[Korean Literature Now] Vol.39 Spring 2018

VOL. 39 | SPRING 2018

The Writer as Witness

Testimonial Narratives in Korea

Han Kang Kim Soom Gong Ji-Young Park Wansuh

Featured in This Issue Shim Bo-Seon Kim Haengsook

FOREWORD

Compressed Madness

A

few years ag o, I used this phrase by

This issue reminds us why a work of fiction like The

Dominican American writer Junot Díaz in a

Naked Tree by Park Wansuh or Human Acts by Han

conference about Korean literature: “I grew

Kang is often closer to the truth than any other historical

up around Koreans, and let me tell you something, if

retelling. Poetry, which now in many parts of the world

you know anything about that national history, it’s like

seems only to speak of middle-class loneliness and vain

the Caribbean in a day, compressed madness.”

complaints, has all the power to penetrate the surface of

I told the audience that the Caribbean, and in a way

things: a seemingly mundane conversation between a

all of Latin America, suffered extreme changes after the

torturer and his victim; the anguish of workers who bore

Spanish arrived in those lands at the end of the fifteenth

the burden of creating the Korean economic miracle;

century: invasion, colonial oppression, racial mixing,

the longing of a divided people living in a divided land;

genocide, slavery, civil war, revolutions, dictatorships,

a ferry sinking that broke the heart of an entire nation.

communism, anticommunism, diaspora. And finally,

The Crucible by Gong Ji-young and One Person by Kim

I threw out this question: “If Korea has lived through

Soom, which round out this issue, make it clear to us how

something similar in much less time as Díaz noted, where

oppression can also have serious sexual connotations that

are the books that speak to such a complex history?” Of

inflict wounds not visible by the light of day. Literature is

course, there is no answer to this question. Or at least, not

an opportunity to heal such wounds as this issue of KLN

an exact answer in the form of a grocery list or a TV guide.

hopefully proves.

Often, I imagine literature as a large group of islands.

Finally, KLN celebrates its tenth year of publication

Sometimes readers are lucky enough to see the tide

in 2018. If this anniversary issue is anything to go by, we

go down to the point where there is no longer water

are in for another year of exciting themes and intriguing

surrounding the islands. It is exactly here that we realize

writers.

all of them in reality form a single piece of land. What is admirable about publications like Korean Literature Now is that they connect these islands that are books, and for a moment, we don’t need the tide to go down to see the whole of literature, its beauty, its importance, and its truth.

In this Spring 2018 issue dedicated to Korean testimonial narratives, readers will encounter book-islands

by Korean authors who look at that “compressed madness”

Andrés Felipe Solano Author of five books, including

Cementerios de neón (2017) & Korea, Notes from a Tightrope (Korean translation forthcoming)

squarely in the eye.

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

01

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

PUBLISHER

Kim Sa-in

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

Ko Young-il

MANAGING DIRECTOR

Park Chanwoo

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Agnel Joseph

EDITORS

Charse Yun, Kim Kyu Eun

FEATURED WRITER

DIGITAL MEDIA EDITOR Yoo Young-seon

Shim Bo-Seon

ADVISORY BOARD

Bang Min-Ho, Steven D. Capener

04 About the Writer

John M. Frankl, Kang Yu-jung

Kim Suyee, Krys Lee

COORDINATION BY

ch121

Art Direction by Kim Jungwon

Editorial Assistant Kim Yeonsoo

Design by Kim Soojung

Photographs by Jung Yoojin

Illustrations by Amy Shin

PRINTED BY

Sejin Publishing Printing

06 Interview 1 1 Selected Poetry

Kim Haengsook 16 About the Writer 18

DATE OF PUBLICATION MARCH 23, 2018

Address all correspondence to: Literature Translation Institute of Korea 32, Yeongdong-daero 112-gil (Samseong-dong), Gangnam-gu, Seoul, 06083, Republic of Korea

Subscribe, unsubscribe, or update your address easily at: koreanliteraturenow.com/subscribe koreanlitnow@klti.or.kr +82-2-6919-7714

Interview

23 Selected Poetry

01 FOREWORD 28 MUSINGS

Christopher Merrill

57 SPECIAL INTERVIEW

Nora Okja Keller

Cover Photo by NOH Suntag Forgetting Machines I #Park Gwi-ju, Died from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1980 © NOH Suntag

SPECIAL SECTION

BOOKMARK

The Writer as Witness

62 A Fish Called Wanda by Baek Minsuk

Testimonial Narratives in Korea

67 Because I Hate Korea by Chang Kang-myoung

Curated and introduced by Kang Yu-jung

72 Modern Boy by Lee Jimin

30 Overview 77 REVIEWS Fiction & Poetry

86 LTI AT THE OLYMPICS

34 The Naked Tree by Park Wansuh

88 TRANSLATORS

37 Human Acts by Han Kang 42 To Detective Kim Who Is Humane, Too Humane

by Hwang Ji-woo

45 They Say We Shoud Wait by Kim Ki-taek 46 I Don’t Know Who You Are but I Love You

by Shin Daechul

49 The Apprentice’s Dream by Park Nohae 50 The Crucible by Gong Ji-Young 54 One Person by Kim Soom

FEATURED WRITER

SHIM BO-SEON

Shim Bo-Seon

Starting from

I Don't Know Shim Bo-Seon made his debut when he won the Chosun Ilbo New Writer’s Contest in 1994. He has authored the poetry collections Fifteen Seconds without Sorrow, Someone Always in the Corner of My Eye, and Today, I’m Not So Sure and has co-authored the essay collections Today’s Progressive Ideas and Smoked Art. He has received the Nojak Literar y Prize, Kim Jun-Sung Literar y Award, and Kim Jong-sam Poetry Award. He is a professor of culture and arts management at Kyung Hee Cyber University. English translations of his books include Fifteen Seconds without Sorrow (Parlor Press, 2016)

© Jung Yoojin

and Someone Always in the Corner of My Eye (White Pine Press, 2016).

04

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

ABOUT THE WRITER

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

05

FEATURED WRITER

SHIM BO-SEON

INTERVIEW

On Poetry and Home

by Jon Thompson

Jon Thompson: Pleased to meet you, Bo-Seon. I admired Fifteen Seconds without Sorrow and was happy to publish it in the series I edit, Free Verse Editions. I thought I’d open this interview by asking you to discuss your relationship with Korean poetry. What traditions in Korean poetry and what Korean poets have been important to you? Why? Shim Bo-Seon: First of all, I’d like to thank you for helping to introduce my collection to English readers. I studied sociology rather than literature, so from the beginning, I read and wrote poetry as an amateur and an autodidact— and maybe I still do. I’m very selective with the poems that I read. I think that looking at Korea’s poetic traditions and placing my poetry within that history is more the role of readers or critics. As I started actively writing and publishing poems in the 1990s, I was in some sense able to naturally overstep the dichotomy between modernism and realism.

I broke away from the classic poetic references of art history and political reality and began to bring the tension and dynamism of everyday life into focus. To me, and maybe to our generation, politics, art, and the everyday life are not separate. I use the sensations and imagination that result from their intersections as a source for my writing. That’s why Ki Hyongdo is one of the poets who has influenced me © Jung Yoojin

06

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

the most. His poems portray the abyss of despair hiding in

INTERVIEW

the lives of the office worker, the commoner, the city dweller,

English-language poems. But that’s not why my writing sounds

as a grotesque landscape or drama. I was attracted to his

the way it does. I only started reading English poems after I’d

work when I began to seriously write my own poetry.

entered my mid-thirties. And when I did, I was very selective about which poets I read. I think that what has influenced

Thompson: Readers wanting “personal uplift” from

my work is not English literature, but prosaic English writing.

poetry are going to come away empty-handed. I don’t

When I lived in New York as a graduate student from 1998

mean to suggest that the business of poetry is to uplift.

to 2006, I was constantly writing in English. The experience

It seems to me your poetry veers more toward exploring

trained me in thinking and in expressing myself. I wasn’t doing

disaffection and the fleetingness of joy and pleasure, and

literary writing, it was sociological writing, and so I always

there’s no small amount of ennui, or to put it more plainly,

had to keep clarity and logic in mind. But it is difficult to

boredom, in your poetry, but not the “abyss of despair”

have a full understanding of what influence this learning

you speak of in Ki Hyongdo’s poetry. Or perhaps it’s not

and training had on me, and whether it’s given my poems a

accurate to think of your poems in terms of these structures

foreign flavor. In any case, the English-language poet I admire

of feeling, and the more perceptive point of view is that the

the most is Adrienne Rich. She was free-spirited, precise, and

poems themselves are ultimately expressions of some more

most importantly, radical. And she managed to create a deep

fundamental angst?

emotional reverberation with her poetry.

Shim: I want to say that one of the jobs of poetry is the

Thompson: Adrienne Rich was “radical.” You’re right: this

“crafting of emotions.” Of course, this study of feelings isn’t

is the term we use now for those who demand social justice

the totality of what poetry can do. Readers of poetry are on

and push for change in that direction. Some readers find

the one hand emotionally uplifted; but on the other hand,

her work sometimes pedantic in its political insistence,

they lose their way within the poem and I think this has

though I agree with your more generous characterization.

to do directly with a poem’s crafting of emotions. When a

Your work seems marked by a sense that the kind of change

poem deals with sadness, the reader experiences a sorrow

Rich wanted—call it revolution—is a chimera. Or maybe

that is both familiar and unfamiliar to him or her and also

it’s truer to say it is haunted by that dream?

receives an invitation to experience a further sadness that is already articulated and simultaneously expanding. The

Shim: When I say “radical” I don’t simply mean it in the

abyss that I speak of in relation to poetry is something that is

political sense, or to mean progressive. The word “radical”

distinguishable, and yet it holds immeasurable depth. I think

can also mean “going back to and restarting from the root.”

that when we fill this kind of blank space in poetry, we create

If my poetry is governed by dreams of a world in which

even more blank space.

everything is destroyed and recreated anew, then in some way, that is a blessing.

