in Kim’s poetry is not autoregressive, but shows the characteristics of reciprocal communication with others. As such, the process that affirms love continues to sparkle without fail in the world of her poetry, and there is a clear goal of obtaining ultimate salvation through that love. Kim Nam Jo has lived by the love bestowed on her from her god, has written poetry with the belief that all poems are songs of love, and writes new poems based on her life and faith. In the end her poems are graceful hymns of pious love and salvation that, in the history of Korean literature, have further deepened the classical domain of reaching salvation through a form of articulation that combines the empirical and the poetic. by Yoo Sungho

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Featured Writer Kim Nam Jo

The Twentieth Century I loved the Twentieth Century. I met my life as my betrothed and through my life-studies (fated to begin most miserably on fields of war and death) I was awakened to pure and passionate yearning and the nobility of life.

Rain, Sky, Wind, Port Kim Nam Jo Translated by Hillel Schwartz and Sunny Jung Codhill Press, 2014, 94 pp. ISBN 9781930337763

I loved the Twentieth Century. I loved its shuddering, suffering, and trembling hope. I loved the sublime loneliness of my contemporaries, those talented people, distant as stars and quite as beautiful, with their superabundant civilizations and deeply thoughtful intellectual traditions. I felt greatly honored to be graced by their light. I loved the Twentieth Century. I loved its aesthetics of heart-numbing contrition, its shame and the ache of its wounds and ah, its floods of bitter grief: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Yes, I did wrong, I did wrong.â&#x20AC;? I ever so much loved the Twentieth Century whose lessons and blood, now transfused into a new millennium, reverberate through the deepest of nerves. p. 49 Visit www.list.or.kr to watch a reading of this work by the author (with English subtitles).

Visit www.list.or.kr to listen to readings of the poems published in this volume.

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Selected Poems

Trees and Shadows Trees and shadows. Trees look down upon shadows. Shadows look up toward trees. Even as night settles, even as rain descends shadows are there. Trees know it. p. 32 Visit www.list.or.kr to watch a reading of this work by the author (with English subtitles).

My Words My words unfortunately are not dangerous. None today was shocked by them nor suffered great pain. My words ask me, at sixty and more, to wait, sealed in time, until each grape becomes wine. If a person cannot express everything, (so my words tell me) silence suffices, and words themselves may bow under the lightest of winds, which is most fortunate. p. 74 Roh Tae Woong, Snowy Day, 50 x 72.7 cm

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Featured Writer Kim Nam Jo

To the Mountains and the Trees

The mountains couldn’t come to me so I went to the mountains. The trees couldn’t come to me so I went and stood by them. That’s the story of how I befriended the mountains and trees. I left the mountains behind. I left the trees behind. They’re where they belong, and I’m like the wind. That’s the story of how I said good-bye to the mountains and trees. p. 28

Kim Sun Doo, To the Mountains and the Trees, 96 x 65 cm

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Selected Poems

Songs of Solomon 4

Loneliness from the deepest roots to the crown of the head. O, I must share only with thee that from its origins in the east to its vanishing beyond the rim of the west, the seam that runs endlessly along the heavens as they revolve and revolve returns ever to this heart. p. 79

Chung IL, Songs of Solomon 4, 72.5 x 40 cm

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Featured Writer Kim Nam Jo

Wind The wind is blowing. Where the wind blows to the end of the world I would follow.

Selected Poems of Kim Namjo Kim Nam Jo Translated by David R. McCann and Hyunjae Yee Sallee Cornell East Asia Series, 1993, 140 pp. ISBN 0939657058

Sunlight: you nourish the soft-skinned fruit, but it is the wind that whispers round the borders of the orchard, almost but not quite the lonely whistler. Those without a place to hold them in this life may have been the winds of a previous life. Wearing coat and hat, the winds may have come to visit. Fond of the wind, I would go as the winds go. They go together, and though they part, one goes ahead and waits. That is what I like best in the winds. When the wind blows I would go with it. Where it goes, far and far away I would be its bride. pp. 80 - 81

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Selected Poems

Life Chung IL, Resplendent Scenery, 40.09 x 53 cm

Life comes with its cold body. The winter barley growing stubbornly from the naked, frozen ground, Mother of life, even she came with her cold body from a distant place. And truth, shattered, also comes, burning in fire. Tossed aside, bleeding, it comes. Behold the winter trees that groom themselves with the razor of cold. See the leaves that fall down and are called away to the providence of future days, and the branch, charged with electricity, that turns to flint. A person who does not know how to love cracked or misshaped things is not a friend One who cannot kiss the scarred and injured skin is not a friend. Life comes with its cold body. Passing the twelfth portal of cold, in the large flakes of snow falling down white, it comes. pp. 76 - 77

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Featured Writer Kim Nam Jo

The Winter Sea

I went out to the winter sea, but the birds of unknown species, those I longed to see, had died and were gone. I tried to think of you, but in the biting sea wind the truth itself turned to tears and froze. The flames of emptiness set fire to furrows on the water.

Roh Tae Woong, The Winter Sea, 72.7 x 50 cm

Time as always is what teaches me. I stood by the winter sea, nodding. The days remaining may be few, but I wish for the soul in which the door to the even more heated prayer is opened after my prayer. The days remaining may be few, but I have gone to the winter sea, I have seen where the waters of bitter endurance form the pillar of the oceanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s deep. pp. 36 - 37

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Translated Works

Windtaufe

ПЕСНИ СЕГОДНЯШНЕГО И ЗАВТРАШНЕГО ДНЯ

Kim Nam Jo Translated by Sophia T. Seo Horlemann, 1996, 100 pp. ISBN 9783895020445

Kim Nam Jo Translated by Lee N. Gregory Hyperion, 2012, 128 pp. ISBN 9785893321951

美しい人びと: 金南祚掌篇集

風の洗礼

Kim Nam Jo Translated by Kono Eiji and Takano Ai Kashinsya, 2012, 244 pp. ISBN 9784760219971

Kim Nam Jo Translated by Kang Jeong-Jung Kashinsya, 1995, 125 pp. ISBN 9784760213511

神のランプ : 金南祚選詩集

Antología poética Kim Nam Jo Translated by Kwon Eunhee and Yoon Junesick Editorial Verbum, 2003, 138 pp. ISBN 8479622695

Kim Nam Jo Translated by Ko Jung-Ae and Honda Hisashi Kashinsya, 2006, 156 pp. ISBN 9784760218622

Vol.27 Spring 2015 31

Special Section Artist Novels

Korean Künstlerroman:

Artist Novels Overview The Aesthetics and Modernity of Artist Novels

First Wave Authors (1920s - 1960s) 36

Discovering the Autonomy of Inner Consciousness

Excerpt: “A Day in the Life of Kubo the Novelist”

Excerpt: Seopyeonje: The Southerners’ Songs

Second Wave Authors (1970s - 1980s) 42

The Significance of Artistic Salvation

Excerpt: “The Golden Phoenix”

Third Wave Authors (1990s - Present) 48

The Artist in Post-1990s Korean Literature

Excerpt: The Vegetarian

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Overview

Editor's Note

In this section, we examine the lives of Korean writers and the nature of their works by sorting them into three generations: the first wave from the 1920s to the 1960s, the second wave from the 1970s to the 1980s, and the third wave from the 1990s to the present.

The Aesthetics and Modernity of Korean Künstlerroman: Artist Novels A

r tist novels refer to fiction in which the artist’s journey forms the main part of the narrative. They may be considered a subgenre of the Bildungsroman or “intellectual” novel in their treatment of the artist’s inner conflict and growth as a character. Novels about writers, in particular, have always formed a core part of the artist novel genre in their autobiographical depiction of the artist’s world. The archetype of the genre in Western literature concerns the artist’s struggle between reality and the artistic ideal, depicting the growth of the artist thereof. Since modern times, artists have had to contend with feelings of inadequacy, self-loathing, and exclusion in the struggle between their artistic desires and the demands of everyday life. In the process of overcoming these obstacles, the protagonist comes to terms with how an artist may exist as a member of society, and thereby comes closer to the question of what art is in itself. The Korean prototype of the artist novel can be

traced back to a handful of short stories published in the early 1920s in literary magazines such as Creation, White Tide, and Wasteland. Stories about artists or aspiring artists revealed a budding tendency to favor aestheticism and escapism, while stories questioning the meaning of art itself also began to appear. As the 1920s were lean times for most Korean artists and writers, the humdrum reality and struggle of the intelligentsia was an oft-depicted subject. Most importantly, these early artist novels show writers questioning the role of art and the artist in the modern world, or pondering the terms and conditions of modernity in art. Kim Dong-in’s “Sonata Appassionato” (1930) is a typical example of the early modern artist novel in Korea. The story revolves around genius composer Baek Seong-su, who resorts to arson, necrophilia, and murder to boost his creative inspiration, and the music critic who seeks to have him committed to a mental hospital so he may avoid being tried and

Vol.27 Spring 2015 33

Special Section Artist Novels

executed as a criminal. The music critic’s reasoning that it would be a sin to execute an artistic genius according to laws written for mere mortals is a gross exaggeration of the Romantic ideal of “genius.” For Kim Dong-in, the concept of artist-as-genius elevates the artist to an absolute being. Depicting lunacy as the spring of creativity only adds to the mystique of this type of artist. A key distinction in modern art is the recognition that art and artists are autonomous from the values of mainstream society. In Kim’s case, however, the autonomy of art becomes an end in itself, an example of enlightenment that exists in a rarified, privileged sphere of its own. Pak Taewon’s “A Day in the Life of Kubo the Novelist” (1934) is a classic example of an autobiographical artist novel. A day in the life of the eponymous Kubo forms the basis of this novella. Told through the eyes of Kubo as he meanders about Gyeongseong (colonial Seoul), the reader takes in such modern spaces as the bustling streets, the tram, coffeehouses, and Gyeongseong Station. The narrative camera pans over all the spaces where Kubo tries and fails to find happiness, eventually dragging himself back home to his mother’s domain. Kubo the writer is faced with the choice of continuing his lonely perambulations of the city or giving in to the demands of everyday life. Stuck in between the modernity of giving in to worldly, everyday concerns, and the aesthetic, avant-garde modernity of refusing to do so, he struggles to find himself. Experimental as this piece is, Kubo’s adventures never lead him in the direction of confronting the contradictions inherent to

34 _list : Books from Korea

a colonial society. Unlike the traditional Korean literati, the modern writer confronts the dual task of rejecting the tyrannical capitalist order while still finding ways to integrate within its sphere. Moving from the spectacle of modern urbanity and anonymous masses back to his physical and inner self, the roaming eye of Kubo heralds a new kind of sensibility. Yi Chong-jun’s “The Wounded” (1966) poses psychopathological questions on trauma and deviance. The protagonists are two brothers, the elder a doctor who writes, and the younger an artist. The doctor chooses to face his psychological trauma through writing, while the artist vicariously experiences pain by stealing looks at his older brother’s work. The guilt of one aware of the source of his trauma, and the weakness of one professing to not have any trauma at all, are both referenced as “wounds,” hence the title. Featuring a story within the story, this device is significant in two ways: it shows the younger brother’s vicarious experience of his older brother’s wounds while questioning the nature of fiction writing itself. As an artist novel, "The Wounded" stands out in that rather than following the self-consciousness of the writer protagonist, it studies him from an objective point of view. The dilemma here is twofold: exploring the collective consciousness of the young, post-April 1960 student movement generation of writers, and the issue of how to verbalize this sort of introspection. Yi Chong-jun’s questioning of the literary form itself elevates this story from simply being another artistic response to the oppression of society to being the

Overview

“ Unlike the traditional Korean literati, the modern writer confronts the dual task of rejecting the tyrannical capitalist order while still finding ways to integrate within its sphere.”

modern culmination of the artist novel. The artist novel continued to diversify in the 1960s. Choi In-hun’s “A Day in the Life of Kubo the Novelist” (1969) is a parody of Pak Taewon’s identically titled story. Choi In-hun emphasizes the meta-level of this work by inserting musings on writing and incorporating dreamlike, fantastical elements as well as the writer-protagonist’s observations of the corporeal world. The writer’s ideas on life and literature and the inner life of the intellectual are on constant display. Choi expands upon Pak's original thesis by questioning what role artists and literature must play in a divided Korea. Yi Mun-yol’s “The Golden Phoenix” (1981) is an exploration of the meaning of art as seen through the clash of a master and his disciple over artistic differences. The protagonist, born with a natural gift for calligraphy, rebels at his teacher’s idea that mastery of the art form is only possible through mastery of the self. The two reconcile when the master finally acknowledges the talent and skill of his pupil. The golden phoenix that appears in the bonfire the protagonist has made of his life’s work before dying may be interpreted in various ways. It could be seen as a final acceptance of his master’s view of art as a mastery of the self, or also as the ultimate act of aestheticism. Whichever the case, this is a classically written treatise on the Asian aesthetic of art. Han K ang ’s “Mongolian Mark” (2005) is a contemporary update in keeping with Kim Dongin’s brand of aestheticist artist novel. A video artist is

equal parts inspired and aroused by the “Mongolian” birthmark on his sister-in-law’s buttocks, which he cannot stop fantasizing about. This story falls within Kim Dong-in’s view of art in that the artistic impulse is presented as being above conventional morality. The Mongolian mark symbolizes the primeval beauty of the body—the vessel of life and death—as well as shows how the desire towards pure art can collide with sexual desire. The protagonist of this story, however, is not a genius, and fails to find anyone to condone his actions. Unlike the early modern artist, this video artist’s aestheticism is not celebrated as enlightenment. Failure to distinguish between lust for his sister-in-law and artistic desire marks him as a failed artist rather than as a genius. The artist novel in Korea combines questions about life in the modern era and questions about art itself. It is a reflective, introspective form that showcases the aesthetics and modernity of Korean literature. As seen in the history of this genre in Korea, the question of what the artist or art means in the modern world directly informs its form and aesthetics. In the strongly realist tradition of Korean literature, the artist novel’s exploration of aesthetics stands out as an outlet of introspective expression. by Lee Kwang-ho Literary Critic and Professor of Creative Writing Seoul Institute of the Arts

Vol.27 Spring 2015 35

Special Section Artist Novels

First Wave Authors (1920s - 1960s)

Discovering the Autonomy of Inner Consciousness A

variety of depictions of artists can regularly be found in modern Korean novels whose themes and subjects show a distinct concern for aesthetic matters. This indicates a strong sense of what art and artists mean to such writers. The ways in which this sense is manifested, however, differs from generation to generation. The first generation to ride the wave of artist novels include Kim Dong-in, Hyun Jin-geon, Pak Taewon, Choi In-hun, Joo In-seok (Joo is actually a third wave author but is discussed with first wave authors here because of his association with Pak Taewon and Choi In-hun), Chung Han-Sook, and Yi Chong-jun. Kim Dong-in, one of the first modern Korean writers to focus on artistry and aestheticism in literature is a firm believer in art for art’s sake. For him, art is a life formed by the artist that the artist must then be able to subjugate through an intense struggle. “Tale of a Mad Painter” (1935) and “Sonata Appassionato” (1930) are two excellent examples of Kim's sensibilities. “Tale of a Mad Painter” is the story of Solgeo, an artist living in the early Joseon period, who pursues a vision of absolute beauty that eventually causes him to descend into madness. The artist dreams of painting the portrait of the most beautiful woman in the world, but when he begins to realize that his ideal does not exist, he loses his mind and wanders the world aimlessly until he dies. The fanatical pursuit of beauty and consequent tragedy depicted in Kim’s story fall short of literary sophistication in some ways, but Kim does succeed somewhat in stating his literary

36 _list : Books from Korea

position as a staunch aestheticist. The same aesthetic applies to Kim’s other artist novel, “Sonata Appassionato.” The protagonist Baek Seong-su is a genius composer following in the footsteps of his equally brilliant father. Deranged by trauma, Baek commits arson, necrophilia, and murder in his ruthless quest for artistic inspiration. Eventually he is inspired by the hypnotic flames of a fire he set, and composes his masterpiece, “Sonata Appassionato.” This is an even more intense statement of Kim’s aestheticist belief that beauty comes before all concerns of morality or conventional ethics. Hyun Jin-geon, a contemporary of Kim Dong-in credited with establishing the short story aesthetic in Korean literature, presents his artistic views in the artist novel The Shadowless Pagoda (1938). This novel portrays Asadal, a sculptor from the Baekje kingdom. Asadal is charged with creating a stone pagoda in what is to be a monumental new temple. He gives himself completely to the task, and his wife Asanyeo, knowing her husband better than anyone, waits patiently for the pagoda to be finished. Her husband has told her to look for the shadow the finished pagoda will cast on a pond, and so she waits. When the shadow never appears, she throws herself into the pond and drowns. Ironically, it is her death that finally leads to the completion of the pagoda. This is why the pagoda, officially named Seokgatap, is colloquially known as Muyeongtap (the shadowless pagoda). Through this fictionalization of how Seokgatap gained its other name and the artistry of the man who built it, Hyun ponders the meaning of

First Wave Authors

art and what an artist’s life should be. Pak Taewon’s “A Day in the Life of Kubo the Novelist” (1934) is a unique example of the genre, not because the author’s chosen writer-as-protagonist is so unusual, but because the process of writing is connected with the inner consciousness of the protagonist. The ebb and flow of the writer’s selfconsciousness as he goes about his day sets the narrative direction, neatly blending with the author’s experimentation. The author’s use of internalization and stream-of-consciousness to depict the artist state of mind gives this story its novelty and modern feel. The story’s interest also draws from the apparently timeless attraction of its protagonist, Kubo. The character of Kubo has been revived by two authors, Choi In-hun and Joo In-seok. Choi In-hun’s “A Day in the Life of Kubo the Novelist” follows Pak’s original closely in that it too features an intellectual protagonist , where the character ’s ever yd ay reflections determine the narrative, and because of its stylistic departure from conventional narrative techniques. Choi In-hun’s original, however, is a critical appropriation that goes beyond stream-ofconsciousness to emphasize the protagonist’s negative view of society and the will to change it. Joo In-seok’s “A Day in the Life of Kubo the Novelist” continues the introspective tradition of Pak Taewon and Choi In-hun while earnestly questioning the meaning of the novel and the novelist. In asking what the role of the writer is in an age of corruption and absurdity, the work also explores the possibilities of metafiction. Chung Han-Sook’s “The Golden Hall Murals” (1955) and “Seal Impressions of the House of Tianhuang” (1955) are artist novels that bring a fresh point of view to the traditional arts. “The Golden Hall Murals” follows the life of Damjing, a Buddhist monk and artist who lived in the ancient Goguryeo kingdom. The author depicts him as a character torn between patriotism and artistic vision, the secular world and his Buddhist faith, before sublimating it all through the force of his will. In “Seal Impressions of the House of Tianhuang,” featuring a master seal carver, Chung questions the meaning of art and traditional values in a hopelessly materialistic world. The