Thompson: Your poetry also appears to be influenced by Western poetic traditions and to my ear, American ones.

Thompson: Briefly, could I return to your interest in

Does that seem like a fair claim? If so, what Western and

“prosaic English writing”? For me, the poems that play off

poets do you admire and why?

this prosaic sense of things or other effects—the strange, for example—produce some very interesting effects in your

Shim: I occasionally hear that my work reads like foreign

poetry. But I was wondering if English affords an access to

poetry. One of my friends even asked me once if I’d read a lot of

a different sense of the prosaic than Korean?

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

07

FEATURED WRITER

SHIM BO-SEON

Shim: Writing prosaic English, especially sociological

the journey. Could you discuss this?

English, has led me to reason more clearly about who and what constitute the “main agent” and the “object” in my

Shim: On a similar note, the title of my third book of

writing. This naturally makes me think more transparently

poems is Today, I ’m Not So Sure. Perhaps you can say that

about how the main agent and the object of a piece of

a sort of agnosticism penetrates my poems. They’re rather

writing come to be: through what actions, for what reasons,

pessimistic that way. But not knowing isn’t a passive state.

and through what emotions. Of course, there is the pursuit

The independence that comes from actively participating

of clarity in Korean as well. But I’m not a native English

and intervening in the state of unknowing causes one to ask

speaker, so I can’t help but make mistakes when writing in

questions. Those questions become a kind of guide, a tool

English. You could say that’s why I’ve spent so much time

to make a path for oneself in this uncharted world. They’re

practicing written clarity.

an instrument of perception as well, and they can become the source of any number of emotions. Sadness, despair,

Thompson: You did a PhD in sociology at Columbia

and loneliness, and happiness and joy as well, all arise from

University. Has New York—or American culture—

the questions we ask ourselves. But to me, the problem

influenced your poetry? If so, how?

of knowing or not knowing is not simply a “question of knowledge.” It’s a question of whether I can accept this

Shim: It would be more correct to say that it was living in a

world given to me. And if I accept it, how will I accept it?

major city as an international student and a foreigner, rather

And if I can’t accept it, what kind of world will I hope for

than the culture of New York itself, that had an influence on

instead? When I say, “I don’t know,” I’m not placing rational

me. I’ve always been an observer. I’ve become accustomed

judgment on the situation. “I don’t know” is the starting

in particular to observing my surroundings during those

point for a life, for a world, for a story.

instances of silence that arise with linguistic barriers— although such barriers later faded. When faced with silence

Thompson: Metaphor (“That’s what love is like / It’s like a

in the past, I would hear real voices inside of me—more

strange famine in a strange country”) and personification

of an internal monologue than a hallucination—and in a

in your poetry appear to suggest that the world is stranger

strange way, those voices would bring me inspiration. You

than ordinarily thought, especially by those who are

could say that my first book of poems, in particular, is the

rationalists. Is poetry for you a way of exceeding or

internal monologue unfolding inside a person observing the

challenging the world posited by rationality?

surrounding world.

Shim: It’s a way to accommodate the world of rationality.

Thompson: A lot of your poetry is haunted by the

R ationalit y means dividing e ver ything around us

question of knowledge, or more precisely, the problem of

into different types of rules and laws. It is a frame of

knowledge: what we know and especially what we can’t

understanding that aims at constructing a predictable

know. In your poem “Bread, Coat, Heart,” you refer to

system. Rationality is only one of the many ways that the

an “unknown shadow” overtaking a park. In your poem

self and the outside world come into contact. If one accepts

“Illusion,” your speaker says, “From here to truth is a very

that the world is full of uncertainty and indeterminacy,

long journey,” which superficially seems pessimistic about

that world can be portrayed and perceived with a language

the possibility of arriving at knowledge or truth, but then

other than that of logic. By extension, we can use different

the poem also posits the possibility of arriving at the end of

languages to participate in that world and even make

08

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

INTERVIEW

new worlds for ourselves. For me, poetry is the language of a world that cannot simply be reduced to the realm of “knowing.” There’s no mystery or romance involved here.

Strictly speaking, poetry is a unique language to recognize the world, to participate in the world, to make a world. But I don’t mean to conclude that this language can “do it all.”

On the contrary, what draws forth the language of poetry is the will to not bring things to an end, to let them remain unfinished.

Thompson: I am interested in your statement that “We can use different languages to participate in that world and even make new worlds for ourselves.” Is it the poet here who has this power? What about people who the world doesn’t regard as poets?

Shim: It’s not just poets—people who aren’t poets also use

© Jung Yoojin

language to participate in and create the world. People who write poetry, though, search out the requisite linguistic

possibilities of language to write poems. When one breaks

activity and abilities a little more consciously, and they

out of the world of familiar language and explores the

are more adept at it. People who don’t write poetry can

capabilities of language once more like a child, he or she is

also discover the participatory and constructive function

no longer restricted by the experiences and justifications of

of language, and after they first discover it, they can use

the adult world. When you use this as literary material or an

language play and language games to absorb themselves in

inspirational tool—that’s when a poem is written, I think.

the development of this function. Minyo and workers’ folk songs are proof of this.

Thompson: Your poetry is rooted in, indeed fascinated by, the everyday, “everydayness,” the commonplace, the

Thompson: Many of your poems, especially those in

ordinary. Would you care to talk about this a little?

Fifteen Seconds without Sorrow, set a kind of childlike awe for the world against a more chastened sense of possibility,

Shim: No one person can ever experience and perceive the

or what might be referred to as disillusionment. What

entirety of the world. All he or she can do is think about

would you say about this tension in your poetry?

nationality, society, the earth, the universe, while looking outside the window at scenery from inside a room, coffee

Shim: Sometimes I’m able to discover surprising poetry in

mug in hand. Of course, as a sociologist, I can’t help but go

the language of children. This is a language that they speak

beyond the ordinary and discuss the forces of structures and

before they use rules and laws and norms to understand the

institutions as well. But sometimes this transcendental way

world, before rationality and common sense are established

of understanding ignores the enormous possibilities behind

in body and mind. Of course, poems aren’t simply the words

everyday life. I find that poetry and literature encompass

of children. But it does take an adult who has relearned the

an exploration of the strengths and possibilities of what VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

09

FEATURED WRITER

SHIM BO-SEON

is overlooked and ordinary. This is why even my poems

Seconds without Sorrow?

concerning issues such as state violence are still interspersed with memories of baseball games and stories about

Shim: If my first collection was something of a monologue,

dinnertime.

my second is more of a conversation. My third collection, which has not been translated into English yet, features more

Thompson: To what extent do you see the self as a strange

characters and varied stories. My poetry collections began as

country? It seems to me that your poetry suggests that the

monologues, but as a wider range of characters appear within

self is no less strange than the world “outside” it. For you,

them, they are slowly morphing into something broader and

what is the source of this strangeness?

richer.

Shim: The self never fails to be awkward, embarrassed, and

Thompson: This seems to suggest a development away

confused. This is because we don’t have a full picture of the

from interiority per se . . .

world around us. But this awkwardness and embarrassment and confusion of the self needs to be temporary and transient.

Shim: You could see it as a state in which the distinction

In the process of learning this, we become adults. A “normal”

between the interior and the exterior becomes vaguer,

life is incompatible with constant feelings of awkwardness,

and where their superposition becomes more varied and

embarrassment, and confusion, and it commands that they be

complicated.

dealt with in some way. I can’t entirely ignore such commands myself. But I do try to remain in a state of coexistence longer

Thompson: A number of poems in Someone Always in the

than others. As I do so, as honestly and tenaciously as I can, I try

Corner of My Eye reference home or, more accurately, the

to take hold of even just one more of the world’s possibilities.

loss of home or distance from it. Yet I believe no one can do totally without it. Bo-Seon, where is your home?

Thompson: Could you expand more on your sense of possibility in the context of poetry, or your writing of

Shim: My hometown is Seoul, a megacity where the feeling

poetry?

of place in some sense is progressively disappearing. I’ve always felt that my home is not really “home.” Poetry allows

Shim: I think that poetry possesses the highest degree

me to explore these contradictory feelings in an intense,

of freedom. Poetry is a language that creates the greatest

natural, and honest manner. My poems themselves, it seems,

number and greatest diversity of possible worlds. But one

are variations on the question “Where is my home?”

of the fundamental social functions of language is the reduction of, and reaction to, uncertainty. By casting doubts on the routine social functions of language, I explore new possibilities for communication. This is the case not only for my poems, but also for every poem.

Thompson: For readers who have not yet read Someone Always in the Corner of My Eye (White Pine Press, 2016), how would you describe it in terms of continuities or discontinuities in relation to your first collection, Fifteen 10

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

Jon Thompson Poet, Strange Country (Shearsman Books, 2016) Editor, Free Verse Editions

SELECTED POETRY

Fifteen Seconds without Sorrow Above a distant high-rise apartment the sun is beating its breast, at its wits’ end beside the daytime moon.

Where shame is concerned, the world went to the dogs long ago.

Sometimes about fifteen seconds pass without sorrow.

Offering every possible excuse, paths are bending everywhere.

The silence gathering on dusky sidewalks hopes to grow older there by the second.

As they grow older, all beings leak when it rains.

All old beings that leak dream of love like installing a new roof.

Everyone knows: whatever happens was bound to turn out as it did.

One afternoon as the sun is squeezing out light with all its might, the past goes walking backward and falls headlong over the apartment railings. The future follows immediately after.

The present, being simply a flower’s day, a flower’s day being the time it takes a flower to bloom and fall, is sad.

A cat is happily nibbling flower petals.

A woman is sipping chamomile tea.

They seem quiet and peaceful.

I stand aimlessly in the middle of the street.

A man passes by on a bicycle, weeping.

He is a human being destined to fall in the end.

The dream-garden in my head where dizziness is in full bloom.

Now about fifteen seconds have passed without sorrow.

I should set off somewhere, but no matter where, ultimately, it’s a disappearing path.

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

11

FEATURED WRITER

SHIM BO-SEON

I Laugh, I Have To 1.

2.

Since father died,

When I go speeding along the riverside on Father’s bike,

there has been no high-flown talk in our family.

its tires flabby,

But under the blue fluorescent light,

the landscape’s tawdry reality gradually reveals itself.

my mom’s basic English has improved day by day.

Flowers bloom and wither, snow drifts high then melts.

My mom asks me, What does ‘nation’ mean?

that’s all.

It means ‘people’; it was a word Father liked a lot.

And sometimes at shallow rapids

I see.

a white heron goes flying up, displaying glossy plumage.

Ask me anything you like.

Does ‘Tom and Jerry’ mean ‘cat and mouse’?

Long ago I once buried a dead bird.

Ha-ha-ha, you joke more often as you get older.

After that, wounded birds used to come and faint at my feet.

I am the interpreter.

How charming, last words expressed only in chirping.

I am the oldest son who laughs loudly.

Even if tragedy strikes again,

A bird, I don’t know what it’s called, staggers near,

even if there is no salvation anywhere,

blind in one eye.

I have to interpret exactly

If it were not for the chirping, birds’ lively language,

and, finally, laugh loudly.

it would be nothing but a black smudge whirling in the shadows, though.

As the eldest son, simply as the eldest son, I’ll fight on until the bitter end with our family’s aimless, vague emotions, unsure if they’re pathos, or grief, or pity.

12

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

SELECTED POETRY

3.

4.

I am walking with Mother in autumn sunshine.

Tell me where there is meaning apart from people and

Turning my hand palm-downward, the back of my hand gleams bright,

language.

I will dwell there, spending all the seasonal seasons that

the word “warmish” means “warmish,” “the rest of my life” means repeating autumn,

remain.

But I must feel pathos, grief, pity, for the things already

winter, spring, summer a number of times.

given me as of now are all there are.

When I ponder the strange connection between wounded birds and myself

Ah, black smudges came and went beneath my feet.

in the autumn sunlight, the world grows impossibly still.

In sunlight or in shadows

It may be lonely, may be sad, but Mother’s heart

I laugh, I just have to laugh

keeps beating pit-pat, pit-pat.

for the things already given me as of now are simply all there are

I’ve heard that a suicide shouted, Jump!

as of now.

as he threw himself off the roof of a building.

His heart must have beat an irregular pitta-pat, pitta-pat cheerfully until the moment it stopped. but other people’s things abandoned in the shadows, those very common palms and hand-backs, are awkwardly enduring the rest of their life as cold air spreads clearly.

It’s a thing to be endured. It has to be, surely.

Fifteen Seconds without Sorrow (Parlor Press, 2016), p. 8, pp. 23-25.

Trans. Chung Eun-Gwi & Brother Anthony of Taizé Copyright © 2008 by Shim Bo-Seon.

Translation Copyright © 2016 by Parlor Press.

Reprinted with permission from Parlor Press.

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

13

FEATURED WRITER

SHIM BO-SEON

Questions I enjoy questions that are heavy and subtle as coffee at a funeral home: When I gently caress someone, will I feel sad if I put myself in that person’s place?

If solitude is always ready to welcome you, is it false solitude?

Although life is composed of volatile moments why is it so boring as a whole?

Does the body’s existence mean the mind has been cleansed and shrouded alive?

Is my body sick so often because my mind wills it?

If someone opens a drawer and takes something out, does the drawer feel like it’s vomiting?

If I were an object, who would look inside me?

Whenever I go up stairs, why do I think I want to eat them?

Each time I gasp, why do I think I want to stop breathing?

Today has come.

Will tomorrow?

Wind blows: wind, be outrageous!

If I say that, omitting wind, will anyone be outrageous?

Having said that, omitting revolutions will anything revolutionary happen?

And what other questions remain?

What questions, like coffee at a funeral home, could shape this world to be so heavy and subtle?

And what other questions still puzzle children and cause their rosy lips to endlessly mumble?

14

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

SELECTED POETRY

Bird We make love without knowing what we want, surrounded by very bright or very dark air.

When we make love, we play with each other’s soul as if with round pebbles.

But how can this happen

When we make love,

when we’re so disgusted with our individual souls?

I whisper in your ear, glistening in silver-grey moonlight, What are you afraid of now?

What are you thinking about now?

When love-making is finished, finished, your hands will be moist as the skin of a newborn baby that has yet to absorb its

I love you. I confess to you three times.

Tee-hee-hee. Laughter rolls from your lips like falling pebbles.

A wisp of breeze that just brushed my face

handful of spirit. When I clasp your hands, I feel your hands gradually grow thinner in my hands, just like a small bird I’ve never owned.

will soon caress your face with completely different hands.

You’ll fly away.

Don’t fly away.

We met. We met several times.

You’ll fly away.

Several times more, we made love, love composed of ordinary emotions and humble desires.

I know. If we owned a bird we’d very sadly let it out the window this evening.

Then we’d giggle together.

Tee-hee-hee. With that strange image, we make love.

Someone Always in the Corner of My Eye (White Pine Press, 2016), p. 20, pp. 57-58.

Trans. YoungShil Ji & Daniel T. Parker Copyright © 2016 by White Pine Press.

Translation copyright © 2016 by Daniel Parker & YoungShil Ji. Reprinted with permission from White Pine Press.

▶

Visit koreanliteraturenow.com to watch a video of the poet.

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

15

FEATURED WRITER

KIM HAENGSOOK

Kim Haengsook

Things that brush against the skin before

Language

Kim Haengsook made her debut as a poet in 1999. She has authored the poetry collections Adolescence, The Goodbye Ability, The Meaning of Others, and A Portrait of an Echo. She has received the Nojak Literary Prize, Jeon Bonggeon Literary Award, and Midang Literary Award. She is a professor of Korean literature at Kangnam University and has served as a contributing editor for the journal, World Literature. Her poetry has appeared in English in Poems of Kim Yideum, Kim Haengsook & Kim Min Jeong (Vagabond Press, 2017).

16

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

© Jung Yoojin

ABOUT THE WRITER

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

17

FEATURED WRITER

KIM HAENGSOOK

INTERVIEW

“Precise Ambiguity” and the Poetic Power of the In-Between

by Jake Levine

Jake Levine: I hear that you’re travelling through Europe

Kim: I think of the daydreams I was endlessly lost in as a child.

as we conduct this interview over email. I’m in Europe too

This was long before becoming a poet, before I even knew

at the moment. From time to time it’s nice to have a break

what poetry was. Among those daydreams, an image that

from the fine-particulate dust, no? What are your travel

captivated my young self was a scene where, having become

plans?

a homeless orphan, I would wander around unfamiliar alleyways on a winter day while white snowflakes fell.

Kim Haengsook: I was just in Barcelona for four days.

Without a mother or father, without anything to my name, it

At some point during that time our shadows probably

was such a light existence that I felt I could float away. To that

overlapped. In Korean there’s a saying that goes, “Even the

girl of my daydream, all the windows revealed a world soaked

brushing of coattails forms a connection between people.”

in lights that were like jewels she could never possess. The fear

And in the word “connection,” or inyeon, that Koreans use,

and uncertainty that coiled around that girl were the price

there is a sense of the mystical time of “past lives.”

that would have to be paid to be captivated by beauty.

I thought that to travel simply meant having “a different window,” but now I think that it’s also about living to “a

Levine: The work of contemporary Korean women

different time.” In Seoul I write at night before going to bed,

poets has struck me as being a part of a tradition that has

and here, a thirteen-hour flight away, I write in the early

a different kind of projection and history than poetry

morning right after I wake up. If I really had to give a reason

written by men. How much of a role do gender and gender

for my coming to Europe, would it be these kinds of things?

relations play in your work?

The aim of this holiday is something I’ll have to find while I’m on it.