“ Deranged by trauma, Baek commits arson, necrophilia, and murder in his ruthless quest for artistic inspiration.”

author’s appreciation of classical beauty is evident in both choice of subject and style, a perfect marriage highlighting yet another facet of the artist novel. Yi Chong-jun is one of the last true craftsmen of this age. Among his contemporaries, few have pursued the subject of art and the artist with such consistency and candor. Traditional artisans and modern artists, Yi’s characters are all locked in a battle for artistic perfection. He has explored the lives of acrobats, falconers, pansori singers, potters, archers, photographers, and painters, pondering the existence of humanity and what writing means to him along the way. Seopyeonje: The Southerners’ Songs (1976) is a profound study of the emotional qualities of pansori— particularly the interplay of sorrow and joy. The sensibility and artistic style depicted in this work hails from a distinctly Korean world. “The Doors of Time” (1982), as the title suggests, uses the medium of time to explore art and the human condition. Photography is the medium of choice here, so the camera takes the place of gesture or speech, dominating and defining the author’s aesthetic. In the end, however, the author returns to the corporeal world. This shows that his view of man, history, and art is phenomenal rather than empirical or material. Phenomena being based on the autonomy of human consciousness, the author’s view of man, history, and art function on the basis of this liberated space. by Yi Jae-bok Professor of Korean Literature Head of the Institute of Future Culture Studies Hanyang University

Vol.27 Spring 2015 37

Special Section Artist Novels

Short Story

“A Day in the Life of Kubo the Novelist”

Pak Taewon Translated by Sunyoung Park with Jefferson J.A. Gattrall and Kevin O’Rourke ASIA Publishers, 2015, 220 pp. ISBN 9791156620709

After a While Kubo decided to walk on. The scorching midsummer sun on his bare head makes him dizzy. He can’t stand here like this. Neurasthenia. Of course, it’s not just his nerves. With this head, with this body, what will I ever accomplish? Kubo feels somewhat threatened by the energetic body and resilient gait of a virile man just passing. Suddenly he regrets having read The Tale of Chunhyang1 at the age of nine—he had to hide from the watchful eyes of the adults in the family. After a visit with his mother to one of their relatives, Kubo thought, he, too, like them, wanted to read storybooks. But it was forbidden at home. Kubo consulted a housemaid. She told him about a rental agency that had all kinds of books and lent them for one wŏn a volume, no more. But you’ll get a scolding. . . . And then, she muttered to herself, “For sheer fun nothing beats The Tale of Chunhyang.” A coin and the lid of a copper bowl were the price of his first storybook seventeen years ago, which was perhaps the beginning of everything that followed, as well as all that is to come. The storybooks he read! The novels he spent his nights with! Kubo’s health must have suffered irreparable damage in his boyhood. . . . Constipation. Irregular urination. Fatigue. Ennui. Headache. Heavy-headedness. Syncope. Dr. Morida Masao’s training therapy. . . . Whatever his illness is, T’aep’yŏngt’ong street, humble, no. . . but barren and cluttered, darkens Kubo’s mind. While thinking of how to drive those dirty junkmen off the streets, he suddenly remembers how Sŏhae2 papered his ceiling

Visit www.list.or.kr to listen to a reading of the excerpt.

38 _list : Books from Korea

Ch’unhyangjŏn, a Korean folktale from the eighteenth century, tells a love story of two teenagers, Ch’unhyang, the fifteen-year-old daughter of a gisaeng and an aristocrat Mongnyong, the son of the local magistrate. After they secretly become engaged, defying a conventional ban on marriage between members of different social classes, Mongnyong moves back to Seoul with his family. Left alone, Ch’unhyang is subjected to the persecution of the new magistrate, who is charmed by her beauty. In the end, she is rewarded for her brave struggle to preserve her chastity.

Excerpt First Wave Authors

Korean Künstlerroman:

Artist Novels to hide its loud patterns. Another unmistakable case of nervous exhaustion. A grin forms on Kubo’s lips. He recalls Sŏhae’s horselaugh. Come to think of it, that, too, was a hollow, lonely sound. Kubo remembers he hasn’t read a single page of Scarlet Flame, a book his late friend gave him, and he feels pangs of regret. It’s not just Sŏhae’s work that he has not read. Already he’s three years behind in his reading. When Kubo became aware of the dearth of his knowledge, he was dumbfounded. A young man passed suddenly into Kubo’s line of sight. He came from the direction in which Kubo is walking. He seems familiar. Someone Kubo should definitely recognize. Finally, the distance between the two is reduced to less than six feet. Kubo sees in the man’s face one of his old childhood buddies. The good old days. A good old friend. They haven’t seen each other since elementary school. Kubo even manages to extract the name of his friend from memory. His old friend has had a hard life. He looks so shabby in his ramie overcoat, white rubber shoes, and straw hat—the hat is the only new thing on him. Kubo hesitates. Should I pass without noticing him? The old friend seems to have clearly recognized him, and he seems to be afraid of Kubo noticing him. At the last moment, just as the two are passing each other, Kubo musters his courage. “Long time no see, Mr. Yu.” His friend blushes. “Yeah, it’s been a while.” “Have you been in Seoul all this time?” “Yes.” “Where have you been hiding?” Kubo manages to say no more than this. He feels depressed and wishes he could add something more. “Excuse me,” his friend says and goes on his way. Kubo stands a little longer, then resumes his walk, head low, hopelessly fending off tears.

“ Kubo hesitates. Should I pass without noticing him? The old friend seems to have clearly recognized him.”

A Little joy is what Kubo decides to look for. For this purpose he decides to stroll through Namdaemun market. All he finds are a few baggage carriers squatting listlessly on both sides of the path, no wind blowing in. Kubo feels lonely. He wants to go where there are people, where the crowds are lively. He sees Kyŏngsŏng Station ahead. There’s certainly life there. The scent and feel of the ancient capital city. It’s only proper that an urban novelist should be well acquainted with the gates of the city. But of course such professional conscientiousness isn’t what’s important. Kubo would be satisfied if he could escape his loneliness among the crowd in the third-class waiting room. Yet that is just where loneliness dwells. The place is so packed with people that Kubo can’t even find a seat to squeeze into, and yet there’s no human warmth. These people are preoccupied with their own affairs. They do not exchange a word with the people sitting next to them, and should they happen to say something to each other, it’s only to check the train schedule or something similar. They never ask anyone other than their travel companions to watch their luggage while they run to the restroom. Their distrustful eyes look weary and pathetic.

Ch’oe Haksong (1901–1932), whose pen name was Sŏhae, was a representative writer of Korean proletarian literature.

Vol.27 Spring 2015 39

Special Section Artist Novels

Novel

Seopyeonje: The Southerners’ Songs

Yi Chung-jun Translated by Ok Young Kim Chang Peter Owen Publishers, 2011, 170 pp. ISBN 9780720613599 Cover photograph © Tae-Heung Films Co., Ltd., 1993

Visit www.list.or.kr to listen to a reading of the excerpt.

40 _list : Books from Korea

hen the singer had concluded another tan-ga with considerable effort, the traveller made a request. ‘I suppose you are ready for a real song, now that you have warmed up with your tan-ga. How about Chunhyang-ga or Sim Cheong-ga—anything your heart desires, any passage from them—I mean?’ He was now requesting her to sing pansori. However, she was already exhausted—but not from singing songs in preparation for the pansori; she no longer cared whether she had any strength left to go on. As she had become aware that the guest’s breathing was growing increasingly harsh as he listened, she felt a strange flash of foreboding in her sightless eyes, and finally it immobilized all her movements. ‘You have such a deep desire for songs?’ No answer came from the man. He flinched, suspecting she had read his mind. He recovered himself and fixed his sight on her. It was obvious that she did not wish to continue; she needed to rest her voice. ‘I wonder why you have come to enjoy listening to songs so much. I have never met a lover of pansori who does not have a reason for becoming one.’ The singer spoke with conviction. ‘What do you mean by “a reason”?’ He hesitated for a moment, then took a deep breath, struggling to speak. Finally, he decided what he should say. ‘If you ask why I have become so obsessed with songs, there is something in my life that you might think is the cause of it.’ His expression remained withdrawn. When he spoke again, it was in a hollow voice. ‘Yes, there is a reason. I am over forty now and looking wretched. I have been everywhere in this region hoping to find songs. But tonight, meeting your voice this way, I know that all the days of wandering were worth while. I have no regrets.’ ‘My humble songs do not deserve to be heard,’ the singer demurred. A hint of a smile surfaced on his lips as he shook his head. ‘Don’t deny it. There is something delightful and precious in your voice, something I value and cherish above anything I have ever known in my life. I feel that it is for this very dear thing—more than for the songs—that I have searched in vain all my life.’

Excerpt First Wave Authors

Korean Künstlerroman:

Artist Novels ‘What is it? What is so very precious and valuable to you?’ She was becoming increasingly agitated and anxious. ‘If you care to listen, I will tell you.’ He began. It was the same story he had recounted years before to the proprietress of Song Pass Tavern in Boseong after he had listened to her songs all through the night. It was the remembrance of a flaming summer sun, a ball of fire that was lost with his childhood and beginning to fade from his memory. Anywhere, anytime he listened to a pansori song, the traveller experienced the heat of that sun beating down on him, the sun of his fate scorching his face and lashes. The man concluded his story calmly, as if it belonged to someone else. ‘My mother died when a bloody lump of flesh in the shape of an infant dropped from her womb, and my stepfather, the songman, could no longer remain in the village. He buried the infant’s mother and left the village with the infant.’ The boy did not believe the songman’s face was the face of the songs, but the flaming sun remained in his consciousness as the true face of the songs. A suffering, pain-ridden face though it was, he could not live a day without it—without feeling its burning heat, his body and soul wasted away. It was in search of this sun of his fate that he had wandered half his life. ‘I needn’t go on telling you what happened to me after that time. You can well imagine the rest. In any event, I have been drifting ever since. Yet I am unable to rid myself of the miserable memory of my childhood. I go from place to place, a god-forsaken beggar of songs. Whenever I listen to pansori singing an image surfaces in my mind of the breaking ocean waves I watched as a child from the soya-bean patch, glistening like fish scales, and I can feel the wind on my face from the deep forest, that cool breeze rising after a short summer rain, washing away the sultry heat. And, more significantly, I see once again the same scorching summer sun that hovered over me with such a horrific intensity that it singed my eyelashes. I tell you now. What I mean is that in your song I meet that sun. Never have I encountered a song that holds a sun as powerful as yours. Now you must understand

why I have been so drawn to them.’ Even after he had finished his story his face remained twisted in pain like a man suffering in the sun’s intense heat. The woman’s expression had betrayed no sign of the turmoil in her mind until the traveller’s story came to an end. She sat immobile, desolate, her sightless eyes fixed on the void, her figure bent, exhausted and lifeless like a withered roadside tree under the summer sun, just as when she would come outside and crouch under the tavern’s awning and, turning her empty gaze towards nothing in particular, endlessly wait for something. When the guest had concluded his story the glimmer of a vague foreshadowing that had spun about in her sightless eyes had disappeared completely, leaving no trace. ‘Very well, then, I’ll let you listen to me sing all night.’ She spoke in an effort to soothe him. She adjusted her sitting position and then silently pushed towards him the drum and the drumstick she had been holding against her chest, an indication that if he wanted to listen to her songs he must be willing to accompany her. This was her habit when her customers asked her to sing, and she always trusted their hands. The man seemed to shrink away from her, his eyes clearly showing confusion as he looked at the instruments thrust at him. But her blank eyes pursued him, allowing him no alternative but to accept her terms. ‘I haven’t touched the drum for so long. I wonder whether my accompaniment can match your songs.’ But he realized he could not resist her gesture and drew the instruments slowly to him. And so began the duet of the blind woman and the traveller which promised to last the whole night. pp. 53 - 58

Vol.27 Spring 2015 41

Special Section Artist Novels

Second Wave Authors (1970s - 1980s)

The Significance of Artistic Salvation A

r t i s t n o v e l s s h a re c h a ra c t e r i s t i c s w i t h Bildungsroman or coming-of-age stories in their treatment of an artist’s growth to maturity. According to scholar Cho Nam-hyun, the artist novel refers to “any work of fiction whose main plot concerns events related to artistic acts.” Artist novels in Korean literature date back to the 1920s. Works penned by authors such as Kim Dong-in, Hyun Jin-geon, Pak Taewon, and Yi Sang depict the mental struggle of artists coping with the dark reality of colonial-era Korea. Independence and division of the country followed, with writers such as Jung Hansuk, Yi Chong-jun, and Choi In-hun picking up the baton of artist novelists, followed by such writers as Kim Seungok, Han Sungwon, Lee Ze-ha, Yu Ik-seo, Yi Mun-yol, Lee Oisoo, So Young-en, Kang Sok-kyong, and Kim Seung-hee. Artist novels in the 1970s and 80s were greatly influenced by Korea’s contemporaneous industrialization and urbanization. Out of these, works by Han Sung-won, Lee Ze-ha, Yu Ik-seo, Yi Mun-yol, and Kang Sok-kyong stand out in their direct treatment of the artist’s craft. Han Sung-won’s Love, Sing Your Heart Out (2014) is a powerful example of the genre. Set against the seaside of Jeolla Province region, it draws freely upon local mannerisms and lore, featuring a cast of hardbitten survivors. Inspired by the life of pansori singer Im Bang-ul, the novel focuses on the healing power of song in times of hardship and weariness. Han describes Im Bang-ul’s artistic journey in minute detail, from his first love to his encounters with the greatest singers

42 _list : Books from Korea

of the time. The author’s characteristic focus on the aesthetics of han (unresolved sadness and resentment) recalls one of his earlier works, “Arirang Ballad” (1977), which connected the doleful strains of the Korean folk song Arirang with Korean history. Lee Ze-ha’s artist novels feature offbeat, grotesque characters not often seen in Korean literature. His characters are at war with reality, showing their selfconsciousness and transcendental romanticism. Thanks to the antics of these characters and his frequent use of fantastic symbolism, Lee’s work has been dubbed by some as “fantastic realism.” An oft-cited example of an artist novel is his “A Short Biography of Yuja” (1969) which depicts the artist’s anger and resistance against a corrupt world. The story looks back upon the turbulent life of artist Nam Yu-ja up to her premature death at the age of 28. The world of art is represented as everything pure and good standing up against the corruption and injustice of reality. The same author’s “A Wanderer Never Stops on the Road” (1985)—an artist novel in a broader sense— deals with the dormant bohemian, artistic yearnings of the everyman. The protagonist who drifts off after his wife’s death represents the desire of modern man to transcend reality. Yu Ik-seo’s Minkkot Sori (1989) also focuses on a pansori artist. It belongs to the author’s pansori trilogy, beginning with Saenam Sori (1981), followed by Minkkot Sori and finally Sori Kkot (2009). Out of these, Minkkot Sori follows the life of daegeum (Korean flute) player Jeong Myeong-jae and his quest for artistic

Second Wave Authors

freedom. The protagonist, born with one eye and disfigured by polio, battles his handicaps in pursuit of playing the daegeum. Sori Kkot, the last of the trilogy, is an ambitious study of the entire history of traditional Korean music. It traces the birth of pansori back to its origins, a mixture of influences ranging from oral literature to Namsadang nori (a traditional Korean circus) to muga (shamanistic singing). One of the most influential writers credited with popularizing the genre is Yi Mun-yol. Art is a form of transcending reality in Yi’s work, with its emphasis on aestheticism and the romantic outsider. Resignation is his response to the pressure of Korea’s ideologically divided society. His artists are deviant individuals trying to break away from the mores or customs of society. Artistic motifs in his work manifest themselves in the form of coming-of-age stories such as The Son of Man, A Portrait of Youthful Days (1981), “The Golden Phoenix” (1981), and The Poet (1991). Out of these, “The Golden Phoenix” is a particularly intense work that pits the artistic approaches of its two main characters Sokdam and Kojuk against each other. The golden phoenix, a mythical bird visible only to those who have reached true enlightenment, symbolizes the highest echelons of art. At the end of a long and lonely quest in search of a pure beauty that eluded even his teacher Sokdam, Kojuk sees the golden phoenix. Sokdam stands for the traditional, sublimated aesthetic, while Kojuk stands for a sensual aesthetic firmly rooted in the real world. Combining his own aesthetic with his teacher’s, Kojuk finally succeeds in attaining the highest level of art. Kang Sok-kyong’s interest in artistic salvation is well worth comparing with the works of Choi Inhun, Kim Seungok, Yi Chong-jun, and Yi Mun-yol. Kang's work is also distinctive for her strong female protagonists, often intellectuals. In her work, female intellectuals turn to spiritualism in response to life’s absurdities and alienation. The images of darkness and closed rooms in Kang’s early work, symbolizing closed spaces, are expanded into the literally limitless spaces of open skies and outer space in her later works. The Valley Nearby (1989), All Stars in the World Rise on Lhasa (1996), and The Staircase Inside Me (1999) all feature

“ The world of art is represented as everything pure and good standing up against the corruption and injustice of reality.”

artist characters who dream of transcendence. The Valley Nearby focuses on the life of a sculptor in a quiet homage to those who choose to walk the difficult path of not compromising their art in the face of worldly temptation. As can be seen in this novel, Kang’s characters do not give in to social mores or taboos easily. Self-styled outsiders, their voices perfectly reflect that of the author’s. As we’ve seen, artist novels revel in the basic desire to break away from the conditions of life that threaten a free existence. The artist protagonist of these works freely traverse reality and fantasy in their quest for self-discovery. Reading these works provides us with the opportunity to reflect upon the role of art as a mental weapon to cope with the absurdities of life. by Baek Jiyeon Literary Critic

Vol.27 Spring 2015 43

Special Section Artist Novels

Short Story

“The Golden Phoenix”

Yi Mun-yol, Yi Mun-ku, Ch’oe Yun, et al. Translated by Suh Ji-moon Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998, 297 pp. ISBN 0894108824

hen Kojuk thought of his childhood, he could not help recalling the day he was thrown into the life that became his. How many decades ago was it? Anyway, he was about ten when he was led by his uncle to Sŏkdam’s old house. .... The teacher was only just forty when they first met, but he already looked old and worn out by poverty. “What can I do? I have only you to thrust this burden on. If I weren’t leaving this country, I’d take the boy with me wherever I drift to and feed him when I can, but . . . ” His uncle, who had decided to go to Shanghai, began. “I can’t ask my wife’s family to take in another burden on top of my sick wife. Please let me leave him with you. He is my older brother’s only child.” (p. 13) .... Sŏkdam, who was an old friend of Kojuk’s uncle from childhood and studied under the same teacher, was a descendant of a great Confucian scholar of the Yŏngnam (the present Kyŏngsang Province) area. He was often listed as one of the three great calligrapherpainters of the late Yi Dynasty for his bold and soulstirring calligraphy and sublime brush painting. But, like the great Ch’usa, whom Sŏkdam’s teacher Ch’un’gang revered all his life, he was more a scholar than an artist. (p. 14) Perhaps from some premonition, Sŏkdam always treated Kojuk coldly and guardedly. . . . There must have been some deep-seated problem other than the financial one, for the teacher’s attitude did not change in the least even after Kojuk grew up and was as good as supporting the teacher’s family by working on the teacher’s farm. It must have been for a very special reason that Sŏkdam made Kojuk read The Minor Learning over and over for many years, and made him attend a primary school when he was thirteen and study ‘new’ subjects instead of calligraphy and painting. (pp. 15 - 16) .... Translator

Visit www.list.or.kr to listen to a reading of the excerpt.