Kim : For poets, lang uag e is not merely a tool for communication. Human language is not a transparent bowl

Levine: Speaking of travelling and aims, what originally

that holds content. The history and subconscious of the group

brought you to poetry? Is there any singular event?

that has used a language is melted into it. The patriarchal

18

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

INTERVIEW

© Jung Yoojin

culture and ideology of Korea has permeated the grammar of

it can be said that the symbol for woman was made within

the Korean language. And therefore I think that the poetic

fantasies of masculinity. One day, around the time when

renewal of the Korean language must be even more actively

I was writing Adolescence, my first poetry collection, I felt

carried out by the hands of those who are the most sensitive

as though I had made a literary discovery by addressing and

to the stains that mark their language. What I’m talking about

referring to eonni. In the Korean language, where honorifics

are the hands of poets, and women poets in particular.

have an intricate subdivision, the eonni that I was using felt

With my own work I am interested in that which cannot be

affectionate and utterly egalitarian to me. It was as though

captured in symbolic language, things that cannot be prescribed,

I was belatedly reading a love letter I’d somehow found, one

things that brush against the skin before language, and things

that had always been hidden from me. I thought that feeling

that approach existence namelessly. When I write poetry, I don’t

was something very important. It’s not a secret only for

think about whether I’m a woman or a man. In that sense, there

women. It can become music in the space between any two

aren’t any instances of me consciously taking a feminist stance.

people.

When I’m writing, I am freed from the multitude of categories of the world, and try to traverse boundaries freely. However, it is

Levine: I know that your work is filled with a lot of

my hope that such poetic freedom will bring about discord and

allusions to other artists who work in other mediums. How

cause a ruckus within the seemingly solid patriarchal narrative

do you decide whom your work dialogues with?

of this world.

I’ll give you an example. What is simply “sister” in English,

Kim: To my mind, the body in a poetic state is less like a

is separated in Korean into different words, including nui,

factory that produces something and more like a corrugated

pronounced “nu-ee,” and eonni. Nui is the term a male uses to

steel roof on which raindrops fall. A steel roof doesn’t make

refer to or address a female sibling, and eonni is the term used

sounds of its own accord, but raindrops also don’t make a

between female siblings. In traditional Korean literary history,

sound unless they meet with something like a steel roof. It’s

the woman was only ever called into being by men, and thus

impossible to know what might come to pass when the VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

19

FEATURED WRITER

KIM HAENGSOOK

outside world is approached and accessed in such a way.

A and B. That’s why poetry is not only linguistic “expression”

This is why it’s possible to say something like, “We don’t

but also linguistic “experimentation.”

write new things in poetry, but rather become new by writing poetry.” I consider the hand of “chance” to be more

Levine: In the poem “The Position of the Neck” (found

important than the intention of the artist. Even if there may

here in this issue) there is a push and pull between the

be a certain inevitability to life, it will always come to find

infinite world of heaven and the passing, momentary

you wearing the trappings of “chance.” In every genuine

sensations experienced in our bodies. The poem ends

crossing of paths there is an element of invention. In a way,

with a question about the purpose of moving the neck. Is

it causes the occurrence of a new third realm, one that didn’t

this question alluding to the in-betweenness you were just

exist beforehand.

talking about?

Levine: Your poems have a light and spatial quality. It is

Kim: I am very interested in the language spoken by the body.

almost as if they expand and move through space rather

I would like it if my poems were conveyed like the speech

than progress through time. These qualities also make

expressed by the body. Those very “momentary sensations

them incredibly difficult to translate. What is it like to see

experienced in our bodies” that you mentioned are more

your work in translation?

concrete and more complex and more historical than the language we produce from our mouths. Nietzsche once

Kim: There have been times when I wanted to make our

wrote, “If you show me how you walk, I will tell you how you

beings flow and jumble together with words so lightweight

think.” I think I know what Nietzsche meant when he said

that they could float from the page like air. This was

that. However, it’s impossible to completely carry through on

something I was particularly preoccupied with when I was

Nietzsche’s claim. I suppose when it comes to language I’m

writing my second poetry collection, The Goodbye Ability.

more skeptical than a philosopher. Poetry is not something

I wanted to draw up a kind of space where the division

that conquers the impossibilities and limitations of language;

between you and me is annihilated, just like my breath mixes

rather, it pushes those limitations out further. Whenever

with yours in the air. I wanted to express beings that are not

language is used for things that don’t use language or can’t use

tough or clear-cut like solid matter, but rather beings that

language, other things get brought along with it, following like

are mobile and tender, flowing and permeating. I think

a shadow. Sometimes that shadow swoops up and engulfs the

that’s what makes my poems come across as ambiguous.

body. To mimic Nietzsche, I think you could say something

But I also think that this ambiguity itself must have some

like, “If you show me how you walk, I will tell you how you

precision. It has to be “precise ambiguity.”

walk.” We let the words that our bodies speak just slide away.

All languages, Korean and English included, create

And so we don’t really know ourselves, how we walk. Poetry

meaning through contrast and fragmentation. With regular

doesn’t just show us how we walk, it also adheres “invisible

ways of using language, although it is simple to show that A

thoughts” and “sensations” to that moving body. It’s mere

and B are “different,” it is difficult to reveal what is “between”

fantasy to believe that thought will be revealed transparently

20

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

INTERVIEW

through language. Along with the limitations of language,

saying, “Fish don’t have necks” as she brought her knife down

which operates through distinction and segmentation, we

and chopped one up, and the shiver that ran down the back

have to scrutinize the opacity of thought itself. It might seem

of my neck at that moment. But then I remembered that the

as though attempts to skim away the opacity of thought

scene was actually something I’d created in a poem. Poetry

would guide us to more intelligent thought, but in fact this all

and memories change each other like that.

too easily reverts to a discourse of power that suppresses the irony and complexity of existence.

Levine: In the poem “Dear Angel” (also found in this issue)

I’m not simply trying to say that mind and body are one.

there is an image of people in a zombified state riding the

For instance, my mind may be facing you, but my neck could

subways and later, an image of the speaker whispering

be staring off in another direction so as not to meet your gaze.

about humans who “kill each other even in their dreams.”

You can express the same situation in the opposite way too.

I made a connection in my mind between the hidden

My neck wants to face you, but my mind keeps pressuring my

violence of everyday life that often makes itself visible in

neck not to look at you. Even when the body and mind fight

the landscape of dreams or fantasy. How did you go about

with each other like that, they share some kind of common

coming up with a concept for this poem?

goal. There are many stories in the neck’s line of movement, in its slanting, and the sensations of that moment. Recreating all

Kim: When I was little, my mother, who was a devout

those stories in a comprehensive way is impossible, and that

Protestant, took me by the hand to Sunday school every

totality wouldn’t guarantee truth anyway. It’s important to

week. Among the things we had to recite back then, there

create the feeling that there are many hidden stories that can’t

was something that went like this: “On the third day He rose

all be guessed at, and call attention to suggestion and mystery.

again from the dead. He ascended into heaven and sits at the

right hand of God the Father Almighty. From thence He will

Levine: Is there a story behind this poem?

come to judge the living and the dead.” To me, the expression “the right hand” of God felt somehow significant. When I was

Kim: If madeleines dipped in tea were a catalyst for Proust

little, I would often confuse my left and right shoes (and of

to bring back long forgotten memories, for me I think the

course I got teased for it), so the idea that right and left were

practice of writing poetry itself brings up those kinds of

also differentiated in heaven felt very odd to me. That was the

happenings. I could mention as the back story something that

starting point for this poem.

came to mind while writing this poem and even later—the

Having grown up to become an atheist, contrary to my

memory of a woman standing on a bridge on the Han River.

mother’s wishes, I think that “God” and “heaven” and “angels”

She was looking down at the flowing waters and shrugging

are all things created by the peculiar powers of the human

her neck into her coat on a really chilly day. I could add that,

imagination and human dreams. I think that’s why, although

while at that moment I felt as though the woman might

“heaven” is set up as a world on a different plane from the

be in danger, I passed her by, holding back my imagined

world of the living, it also has many strangely similar aspects.

thoughts of her misfortune. I also remembered a fish seller

Just as God resembles humans, if angels and humans are VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

21

FEATURED WRITER

KIM HAENGSOOK

its back on human suffering. Picturing this angel with wings like lead, I was able to imagine a “community of sadness.” It’s humans who are ruthless, stepping on each other, committing murder, but it’s also humans who create community out of suffering and sorrow. If you were to ask the angel if it loves such humans, I don’t think it would be able to come up with a quick answer. It might be that it can’t bring itself to say it doesn’t love humans, or it may be that it can’t easily bring itself to say that it does love humans. But in that time where we are left waiting for an answer, we come to think about humanity a little differently.

Levine: What can we expect from you in the future?

Kim: I’m on a plane returning to Seoul from Rome at the end of my long travels. So, right now, I’m in the air.

Answering questions like this, even if it isn’t on a plane like I am now, I think I’ve always felt as though I were floating mid-air. When it comes to poetry, I never © Jung Yoojin

have any particular plans. Poetry is written irrespective of my intentions or planning. It’s not I who lead the

placed in a dichotomous structure, it wouldn’t be a clearly

poems, but rather the poems that lead me. I rather like this

divided dichotomy like black and white, but rather, it would

passivity. I am always ready to be transformed by poetry.

have to be a dichotomy that overlaps, each polarity entering into each other’s territory and mixing together.

Particularly on the divided Korean Peninsula, the terms right and left, far-right and far-left, are used as rhetoric to bring Jake Levine

polarization. If I imagine an angel wandering the earth, its

Poet and Translator

wandering is not led by images of beauty and happiness, or the essential goodness and hope of humanity. If there was an angel that couldn’t leave earth, it would be because it couldn’t turn 22

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

© Adrianne Mathiowetz

about hysterical responses in an environment of ideological

Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Keimyung University

SELECTED POETRY

Santa Sangre —This amount of blood could save at least three people.

—You only care about the quantity of things. This volume of blood from a nosebleed is impressive, but blood is useless in this age when all holy superstitions have disappeared.

—from Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre

Within the elephant bleeding out of her trunk there is a baby elephant who is pumping out her blood. In the outside world, what kind of manual labor do people do to reach death? Mother, I will labor myself to death in my heaven.

The elephant’s ears flap. Her enormous body gets baggy.

Mother, we are cleansing together. Your trunk makes a great hose.

Come on, perk up, and spray all around us.

The elephant’s blood creates a colosseum. The audience is gathered by the blood.

Our death-battles are headed in the same direction, so we are at peace.

But, mother, I am still afraid of their orgasms.

Now the elephant’s skin drapes saggily. The skeleton that supports the appearance of the elephant is triumphant.

Mother, it is empty here. I’m a little cold and hungry, but I enjoyed the labor.

Mother, this place right here, it is still my heaven.

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

23

FEATURED WRITER

KIM HAENGSOOK

The Goodbye Ability I am all the things that take gaseous form.

I am cigarette smoke for 2 minutes.

I am rising steam for 3 minutes.

I am oxygen entering your lungs.

I will burn you away with a happy heart.

Did you know that there is smoke billowing from your head?

The meat fat you hate is gently burning and the intestines became a stovepipe and the blood boils and all the birds in the world leave to immigrate, commanding the world’s fog and I sing for more than 2 hours and do the laundry for more than 3 hours

there were moments I opened my eyes.

and nap for more than 2 hours

My eyes and ears get clear,

and meditate for over 3 hours

and my Goodbye Ability peaks,

and of course I see the apparitions. They are fucking

and I shed my fur, and I am cigarette smoke for 2 minutes.

beautiful.

I love you for 2 hours or more,

The smell disappears for 2 minutes, and

I love the things that exploded out your head.

I take off my clothes. Regarding the clothes dispersing

Birds snatched the loudly crying children

into the distant horizon,

and took them away.

regarding my neighbors,

I learned that in the middle of doing eternal laundry.

I wave.

My coat turned into a gas.

The thing I pulled out my pocket, a cloud. Your cane.

Well, that’s that. In the middle of singing an endless song, in the middle of taking an endless nap,

24

Rising steam for 3 minutes.

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

SELECTED POETRY

Hormonography O Hormone, light me bright like blazing morning. The Rage is swelling, and I want to manifest it like the eye of a typhoon. That man cheated me. I shall hunt him to the end.

Connected through the milk-lines, I flow to you, I am river Soyang, I am river Nokdong. I am a boatman without an oar. Wherever I end up, if you call me as a man I, as a man, will . . .

Or if you call me as a woman, I’ll try to immerse myself in my role as a woman. From the third, fourth, seventh rung of the ladder between heaven and hell, I’ll caress the cards that are dealt to me until I’m destitute. Make me weary. O Hormone, with the gentle caress of your hand, lower the lids of my eyes and stir up my dreams. I’ll be your movie theatre. O Hormone, through big waves stir the landscapes and facial expressions until the screen goes black, until we reach a war-like meaninglessness.

At the mountain spring of the holy hormone, eternally twinkling signals.

Poems of Kim Yideum, Kim Haengsook & Kim Min Jeong (Vagabond Press, 2017), p. 75, pp. 78-80.

Trans. Jiyoon Lee & Jake Levine Copyright © 2016 by Vagabond Press.

Translation copyright © 2016 by Jiyoon Lee & Jake Levine.

Reprinted with permission from Vagabond Press.

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

25

FEATURED WRITER

KIM HAENGSOOK

The Position of the Neck Isn’t it odd? Also, the position of the head.

I crook my neck to say hello. I bend my neck all the way back and look up at the night sky. Right after greeting you, if the neck immediately turns to the ceiling or night sky, it is a kind of neck that reveals only a single line of movement. And this means, once again, that my heart helped make up my mind to track the traces of my neck. Track the traces like rushing to pick up and put on clothes because of shame.

To avoid your eyes, which direction must the neck avoid and which direction must the neck stop in again? The night sky, isn’t it confusing? Also, the shape of the neck.

Am I not vague? About you.

A cough popped out of my neck. Suddenly I remembered the writing of some epicure that said, I want to have the longest throat in the world. Is the speed of the sinking of the ecstasy that food gives as slow as the length of the neck? Or does the length thinly expand the pain of the departing landscape? Or are we just in the middle of carefully whittling down the white bones of happiness until they finally fall apart? Suddenly, here, everything disappears.

It’s no use—trying to adjust the length of the neck. Trying to make the neck disappear into a coat. It’s still cold and isn’t it still impossible—trying to hide the large frame of the body?

Even so, isn’t there something I want to accomplish—accomplish by moving my neck? Like moving my legs to leave you. Like moving my legs having found you once again.

26

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

SELECTED POETRY

Dear Angel I heard there is a chair in heaven. I heard there is a left and a right. Sometimes what I think she means is that if something exists in heaven that also exists in this world it must be good, and then sometimes I think that what she means is that if something exists in this world also exists in heaven it must be bad. Oh moonlight, you are like an echo. The tail blurs . . . trembles . . . light and echoes. At first I think moonlight is good for packaging secrets, and then I think moonlight is good for unwrapping secrets. Moonlight is a good light to softly kneel down in. Moonlight is a good light to love in. And, also, moonlight is a good light to die in.

Tonight the world is also filled with light good enough for the wings of an angel to get soaked with and, really, it feels like there is no outside to this world. I said there are trains drawing curves underground the city and I said in the train there are long chairs. I told her the story about the people who sit on the long chairs and the whites of their eyes that disappear as if they are dead like people in heaven.

Blowing warm breath into her snowflake ears, I whispered the story of people who kill each other even in their dreams.

Do you love humanity? I asked. And I waited a long time for the response.

Translated by Jake Levine & Seo Soeun

â–ś

Visit koreanliteraturenow.com to watch a video of the poet.

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

27

MUSINGS

Corrective Readings: Translation in the Age of Trump T

ranslators from various languages despaired of making sense of Donald Trump’s comments long before he coined in a late-night tweet the word “covfefe,” which quickly went viral, inspiring him to add some hours later, “Who can figure out the true meaning of ‘covfefe’???

Enjoy !” Three days after Trump’s inaug uration, for example, the Washington Post reported on the difficulties of rendering into Chinese his infamous Access Hollywood taped remark: “Grab them by the p---y.” One media outlet translated it as, “You can even play with their nether parts; anything goes.” The larger problem, according to French translator Bérengère Viennot, is that “Trump’s broken syntax, often limited vocabulary and repetition of phrases makes it difficult to create texts that read coherently in French, a very structured and logical language.” We know how his Rose Garden speech about withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement was received around the world, but we can only imagine how it was translated because, as Viennot explains, “Most of the time, when he speaks he seems not to know quite where he’s going . . . It’s as if he had thematic clouds in his head that he would pick from with no need of a logical thread to link them.” Which is a dilemma for a translator who must decide whether to render his words literally, leaving others to figure out what he meant, or make them cohere. Trump’s former press secretary, Sean Spicer, came up with a brilliant translation of “covfefe”: “The president and a small group of people know exactly what he meant.” Wouldn’t it be nice to say that to a reader who flags a phrase you labored over?

My title comes from Louise Gluck’s reflections on the 28

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

necessity of corrective reading—that is, reading against the grain, outside our comfort zone, in order to challenge our assumptions about what makes for good poetry. Norman Dubie offers wise counsel: “If you are a young writer who admires the work of a single older writer, then you are in great danger. Admire the work of two older writers, or more. Give your mind a problem and your mind, without permission, will solve that problem.” It is common in a literary apprenticeship to seek models, imitating others in the desire to touch their magic. But it is no less crucial to read as widely as possible, expanding your sense of the contours of literature, in the hope of discovering what might belong only to you. Translation can play a key role in the acquisition of this knowledge. Remember Ezra Pound’s advice to W. S. Merwin, who at the age of eighteen, visited the incarcerated poet at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital: Write seventy-five lines a day and translate. When I asked Merwin some years ago if he could indeed write seventy-five lines a day, he replied, “No. But you can always translate.”

Rereading is another way to read against the grain. If in my youth I read in translation such poets as Eugenio Montale, Czeslaw Milosz, and Anna Akhmatova for pleasure, instruction, and inspiration (admiring the crystalline beauty of their lines, the rigor of their thinking, and their insights into the human condition, albeit with a sense that their experiences were so removed from mine that I might never touch the true depths of their work), I now read them for something more: guidance for a turbulent time. In the same way, I also read Victor Klemperer’s two-part diary of the Nazi era, I Will Bear Witness, which records day by day

Germany’s descent into madness. If once I traced an aesthetic current through German folklore, expressionism, and French Surrealism, now I look to writers who have borne witness to the evil that humankind is capable of.

At the time of Trump’s election, I happened to be reading David Michael Hertz’s Eugenio Montale, the Fascist Storm, and the Jewish Sunflower—a monograph exploring the relationship between the Italian Nobel laureate and his muse, the American Dante scholar Irma Brandeis, and the necessity of maintaining one’s independence under an authoritarian regime. Meditating on Montale’s so-called Clizia poems, I realized that my life in translation, as a reader of literary, philosophical, and spiritual works from various languages, and as a poet, writer, and translator, was a form of preparation for whatever American-made storm was in the offing. It is not often remarked upon, but in addition to the delights we take from reading great works of literature, we may also find models there for how to live and love and write; how to bear up in difficult circumstances; how to summon courage for the way ahead, no matter how dark that may turn out to be.