44 _list : Books from Korea

Kojuk reveres his teacher for his lofty, austere

character but is repelled by his penurious life. Sŏkdam suspects Kojuk of worldly tendencies and weakness before

Excerpt Second Wave Authors

Korean Künstlerroman:

Artist Novels temptation, which in Sŏkdam’s eyes disqualifies Kojuk as a seeker who follows the Way in calligraphy, so he is extremely reluctant to admit Kojuk as his disciple. While Kojuk admires what his teacher has attained, he strives towards his own artistic goals; hence, the teacher-disciple conflict.

Was it really an evil fate that brought Sŏkdam and him together? Even after Kojuk was allowed to study calligraphy under him, their relationship continued to be a strained one. Sŏkdam was chary of giving instruction, so chary that it remained a bitterness in Kojuk’s heart well into his middle age. . . . But the day of their unhappy final parting was drawing hear. As time passed, the thing that made the teacher uneasy, the thing that separated the teacher and disciple, became more and more evident. What separated them essentially was the difference in their artistic principles and premises. Sŏkdam valued vigor, integrity and nobility in calligraphic writing. But Kojuk valued beauty and tried to express his emotion and will in calligraphy. Their views differed, too, with regard to brush painting; Sŏkdam focused on expressing the soul of the objects, while Kojuk tried to give a faithful rending. The debate between the master and the disciple on plums and bamboos well illustrates that conflict. Bamboos and plums were Sŏkdam’s specialty as a painter. In his youth his bamboos and plums were healthy and exuberant. But, after the colonization of the country by Japan, his bamboos and plums had begun to grow withered, lean and gnarled. So that in later years there were no more than three leaves to one stalk of bamboo and fewer than five blossoms to a bough of plum. It made Kojuk extremely unhappy. “Why are your bamboos and plums so withered and poverty-stricken?” Kojuk protested. “How can a bamboo tree in a fallen country be exuberant, and what scholar of a colonized country would have the heart to make the plums blossom?” Sŏkdam responded. “Cheng Sou-nan expressed his grief for the fall of Sung by exposing the roots of his orchids, while Chao Meng-fu served in the court of his country’s conqueror Yuan. But I never heard anyone argue that only Cheng

Sou-nan’s orchids are fragrant and Chao Meng-fu’s calligraphy is base,” Kojuk objected. “Calligraphy and paintings are reflections of the soul. You borrow the shapes of things to give form to your spirit and soul. There’s no need to be governed by the outward forms of things,” was the teacher’s reply. “If calligraphy and paintings are simply means of expressing a scholar’s grief and pain, they’re futile and worthless as arts! Isn’t it a shame, in that case, for a man to rub ink and foul up paper all his life? If one’s country is of such great value, wouldn’t it behoove a man to become a guerrilla warrior and die in fighting the enemy? Isn’t it deceiving yourself and the world, to sit in your study and draw lean and twisted bamboos and plums in lament for your lost country?” Kojuk pursued obstinately. “That’s not so. In literal representation, you can’t top the side-walk painters. But because their souls are shallow and spirits base, their pictures are cheap and end up as floor papers. You try to deny the spirit of calligraphy and drawings, but, without their lofty spirit, all drawings are simply ink smeared on paper,” Sŏkdam countered. Another instance of their conflict was their debate on artistic principles. It was also provoked by Kojuk in his mid-thirties, when Sŏkdam was growing weak with old age. “Are calligraphy and painting arts, laws, or ways? Kojuk asked, to open the debate. “They are ways,” Sŏkdam returned. “ Then, why are there words like ‘the art of calligraphy’ and ‘the laws of calligraphy’?” Kojuk challenged. “Art is the fragrance of the Way, and laws are the garments of the Way. Without the Way, there can be no art, no law,” Sŏkdam enunciated. “Isn’t it said that refinement of art will ultimately bring one to the Way? Isn’t art the gateway to the Way, not just its fragrance?” Kojuk objected. “That’s what artisans say. Everything must reside in the Way at all times,” Sŏkdam insisted. “Then the first step in learning calligraphy and painting must be purification of the soul?” Kojuk pursued.

Vol.27 Spring 2015 45

Special Section Artist Novels

“Yes. That’s why Wang Hsi-chih said, ‘One must not teach anyone who has not the right character.’ Can you see the meaning now?” The teacher’s withered face brightened up with those words and he studied his disciple’s face with hope. But Kojuk refused to understand him to the end. “If noble mind and soul are prerequisites, how is it that you teach calligraphy to little children? If noble mind and soul are prerequisites, how many could there be who are worthy to take up the brush before death?” Kojuk protested. “It is to teach the technique while waiting for the Way to take root. If one merely acquires the skill, one is an artisan; if one can advance to the next stage, one is an artist; if the technique and the Way can both be perfected, one becomes a master,” Sŏkdam explained. “Then it means that artistry is more basic than the Way. So, to suppress the refinement of the technique for the refinement of the soul is like putting the cart before the horse, isn’t it?” That was Kojuk’s objection to the whole of his teacher’s principles and instruction. Seeing his lifelong dread become evident in the disciple’s own words, the teacher’s response was fierce. “You low-down! How dare you try to cover up your deficiency in discipline and scholarship with your sophistry? Scholarship is the road to the Way. But you are neither interested in the classical canons nor take delight in poetic composition. You only try to refine your wrist and fingers to imitate the ultimate attainments of past masters. How can this be different from base artisanship? And you aren’t ashamed of yourself in the least, but rather presume to pass judgment on the great masters!” Then there came the day of their fatal separation. This happened when Kojuk was thirty-five years old. At that time Kojuk was exhausted for many reasons. His training over the eight years since his readmission to discipleship was a period of long penance. Because he sat in the same position all day long, day after day, practicing writing and painting, boils erupted on his buttocks in the summer, and in the winter his joints became so stiff that he had difficulty standing up. He didn’t so much as glance at

46 _list : Books from Korea

or bother to listen to anything unrelated to calligraphy and brush painting. Afterwards, Kojuk always thought of those eight years as the most valuable years of his training. If his first ten years under Sŏkdam could be called the years of struggle to reach Sŏkdam’s stage, the later eight years embodied his struggle to transcend Sŏkdam’s methods and principles. His artistry grew more sophisticated, and his name began to be known. Some critics still rate his works of that period as the best of all his life’s works, for their wit and imaginativeness. Still, Kojuk was oppressed by a sense of loneliness and emptiness. There were two factors at the base of his loneliness and emptiness. The first was the feeling that his youth had gone by while he was wrestling with paper and brush. He had a wife and two children from his marriage arranged by Ungok. But, from the first, they were articles of necessity, like the stationery chest or the writing table, not objects of desire. All his youth, hope, love and yearning were dedicated to calligraphy and painting. But he found that though his youth was almost gone, he was still not much nearer the rainbow peak of his desire. (pp. 25 - 28) Translator

Kojuk is expelled by his teacher after he dared to

accuse him of excessive and futile asceticism.

For a while after leaving his teacher’s house for the second time, Kojuk believed that he was thrown out by his teacher. Even though he sold his calligraphy and paintings indiscriminately and lived the life of a prodigal, he told himself he was taking a just revenge on the cruel teacher. But, when he got accustomed to the money and acclaim offered by the worldly crowd, and the pleasures he could buy with money, it occurred to him from time to time that it was he who was betraying his teacher. It also dawned on him that the praises and pleasures he was enjoying had nothing to do with what he strove to attain in his life, and that they were poor recompenses indeed for the unremitting penance of his entire youth and young manhood. (p. 31) Translator

After years of rather excessive self-indulgence

Excerpt Second Wave Authors

Korean Künstlerroman:

Artist Novels amidst worldly fame and prosperity Kojuk goes to stay

works command high prices. Reviewing them one by one,

at a temple for a while to purify his mind and heart, and

he is greatly disappointed, as none of them meet his own

there chances to see a great golden phoenix depicted in

standard of artistic perfection. He decides to destroy them

a Buddhist painting. The bird was Kumshijo, or the golden

all, and bids his disciple to burn them.

phoenix that his teacher had said he wanted to see rise from his calligraphy. On beholding the vivid image of the bird, Kojuk is seized by a yearning to see the golden phoenix soar from his own calligraphy and paintings. And he comes down from the mountain to head for his teacher’s house.

The teacher was already dead . . . . The house, which was always quiet and lonely, bustled with the teacher’s friends and disciples. But no one greeted Kojuk warmly. Only Ungok told him coldly: “You write the banner on the coffin. That is the teacher’s wish. Don’t write his titles and honors but simply write, ‘Scholar Kim Sŏkdam’s hearse.’ Then he added, with tears streaming down his face: “Do you know what that means, you wretch? He means to carry your calligraphy to the other world. He loved your calligraphy that much, you idiot!” In that instant, Kojuk’s hatred and bitterness of many years towards his teacher melted away without a trace. Kojuk felt an irresistible longing to see his teacher once more, but the coffin had already been nailed. (p. 34) .... From the Western viewpoint, Kojuk was a born artist. But, to Sŏkdam, he was not much better than a base entertainer. The conflict between the teacher and the disciple might not have been so persistent nor so intense, had Kojuk’s character been weaker or had he been born a little earlier. But Kojuk could not stand for his art to be governed by anything that was not art in essence, and the changing times were on his side as well. Fortunately for the two, Kojuk had a deep reverence for the integrity of his teacher, and the teacher had an irrepressible love for his disciple’s talent, so that there could be a reconciliation between them, albeit a posthumous one. (p. 40) Translator

What was it that Kojuk wanted to see in his works? It was to see a golden phoenix rise from them, such a phoenix as he saw in his dream of that dawn. The phoenix that flew to him from his teacher Sŏkdam was an emblem of such Oriental virtues as integrity and sublimity of character. But the bird was transformed in Kojuk’s mind. It had become a bird symbolizing aesthetic fulfillment or artistic perfection. (p. 43) .... A commotion rose in the room. Some tried to dissuade him, and some rushed out to grab Ch’ohon’s arms. But all to no avail. Kojuk thundered imperiously: “I said set them on fire!” Ch’ohon’s reaction amazed everyone. For a minute he glared at his teacher furiously, but then, shaking off those people grabbing his arms, he set fire to the pile. Judging from the fact that Ch’ohon later accused his teacher of being a fake, it must be that his scholarly and ascetic temperament rebelled against Kojuk’s excessive self-abnegation and self-negation. The pile of paper soon burst into flames. Sighs and groans and sobs broke out from everyone. To some, Kojuk’s entire life was burning. To others, Kojuk’s truth was in flames. To still others, it was like sheaves of high-denomination currency burning. The works of a celebrated old master, whose works no less than two presidents sought to own and who had refused to serve on the prestigious screening committee of the National Art Exhibition, were being destroyed all at once by the flames. But Kojuk saw in the flames a golden-winged phoenix soaring. He saw its astonishing beauty and its vigorous flight. Kojuk breathed his last around eight o’clock that evening. He was aged seventy-two. (p. 45)

Now in his seventies and sensing his end drawing

near, day after day Kojuk makes the rounds to traditional art dealers to buy up his works, paying huge sums as his

Vol.27 Spring 2015 47

Special Section Artist Novels

Third Wave Authors (1990s - Present)

The Artist in Post-1990s Korean Literature U

p to the 1990s, the artist in Korean literature is most commonly portrayed as a tortured intellectual struggling to address the problems of the time. The history of this portrayal is closely related to the development of modern Korean literature. The modern Korean writer first emerged under Japanese occupation, wherein this singularly specific set of conditions led writing to become directly associated with resistance. Writers were not just creative artists but intellectuals in the tradition of Enlightenment thinkers, concerned with the problems of Korean society under Japanese occupation as well as more philosophical matters. Of course, there are variations in different works, but from the viewpoint of literary history, the artist-as-intellectual is the most commonly repeated depiction of artists up to the 1990s. The 1990s saw a radical departure from this, however. The democratic revolution of the 1980s ushered in a token democracy, and the ensuing breakneck speed of economic and technological development meant that Korea was already on its way to becoming a post-industrial society. These changes were felt in direct and indirect ways in Korean literature. Portrayals of writers, artists, and musicians with different values than the traditional intellectual began to crop up, and the 2000s saw the rise of “creatives” working in relatively new media such as film, performance art, or the video game industry. At the forefront of this new portrayal of the artist in post-1990s Korean literature are Shin Kyung-sook, Han Kang, Kim Young-ha, and Im Young-tae. The artist

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as depicted by these writers breaks away from the Enlightenment mold of the past. Shin Kyung-sook’s protagonist in The Girl Who Wrote Lonliness (1995), an autobiographical work, is a writer. Shin’s protagonist, however, differs considerably from the Enlightenment intellectuals of yore. She moves to Seoul from the countryside to work in a factory, and shows markedly different tendencies than her night school teacher and her second-oldest brother, both tortured intellectuals. Her older brother, a democracy activist, and her night school teacher, who focuses on the social role of literature, fall within the category of the socially conscious intellectual. The narrator, however, ascribes meaning to the act of writing itself. To write is an act of self-expression for her, not a means to something else. In this sense, the protagonist of The Girl Who Wrote Lonliness embodies the rise of a new kind of artist in Korean literature whose self is reconstructed through his or her narrative identity. Han Kang has published a number of works featuring artist protagonists over her career, from such earlier works as the novel Black Deer (2005) and the short story “Mongolian Mark” (2005) to the more recent Leave Now, the Wind Is Blowing (2010). In Black Deer, the protagonist prefers to paint murals inside of mines rather than participate in the institutionalized art world. The artist is driven to the edge in search of a raw beauty that is absent in institutionalized art. This motif is repeated in “Mongolian Mark.” The protagonist is a photographer who dreams of photographing his sister-in-law in the nude. In scenes that put aesthetic

Third Wave Authors

desire over and against everything forbidden in society, Han’s own aesthete personality takes center stage. Likewise, the artist protagonist of Leave Now, the Wind Is Blowing pursues hidden clues with the force of one determined to bring the truth to light. The creatives in Han Kang’s work thus demonstrate a strong desire to transcend the boundaries of conventional morality and art. K im Young-ha’s novel W hy A rang? (2001) successfully brings together the author’s cultural sensibilities and literary skill. Loosely based on a traditional Korean myth, Kim cinematically recreates the process in which the Arang myth came about. Using metafictive devices to bring the characters of the original myth to life, the characters act as if they were playing themselves in a movie directed by the author. In this sense, the author borrows the language of film in this experimental reinterpretation of an ancient myth. Im Young-tae’s novel Ninth House, Second Door (2010) also features a writer protagonist. This particular writer, however, happens to be a ghostwriter dedicated to reconstructing the lives of others, specializing in autobiography. Rather than consider this a failure of creative writing, however, the writer perceives this as an opportunity to empathize with the life of another. Ghostwriting is not seen as a mechanical act but a veritable labor of love, a strikingly memorable portrayal of an artist. Artist characters from new and emerging media are also well represented in Korean literature today. Most notably they can be found in the works of Yun I-Hyeong, Lee Kiho, Kim Junghyuk, and Yun Ko-eun, the youngest wave of Korean writers. The protagonist of Yun I-Hyeong’s “DJ Loneliness” (2007) reads like a science fiction character, while “Rose Garden Writing Machine” (2011) goes one step further, introducing us to a writing machine. The author’s musings on writing in a post-industrial society take a whimsical turn in portraying these kinds of artists. Lee Kiho’s protagonist in “Birney” (1999), his first published story, is a rapper. Borrowing heavily from the conventions of hip hop, itself a subgenre of pop music, Lee aims for maximum subversive effect through this

“ To write is an act of self-expression for the protagonist, not a means to something else.”

form of subculture. The resulting experiment is a key example of an author attempting to break away from the conservative standards of mainstream culture. Kim Junghyuk has a knack for unconventional, often geeky subjects. Stories such as “Offbeat D” (2008) and “The Glass Shield” (2008) use their subjects to great effect in reconstructing the reality of Korean youth today. “Offbeat D” features a cast of tone-deaf characters that form a popular musical group, while “The Glass Shield” depicts performance artists who consider their work as play. The author thus takes a lighthearted approach to the reality of Korea’s 880,000-Won Generation, the equivalent of Europe’s 1,000-Euro Generation, while seeking alternatives to the aggressively neoliberalist society we live in today. Yun Ko-eun writes about the creative plight of young Korean writers in “Invader Graphic” (2010), a masterfully revealing story. The protagonist of this work is a writer who gets her writing done in shopping mall restrooms. This is not by choice, but because she is so poor she cannot afford to pay for things like Wi-Fi or toilet paper. Few writers have depicted the struggling artist in today’s rapidly changing environment in such a poignant yet irreverent light. These are the latest incarnations of the artist as portrayed in Korean fiction—a departure not only from the artist as Enlightenment thinker but from the aestheticist, pop cultural references of the 1990s as well. by Jang Sungkyu Literary Critic and Lecturer Seoul National University

Vol.27 Spring 2015 49

Special Section Artist Novels

Novel

The Vegetarian

Han Kang Translated by Deborah Smith Portobello Books, 2015, 183 pp. ISBN 9781846275623

Visit www.list.or.kr to listen to a reading of the excerpt.

50 _list : Books from Korea

e opened the sketchbook. The drawings filled scores of pages and, despite being based on fundamentally the same idea, were completely different from the performance poster in terms of atmosphere and artistic feel. The naked bodies of the men and women were brilliantly decorated, covered all over in painted flowers, and there was something simple and straightforward about the ways in which they were having sex. Without the taut buttocks, tensed inner thighs, and the skinny upper bodies that gave them a dancer’s physique, there would have been no more suggestiveness about them than there was with spring flowers. Their bodies—he hadn’t drawn in faces— had a stillness and solidity which counterbalanced the arousing nature of the situation. The image had come to him in a flash of inspiration. It had happened last winter, when he’d started to believe that he might somehow be able to bring his year-long fallow period to an end, when he’d felt energy start to wriggle up from the pit of his stomach, bit by bit. But how could he have known this energy would coalesce into such a preposterous image? For one thing, up until then his work had always tended towards realism. And so, for someone who had previously worked on 3D graphics of people worn down by the vicissitudes of late capitalist society, to be screened as factual documentaries, the carnality, the pure sensuality of this image, was nothing short of monstrous. And the image might never have come to him, if it hadn’t been for a chance conversation. Had his wife not asked him to give their son a bath that Sunday afternoon. Had he not watched her helping their son to pull on his underpants after towelling him dry and been moved to exclaim, ‘That Mongolian mark is still so big! When on earth do they fade away?’ Had she not replied thoughtlessly, ‘Well... I can’t remember exactly when mine went. And Yeong-hye still had hers when she was twenty.’ If she hadn’t then followed up his astonished ‘Twenty?’ with ‘Mmm... just a thumbsized thing, blue. And if she had it that long, who knows, maybe she’s still got it now.’ In precisely that moment he was struck by the image of a blue flower on a woman’s buttocks, its petals opening outwards.

Excerpt Third Wave Authors

Korean Künstlerroman:

Artist Novels In his mind, the fact that his sister-in-law still had a Mongolian mark on her buttocks became inexplicably bound up with the image of men and women having sex, their naked bodies completely covered with painted flowers. The causality linking these two things was so clear, so obvious, as to be somehow beyond comprehension, and thus it became etched into his mind. Though her face was missing, the woman in his sketch was undoubtedly his sister-in-law. No, it had to be her. He’d imagined what her naked body must look like and began to draw, finishing it off with a dot like a small blue petal in the middle of her buttocks, and he’d got an erection. It was almost the first time since his marriage, and definitely the first time since he’d said goodbye to his mid-thirties, that he’d felt such intense sexual desire, a desire which, moreover, was focused on a clear object. And so who was the faceless man with his arms around her neck, looking as if he was attempting to throttle her, who was thrusting himself into her? He knew that it was himself; that, in fact, it could be none other. Arriving at this conclusion, he grimaced. He spent a long time searching for a solution, for a way to free himself from the hold this image had on him, but nothing else would do as a substitute. Another image as intense and enticing as this one simply didn’t exist. There was no other work he wanted to do. Every exhibition, film, performance, came to feel dull and flat, for no other reason than that it wasn’t this. He spent hours seemingly lost in a daydream, mulling over how to make the image become a reality. He would rent a studio from his painter friend and install lighting, get some body paints and a white sheet to cover the floor . . . he let his thoughts run on like this even though the most important thing, persuading his sister-in-law, still remained to be done. He agonized for a long time over whether he might be able to replace her with another woman, when the suspicion occurred to him, somewhat belatedly, that the film he was planning could all too easily be categorized as pornography. Never mind his sister-inlaw, no woman would agree to such a thing. In that case, should he shell out a large sum of money to hire

“ Their bodies—he hadn’t drawn in faces—had a stillness and solidity which counterbalanced the arousing nature of the situation.”

a professional actress? Even if, after making a hundred concessions, he eventually managed to get the thing filmed, would he really be able to exhibit it? He’d often anticipated that his work, which dealt with social issues, might put him in the firing line with some people, but never before had he imagined himself being branded as some peddler of cheap titillation. He’d always been completely unrestricted when it came to making his art, and so it hadn’t ever really occurred to him that this freedom might become a luxury. If it hadn’t been for the image he would never have had to go through all this anxiety, this discomfort and unease, this agonizing doubt and self-examination. He wouldn’t have had to suffer the fear of losing everything he’d achieved—not that that really amounted to all that much—even his family, in one fell swoop, and due to a choice that he himself had made. He was becoming divided against himself. Was he a normal human being? More than that, a moral human being? A strong human being, able to control his own impulses? In the end, he found himself unable to claim with any certainty that he knew the answers to these questions, though he’d been so sure before. pp. 58 - 61

Vol.27 Spring 2015 51

Younger Writers Kim Yeonsu

A Writer’s Back I

know his back quite well. In our early twenties we were roommates, and I’m sure I saw his back more often than his face (to exaggerate ever so slightly). He sat in front of his desk, facing the wall, and wrote all the time. When I got home drunk, there he would be at his desk, tapping away at something under the light of a small lamp. When I woke up he would still be writing. Had he been up all night? He very well may have. No surprise when he became a novelist, that one. Recently he published a collection of essays called, The Work of the Novelist. Out of all the sentences I enjoyed from that collection, my favorite has to be this: “The only important thing for a writer is the verb, ‘to write.’ ‘To write well’ and ‘to write poorly’ all come down to the same verb in the end.” Now I wonder if he was thinking that already in his twenties. In any event,

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he kept writing, for better or for worse. He made his debut as a writer in 1994, and I in 2000. We met when we were 12, so we’ve known each other for more than 30 years now. So I feel like I should know Kim Yeonsu better than anyone, but I actually don’t. I do know his favorite foods (tteokbokki, noodles, and seafood). I also know his go-to coffee order (he likes cappuccinos), his past girlfriends (not that I would ever name names), and what kind of person he dislikes (again, no names). Our collective drinks together would fill a swimming pool (mostly because I drink a lot of beer), and we used to play tennis together in the daytime (usually won by me). I know what kind of music he listens to when running marathons (not at all my type). I know all these things about him, but I still don’t feel like I know him that well.

Essay

Kim Yeonsu Kim Yeonsu debuted in 1993 by publishing a poem in Writer’s World. He published the novels Walking While Pointing to the Mask, Goodbye Mr. Yi Sang, Route 7, The Night Is Singing, and Wonder Boy and the short story collections I Am a Ghost Writer, Twenty, and World's End Girlfriend. Kim has received a number of literary awards, including the Daesan Literary Award and Yi Sang Literary Award. photographs by Son Hongjoo

It must be because of his writing. When I read Kim Yeonsu the novelist, it doesn’t feel like I know him at all. Every sentence is an enigma. Why did he choose to write sentences this way, and why did he choose to create these kinds of characters? It must be another person inside of him that I don’t know. In The Work of the Novelist he writes, “They say, why not write [novels] better from the beginning? But how could I possibly without knowing the end? It’s the same with life. The story of my life is not over yet, so how could I live it well from the beginning? . . . Nobody lives well from the beginning. The same applies to fiction. The novel begins only after all the stories have run their course.” Novelists are like actors in that they live the lives of multiple characters. Actually, actors only live their roles, but novelists live all of their characters. That’s

what fiction is about. We empathize with the lives of strangers through the power of fiction. Who knows how many more mistakes we would make without it? Writing fiction is an inherently painful process, but one through which we strive to understand others. Mostly, I can’t get over how both of us, two childhood friends, turned out to be writers. We still live near each other so when I’m stuck I call him up for a drink. We don’t talk about writing at all, but I always feel that he gets me, at least a little bit. Afterwards, on the way home, I turn to look at his back. It’s a familiar back that looks like it’s writing even when it’s walking. by Kim Junghyuk Novelist

Vol.27 Spring 2015 53

Younger Writers Kim Yeonsu

My Small Steps Towards Foreign Fiction A

while ago, I started taking Japanese classes at a language school near my home. It is a small school offering only Japanese, located on the seventh floor of a sparsely frequented building in the outskirts of Seoul, a fact that I like. The first class I went to only had three students including me. When I was an actual schoolboy I used to nod off in class, but in this one I’m constantly kept on my toes since I never know when the teacher will ask a question. So I’m coming along with my Japanese better than I thought. But that’s not the only thing preventing me from relaxing. I mentioned three students: myself, a young

54 _list : Books from Korea

man, and a girl. The man, who always waltzes in after the teacher smelling of cigarettes, is older than the girl, but still at least two decades younger than me. With the girl it’s easier—she’s just one year older than my daughter. Anyway, it’s enough motivation for me to not make a fool of myself in front of these youngsters. The three of us were sitting in conversation class when the girl, who’s planning to go to a tourism vocational school next year, asked me in Japanese, “何年生まれですか? (What year were you born?)” The point of this particular lesson was to learn how to say ‘years’ in Japanese the correct way, but given the circumstances I felt justified in glossing over my answer. I did wonder what the girl, who was born in 1999, imagined the year 1970 to be like. All in all, however, it’s a tremendous load off my mind to be learning Japanese before it’s too late. It’s not just a relief, it’s a pure joy. And no, it’s not because I’ve discovered a sudden passion for learning in my old age, or because I’m worried about my rapidly deteriorating brain function. I’ve wanted to write a novel set in Nagasaki for a long time, and I’ve only just started learning Japanese. I feel like I barely got my foot in before it was too late to take that first step. But why is learning a foreign language the first step for writing a novel? Allow me to explain. This is not my first time writing a novel set in a foreign country. Ten years or so ago, I wrote a novel about Korean communists in Yanbian. The first thing I did then, too, was to go to Yanbian University to learn Chinese. I didn’t consider if Chinese would be useful in writing the novel, and as it turned out it wasn’t. I was merely willing to make a small step towards understanding life in another country. “So write novels set in Korea,” a fellow writer observing my struggles told me. Meaning that at least then I wouldn’t have to learn a new language just because I wanted to write a novel set in a particular country, which is very good advice. I’m not sure how long I can keep writing this way, either. I dream of going off and writing a novel set in a place that I know well, for once. But I don’t think I can. No, I’m positive I can’t.

Writer’s Insight

Whether it’s telling stories or writing novels, literature is transmitted through the medium of language. And this language thing is pretty abstract, and, therefore, a considerably subjective business. If you take an equation like 2+2=4, everyone who’s learned basic arithmetic understands it on the same level. You either know it or not, and for those who do know it there are no different levels of understanding. Not so with sentences in literature. There are different levels of understanding in literature, depending on the individual’s experiences. Novelists have it harder than mathematicians in that sense. For instance, Kafka opens The Castle with the following sentences: “It was late evening when K. arrived. The village lay deep in snow. There was nothing to be seen of Castle Mount, for mist and darkness surrounded it, and not the faintest glimmer of light showed where the great castle lay.” This opening will be understood on different levels by those who have experienced both snow and castles, those who have experienced snow but not castles and vice versa, and those who have experienced neither. Even with a very simple sentence in a foreign language, a beginner will have a literal interpretation of it while a more advanced student will consider its context as well as bring their own experience to the interpretation. This is not just for foreign languages, of course, but applies to one’s native language as well. A primary school student is capable of reading most things off the page, but that doesn’t mean they can read, say, an astronomy text. To be precise, they are capable of reading the words but not of understanding them. To read literature is to go through these two steps of reading and understanding. For a primar y school student to read and understand an astronomy text, they would first have to take an interest in astronomy. The same applies to reading foreign novels, to a certain degree. You must first be willing to take a small interest in that country’s literature, which is definitely more of a pain than reading books in one’s own language. You don’t feel like you’re missing anything by not reading stuff like that. Just as a primary school student’s life isn’t

Visit www.list.or.kr to watch a teaser video and an interview with the author.

affected in the least by not knowing the basics of astronomy. Except you are missing something. You just don’t understand what it is. To be willing to take a small interest is to change your mind ever so slightly. That is what changes your behavior, and that behavior changes the world. To understand means that your world has changed. It may seem odd to learn a foreign language to write a novel, but as all language learners can testify, your world changes when you speak a foreign language. Out of the blue, gibberish becomes perfectly comprehensible. It is a miraculous instant comparable to a blind person suddenly being able to see. This small willingness is all it takes to change the world. The same applies to reading foreign literature. If you are satisfied with your life now, there is no reason for you to change the world. You simply carry on living your life. But if there is something missing from your life now, then you do need to change the world. You need to be willing to take a small step towards understanding. This willingness is what makes people read books from other countries, and what changes the worlds of those readers. If you think that the world you find yourself in now is the entirety of the world as you know it, please think again. Be willing to take a small step forward. That’s all it takes to change the world. by Kim Yeonsu Novelist

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Younger Writers Kim Yeonsu

Short Story

“World’s End Girlfriend”

Kim Yeonsu Munhakdongne, 2009, 318 pp. ISBN 9788954608824

Visit www.list.or.kr to watch a booktrailer and listen to a reading of the excerpt.

56 _list : Books from Korea

ome things tell of what is to come. A moon halo seen out the window after packing for a mountain trek the next day, heart brimming with anticipation; an interviewer you wait two hours to meet, but who just sits with a constipated expression without asking a single question; an empty classroom you wake up to after sleeping for a full hour when you were just planning to briefly rest your head down on the desk, exhausted from working through the night but finally completing the project you were given only a week to finish. Be it the round moon halo, the constipated expression, or the hour that just slipped by, it is through these things you discover a reason why you should not call life a mystery. Memory being what it is, you lose sight of many of the wheels in between, but life is like a set of cogwheels turning and meshing with each other. All events leave some kind of mark, and after a while this makes it possible for us to realize what the first cogwheel was. It was the busy work of a volunteer at the library that served as the first cogwheel leading up to my story of love. Noticing an empty spot on the bulletin board where new acquisitions and announcements were posted, the volunteer had gained permission to print out and tack a new poem every week. Then it took three seasons—fall, winter, and spring—to pass before the next cogwheel began to turn. Early May, the worker had to quit work to follow her husband out of town, and for a while it was a poem by Ra Heeduk that remained on the board. Then someone, most likely some soul who was concerned about the Poem of the Week being mistaken for the Poem of the Weak or whatnot, or perhaps a library user who wanted to demonstrate what it really means to volunteer, started posting poems by Shin Kyeong-nim. Thereafter followed a number of people eagerly contributing their own papers and tacks to attest to the wealth of the superb poets the country was blessed with, and as their efforts soon began cluttering up the bulletin board, someone came up with the idea to hold a weekly meeting at which interested parties could gather and select the next poem to be posted. And thus the Poetry Reading Club, or the PRC for short, was born. As for myself, I was the third person

Excerpt

to post a favorite poem (one by Choi Ha-rim) on the board. Starting with “When I was six or seven years old seagulls flew on the sea,” the poem1 ended with the words “Thus it will likely be when we grow old. There will lay an evening shadow quietly casting a shade like the sorrows of men.” However, while I had contributed my poem, it never occurred to me to join the newlyformed group of people who had begun to gather each Wednesday to read their selections and decide upon the next poem to go up on the board. Then one day—after the heavy summer rains had ended for good, and the hot and hot, oh so hot summer began in earnest—I was at the library to borrow a book when I came upon the poem “World’s End Girlfriend” posted on the bulletin board. According to the poet, there is a Metasequoia tree at the end of the path he is walking, and this is the very end of the world where he and his girlfriend will someday sit together, leaning with their backs against the rough trunk of the tree, “as fire and tears seep into each other, or as the moon and a rainbow would.” Meanwhile, the poet says, love will “belatedly fade away / at a touch, a very touch / without a trace, not a mark // just as snow in March.” As I stood pondering the poem and the poet’s name for a long while, the line about “a Metasequoia standing facing the lake” struck a chord in me and I searched on the library computer, eventually finding a book called Metasequoia, the Living Fossil. In a way it was no wonder I decided to borrow the book, which had been shelved in the seldom-visited Botany section and looked as if it had never been checked out before. Early evening, among falling leaves, I pass through a mountain with many graves. Before I know it, I am walking with a lowered head. A part of the sky flows in clear and is swept into the inhabited mountain. Into the inhabited mountain, water flows and flows to join me on the tranquil floor. I feel myself warming up. I wish for a chance encounter with a familiar face.

1 2

Choi Ha-rim, “Evening Shadow.” Shin Dae-Chul, “Missing Anyone Today 1.”

A middle-aged man began reading a poem with a slightly sheepish expression on his face. The summer rains had ended for good and the burning heat of the day still lingered on a Wednesday evening. I sat with about twelve other people in the basement meeting room, carefully looking at everyone’s face and wondering who had been the one to choose “World’s End Girlfriend.” Before coming to the meeting I had thought the PRC would be a group of literature buffs who dreamed of making a late start of their literary careers, and who, together with a teacher who had debuted in some mediocre literary magazine, gathered to read text poems and give group feedback about their practice poems. But after attending the meeting I could see the PRC differed from any ordinary literature programs hosted by the library. As I later learned, the PRC had a total of twenty-one members, among which around fifteen people usually made it to the Wednesday meetings, depending on their schedules. Many were young housewives living in new town communities, but the members hailed from a broad range of professions, including military men, school teachers, lawyers, and nurses, and their ages ranged from middle school students to senior citizens. The middle-aged man continued. “. . . Dear Nameless / you whom I could never call / in the tongue of my land . . . . ” 2 Then, after finishing, he paused briefly and cleared his throat, “A few days ago, a street vendor committed suicide during a demonstration against the city for clearing away street stalls. So the vendors held another street demonstration yesterday, which caused a traffic jam on the Riverside North Expressway starting from Seongsan Bridge. Everyone hear about this?” There came a few answers from the seated people. Yes. For three hours. Such a tragedy. As for myself, I hadn’t had an inkling. “I was heading back from a business meeting with one of my female employees, and after an hour stuck going nowhere we decided to just pull over at a corner store next to a gas station. They were selling coffee. So the two of us sat and had a cup under the store’s awning, looking at the sky hanging over the Han River. Looking back at the jam-packed road, I was suddenly

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Younger Writers Kim Yeonsu

struck by the thought that this must be the most relaxing time of my life. I said to her. ‘Do you know why the road is jammed?’ ‘Yes, it was on the radio that street vendors were holding a demonstration, wasn’t it?’ ‘No, it’s because of tedium,’ I said. I read a piece about the vendor who killed himself. Forty-three years old. Same age as I am. Being forty-three is like this. You’ve passed the halfway-point and are still churning along for a while—like you always have—when it hits you. You’ve already seen this part of the road. And you will have to run the same distance before it all ends. The man probably killed himself because he was sick of that. And there the conversation stopped. The two of us kept still for a moment, and then we both took another drink of our coffee. That was when the poem came to my mind. You see, back when I was a college freshman there was this guy I would often come upon at this bar, and whenever he was drunk he would recite it with tears dropping from his eyes. I thought he must be some kind of mystery man, but turns out he was in the same year, even the same department, as me. What a surprise. . . Well, anyway that was back in the day.” “You didn’t have any designs on your employee, did you?” A girl around my age asked him in a teasing voice. “Designs? What am I, an architect? But anyway, once you pass forty all that’s left is parting with people. I parted with her too.” “Then you did go out with her?” This, by an old woman with speckled white hair. “ Well it’s not like you have to go out with someone to part with them. We part with each other every day. Meet in the morning and part in the evening. Meet your wife in the evening, part with her in the morning. . . .” “That’s so sad.” I found myself blurting out. I had been louder than I had intended and everyone was looking at me. “This is your first time here, isn’t it? Did you bring a poem by any chance? You’ve seen us taking turns, so you probably understand what to do, no? Read a poem and just tell us why you chose it. Want to give it a try?” The elderly woman asked me in her somewhat curt voice.