“Culture has never been a guarantee against barbarism,” Hertz notes, since “among the administrators of ‘the final solution’ were men who admired Goethe, Rilke, Mozart, and Bach.” Then he describes Montale’s lifelong effort to compose poems in the service of his language and vision of the world—a vision at odds with the Fascist ethos of Mussolini and his minions. Hertz reminds us that the philosopher and Nazi apologist Martin Heidegger wrote his book on Hölderlin near a concentration camp, and wonders how the course of history might have changed had Hitler not been rejected by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He writes: Montale was probably the most significant poet of the twentieth century who dealt with this great paradox in his finest works. In his poetry he returns again and again to the irreconcilable extremes of human nature as he ponders a world that creates both the forces of the storm and the forces of love. On the one hand, he sees Hitler, Mussolini, and the destructiveness that

overwhelmed European civilization in the mid-century.

On the other, he sees his beloved Jewish-American Dante scholar [Irma Brandeis]. How can both be real?

How can both be part of what human beings are? What purpose can there be to a humanity that has given a new meaning to bestial, a meaning that would even make the beasts ashamed? Montale is the poet who realizes the ramifications of this paradox, who is contemplating the great teachings of the Western culture and staring down the brutality of Fascism at the same time.1

In 1925, Montale took the courageous act of signing an anti-Fascist manifesto and then published his first important essay titled “Style and Tradition,” the first in a series of articles about the Italian-Jewish writer Italo Svevo, and his first book of poems, Cuttlefish Bones, which announced the arrival of a singular talent. He knew that signing the manifesto would not be without consequences, professional and personal, and yet he did it anyway—a reminder that in the face of authoritarian rule every decision counts. He discovered how to embody the complexity of experience, which is always the first victim of propaganda. Against the bombastic simplicity of Trump’s tweets, amplified in the echo chamber of right-wing news outlets, I propose that we write and translate poems that embrace nuance. Against Trump’s doctrine of “America First,” which seems intent on destroying our democratic traditions, political alliances, and even the earth itself, let us learn from those whose works survived the onslaught of totalitarianism and the destruction of the truth.

1. H ertz, David Michael. Eugenio Montale, the Fascist Storm, and the Jewish

Sunflower . Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013, pp. 17–18.

Christopher Merrill Poet, Writer, Translator Director, IWP University of Iowa

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

29

SPECIAL SECTION

NOH Suntag is known for his documentary pieces on Korean history and social issues.

His solo exhibitions include reallyGood, Murder (2015) and Forgetting Machines (2012).

30

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

OVERVIEW

The Writer as Witness Testimonial Narratives in Korea

N

ovels are fiction. This might be so obvious it could even be the very first line of an introductory lecture on literature. Novels are crafted stories, made up of events that seem plausible. If such crafted stories are fiction, then non-fiction is supposed to be the exact opposite: a recounting of real events. Stories based on real events, historical events that really took place, are non-fiction. But is it actually possible to make events that really did happen into a story without crafting them in some way? Can we really believe that all history, which claims to record events that happened in the real world, is complete fact?

All novels, without exception, are involved with history in some way. This is because as long as anyone lives with flesh and bones and has feet on the ground, one cannot help but be a part of history. This is true even for those often seen as residing on the fringes of history, the “ordinary people” history tends to overlook. This is the reason that all novels, especially those that consider the modern history of Korea, are both non-fiction and fiction at the same time. All fiction is both history and fact.

Namildang Design Olympic II #BJB2201, 2009 © NOH Suntag

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

31

SPECIAL SECTION

It is also in literature that those facts that have yet to be settled, things which have already passed but which will continue to shape our futures, have a much more holistic form. Every Korean novel is both wholly fiction and wholly historical.

Published in 1989, Kim Won-il’s novel The House with a Sunken Courtyard depicts the life of a family of refugees during the Korean War. Having fled south without their father, the family manages to find a place to live, but suffers from poverty and exhaustion in the aftermath of the war. The situations of the various families who all live in different rooms under the same roof of what they call “the house with the sunken courtyard” are all somewhat similar.

This space and story are fictional creations by the author, but they are also very reminiscent of the life he lived at that time. An adult narrator shows us this life through the eyes of a child. Through such young eyes, which cannot yet fully understand the world, the Korean War and its aftermath become much more vivid for the reader than any historical account could be.

Park Wansuh’s novel The Naked Tree is also an outstanding testimony and record of the Korean War. The daring and unflinching perspective of a twenty-yearold woman, not very young, but not quite fully mature, is particularly striking. A glimpse of the terrible time suffered by those who could not escape from the battleground of Seoul during the Korean War is depicted in scenes that pull the reader in. The work reveals a kind of life in Seoul that was not recorded in the history books, and brings into relief the wearisome silhouette of an artist hidden from public memory.

Fiction or novels can often be far stronger than bare facts or sparsely recorded history. In South Korea, there have been times when it was also impossible to depict or talk about certain historical events without facing severe consequences. The clearest example of this is any reference to the Gwangju Uprising in 1980. Many people who lived in other cities had no way of knowing what was happening 32

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

during those tragically momentous days in Gwangju.

Information was blocked and facts were distorted. For a long time, even the word “Gwang ju” was taboo. It took years to even acknowledge that such a prohibition existed. Strictly speaking, it would be more accurate to say that the events of May 1980 have still not been properly investigated or brought to light.

This is precisely why Han Kang’s novel Human Acts draws much closer to truth than any historical record.

Through the character of a young boy who was part of the Gwangju Uprising, Han reveals an inner space overlooked by other narratives. It has a very different quality to the evidence of cold-blooded violence shown in the documentary footage that survives. The terror and despair, the conflicting feelings of someone caught in the middle, are conveyed intact. Seeing the corpse of the boy's friend left to rot, along with so many others, induces a strong desire for truth, truth of a world in which the facts have still not been fully revealed. Through the lens of another’s suffering, the reader is taken directly to the point of compassion.

The “I” and Detective Kim who appear in Hwang Jiwoo’s poem “To Detective Kim Who Is Humane, Too Humane” are no different. In the poem, the tortured “I” shakes hands and shares smiles with his torturer, Detective Kim. “I” was tortured in reality, but at the same time, he is also a poetic voice that exists only in the space of a poem. Detective Kim is an actual person who has tortured someone, but he is also a fictional character who exists in a poem. When the two people ask each other how they are and talk about what they have been doing since the incident, the conversation may not be truthful, but there is an agitated echo that leaps beyond questions of fact.

OVERVIEW

The important thing is not the veracity of their exchange, but rather that, in the scene where the two “act” as though nothing has happened, there is a chilling truth that rises up from the depths, hidden by the official history that denies it. The scars left on “I” by the grossly inhumane torture stand in stark contrast to the too humane Detective Kim. Although both poetry and fiction set out from facts and history, they surpass simple descriptions or testimonies and function as meaningful statements. In the poem “The Apprentice’s Dream” by Park Nohae, who conveyed the labor conditions of the 1980s in a simple but heartbreakingly truthful way, we discover an anguished confession. The poem does not focus on the dangerous working conditions, terrible injustices, or merciless circumstances faced by workers. Like the “dream” in the title, the apprentice’s dream is confined to a small and humble world. If one can lead an ordinary life only in one’s dreams, then one’s life has clearly taken a wrong turn.

Shin Daechul is greatly concerned with the division of North and South Korea, and depicts it in his poetry not as an issue of politics but as an issue of people, thus revealing a way for our reality to become literature. In “I Don’t Know Who You Are but I Love You,” he calls out, “you who are . . . / nowhere in our land, / I don’t know who you are but I love you.” Here, he enters into the realm of truth beyond fact, where love defies the reality of living across a militarized border zone. This is also the reason that the poem “They Say We Should Wait,” written by Kim Ki-taek to share the desperation and suffering following the 2014 Sewol Tragedy, begins with a text message left by one of the deceased. The text message of “They say we should wait” is not simply a piece of evidence found on the deceased’s phone, but stands as a symbol of the Sewol Tragedy and of our society as a whole. In such a way, poetry and novels deal with things that cannot endure as history or fact.

Gong Ji-Young’s novel The Crucible, which was based on an actual case of sexual abuse at a school for children with disabilities, is an example of literature becoming a catalyst for making things happen in the real world. In the end, the events in the novel, which were also made into a film, brought about such public indignation that

an investigation was reopened and those responsible were brought to trial.

Kim Soom’s novel One Person captures truth that goes beyond the many non-fiction narratives of the Korean comfort women. The story begins when all of the other victims of sexual slavery have passed away, leaving only one last survivor.

Unlike history, literature is made up of stories that plausibly could have happened. But literature is also capable of reaching under the skin into the minds, realms, and lives that history tends to eliminate. Although the way of literature may be a narrow and perilous path, it is precisely within literature that we can discover the experiences of people excluded from history: the shame of those for whom history is a wound, the hope of those who dream of a better life in the midst of that history, and even the despair of those who have to brutally keep it bottled up. It is also in literature that those facts that have yet to be settled, things which have already passed but which will continue to shape our futures, have a much more holistic form. Every Korean novel is both wholly fiction and wholly historical. Literature is the last stronghold of those who have suffered.