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Well, this was how the story went. It was spring, and upon graduating from college I had spent a month or so holed up at home. Right around when the cherry blossoms began to fall I started part-timing at a downtown mall coffee shop from ten in the morning to four in the afternoon. In the evening I jogged around the lake listening to Bae Chul-Soo’s music program on the radio, and I sent inconsequential text messages to a girl named Nan-Ah only about once every three times I thought of her. When she sent back a reply—again not every time but about once every three times I texted her—the name “Nana” would appear on the screen of my cell phone. For example: “just faking sick 2 get ur attention lol JUN 15 10:48am Nana.” She had asked me spell her name that way because she had been unhappy with the original version—a gift from her grandfather who had been a middle school teacher his whole life—all through school. Thus reminded of Emile Zola’s novel more than ten times a day, I went so far as to scout out and flip through a copy at the library, but learned little more than about the promiscuity of the female protagonist Nana, as I did not finish the outdated translation of the realistic novel to the end. Like this. The second season of my twenty-fifth year passed by like the pages of a nineteenth century Naturalism novel. And then the summer rains began, and as the weather prevented me from running I read books borrowed from the library and waited for the rainy season to pass. It was because of the rains that I ended up calling her, if not I would have perhaps just sent another text message to Nana. We talked for a while about the weather. About how it would at least be more satisfying if it poured instead of just drizzling without end, about the uniform blanket of grey that filled the sky, about the instinctive longing for the hot and hot, oh so hot summer sun. I told her how the rains prevented me from running, and she replied that she had never imagined me to be a runner. And then she said to me. “Yes, it was good. We were really good together. But even so, we can never go back to those times.” These words made me happy, and also made me sad. First because of the word “Yes,” and then because of the “but even so.” Yes. But even so. Yes. But even so.

Excerpt

“ Being forty-three is like this. You’ve passed the halfway-point and are still churning along for a while—like you always have—when it hits you. You’ve already seen this part of the road. And you will have to run the same distance before it all ends.”

After hanging up I repeated the words to myself from time to time, for instance as I lined up pieces of bread on the kitchen table to make a sandwich, or while smoking a cigarette in the library lounge, looking out to scenery that seemed unsure and grey as my own future. Then a few days later, as the rains began to dry up, I thought to myself, “Yes, these rains may last forever. But even so, I will start running.” I put on yellow shorts and a t-shirt and, after a look up at the drizzling sky, I began to run. In my neighborhood of detached houses in the new town community, the rainy season was passing through its last few days. Through the narrow alleys where cars were parked 24 hours a day, the rainwater flowed toward the sewer like a crowd of grade schoolers bustling home, between the uniform rows of multi-unit houses and modest villas. Days passed without a single bird flying over the cherry and zelkova trees in the small park that had once been a paper mulberry field, as a notice informed visitors; in a corner, a lone swing and slide set was rapidly going to rust. In the morning news, a weather forecaster had been wearing a yellow rain slicker as she pointed out a low pressure trough passing through the peninsula and predicted the heat to start the next day—it was a Friday, it was the evening, and I ran toward the lake. Exactly as much as the rain seeped into my clothes, as much as rust collected on the swings and slides, just as the low pressure trough passed through the peninsula, so did my twenty-fifth year fly by. The trouble with being twenty-five is that your troubles only amount to so much. No matter what you may think, things matter only so much and not a bit more. After perhaps thirty minutes of running I was

halfway around the lake, my body soaked through and water seeping into my shoes, but the rain had begun to taper off. Turning my head toward the west, from where a breeze was blowing in, I noticed the sky was getting brighter. Towards the west the sky was black, then blue in some ways, and then again white in others, which impressed me so much I stopped to stand looking at the sight for a while, panting to catch my breath. The clouds covering the sky were quickly becoming bright, and puffy clouds sprouted just off from the horizon and said that the day was clearing up. First it was the rain clouds, then the wind, then the evening, the season—just like that, a whole era was passing by. Any emotion I could imagine was already visible in front of me in the passing scenery, so instead of moving on I just stood still and let my breathing return to normal. The wind chilled my wet body and raindrops grew fatter and splattered off the leaves, and then a bluehued sky finally poked through the clouds. I could see this was the last day of the rainy season. It was clear to me as I looked at the west sky, the puffy clouds, and the tall Metasequoia which stood alone with its uneven trunk and drops of water clinging to its leaves. translated by Cho Yoonna

For publication inquiries, please contact us at info@klti.or.kr

Vol.27 Spring 2015 59

Younger Writers Kim Ae-ran

Kim Ae-ran Kim Ae-ran made her literary debut with a short story that won the 1st Daesan Literary Award in 2002. She is the author of the short story collections Run, Pop, Run!, A Pool of Saliva , and Vapor Trail , and the novel The Youngest Parents with the Oldest Child. Kim has received a number of literary awards, including the Hankook Ilbo Literary Award and Todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Young Artists Award.

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Essay

I Went My Way, with Someone Beside Me

photographs by Son Hongjoo

ometimes I get the feeling that Ae-ran thinks with her eyes. Big, dark eyes turned mischievously on the world, taking a good, long, deep, lingering look, before turning inwards to herself. Storing up what they had just seen, no doubt. Only then does she put words to the objects of that good, long, deep, lingering gaze, taking her own sweet time producing each sentence. Sometimes it feels like that when she’s talking, too. If you ever catch Ae-ran suddenly falling silent in midsentence, blinking slowly and seemingly staring off into space, rest assured that what you are witnessing is nothing more than a mental warm-up of sorts. Flexing the muscles of her thoughts, Ae-ran leaps up and usually lands on a joke. We’ll burst out laughing or nod understandingly before more jokes and more laughs follow, or sometimes tease her a bit before joining in the laughter. Ae-ran’s jokes are often ways of brushing off trivial but bothersome worries, unpredictable coincidences, and unspecified stretches of time, but what she is actually thinking is beyond the realm of jokes, the invisible gap between jokes, their pale and fragile texture. And while she does not try to erase the stain of things that happen to her, she thinks about them

for a long time, watches them, and embraces them. She does not plough over what is difficult to say or explain, or try to turn it into a joke, or tie a neat narrative bow around it—that she leaves up to those deep, dark eyes that gaze upon the world and herself at the same time. She doesn’t jump to conclusions about people or things, preferring to guess and surmise with an “I suppose so.” She thinks the good thing about writing is “those instants when I get to feel awed by the world and its people, without having any religion,” and that writing fiction comes down to a kind of attitude, of facing the world and treating people the best way she can. She knows that if you give one hand to joy, you always take sadness in the other.

by Pyun Hye-young Novelist

*This is an excerpt from “I Went My Way, with Someone Beside Me,” Yi Sang Literary Award Anthology (Seoul: Munhaksasang, 2013).

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Younger Writers Kim Ae-ran

Meeting You Face to Face I

was in the computer lab at my school when I got the news that I had won the new writer’s competition. I asked the caller, “Fiction or poetry?” and the answer was fiction. My poetry submission hadn’t even made it to the first round. I had a simple reason for asking this embarrassing question when I would have gotten the answer soon enough. I wanted to know if I was a novelist or a poet. I hung up and had to stop myself from turning somersaults, mindful of the “Silence” sign hanging in the lab. After all these years that suppressed joy is still caught in my throat, pressing against it uncomfortably. Another writer, hearing my problem, advised me to dig a hole in the ground and laugh into it three times every night until I was cured. I hid the fact that I had won all day long. It felt sacrilegious, somehow, to share my news, yet I also wanted to shout it from the top of my lungs. The shame and pride, the nerves and anxiety of carrying around a secret began to take its toll on me, however, and I decided I had to tell someone. My mother answered the phone in a karaoke. My hardworking, tone-deaf, country woman Mother had closed up shop and made a beeline for the karaoke, although it was still early in the evening. I did not find this strange. At the time the only news that crossed the threshold of my parents’ house in a rural village near the West Sea was of the “bad,” “very bad,” and “even worse” variety. Mother sounded a bit tipsy. But she was very happy to hear what I had to tell her. I could hear the sound of the other women singing at the top of their lungs as Mother struggled to speak over the din. I felt quite emotional about my win, not just

62 _list : Books from Korea

because it was good news, but because it was the first good news to come after the bad, very bad, and worse news that had preceded it. Mother must have felt the same way. The fortunes of our family were not reversed overnight, however, and Mother had many more nights of karaoke ahead of her. Perhaps that is why even now, whenever I hear the word “new writer’s contest” I think of all those karaoke establishments tucked into every possible nook and cranny across the country. I think of the lyrics to the songs that my tone-deaf mother must have belted out, her nod to the inherent corniness of life. What we call literature must have also started out as songs. I celebrated quietly with some friends that night. A longhaired friend of mine from the same year bought an ice cream cake for me. Imun-dong hardly being the neighborhood for glittering franchise bakeries, the only ice cream cake he had been able to find was a luridly colored affair that tasted like a rancid dishcloth. The teddy bear-shaped cake was nonetheless placed in the middle of the table and we all dug in. We tried

Writer’s Insight

“ It occurred to me that literature was not here, at this party, but inside all of the people that had so graciously agreed to come.”

Walking past a bakery near my university a few years later, my thoughts returned to that night. The face of the teddy bear slowly caving in over his missing eye and nose, and the words that my friend kept muttering to himself. It was only then that it hit me, the kindness of those words: “I should have gone to Baskin-Robbins.” Somewhere, in some obscure bakery, someone was trying their best to imitate a real ice cream cake or something equivalent to a real ice cream cake. The clumsy thoughtfulness of it all enveloped me like a warm blanket, cherishing and nurturing me.

Visit www.list.or.kr to watch a teaser video of the author.

our best, but there was still some left over. As people chatted idly over their drinks, the friend who brought the cake kept muttering dejectedly, “I should have gone to Baskin-Robbins.” I may have been cocky enough to ask, “Fiction or poetry?” on the phone that day, but I still did not believe that I would be able to make a living writing.

My outfit on the day of the awards ceremony was nothing special. A grey woolen sweater, faded jeans, khaki loafers. It looked casually put together, but it was actually all brand new. Looking back at that day, I remember: Mother sitting very straight as I stammered out my acceptance speech, tossing in a few homilies in an effort to look like a “real” author, the pork rib place near City Hall where we went to celebrate, the chapped skin on the back of Father’s hands as he placed pieces of meat on top of my rice, and everyone struggling to open the bottle of wine someone had brought, and Mother filling her beer glass with wine and criticizing the food in Seoul. She had nothing but praise, however, for the cultured people she had met at the awards ceremony. What was it about literature, or arts and letters that impressed my parents so much? To my parents, people involved in those things were somehow different, better, than them. Their worship was a vague one, but the respect was there nonetheless. To them, the world of letters meant taking phone calls

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from their daughterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s teacher on their knees, even though there was no one to see them. Learning was to be venerated. Their awe aside, however, I found the awards ceremony to be more like an overrated, miniature circus. The feeling only grew stronger the more I tried to be the sort of person who fit in there. Giving my acceptance speech, I spouted off some pretentious nonsense with the rest of them. But with my friends and family, struggling to get the cork out of the bottle, gulping down the meat my father placed in my bowl, it occurred to me that literature was not here, at this party, but inside all of the people that had so graciously agreed to come. Theirs was not the kind of literature that takes sides, but embraces even the vanity of a beginning writer who had made her first foray in front of the public, acknowledging that she might have something to say about life. I am still inside that embrace, still making mistakes and learning from them. Except that I have a horrible memory and keep making the same mistakes over and over again. It still amazes me when my words take on meaning

64 _list : Books from Korea

in a different language, like this, making ripples in a completely different way than I could have ever imagined. I remember the day that I was first called a writer. And I remember the place where my mother was when she told me, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Well done.â&#x20AC;? The karaoke, where she wiped away her tears. Where she went for survival, not diversion, when life sent too much bad news to be able to brush it away with a laugh, or even attempt to crack a joke. Although there were still days that she did go for diversion. And so if ever, at some point in my life, if I ever come face to face with you in some piece of writing that I built, and if you seem a bit hungry, the pseudo-ice cream cake is on me. by Kim Ae-ran Novelist

Excerpt

Short Story

“Sky Kong Kong the Pogo Stick”

Run, Pop, Run! Kim Ae-ran Changbi Publishers, 2005, 268 pp. ISBN 8936436902

Visit www.list.or.kr to watch a booktrailer and listen to a reading of the excerpt.

long time ago, there was an old street lamp that stood in front of our, or rather the landlord’s house. Our place sat on the roof of the building so the lamp looked right down at us, especially into the window of the room that my brother and I shared. In those days, the tops of me and my brother’s heads were always soaked in a pool of yellow light. No one knew the age of the lamp. We only knew that it stood there for a very long time, way before I was born, with its neck stretched out and shoulders hunched forward. Always alone, like the very first Homo sapiens to stand on two feet on the African plain. The lamp was there since long ago so it knew everything. From the time of the sunset to the angle of the descending moon, the names we muttered with triviality long passed down to us, the things we said about love, as well as the beauty of a grand cathedral and the songs of the Sand Pebbles—there was nothing that the lamp didn’t know. Unfortunately, the only thing the lamp knew how to do was to switch on and off. This it did very faithfully and diligently. The lamp knew that every once in a while it could actually create a miracle. The moment it turned itself on was probably when the world blinked very quickly. Something occurred in that brief moment that no one knew, that escaped everyone’s notice. Like when the kinds of things you don’t believe happen or have happened on the lips of those close to you. Like our first brief kiss from long ago. The days when we didn’t have anything, we needed the street lamp when we didn’t have anything except night and day. It turned with the earth and blink, switched itself off; and then turned again before another blink, switching itself on. I used to sit by the window with my elbows on the windowsill. One hand propping up my chin, I dreamed about the rotation of the lamp drawing a circle bigger than the earth. The width of a circle drawn by the fingertip of the lamp and the circumference of the earth and people who live between the two circles. I could see a pterosaur perched atop the street lamp shade and a Cro-Magnon man peeing under the lamp light, his gigantic penis sticking out from his loincloth. Everyone—including a monkey

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Younger Writers Kim Ae-ran

climbing up the lamp as he licked his fingers and picked at a swarm of drake flies as well as a sniveling straggler from a defeated Maori tribe clutching the lamp pole— materialized and quickly disappeared. I saw an aye-aye scurrying around the corner and thought the alleys were a perfect place to vanish. We were living in a prefabricated house in a small town. The owner built it on the rooftop of his building without any city inspection and rented it out. His building sat on high ground so we could see almost everything from the windows of our house. Curvy wrinkles of winding corners and meandering roads layered the town. People disappeared into and reappeared from the wrinkles many times throughout the day. The three of us—my father, my brother, and me—lived in that little plastic box overlooking the town. One day, my father said, “I heard that you can get taller if you play with Sky Kong Kong, the pogo stick.” I could’ve cared less about getting taller but sure wanted Sky Kong Kong. He looked into my eyes brimming with excitement. “I’ll get you one if you show me your pee pee.” “Show you what?” I turned pale. “Your pee pee.” My brother was reading a newspaper when he muttered, “Hey, Father, there’s an astronaut who came back from space a little taller.” My father ignored him and waited for my reply. I mulled over what was more precious to me between my pee pee or Sky Kong Kong. I thought very hard about it but I couldn’t decide which one of the two was more important to me. “You don’t want to?” My little guy shriveled up instantly, feeling the chill. I thought about my age, my dreams, and faces of those who loved me. But a small voice kept whispering inside my head that it would be for the best if I bear it for a few seconds. “You mean, right now?” My father nodded while my brother mumbled again, “It says here that he’s a Russian astronaut and that his crooked spine got straightened out in space’s zero-gravity.”

66 _list : Books from Korea

With a trembling hand, I unzipped my pants. Out came my underwear with Robot Taekwon-V1 holding his arm upright and his hand made into a fist, as if he was just about to take off. My father smiled at me encouragingly. I took a deep breath and was about to pull down my underwear when my brother turned a page, making a rustling sound, and asked, “By the way, Father, is it normal for a man’s spine to be completely straight?” My father ran an electrical repair shop, a tiny space about to explode with random parts and wires tangled and coiled with each other like intestines. Piles of defective electric housewares crowded the front of his shop. They all looked frustrated and mortified, like a drunkard in the police station waiting anxiously for his turn to fill out an investigation report. Inside, my father slouched on a stool and inspected machinery and tools through his smudged glasses. Like a man who has been doing just one thing for a very long time, his gaze was absentminded but very attentive. He had the same look when he looked into my mouth to check for cavities after I complained about a toothache. He spent his entire life fixing broken things and wore out his back and rear end along with his sight. But while he fixed trivial things and trivial problems, he wanted us to become important people instead. He knew that we were the kind of kids who doggedly carried our VCR, with a bootleg tape stuck inside, all the way to the next town because we couldn’t go to the only electrical repair shop nearby run by our father. In truth, we had never dreamed, not even once, that we’d actually become people who mattered. But on that day, just for that brief moment when my brother talked about the Russian astronaut, I wanted to be someone special. I thought maybe my father’s bad back would straighten out neatly if I became someone important and sent him to space. Unfortunately, we’d have to wait too long for that day to come so I decided to become a funny person first

A famous cartoon character who fights the evil masters of the earth with his martial arts skills and special powers.