Kang Yu-jung Literary and Film Critic Kangnam University

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

33

reallyGood murder #BIK0404, 2008 © NOH Suntag

SPECIAL SECTION

34

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

FICTION

The Naked Tree

by Park Wansuh

Chapter Four In my heart, however, a nasty thought swirled. The war isn’t finished yet. It will continue for many, many years, and disaster will strike everybody equally. I just happened to receive my share earlier than others.

“You must be tired. Why don’t you go to bed?” I said to my uncle.

After spreading out a mat for him in my room, I lay down beside my mother for the first time in a long while.

Still, we had little to talk about. My mother let out a low sigh.

“Did Uncle give you any money?” I asked.

“Yes. He said it was for our living expenses.”

“How much?”

“I don’t know. It’s over there. You can count it later.”

“Did he eat here?”

“Yes.” “What did you cook for him?”

“Nothing special. I just served what we usually eat.”

Had my mother, once such an expert hostess, become demented?

“What did he say about my job?”

“He complained that we’ll have a hard time marrying you off now that you’re working there.”

“Do you think so, too?”

“No.” I turned my back to her. My uncle’s cough filtered through the walls intermittently from the other room, as if he couldn’t fall asleep either. I couldn’t tell whether my mother was asleep or not as I couldn’t sense even her breathing.

The bleak wind set the shutters clattering, and the sliding door hummed. The wind swished through the house, making grotesque sounds here and there.

I pulled the quilt over my head.

Still, I could hear the wind, the wind that shook the haunted house, that rushed through the hole on top of the roof of the servants’ quarters, that trampled the broken tiles, that shuffled through the broken pieces of the rafters, that dislodged the clay underneath, that shook the loose wallpaper and spider webs, that stirred the piles of dirt. The sound of the wind rattled my eardrums mercilessly, even when I put my hands over my ears.

I couldn’t help but think of Ock Hui-do. He’s different from the others, he’s different from the others, I chanted.

Perhaps I was attempting to knock on the door to a new life by repeating it.

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

35

SPECIAL SECTION

Chapter Five A Christmas tree stood in the center of the arcade, and colored lights flashed on the Santa Claus and the four reindeer that pulled his sleigh. The arcade was bustling more than ever, packed with shoppers, and the Korean products section was in utter confusion. Housecoats and pajamas with embroidered dragons and peacocks on them sold like hotcakes, and the small flower baskets were gone in no time.

The owners of the Korean products section enjoyed the unprecedented business, and the salesgirls in the American products section were indiscreet in their restlessness, making dates with GIs, talking about the coming parties, and bragging about the presents they would receive from America.

Outside the PX, the streets were as desolate as ever, weighed down by the dark, anxious atmosphere of a city so close to the front line. Nobody was stupid enough to be caught up in the spirit of a foreign holiday.

The portrait shop was doing a good business as well, and I kept busy with my work the whole day, but I made some stupid mistakes because my heart fluttered at intervals.

I was fraught with anxiety. Mine was not like the others’ Christmas-season excitement, however, and my anxiety wasn’t solely due to the war or the darkness in the streets.

I had begun to think I was in love with Ock Hui-do.

The thought was painful at times, sweet at others, and frightening once in a while. I couldn’t figure out exactly what my feelings were, but I couldn’t drive the idea out of my mind.

Tae-su bustled around on the heels of the sergeant who was installing the Christmas decorations. He would call out “Hi!” to me in English from unexpected places like the top of a ladder or the frame of a display window. Sometimes he winked at me, and he liked talking about silly things, his overall-clad behind perched on my desk in a friendly manner.

The Naked Tree (Cornell University, 2011), pp. 25–27.

Trans. Yu Young-nan Copyright © 2011 by Cornell University.

Translation copyright © 1995 by Yu Young-nan.

Reprinted with permission from Cornell University.

Park Wansuh is one of South Korea's most revered writers who debuted at the age of forty and wrote over a hundred novels and short stories in a career spanning almost forty years. She received several prestigious awards, including the Republic of Korea's Geumgwan Order of Cultural Merit. Her books, including The Naked

Tree , My Very Last Possession and Other Stories , and Lonesome You , have been translated into more than twelve languages.

36

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

FICTION

Human Acts

by Han Kang

It wasn’t as though we didn’t know how overwhelmingly the army outnumbered us. But the strange thing was, it didn’t matter. Ever since the uprising began, I’d felt something coursing through me, as overwhelming as any army.

Conscience.

Conscience, the most terrifying thing in the world.

The day I stood shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of thousands of my fellow civilians, staring down the barrels of the soldiers’ guns, the day the bodies of those first two slaughtered were placed in a handcart and pushed at the head of the column, I was startled to discover an absence inside myself: the absence of fear. I remember feeling that it was all right to die; I felt the blood of a hundred thousand hearts surging together into one enormous artery, fresh and clean . . . the sublime enormity of a single heart, pulsing blood through that vessel and into my own. I dared to feel a part of it.

At one o’clock in the afternoon, while the speaker in front of the Provincial Office was playing the national anthem, the soldiers opened fire. I’d been standing in the middle of the column of the demonstrators, but when the bullets came flying, I turned and ran. That sublime feeling that I’d been tapping into, that enormous heart I’d felt briefly a part of, was smashed to pieces, strewn over the ground as so much rubbish. And the gunfire wasn’t only in the square; snipers were also positioned on the roofs of the surrounding buildings. Beside me and in front of me people crumpled to the ground, but I kept on running.

Only when I was sure I’d left the square far behind did I let myself stagger to a stop. I was so out of breath I genuinely thought my lungs would burst. My face a mask of sweat and tears, I sank to my knees on the steps leading up to a shop door. Its shutters were down. A small group had gathered in the street, and I heard them talking about raiding the police stations and reserves barracks to get guns. They were clearly made of much sterner stuff than I was. We’re sitting ducks like

this. They’ll gun us down, the lot of us. Paratroopers even broke into the houses in my area. I was so scared I slept with a kitchen knife by my pillow. Shooting hundreds of rounds like that in broad daylight – I’m telling you, the world’s gone mad!

One of them jogged off to fetch his truck, and I stayed there slumped on the steps until he drove back. I thought about whether I really had it in me to carry a gun, to point it at a living person and pull the trigger.

It was already late at night by the time the truck I was riding in returned to the centre. We’d twice taken a wrong turn, and when we’d got to the barracks we’d found that the guns had already been looted, so it turned out to be a wasted trip. In the meantime, I had no way of knowing how many had fallen in the street fighting. All I remember is the entrance to the hospital the following morning, the seemingly never-ending line of people queuing up to give blood; the doctors and nurses striding through the blasted streets, white gowns bloodstained, hands gripping stretchers; the women who handed up stale rice balls, water and strawberries to the truck I was riding in; the strains of the national anthem, and ‘Arirang,’ which everyone was singing at the top of their voice. Those snapshot moments, when it seemed we’d all performed the miracle of stepping outside the shell of our own selves, one person’s tender skin coming into grazed contact with another, felt as though they were rethreading the sinews of that world heart, patching up the fissures from which blood had flowed, making it beat again.

That was what captured me, what has stayed with me ever since. Have you even known it, professor – that terrifying intensity, that feeling as if you yourself have undergone some kind of alchemy, been purified, made wholly virtuous? The brilliance of that moment, the dazzling purity of conscience.

It’s possible that the kids who stayed behind at the Provincial Office that day experienced something similar.

Perhaps they would have considered even death a fair exchange for that jewel of conscience. But no such certainty VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

37

SPECIAL SECTION

is possible now. Kids crouching beneath the windows, fumbling with their guns and complaining that they were hungry, asking if it was okay for them to quickly run back and fetch the sponge cake and Fanta they’d left in the conference room; what could they possibly have known about death that would have enabled them to make such a choice?

When the announcement came over the wireless that the army would reach the Provincial Office within the next ten minutes, Jin-su propped his gun against the wall, stood up and said, ‘It’s possible that we could hold out until the morning and run the risk of dying in the process, but that’s not an option for the youngsters here.’ For all the world as though he himself were a seasoned adult of thirty or forty, rather than a boy barely out of school. ‘We have no choice but to surrender. If death seems the only other outcome, put down your guns and surrender right away. Look for a way to live.’

I don’t want to talk about what happened next.

There is no one now who has the right to ask me to remember any more, and that includes you, professor.

No, none of us fired our guns.

None of us killed anybody.

Even when the soldiers stormed up the stairs and emerged towards us out of the darkness, none of our group fired their guns. It was impossible for them to pull the trigger knowing that a person would die if they did so. They were children. We had handed out guns to children. Guns they were not capable of firing.

I found out later that the army had been provided with eight hundred thousand rounds that day. This was at a time when the population of the city stood at four hundred thousand.

In other words, they had been given the means to drive a bullet into the body of every person in the city twice over.

I genuinely believe that, if something had come up, the commanding officers would have issued the order for the troops on the ground to do just that. If we’d all done as the student representatives said, piled our guns in the lobby of the Provincial Office and attempted a clean surrender, 38

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

we would have run the risk of the soldiers turning those same weapons on unarmed civilians. Every time I recall the blood that flowed in the small hours of that night – literally flowed, gushing over the stairs in the pitch dark – it strikes me that those deaths did not belong solely to those who died. Rather, they were a substitute for the deaths of others.

Many thousands of deaths, many thousands of hearts’ worth of blood.