Excerpt

“ My father ran an electrical repair shop, a tiny space about to explode with random parts and wires tangled and coiled with each other like intestines.”

before I became important. The day when he looked at my pee pee, he looked happier than he might have had he boarded the spaceship. I was so excited when I finally got Sky Kong Kong that I dashed out of the house in my underwear. My bowl-shaped hair waving in the wind, I bounced on it to my heart’s content. I grabbed the handle with my two hands, hopped on the foothold, and jumped off the ground with all my might! With the elastic force of the spring, my earlier shame flew away into space. I was so good at Sky Kong Kong that once I hopped on it, I rarely hopped off. Even when my father spanked me or my brother blabbered on about some nonsensical story, even when one of my favorite singers won a teen-star award, I stayed on my Sky Kong Kong. When the entire world was buzzing about the return of Halley’s Comet after seventy-six years, I was on my Sky Kong Kong, hopping quietly on the rooftop. With the world’s noise behind me, I felt alone but graceful on my Sky Kong Kong. When I was on it— how should I describe it—there was a “spirit” in my motion. The town looked different each time I jumped up on my Sky Kong Kong. Kong, I jumped up and poof, the guy I saw a few seconds ago was gone and kong, I jumped up again and a school girl who wasn’t there earlier appeared. I liked these quick glimpses of a faraway place, the “vagueness,” so I jumped harder. It would be nice to disappear someday, up into the air, before my feet touched the ground. I closed my eyes and tried to stay longer in the air. I took a quick peek and blink, the street lamp winked at me. I fell on the concrete floor of the rooftop and as if finally getting a chance to use the line that I had been rehearsing for a

very long time, I shouted out loud. “What the . . . ?” When I wasn’t on my Sky Kong Kong, I was busy either spitting from the rooftop or gazing at the sky as I sat on the windowsill. The window had a screen with gaping holes like an over-ripe pomegranate in autumn. A green curtain unwashed for a very long time bristled in the air with a breeze. I buried my face in it and inhaled deeply. I liked the old warm smell of dust. The smell of dust—how should I describe it—made me feel as if I was living in a world that I never knew before, a world that I may have lived once but didn’t understand. In those days, I was smaller than I am now so the distance between me and the night sky was that much wider. Such a dark and deep sky made me want to stay as far away as possible even if it meant I’d become even that much smaller.

translated by Kyong-Mi D. Kwon

Vol.27 Spring 2015 67

Poetry

Foreword Yun Dong-ju

Wishing not to have so much as a speck of shame toward heaven until the day I die, I suffered, even when the wind stirred the leaves. With my heart singing to the stars, I shall love all things that are dying. And I must walk the road that has been given to me. Tonight, again, the stars are brushed by the wind.

Sky, Wind, and Stars Yun Dong-ju Translated by Kyung-nyun Kim Richards and Steffen F. Richards Asian Humanities Press, 2003, 120 pp. ISBN 9780895818263

Illustrated by Woo Juri

68 _list : Books from Korea

The Youngest Parents with the Oldest Child By Kim Ae-ran Translated by Chi-Young Kim

Prologue My mother and father were seventeen when they had me. I turned seventeen this year. I have no idea if I will live to see eighteen or nineteen. That isn’t something I can decide. All I can be sure of is: there isn’t a lot of time. Children grow bigger and bigger. And I grow older and older. An hour in someone else’s life is like a day in mine. And a month in someone else’s life is like a year in mine. Now I’m older than my father. My father sees his future eighty-year-old face in mine. I see my future thirty-four-year-old face in his. Distant future and unlived past gaze at each other. And we ask: Is seventeen the right age to become a parent? Is thirty-four the right age to lose a child? My father asks me what I would want to be if I were reborn. I respond loudly, Dad, I want to be you. He asks why him when there are better people. I say quietly, shyly, Dad, I want to be reborn as you and father me To know what you feel. My father cries. This is the story of the youngest parents and the oldest child.

Chapter One

hen it’s windy, flashcards create a small whirlwind

inside me. Words are written on them, words with reduced body mass, like a fish dried in sea wind for a long time. I trace the names of objects, names I pronounced for the first time when I was young. This is snow, that’s night, over there is a tree, the ground is beneath my feet. You are you. Everything around me I learned first from its sound and then by copying the letters over and over again. Sometimes, even now, I’m surprised I know the names. I picked up all kinds of words all day long when I was young. “Mom, what’s this? What’s that?” I chirped, throwing everything into disarray. Each name was clear and light and didn’t stick to the object. Even though I had heard it the day before and the day before that, I kept asking as though it was the first time. When I lifted my finger to point at something, words with unfamiliar sounds fell out of my family’s mouths. My questions moved something, the way a wind chime danced in the breeze. I liked asking, “What is this?” I liked that better than actually learning the names of those objects. Rain is rain. Day is day. Summer is summer. I’ve learned a lot of words in my lifetime. Some words I use often and some I don’t. Certain words are rooted in the earth and others flit about like the seeds of a plant. When someone called summer by its name, I thought I could grab it. I kept asking what it was, believing that I could. Ground? Tree? You? This and that overlapped and shook according to the breeze from my mouth. When I pronounced it as “that,” it reverberated as “that,” spreading out in concentric circles, which sometimes felt as though it was as large as my whole world.

Now I know almost all the words I need in life. The important thing is to gauge the width of the words, reducing their mass. When you utter the word “wind,” it’s to imagine a thousand directions from which wind blows, not simply the four directions of a compass. When you say “betrayal,” it’s to follow along the lengthening shadow of a cross under the setting sun. When you call someone “you,” it’s to understand their depth, the flat part that’s hidden like a snow-covered crevice. But that has to be one of the hardest things in the world, because the wind keeps blowing and I have never been young. That must be how words feel. When I conversed with the world for the first time, it was in an agrarian mountain village, graced with clear water. In that place where a stream divided into several strands before they circled the village and ran into one, I learned my name and started to toddle. I began to babble, and three years later I started making simple sentences. During that time my parents lived with my maternal grandparents. The villagers usually raised or made everything they needed, so the words I learned would have had to do with our life, the way my cousin, who grew up in front of the TV, uttered “LG” as his first word. My slowness to speak worried my mother for a while. Concerned that I had some kind of problem, she asked her parents for advice. My father, on the other hand, claimed that kids were the cutest when they couldn’t speak and then he calmly went to work. The Daeho Tourism District was being constructed nearby, where my father labored. My grandfather, who had a head for numbers, built a structure in their front garden for the workers that would swarm in from other towns. It was a drafty house with concrete walls and a slate roof. A total of four families could live in that small straight building. One of

those rooms was for our family—a teenaged couple who still looked like kids and their newborn. The kitchen was in name only and the room was ridiculously small, but my parents say

year-old high school student. When the two first met, my grandfather launched into a grumpy interrogation. “So what are you good at?” This was after a serious hurricane of tears

they didn’t complain at all because it was free rent and my grandparents paid for their living expenses.

From the very beginning, my grandfather didn’t like his son-in-law. The biggest reason was that my father, still wet behind the ears, had gone and made another kid who was wet

and fighting had landed in the house from the news of my mother’s pregnancy. Kneeling before him, my father was unsure of what to say. “Father, I’m good at taekwondo.” My grandfather let out a grunt of disapproval. It was true that my father had gotten into the largest athletic high school in the province with his talent in taekwondo, but that skill wasn’t very useful in life. My father, made anxious by my grandfather’s silence, added, “Would you like to see?” He gripped his fist into a tight ball, and anyone who saw him then would have been forgiven for thinking that he was trying to strike my grandfather. My grandfather involuntarily flinched before calmly asking, “So are you saying your fist is a money maker?” “Um, well, when I graduate I’ll look for work at a small taekwondo studio…” My father trailed off, knowing full well that he couldn’t return to school. My grandfather hadn’t expected an impressive answer. So he decided to give him another shot. “And what else are you good at?” Many thoughts flew through my father’s head. ‘I’m good at Street Fighter.’ But if he uttered that, his new father-in-law might punch him in the face. ‘I’m good at talking back to the teacher.’ But that didn’t seem to be the kind of answer his father-in-law was waiting for. ‘What am I good at?’ After a few moments of agony, he ended up saying to his father-in-law, who was glaring holes into him, “I’m not sure, Father.”

behind the ears. The second reason was that he didn’t have the ability to make a living as the head of our little household, even though that came with the territory for a seventeen-

And then he realized, ‘Oh, I’m good at giving up.’ After his son-in-law left, my grandfather made a bitter remark. “He can’t do anything well. Other than breeding at a

My grandmother had six children: five sons and a daughter. Once I asked, “Mom, you said Grandmother and Grandfather never got along. So why do they have so many children?” My mother explained in embarrassment, “I know, right? I was curious about that, too, so I asked your grandmother. Well, they did it once in a blue moon and each time she got pregnant.” My mother was the baby of the family. Her childhood nickname was Princess Fuck. Since she grew up around foul-mouthed men, she threw out curse words at every opportunity in a way that was at odds with her pretty face. When I imagine a small girl wandering around the village, cursing adorably, I feel close to her. My mother’s still feisty, but she must have toned down her vocabulary when she understood that all the problems in the world couldn’t be solved by saying “fuck.” She must have realized that when she became pregnant and was kicked out of school, when my father was severely beaten up by my five uncles, when she had to listen to the younger customers at the restaurant complain about the smallest details and create a fuss, and when she stared at the hospital bills she couldn’t pay no matter how hard she thought about it.

young age.” My grandmother, who lost her deference toward her husband as she grew older, quietly grumbled, “Well, that’s a

high school that had space and at least get his diploma. My grandfather promised he would talk to the principal on his behalf. But rumors and gossip traveled at lightning speed in

talent, too.” My mother, her flattened bangs secured to one side by a hairpin or two in the style of the day, sat primly nearby without speaking. My grandfather looked away, as though more disappointed in his daughter’s taste than her actions. “If a man doesn’t have money he should at least have bravado. I don’t know. He’s such a simpleton.” But my grandfather had failed to realize something about my father. He was a simpleton, yes, but he was a rash and adventurous simpleton, which is the most dangerous kind. That explained why he got into a fistfight with the officiant on the day of his wedding and hung out with his friends that night, abandoning his wife as if she were the jilted bride in Midang’s poem Jilmajae. That also explained why, after he dabbled disastrously in a variety of things on the foolish recommendation of his friends, he helped me with homework about our family’s motto by telling me that ours was “Trust Between Friends.” That saying was framed and hanging in our house. He’d bought it from the old man in the Bulguksa temple souvenir shop during a trip with his buddies. My mother made fun of him for that motto. Others might shake their heads in dismay, thinking that she was treating her husband with contempt, but it was a natural impulse for a woman who had a shaky grasp of foreign-sounding Confucian teachings on the importance of relationships.

our small town and no school would let him in. They all insisted that allowing in a student like that would damage the school’s discipline and dignity. My grandfather, who prided himself on being a village leader, was humiliated. He ended up pushing his son-in-law into construction. He said that a man had to go to work. He intended for my father to take some responsibility as the head of his household and realize how difficult life was. It was less a serious suggestion than a calculated decision to make this boy who dared touch his daughter suffer for a few months. My grandfather never forgot to lecture my father about studying at night for the high school equivalency exam. My father, whose family was not well off, heeded his father-inlaw’s advice. As the local self-government rule was established, the county aimed to create a large-scale tourist attraction under the motto, “Daeho, a fun loving city.” The most important project was to enlarge the stream and build an eco-tourist attraction that would allow sightseeing from a boat. Eventually my parents’ village and a few other ri would disappear. My father went to work with the itinerant laborers living in our house. At work he was teased but beloved. Everyone called him Han the Married Man. The village elders patted him on the shoulder, saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay, around here anyone who gets married is an adult,” and chortled, “The Chois got a free son-in-law!” In the beginning, my father was satisfied with construction work. He enjoyed the lively, earthy talk of the men, he was now respectable in his in-laws’ eyes, and he

My grandfather urged my father to finish school. Since it was obvious he would now be kicked out of his athletic high school, my grandfather advised him to enroll in a nearby

liked that his boundless teenage energy was tamped down. He thought this was a good thing; he had wanted to quit his sport because he was tired of being beaten by his teachers. Ever since

he was thrown into reality and did adult work, he wanted to climb up the hill, rip open his shirt, and roar: “This is real life!” But it took less than three days for my father to realize

were more outgoing and spent more money than the collegebound boys, but she was also attracted to the college-bound boys’ untouchable self-regard. My father was the first athletic

how hard physical labor was, to keenly feel how arduous and backbreaking it was to use one’s hands to survive.

high school boy she’d met. And it wasn’t on a group or blind date, but by chance at an unexpected place. Anyway, from my mother’s perspective, my father had attractive characteristics of both kinds of students. He had the self-esteem of a person whose small talent had been acknowledged, but he gave off a subtle sense of inferiority and naiveté derived from the fact that this talent lay in a sport.

My father learned about my mother’s pregnancy near the intercity bus terminal in town, in a café frequented by middle and high school students. My mother had gone there on a few group dates. Once, she was in hot water at school after a biker gang member she met on a blind date drove his motorcycle to her school and circled the yard five times, doing wheelies, and shouted, “Mi-ra! I love you!” three times before disappearing with a roar, a giant dust cloud growing behind him. After that incident, all the Mi-ras in the school—Kim Mi-ra, Park Mi-ra, and Choi Mi-ra, my mother—were called to the teacher’s office one by one for questioning. The group dates usually moved from the café to a karaoke room. My mother observed with interest how the boys who awkwardly didn’t say a word in the café became extroverted at karaoke. The boys from agricultural or industrial high schools would shove all the tables to one side and dance vigorously to the songs of Seo Taiji or Deux. The lyrics rang out in the dark, dank room: “Time will never stop. Yo!” or “Now I have to be brave to get you.” A girl would sing the first few measures of a sweet duet before furtively putting the mike down on the table. Then the boy who liked her would grab the mike and sing after her. The boys fell in love first with my mother’s face and then with her voice. Many times, after she put down the mike, several hands pounced on it at the same time. Although our area had a total of five high schools, including the general and vocational schools, few boys captured her heart. From my mother’s perspective, the agricultural and industrial boys

The café was fairly empty. Neither my mother nor my father was in their school uniforms. My father was wondering why she was wearing a proud expression. He was worried that she would tell him they needed to break up again. Plus, this café made him feel uncomfortable. He couldn’t understand why girls would come to a place like this and just talk for over two hours with a single beverage in hand. My father looked at my mother. Mi-ra, whom he hadn’t seen in some time, had suddenly matured. Each time my mother took a sip of lemonade and licked her lips, my father licked his dry lips, too. Eventually she opened her mouth. “Dae-su, come here.” “Why?” “Just come here.” My father leaned forward. My mother, one hand covering her mouth, whispered something in his ear. The fuzz on his earlobe stood on end. Not really concentrating on what she was saying, he focused only on her soft breath, grinning despite himself. But soon enough his face turned pale and he raised his voice. “Why did you wait so long to tell me?” Everyone in the café turned to look at him. “What the hell? Why are you yelling? I hate people who yell!” she snapped, even louder than my father.

My father, who had gotten in trouble a few months ago for writing down on an aptitude test: “Hobbies—compromise. Special ability—compromise,” quickly apologized to his

struck far away, or like large footsteps. The rumbling seemed to be caused by a giant striding towards me. Each time I prepared to retreat like a reindeer sensitive to aftershocks. But at the

girlfriend. “Sorry, sorry.” The two put their seventeen-year-old heads together and brainstormed for a solution. But there was no easy solution. Around them a few teens were arrogantly and quietly chain smoking. Eyes downcast, my father toyed with a small parasol planted in his parfait. “Mi-ra, I—” he started, launching into how he was nothing much, that he could never be a good father, that he was too poor, that he was afraid of disappointing people, that now that he thought about it there were people in his family who’d had cancer. He rambled on, illogical and incoherent. My mother listened quietly. “Dae-su,” she called gently. “Yeah?” “There’s this bug that camouflages itself with bird shit so it won’t get eaten by a bird.” “And?” “That’s you.”

same time I wanted to dance because my mother’s heartbeat overlaid mine, like music. Boom thump thump. Boom thump thump. Boom boom thump. Boom thump. The boom was my mother’s, the thump mine. The boom set the tone and the thump hit the off-beat. Tethered to the long umbilical cord, I concentrated on that sound. My mother’s heart floated above my head like a plump moon and spread beats all around, drop by drop, the way a tree blooms in green. The sound was both a bit, the smallest unit of data, and a musical beat. The bits and the beats were scattered around like leaflets, sending important messages throughout my body. It was a rhythm that would cause anyone to rise to action and it made me want to become something. The cells receiving their orders immediately rushed into action. My organs, greeting the beats pouring down from above, sprouted and stretched. My liver swelled and my kidney ripened and my bones formed. I grew rapidly. And in my dreams, I frequently met my mother’s dreams and had rambling conversations. “Mom?” “Yes?” “Mom?” “Yes.” “I’m nervous. My heart is pounding. I feel like my heart’s in my throat. I feel like I’m going to die, but I can’t stop it.” “Baby.” “Yes?”

[……] Even after that my mother couldn’t make a definite decision. She vacillated several times every day between the pros and the cons. Time kept flowing by and I kept growing in the damp dark space. All around me was an unrelenting thumping. I heard that not with my ears but with my entire body. I tried to determine the true nature of this vibration that surrounded me, like a soldier in an underground bunker concentrating on cracking the Morse code. That code was: Pitpat…pitpat…pitpat… Or it could be described as banging, like drums being

“It’s the same with me too. My heart keeps pounding. It pounds so much that it hurts but I can’t stop it.”

[……] My mother knew that life was not born but forced out.

I know this sound!’ My mother looked down seriously at her crumpled baby. Then she made a strange cracking noise: “A-reum, it’s your mom...” and then she started to bawl. She

She’d always known this, since she grew up in the country. All of the flowers, animals, and insects she’d seen had ripped through a shell smaller than itself before bursting out like a firecracker as though they had waited for a long time, as though they couldn’t wait any longer. Bursting out like laughter, like jeers, like applause. Boom! Boom! Their fully formed bodies made it hard to understand how those large wings and legs were packed inside when you looked at the shell left behind. In late spring, my mother gave birth to me after a difficult labor. Unusual for a premature baby, I burst out with ferocity, abruptly, confidently, ripping through the ancient and complicated family trees of Choi Mi-ra and Han Dae-su. And I instinctively felt that I had to cry very loudly in front of everyone to lessen the impact of that abruptness. But I didn’t know what crying was and I didn’t know how to cry. A hot and pliable energy came up from within. But I felt nauseated and dizzy; I couldn’t make any noise. No wonder, since I had been breathing through the umbilical cord and had to use my lungs for the first time. A precarious silence flowed in the delivery room. The doctor fluidly picked me up and slapped my bottom with his large hand. It was so painful I wanted to get angry but all I could do was burst into tears. If not I might get another slap; also, that was the only thing I could do right then. “Good, good. Crying means you’re alive,” the heartless salt-and-pepper haired doctor soothed me. He brought me to my mom’s breast. I was introduced to my mother covered in all kinds of fluids. She must have been excited for this

apparently didn’t know why she was crying. She told me later that all the emotions that a human could feel—sadness and happiness, pride and shame, relief and hurt, hollowness and satisfaction—came over her at once, and that she had never experienced such all-encompassing feelings. At that moment, her face didn’t look like how she would want to appear to the world. Her sobs were those of a woman who didn’t realize there was anyone else in the room. She simply disintegrated, like the rapid controlled-collapse of a high-rise building. I imagine a woman would cry like that only once or twice in her life: when her child is born and when her child dies. Listening to my mother’s animalistic keening, I felt relieved. I was born to people who cry the way I do, I thought. And I made my mother feel something. Even though I didn’t fully understand it, her tears gave me the belief that at least I wasn’t a completely worthless presence. My family, who had been worried sick about the possibility of some mishap since my mother had been suffering from toxemia throughout her pregnancy, was overjoyed when they heard the word “son.” My grandmother collapsed to the ground and wiped her eyes. My grandfather and my father, who had never before touched each other, embraced. And like blades of grass that flattened in the breeze, the wailing that started from me went over to my mother, passed through my grandfather, and seeped into my father. They cried loudly even though they weren’t the ones who’d been born, as though they had heard once or twice that crying meant they were alive too,

moment, but I was mortified that I was so dirty. Of course, like other newborns, I could barely see. But as soon as I was nestled against Mom and heard her heartbeat I relaxed. ‘Oh,

that even though they were alive, they wanted to live more. My father cried the loudest. After he held me for the first time with trembling hands, apologetic that he had been secretly

praying, please don’t make me a father, he cried twice as loud and three times as long as anyone else, becoming the object of the nurses’ grumbles.

bag of cheap dumplings. It wasn’t the first time someone said something like that to us, so I don’t know why it set him off like that.

turned seventeen this year. People say it’s a miracle that I’ve lived this long. I think so, too. Not many in a situation like mine have lived past their seventeenth birthdays. But I tend to believe that the larger miracle exists in the ordinary. Living an ordinary life and dying at an ordinary age are the miracles. In my eyes, my mother and father were the miracles. My uncles and aunts were the miracles. Our next-door neighbors. The middle of the summer and the middle of the winter. Not me. A few years ago, a neighbor came over and asked, “So you don’t know what caused it and there’s no treatment?” “That’s correct,” my father said. “That’s not a disease,” she said. “I’m sorry?” “That’s a message.” In her hands were a worn bible and a rosary. “Ma’am,” my father said, “he’s not a message, he’s A-reum. His name is Han A-reum.” At that moment I was embarrassed about my gentle, round name that was at odds with my appearance, but I was also proud; my father was all grown up. As a teenager, my father just bowed his head as though it was all his fault when

My father came into my room and lay down, using my weak legs as a pillow. He puffed out his cheeks and grinned. “A-reum, what song do you like?” “Why?” I asked, my weak voice trembling. “Just curious. I want to know what my son likes.” With dim eyes, I looked over my glasses at my young father, my oh-so-young father, and smiled. To make him feel better, I made a joke. “I like anything that a pretty girl sings.” My father hollered like he was insane. “Me toooooooo!” He sprang up and shouted, “Lee Hyori’s the bomb!” I raised both arms high. My voice wasn’t as powerful as I wanted but I yelled as loud as I could. “Park Ji-yoon is the bomb!” My father jumped up and down. “Uhm Junghwa’s the bomb!” “Sung Yu Ri’s the bomb!” “BoA’s the bomb!” He suddenly became quiet, like a distraught man. “But you know, as you get older you start liking sad songs. And the saddest song in the world is the song you listen to when you’re drunk. So when you’re grown up you have to listen to ballads when you’re drunk, okay?” “Okay, Dad,” I said, grinning through my few remaining teeth. “Dad?” “Yeah?” “Are you sad right now?” “Yeah.” “Because of me?”

people said things like that, but now he tried to protect our family from ignorant people. He still must have been upset; he came home drunk that night. In one hand he was holding a

“Yeah.” “What can I do for you?” My father stared at me. I could tell he was thinking about

Chapter Two

something. He said quietly, “I don’t know what you can do, but I know what you shouldn’t.” “What’s that?”

and Shakespeare in the goal box. I played baseball in a stadium with Plato as the catcher and Aristotle pitching. The game usually went like this: Plato pointed toward the sky and

“You shouldn’t be sorry.” “Why not?” “It’s rare for someone to be sad for someone else.” I was quiet. “I’m happy that you’re the reason for my sadness.” I didn’t say anything. “So you should grow up and be someone’s sadness. And when you’re feeling sad, you should cry like a child.” “Dad?” “Yeah?” “I’m already a child.” “Right, that’s right.” My seventeenth birthday present was a laptop. My parents bought it for me so that I could get on the internet from the hospital room. It was a clunky used laptop but I’d needed a computer, so as soon as I received that heavy thing, I hugged it tight as though it were a puppy. And to show my parents how much I loved it, I grinned like an idiot. It was perfect timing; there was something I’d wanted to do with the computer. When I was alone, I usually read books. At first I followed along with the school curriculum, but later I read out of boredom. Books became a grandmother who told me great stories all night long, a teacher who imparted all the knowledge and information in the world, and a friend who shared his secrets and problems. Because I became sick at a young age, I

Aristotle, chewing gum, nodded and pointed at the ground. And soon a change-up with a beautiful arc floated toward me from ancient times. I stupidly swung a bat taller than me and missed. Of course philosophical books were difficult and there are so many parts I still don’t understand, but I thought of them as a long, elegant poem. The parts that didn’t make sense would walk out toward me someday to say with a smile, “Hi, it’s me.” This would happen much later, the way important life lessons usually arrive. It was the same when I played tennis with poets, Go with playwrights, and volleyball with scientists. From them, I learned how to make my heart race without actually running. I liked everything composed of paper and print no matter the genre or thickness, from illustrated guides of insects, plants, and marine life to collections of poetry that stomped all over my heart to social science books that made my mind feel as though it was slapped. Among them were odd, random books for beginners: Go’s First Steps, What Is Golf, Beginning Japanese, Basics of Electrical Engineering, Classical Music for Beginners, Easy Feminism. I don’t know why I read them. I studied electrical engineering but changing a single light bulb made me slick with sweat. I memorized hiragana but have never been to Japan. I didn’t read for the love of knowledge but with the anxiety of someone who would be the sole survivor after the end of the world. Putting aside the fact that I was reading about golf when I’d never been out on the green, what

couldn’t go out and play. Instead, I played sports with all the writers in the world. I played soccer in an imaginary playing field with Flaubert as the striker, Homer as the midfielder,

use did the sole survivor of the human race have for feminism? If someone were to ask me, how in the world did a kid like you read all of that? I would say, if a person was by himself

for a long time, he could do a surprising number of things. Not because he’s so determined, but because he suddenly realizes what he’d accumulated. Fiction was my favorite, from the oldest story of mankind to a brand-new debut novel from a young foreign author, from the most mainstream story to experimental works created by an author annoyed at the canon and only wrote them to say fuck you to older writers. And while I hung out with all the authors in the world, and books I didn’t have a chance to read—and maybe would never read—kept pouring out into the universe, I’d quietly become old. In my old age, I hung out with those books. My skin had turned brittle a while ago and my hair was falling out one by one. But that was just my outward appearance; I didn’t have the wisdom or experience of the elderly. My aging didn’t have layers of wrinkles and volume. My aging was a hollow process. So I was curious about the lives of people who lived longer than I. I wanted to know about the thoughts and problems of those who were younger. Thankfully, books, while they didn’t contain everything, had a lot. Sometimes my mother asked, “A-reum, what are you reading?” Through my sunken lips, I chirped like a bird, “Just essays, Mom. This writer’s mother died when he was seven and he suddenly went blind. But eight years later, one day, he could miraculously see.” “It’s a novel?” “No, a memoir. But he thought he might go blind again at any moment and rushed to the bookstore. And the first book he grabbed was called The Idiot.” “Why? Is it a famous book?” “It was to him, because when he was little, his father kept saying, you idiot, you idiot. Isn’t that funny?”

My mother smiled shyly. “I have a potty mouth, too.” One day, my father asked, “A-reum, what are you reading?” Wind whistled through my missing teeth as I replied, “A novel, Dad. A boy and his family are moving to America but the main character gets stranded because of a hurricane.” “Yeah?” “And so this boy is left in the middle of the Pacific with a tiger. At a certain point he says that despair was more frightening than the tiger. One day, when the tiger he was so afraid of disappears, he breaks down in tears.” “What? That doesn’t even make sense.” “No, it does. If you read it you understand why that is.” “Yeah?” “That’s what I’m saying,” I said in my trembling voice, blinking my gray eyelashes. “So Dad?” “Yeah?” “When you feel so alone, when this world feels like the vast, frightening Pacific...” “Yeah?” “I’ll be your tiger.” My father didn’t say anything for a while. He stroked my head, murmuring, “A toothless tiger, huh?”

The Youngest Parents with the Oldest Child Kim Ae-ran Changbi Publishers, 2011, 354 pp.

Visit www.list.or.kr to listen to a reading of the excerpt. For publication inquiries, please contact Joseph Lee / KL Management: josephlee705@gmail.com

REVIEWS 72 70

Nowhere to Be Found

A Warm Family Kim Huran

Bae Suah

安慰少年

(Comfort the Young) Eun Heekyung

Cuentos de la noche escalofriante (Stories from the Terrifying Night) Lee Ho-cheol

Zombies, la descente aux enfers (Zombies) Kim Junghyuk

Vol.27 Spring 2015 69

Searching for No One

Nowhere to Be Found Bae Suah Translated by Sora Kim-Russell Amazon Crossing English, 2015, 108 pp. ISBN 9781477827550

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In Nowhere to Be Found, her second work translated into English following Highway with Green Apples, Bae Suah does more with character and narrative in 60 pages than most novelists accomplish in 300. With concise, evocative prose, Bae merges the mundane with the strange in a way that leaves the reader fulfilled yet bewildered, pondering how exactly the author managed to pull this all off. Plot-wise, Nowhere to Be Found is pretty straightforward. Set, for the most part, in 1988, the unnamed narrator is a young temporary worker at a university in Gyeonggi Province as a sort of administrative assistant and works part-time at a nearby restaurant, running herself ragged in order to support her semi-appreciative family. Not much of the narrator’s life outside of work is depicted. Although she does have a boyfriend of sorts, it’s complicated both by his being away in the military and by the fact that his mother thoroughly dislikes her for being lower class. While her boyfriend, Kim Cheolsu, is finishing up his military duties, our narrator takes off a day to visit him where he’s stationed, but things go awry, and she is led on a wild goose chase after an officer tells her that the Kim Cheolsu she’s looking for is off on a special training mission. When, after a lengthy bus mix-up during which she reads a long “Wanted” flier about three persons suspected of murder, she finally arrives at another camp, where the soldiers there tell her that there are two Kim Cheolsus—one who is stationed at the base she went to first and another who was in an accident and didn’t show up for training. Worried, she returns to the first base, finds her boyfriend Cheolsu there, breaks things off, and then goes home. That’s not to say this is a simple, straightforward story. On the contrary, there are several strange sequences that complicate the characterization of the narrator. The first odd moment pops up, when, after a meticulously realistic description of the narrator’s two dead-end jobs, she answers a call at the university from a guest lecturer on criminal sociology. After opening the conversation in a startling way—“This week’s topic is murder”—the two converse about practical matters and it becomes clear that the

narrator had mistaken this lecturer for a different professor and failed to send him the proper forms. They banter a bit: “If you’re free on Saturday, would you like to come to my lecture? It’ll be an interesting one—” I cut him off. “What kinds of people commit murder?” “Murderers, I suppose.” “Why do they do it?” “I’m sure they have their reasons.” “Is this how all your lectures go?” Functioning almost as a rom-com cute-meet, this conversation is repeated near the end of the book when, a decade later, she meets a man who claims to have seen her when he was completing his compulsory military service back in 1988.

and set my body on fire. Burn me at the stake like a witch. (p. 57) This self-destructive violence arrives from almost nowhere, puncturing the placid tone of the narration, which, aside from these sections and the ones where the narrator is lambasted by her mother and her boyfriend’s mother, is disaffected and almost flat. These disruptions—juxtaposed with the “Wanted” poster and the criminal sociologist— add a significant dimension to the narrator’s sense of being, culminating in a haunting last line that will make you want to re-read the story again. by Chad W. Post Publisher, Open Letter Books

“Wow, that was already ten years ago. I teach sociology courses at a university, but I’m not a full professor. I’m what you might call an after-hours club performer—a part-time outsider lecturer who teaches night classes. By day I’m an ordinary company employee. The official title of my course is criminal sociology; I lecture for three hours straight. The topic changes every week: murder, robbery, burglary, rape, domestic violence.” “What kinds of people commit murder?” “Murderers, I suppose.” Repetition like this, in a novella as short as Nowhere to Be Found, begs the reader’s attention, especially when it’s paired with the one other repeated scene—an abstract sex scene tinged with violence: Rain falls inside the dark, abandoned house. It streams down the walls of the kitchen and front door like a waterfall. Burn me. Pour gasoline over me and set my body on fire. Burn me at the stake like a witch. (pp. 19-20) When the lighter hovers by my crotch, he asks, “Can I burn you a little?” I nod and shut my eyes. Burn me. Pour gasoline over me

Vol.27 Spring 2015 71

Togetherness Becomes Us

A Warm Family Kim Huran Translated by Cho Young-Shil Codhill Press, 2014, 110 pp. ISBN 9781930337800

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A Warm Family is a collection of poetry that emphasizes the family as the foundation of all human interaction. Kim Huran shows the importance of family and friendship as the fundamental relationships that shape our world. Throughout this work, the poet creates images that show secluded moments of bliss with lovers—those moments when love seems to enshroud and shield us from the reality of the world. These experiences allow us to overlook the mundane and all the pain that comes from it. Kim’s poems express the reality that we all need each other, and they show the natural urge of humans, as well as animals, to seek comfort. We take delight in knowing someone is at home waiting for us. The poet mirrors this sentiment through images in the natural world. In “Family: A Herd of Elephants,” she shows how animals intuitively understand their own interconnectedness as they wait for a young elephant seeking nourishment. “Suddenly One Day” reveals the anguish that arises when feeling disconnected. The poet strives to tear down walls that separate us, awakening the reality of interdependence that is fundamental to our own nature, as well as reaffirms that the walls we build are constructed out of fear. In this poem, the narrator’s “insides throb with pain,” and it is this pain that is the result of constructed isolation—a false sense of separateness leading to loneliness. Kim acknowledges that the journey of life calls for consciousness. There will always be another tomorrow waiting to fill up our time, but we have the choice

to slow down and enjoy the moment. She likens the day to a ship: when night comes, the day anchors us to reality, allowing us a certain safety as we drift deeper into the night and the presence of loved ones. The family is like an anchor, allowing one to venture out into the world while knowing that at home there is a certain safety to be returned to again and again. Kim Huran calls for a world that shouldn’t have to be imagined—a world in which people actually connect with their neighbors. Her poetry presents the idea of allowing warmth to radiate and change our lives, bringing us closer to one another. If the world she writes about is unfamiliar, it is because we are so disconnected from each other. Her poetry does not take us to faraway, enchanted realms; instead, it is focused around the hearth. The essence of Kim’s poetry is the essence of compassion, of companionship, of family, of the stars lingering as we sit and enjoy the moment with good company. She calls for a spring awakening of the communal as a source of redemption for the isolated individual. When we spend too much time alone, we get lost in our deceptions and delusions. This collection of poetry aims to spread the lightness and warmth that radiate naturally when we are with others. by Diana Waldron Editorial Assistant, Codhill Press

The Light at the End of the Tunnel

Cuentos de la noche escalofriante (Stories from the Terrifying Night) Lee Ho-cheol Translated by Hae Myoung Yu Bonobos, 2014, 78 pp. ISBN 9786078099672

Reading Lee Ho-cheol is like walking on the edge of a cliff. The opportunity to step back to safety is always there, but the abyss feels more powerful and, worse still, deeply desirable. In Stories from the Terrifying Night, desperation, pain, the inevitable passing of time, the conflict between North and South Korea, and the thin line between life and death combine through masterful storytelling. In addition to the political and historical themes that Lee includes in these witty, satirical stories, there is a deep understanding of human nature as he explores the inner feelings we experience when confronted with extreme situations. Within the prevailing mood of melancholy and desperation, there is always a spark, symbol, or shift in emphasis that helps us to keep going and find the strength to face our harshest judge: ourselves. In “The Naked Image,” for example, we are presented with the moral dilemma of two brothers—prisoners of war suffering not only from the inhuman conditions of the conflict itself, but struggling to reconcile their strengths and weaknesses when confronted with tragedy. It is a raw portrayal of the slow collapse of an initial stoicism in the face of disaster where the characters are forced to become empty in order to survive. In “Odol’s Grandmother,” an old woman waits for news from her grandson who has left her, treasuring the brief letter she received in her lonely home and asking the Lord of the Mountain to keep him safe. But she must pay a high price for his absence as her desolation takes its toll. In “Heat on a Cold Night,” the first

story in the book, Captain Kim has to put up with a pompous superior, a young general obsessed with trivialities, who takes his subordinate on an inane jeep ride. The general’s explanation for his erratic, volatile behavior is that: “A new war must break out! We are soldiers but we’re bored and have nothing to do.” In the wide scale of emotions that can be found in this collection, “Invitation to a Birthday Party” stands out. The protagonist, Wankyu, tells a group of enthralled listeners about the series of events that almost killed him and his brother during the war. As they listen, the audience experiences a growing sense of anguish that is then conveyed to the reader, who starts to feel as though they’re also a listener. Stories from the Terrifying Night was translated into Spanish for the first time by Hae Myoung Yu for the Mexican publisher Bonobos, in collaboration with the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. It introduces us to a tough, overwhelmingly harsh world and the inescapable awareness that our worst demons are always to be found within ourselves. by Amelia Suárez Arriaga Writer and Editor, Bonobos Editores

Vol.27 Spring 2015 73

Adolescence Found

安慰少年 (Comfort the Young) Eun Heekyung Translated by Xu Lihong Flower City Publishing House 2014, 396 pp. ISBN 9787536068919

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All of us are vagabond juveniles in this unpredictable universe, so does anyone understand the sensitive mind of a teenager? Comfort the Young tells us a story about a lonely teenager who gradually becomes mature by experiencing familial affection, love, and friendship. The wellknown Korean author, Eun Heekyung, transforms herself into the main character in this novel, a lonely boy, in order to infiltrate the inner worlds of young boys and girls. Through an elaborate but wellconnected sequence of events, the author poses a soft challenge to the traditional sense of narrative order, forcing readers to confront, not only in content, but also in narrative form, universal anxieties and insecurities of adolescence. Yan Yu is a gentle frail-looking boy from a single parent family. His divorced mother is a fashion columnist with a strong will and a younger boyfriend. This kind of family garners a lot of attention from society, making Yan Yu precociously sensitive and better mannered than others of his age. In high school, he gets to know a boy called Tai Zhu, who has just returned from overseas. Although he possesses a strong personality, it turns out he is just as lonely as Yan Yu. Also, he has an unforgettable first love with a girl named Li Caiying. Music is another of Yan’s companions. Alongside a personal soundtrack of his favorite tunes, Yan runs in his youthfulness, competing with time itself. There is an exclusive tiny little world inside everyone’s mind, which, in the process of maturity, inevitably collides

with the outside world. Although reality is cruel, Eun’s characters long to be treated tenderly and to feel comforted. The loss of youth, growing pains, the general confusion of love and the pressures of society—all of these factors, throughout all times and in all places, will be universally suffered by every single young person. This novel will remind us of those warm but bitter memories. Eun Heekyung has earned her reputation as a popular South Korean author in China. Comfort the Young was included in the Korean youth novel series called “Mujin•Lei” (along with her novel What Are You Doing, Fox?, which also takes personal growth as its theme) after it had been published in China in 2014. Eun always maintains a sharp social awareness of those who criticize common sense and ordinary ideology, from the view of women’s lives proffered by feminism to young people’s offbeat life philosophy. Comfort the Young is an exemplary South Korean novel, the details of which help readers from different countries to know this country better. On the other hand, it is a transnational work in which everybody who has gone through adolescence will recognize their own reflection. It helps us to experience young people’s emotions once again and probably prevents us from breaking their hearts. by Du Xiaoye Editor, Flower City Publishing House

Encountering Zombies

Zombies, la descente aux enfers (Zombies) Kim Junghyuk Translated by Moon So-young and Béatrice Guyon Decrescenzo Éditeurs 2014, 300 pp. ISBN 9782367270166

After publishing La bibliothèque des instruments de musique and Bus Errant in the Micro-Fictions collection of Decrescenzo Éditeurs, which introduced several Korean writers such as Kim Aeran and Eun Heekyung, Kim Junghyuk is back with his first novel to be translated into French, Zombies, la descente aux enfers. The novel introduces Chae Ji-hoon, an amiable protagonist that readers will enjoy following around. Ji-hoon suddenly leaves his peaceful daily routine of detecting telecommunication signals alone in his car, by encountering several characters. First, he meets Bouboule 130, a joyful librarian fond of music who will soon become his best friend. Then come various habitants of the city of Gorio, a gloomy, strange, and even sometimes inhuman place. Ji-hoon will soon learn how to live with the “zombies” he meets and get used to them through a series of encounters, each one more bizarre than the last. For example, we will learn that these creatures from another world love music. Feeling fear as well as compassion, Ji-hoon and his friends start tracking the zombies in order to discover the odd story surrounding them. In this lengthy but fast-paced novel, the typical Kim Junghyuk characters can be found: characters who are removed from reality and who always convey a lot of fun (Bouboule 130 is the true epitome of grotesque!) but nevertheless show human concern and sympathy. We are also very pleased to find humor along the way and serious themes dealt with

unconventionally, such as the funny episode of the epitaphs on gravestones that look like genuine pearls of literature. Slightly fantastic but not overly so, Zombies is a very pleasant read which distinguishes itself from the usual realist serious literature. Do not be turned away by the blood-red cover. On the contrary, horror is mocked throughout the adventures of the two protagonists. by Lucie Angheben Co-editor-in-chief, Keulmadang

Vol.27 Spring 2015 75

The 6th International Translators’ Conference

The following two papers are from the 6th International Translators’ Conference, co-hosted by LTI Korea and the Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation at Ewha Womans University from December 5 to 6, 2014, on the theme “In ‘Other Words’: Challenges in Translating Korean Literature.”

Building a UK Readership for Korean Literature Translation Practices Within Korea, translation quality is often judged according to different criteria than it is in the UK and U.S.—those who teach translation in Korea place a strong emphasis on “faithfulness” to the original text and on communicating cultural context, whereas translation for the UK market is a far more creative process, with publishers encouraging the translator to “take liberties” in recreating the text for an Anglophone audience.

Talking about Literature In Korea, writers are seen as intellectuals, and are used to being asked for their views on art or philosophy, perhaps even more often than their Anglophone counterparts. Hence, it’s difficult for those in the UK to understand that this kind of intellectual engagement is seen as an integral part of a writer’s job for all writers, not merely the “high-brow.” Hwang Sun-mi likes to describe The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly as a serious-minded take on mixed-race adoption and environmentalism, but Chi-young Kim’s English translation flew off the shelves because it was presented to readers as a

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charming fable about motherly love. Translators need to be aware of these conventions, and know that they will not be able to sell the book effectively if they simply translate a synopsis or review which was originally written with Korean readers in mind. Mood and tone have traditionally been privileged over character and incident in Korea. The reader’s emotional engagement is Korea’s equivalent of the Anglophone obsession over “identifying” with the protagonist. Combined with the Korean tendency to subsume these imaginary readers into an ethnicallydefined homogenous “we,” reviews can come across as both woolly and culturally exclusivist, making it difficult for UK editors to get a handle on the book’s merits. Plot is not absent from Korean fiction—it’s just not what’s usually mentioned. Yet it is precisely what UK editors want to know most about, so that they can pitch the book to their marketing department, who will use this information to design the most effective strategy for promoting the book in the UK market. Translators need to embrace a lot of the work that, with other language pairings, is taken on by agents or commissioning editors, as well as spend time keeping

Essay

their fingers on the pulse of the literary scene in both the source and target country. This might all sound like a lot for translators to take on, but the upside is that it allows us to be advocates (vocal and often pushy) for the literature we love; the books we bring to the attention of publishers can counteract any tendencies towards pigeonholing a national literature, founded on an overly narrow conception of what readers want and a correspondingly timid marketing strategy. Overly homogenising translation practices—in the choice of which books to translate, in how “domesticating” a translation is—will only serve to accelerate stagnation, doing both literatures a disservice.

Role(s) of the Translator Participating in social media and online communities can be an effective way for translators to raise their own profile and make useful contacts by engaging directly with editors, reviewers, and other translators, who work with different language combinations. Editors will be more likely to publish a given translation, and/ or select a given translator to work on a particular book, if the translator has contacts within the industry who could be useful for promotion.

Collaborations with UK Institutions One of the UK institutions with whom LTI Korea would benefit from collaborating is the National Centre for Writing (an imminent merger of the current Writers’ Centre Norwich and the British Centre for Literary Translation). It combines expertise in the three main areas relevant for aspiring translators: translation, creative writing, and the promotion of literature. Many graduates of the BCLT’s highly successful summer school and mentorship programmes have gone on to secure translation contracts. This expert knowledge of the target market and proven track record in training translators places them in a unique position to supplement the excellent training provided by LTI Korea’s current programmes. There is also SOAS (The School of Oriental and African Studies), which is the UK’s chief centre for Korean Studies and runs a separate Translation Studies MA programme.

Selecting Books to Translate It is imperative to identify a specific target audience, and give concrete reasons why a given book will appeal to that audience. Rather than choosing books based on books that have been well-received in the Korean market, I recommend translators/agents first familiarise themselves with the target market, and with the lists of specific publishers who are willing to take on translated literature. This will give them an idea of which type of book these publishers might be looking to commission, and they can then select one or two Korean titles that best fit these criteria. UK publishers won’t want to publish a book purely because it’s Korean. This is just business sense; Korea and its culture are still so little known in the UK, the group of people with a specific, pre-existing interest in Korea is not large enough to constitute an audience for a book. But this is in fact an advantage for Korean literature, because it means that any Korean book that gets published in English translation has to earn its place there by virtue of its literary and artistic quality, not because it is of academic or sociological interest.

Conclusion The various challenges I have mentioned can be seen as just that—challenges to be overcome with patience and perseverance, rather than insurmountable obstacles. If LTI Korea can collaborate with UK institutions and individuals in order to aid its translators in gaining expert knowledge of the UK market, and if these translators can make the best use of this knowledge through tailoring their translation practices and promotional pitches accordingly, then the future of Korean literature in the UK will be very bright indeed.

by Deborah Smith Translator

Vol.27 Spring 2015 77

The 6th International Translators’ Conference

Back-translating Race: On Dealing with Racially Sensitive Language in Translation

fellow translator and I have a routine. One of us will be translating a text when a difficulty arises: the author has written something that could be construed as insensitive. Maybe it’s a comment on race, or gender, or the use of a word that stigmatizes disability. We ask each other the same questions each time: Do you see what I see? If so, is it a mere glitch, or does it belong in the text? Is it a problem? Will it make the author look bad? Should I let the author look bad? We have this routine because that second opinion helps to balance our personal reactions against our broader understanding of a text, and because the process of translation itself can exacerbate the issue— a single shift in word choice can mean the difference between subtly needling the reader vs. slapping the reader in the face. Ideally our goal is to match the effect of the original, but different social histories and mores mean that this is not always possible. In regards to race, Korean literature is more diverse than it is sometimes given credit for. AfricanAmerican characters, for example, make an occasional appearance. When we translate these texts into English, we are translating them for a readership that not only includes African-American readers but also has its own history and set of expectations regarding use of language, sensitivity, and authenticity. So it is worth asking whether translators have a responsibility to address depictions that may be stereotypical or problematic. This question arose for me while translating a short story set in New York, in which a Jamaican-American

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woman tells a Korean man: “처음에 이 미국땅에 발을 디딜 때만 해도 몸뚱아리 하나밖에 없는 깜둥이 계집애였다고요.”

Translation: “When I first set foot in this country, I was just a [derogatory term for a black person + derogatory term for a woman] with nothing but the clothes on my back.” Ggamdungi (or ggeomdungi) is a native Korean word that refers to anyone with dark skin, but it has also become the standard Korean translation of the English “n-word”—the critical difference being that while ggamdungi would never be considered a polite word, it lacks the full shock factor (not to mention genocidal history) of its English equivalent. Nevertheless, in this particular story, the word is meant to echo its American usage. In other words, my task was not actually translating Korean but rather back-translating a culturally specific form of American English. For this particular story, the author’s intent was to create an authentically African-American character. The problem was that the language was misapplied. While the “n-word” is used by some African-Americans as a form of linguistic reappropriation, the important distinction is how, when, by, and with whom the word is used. In this case, the dialogue ended up sounding inauthentic: the woman is talking to someone that she’s just met for the first time and who does not share her racial or cultural background, so it’s unlikely that she would use such an intimate form of ingroup language with him; also, the character is a firstgeneration Jamaican immigrant, so this particular use of American English might not actually apply to

Essay

her. After consulting with the author and editor, I translated the line to read: “When I first set foot in this country, I was just a little black girl with nothing but the clothes on my back.” The phrase “little black girl” preserved the meaning and intent but without slapping the reader in the face. The fundamental question, though, behind this translation was whether to preserve the author’s original word choice as accurately as possible, or to adapt the text to the sensitivities of the target readership. The former approach makes sense if the text is meant to be problematic, or if it is in some way a representation of the writer’s personal sentiments, a specific context or historical moment, or simply the prevailing sentiment of that society. But what if the author’s goal was simply to create a character who talks and behaves like a real person? This is where translators can intervene as cultural brokers and speak from the culture of their target language, particularly as more and more Korean literature is being set outside of Korea. As individual translators, these situations are tricky, but it can be even trickier as a teacher of translation, particularly when your students lack exposure to other ethnicities. Assuming they even notice the incongruity in the first place, students may feel overly bound by the original text and the strictures of grading or unsure of what would read as authentic in English. During a recent translation workshop, my students and I discussed the following passage: “사격자는 희끗희끗한 곱슬머리의 덩치가 큰 흑인이었다. 곱슬머리는 담배 냄새 풍기는 입을 벌리고 고래고래 소리를 질렀다.” Translation:

“The shooter was a big black man with curly, grey hair. Curly Hair opened his mouth and shouted, his breath reeking of cigarettes.” The epithet “Curly Hair” is repeated throughout the passage. The issue here was that, from an American perspective, it was hard to take seriously the idea that the one black man in a group of white men would be referred to by the texture of his hair and not by his race. Also, the fact that his hair texture is focused on seemed somehow more racialized. The solution arrived at in class was to simply drop the reference to hair texture, as it would not be a remarkable detail for Western readers: “The shooter

was a big black man with gray hair. He opened his mouth and shouted, his breath reeking of cigarettes.” The students agreed that the original text wasn’t necessarily offensive in Korean, but what is innocuous in one language can stand out as unusual in another. What I wish to emphasize here is that questioning language use is not about some simplistic notion of “politically correct” language or “language policing,” nor is it about burying our heads in the sand and pretending that racist language doesn’t exist. We shouldn’t sanitize a text simply because it bothers us or because there is some slight chance it will offend someone else (the same can be said for profanities or sexual content). It’s about bridging the gap between authorial intent and reader reception, and examining the text itself to figure out what makes sense for that character and for that scene. It also means raising more questions, such as, in the quest to market Korean literature, do we preserve phrases in translation that might put readers off, or do we rewrite and adapt problematic language to match the mores of the target audience? And when it comes to translating characters or dialogue that feel and sound “real” in English, who has the final say on authenticity and offense? We talk a lot about the challenges of translating Korean culture for non-Korean readers, but translation is not always unidirectional, particularly when we find ourselves “back-translating” the very language we’re translating into. But self-censorship and gatekeeping are not ideal solutions either, as they patronize readers and writers alike. Instead, it’s worth engaging writers in conversation about language and characterization in order to find creative, constructive approaches that honor both sides.

by Sora Kim-Russell Translator

Vol.27 Spring 2015 79

Afterword

On Listening to the Poetry of Kim Nam Jo T

he poetry of Kim Nam Jo is a resonant poetry, meant to be read aloud, for however much she is in quiet conversation with an inner voice, taking her cue from small events that would be invisible or inaudible to others, she is also in direct conversation with us. She asks us to set aside happenstance and, in her company, make sense of accident, of people and worlds momentarily coincident, off balance, or on edge. It is in the space of the double-take, the slight after-shiver of recognition that things have just fallen too neatly in or too oddly out of place, where she finds our center, and it is in the time of the hesitant or trembling pause, “across the chill of a drift,” that she finds her—and our—rhythms. These central features of her work require of us a particular alertness, for with each of her poems we must begin anew to listen to simple but recalcitrant words taking on a burden the poet regrets or resents but ever resumes. Indeed, time and again she argues with herself about the role, nature, and presence of poetry, at once her spiritual companion “sitting side by side / in a dry congenial wind,” and her alderwood mask for enacting rituals (as catholic as they may be Catholic) for taking the measure of a world inevitably altered by what is most human about us. Nothing, then, in the poetry of Kim Nam Jo, nothing at all is still. As a contemplative poet, she may appear to write out of personal stillness or toward a greater sacred stillness, “waiting for my secret orders.” Nonetheless, the lines of force in her work tend toward a drama that is neither reclusive nor secluded. She is, as must we all be in the presence of her voice, engaged. Given the inevitable grief, despair, sorrow, and solitude—and granted the unlikelihood of full consolation here on this Earth, it is only reasonable that we may find ourselves, as she writes in her many personae, recalcitrant actors; and yet here we are, aching to be heard, singing in whatever chorus we can. In her poetry even Sisyphus has something to say beyond complaint. So, willy-nilly, entering any one of Kim’s poems we enter into conversation. The situation may be desperate, the terms unsteady or unclear, and the emotional weather intemperate, but there is a conversation to be had. Alone, we are no good to each other. Let me repeat that, for it stands behind much of what drives these poems. Alone, we are no good to each other. “See the piercing hunger / each has for someone else,” she writes, “and our insatiable appetite for something more.” How shall we manage in light of such appetites except through listening to the pauses between our words, the subtle shifts in rhythm and momentum? How else shall we make our peace with mountains, storms, and icy streams, except through an equally attentive if decidedly other mode of listening? I would not call her poems nature poems or meditative poems or religious poems. They are poems of mutual counsel, pieced together through conversations between past and present, wind and plain, home and hinterland, mothers and children, lovers and lovelorn. We do not learn or grow in isolation; trees, too, study in the society of wildflowers, insects, clouds, and sun. There is no single lesson to be learned except that we are no lesser beings for needing the warmth of each other’s counsel and heeding the reflections of trees. by Hillel Schwartz Poet and Translator

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20th Century Korean Literature Featuring works of short fiction by prominent Korean writers from the early to mid-twentieth century

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VOL. 27 SPRING 2015

Special Section

Korean Künstlerroman: Artist Novels Featured Writer

Kim Nam Jo VOL. 27

SPRING

Spotlight on Fiction

2015

The Youngest Parents with the Oldest Child by Kim Ae-ran

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

VOL. 27 9 772005

279002

ISSN 2005-2790

S P R I N G ISSN

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2005-2790

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