Out of the corner of my eye I could see blood silently seeping from people I’d been speaking with mere moments before. Unable to tell who had died and who survived, I lay prone in the corridor, my face pressed into the floor. I felt someone write on my back with a magic marker. Violent element. Possession of firearms. That was what someone else informed me was written there, afterwards when they threw us into the cells at the military academy. * Those who hadn’t been carrying a gun at the time of their arrest were classified as mere accomplices, and were released in batches up until June, leaving only the so-called ‘violent elements’, those who had been caught in possession of firearms, still in the military academy. That was when the programme of torture entered a different phase. Rather than brutal beatings, our captors now chose more elaborate methods of inflicting pain, methods that would not be too physically taxing for them. ‘Hairpin torture’, where both arms were tied behind the back and a large piece of wood inserted between the bound wrists and the small of the back; waterboarding; electric torture; the method known as the ‘roast chicken’, which involved trussing the victim with ropes and suspending them from the ceiling, where they were then beaten while being spun around. Before, they’d tortured us in order to extract the particulars of actual crimes. Now, all they wanted was a false confession, so that our names could be slotted neatly into the script they had already devised.

Kim Jin-su and I continued to receive a single tray and share its scant meal between us. It took an enormous feat of will to put what we’d experienced a few hours ago in the interrogation room behind us and wield our spoons in stony silence, fighting the temptation to scrap like animals over

FICTION

reallyGood murder #CAI1701, 2010 © NOH Suntag

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

39

SPECIAL SECTION

a grain of rice, a shred of kimchi. There was one man who knocked his meal tray over and screamed, I can’t take any more of this! What’s going to happen to me if you shovel the whole lot down yourself ? As he grappled with his partner, a boy pushed between them and stuttered, D-don’t do that.

I was taken aback; this was the first time I’d ever seen that quiet, shy-seeming kid open his mouth.

W-we were r-ready to die, you know.

It was then that Kim Jin-su’s empty gaze rose to meet mine.

At that moment, I realised what all this was for. The words that this torture and starvation were intended to elicit. We will make you realise how ridiculous it was, the lot of you waving the national flag and singing the national anthem. We will prove to you that you are nothing but filthy stinking bodies. That you are no better than the carcasses of starving animals.

40

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

The boy with the stutter was called Yeong-chae. It was a name Kim Jin-su pronounced frequently in the afternoons following that initial altercation. In the ten or so minutes after the meal, which was when the guard tended to relax his vigilance, he would address the boy in a soft, friendly tone. You must be hungry, Yeong-chae, no? Kim Yeongchae, where’s your family from? I’m a Gimhae Kim too.

Which branch? You’re fifteen, right, well then, no need for honorifics with me. I’m only four years older than you at the most. I don’t look my age, do I? Oh, well, all right. Call me uncle, then. We’re distant relatives, after all.

From listening in to their conversation, I learned that the boy hadn’t continued his education beyond middle school, and was learning carpentry at his uncle’s woodworking shop.

He’d joined the civilian militia to follow in the footsteps of this uncle’s son, who was two years older; this cousin, to whom he’d always looked up, had been killed that final

FICTION

reallyGood murder #CAI1701, 2010 © NOH Suntag

Somehow or other, I needed to make sense of what I’d experienced.

Watery discharge and sticky pus, foul saliva, blood, tears and snot, piss and shit that soiled your pants. That was all that was left to me. No, that was what I myself had been reduced to. I was nothing but the sum of those parts. The lump of rotting meat from which they oozed was the only ‘me’ there was.

Even now I find summer difficult to endure. When runnels of sweat trickle down over my chest and back, itching like the bite of insect mouths, that time when I was nothing but a lump of meat is suddenly back with me, the feeling unchanged, and I have to take a deep, steady breath.

Grind my teeth together, and take another deep, steady breath.

night at the YMCA. I-I l-like to eat sp-sponge cake the best.

W-with S-sprite. Yeong-chae’s eyes stayed dry while he told the story of his dead cousin, but when Jin-su asked him what his favourite food was he had to scrub at them with his fists. With his right fist, that is. His left remained in his lap. I stared at it, at the cotton wool poking out from between those clenched fingers.

I was constantly racking my brains.

Because I wanted to understand.

When a square wooden cudgel is squeezed in between my shoulder blades, manipulated so that my screaming joints are forced as far apart as the physical composition of my body will possibly allow, when this body writhes and contorts and the words spew from its lips, for God’s sake, stop, I did wrong, seconds strung together with jerked, juddering gasps, when they insert a drill bit beneath my fingernails and toenails, shuddered-in breath spat out in a rush, for God’s sake stop, I did wrong, seconds patched with broken groans, rising into a wail, make this body disappear, please, for God’s sake, just wipe it off the face of the earth.

Human Acts (Portobello Books, 2016), pp. 120–128.

Trans. Deborah Smith Copyright © 2014 by Han Kang.

Translation copyright © 2016 by Deborah Smith.

Reprinted with permission from Portobello Books.

Han Kang has received the Man Booker International Prize 2016, the Yi Sang Literary Award, Today’s Young Artist Award, and the Manhae Literature Prize.

English translations of her books include The Vegetarian (Portobello, 2015),

Human Acts (Portobello, 2016), and The White Book (Portobello, 2018).

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

41

SPECIAL SECTION

To Detective Kim Who Is Humane, Too Humane

by Hwang Ji-woo

Detective Kim and I can talk frankly now. My wife also finds “something humane” in him-he buys toys for our children, she serves him coffee-though at first she was wary of him. He even bows to my old mother. Probably because of his humanity, we seldom discuss politics. But once I praised Bulam Choi’s performance in The First Republic.

Performance? Are we not also performing roles, Sir? He seems happy to be called “Sir.” Because he laughs so hard, I laugh with him and answer his question about how I’m doing. He wonders how I can live on so little. I answer him. He asks about my health. I answer him. He tells me his own history, though I have never asked about it.

He descends from landlords in the Hwanghae province of North Korea. In his youth he saw family members taken away by men from the Ministry of Home Affairs, he knows how terrible man can be. He crossed the 38th parallel, led a harsh life, enlisted in the marines, dedicated himself to his profession. He told me why people loathe him when he visits their homes. He laughs a lot; he has good manners; sometimes he even seems to have compassion for things. I told him he’s always welcome. He invited me to enjoy a cup of Soju with him someday, though he also lives on a meager salary. After he left, I stopped mulling over our “performances.”

Even Birds Leave the World (White Pine Press, 2005), p. 18.

Trans. Won-Chung Kim & Christopher Merrill Copyright © 2005 by Ji-Woo Hwang.

Translation copyright © 2005 by Won-Chung Kim & Christopher Merrill.

Reprinted with permission from White Pine Press.

Hwang Ji-woo has published several poetry collections, including Even Birds

©Sssauna studio, Kim Kyung-soo

Leave the World , I am You , A Lotus in the Crab’s Eye , and One Day I’ll be Sitting

42

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

in a Dingy Bar . He has received numerous awards, including the Kim Su-Young Literary Award, Hyundae Literary Award, Daesan Literary Award, and the Republic of Korea’s Okgwan Order of Cultural Merit. His books have been translated into English, German, French, Spanish, and Mongolian.

POETRY

Namildang Design Olympic II #BJE2902, 2009 © NOH Suntag

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

43

SPECIAL SECTION

Meaning of missing 7 hours #CEF1054, 2014 © NOH Suntag

44

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

POETRY

They Say We Should Wait

1

by Kim Ki-taek

They say we should wait. While the 6,835 ton ship capsizes; while the ship sinks with just a part of the bow visible on the surface of the sea; while an announcement just repeats “Wait!” with the captain and the crew slipping out of the ship, they say it’s too dangerous for us to move, so we should stay put and wait. While the National Maritime Police just circle around the sinking ship; while they’re stopping the UDT team and civilian divers who have hurried over to rescue us, the television says they’re hard at work rescuing us, so we should just stay calm and wait.

Tired of waiting for a rescue team that doesn’t arrive, the dark sea water rushes in first to block out our cries and screams, and tie up our floundering bodies; no matter how desperately our torn off fingernails and broken fingers try to grasp something, or anything, they say we should not ask questions, but just sit and wait. Though sea water swallows up KakaoTalk; though it swallows “They say we should wait”; though it swallows the very fingers that typed out “They say we should wait,” they still tell us we should wait, not to worry since no deaths can yet be confirmed. Though Mom and Dad wail and stamp their feet repeatedly, and the rescued school’s vice principal hangs himself with heavy hearts all around, they say we should wait, not to be taken in by false rumors, but to stay focused on their announcements. While death swells in the water, and bursts forth tearing up clothes; while faces swell and reduce to a pulp, they say that since the baby faces on student IDs remain intact, just hold those faces tight in grasped hands and wait. They say we should wait in the water of Maenggolsudo2 until the East Sea runs dry and Mt. Baekdu wears away.

Translated by Yang Eun-Mi

1. “ They say we should wait. No further announcements after ‘wait.’” At 10:17 am on April 16, 2014, the last KakaoTalk message was delivered from a Danwon High School student from inside the Sewol ferry as it was sinking. This was 50 minutes after the National Maritime Police’s rescue vessel arrived on the scene at 9:30 am. (Yonhap News, April 28, 2014) 2. T ranslator's Note: A sea channel between Maenggol Island and Geocha Island with one of the most rapid and unpredictable currents in Korea.

Kim Ki-taek is a poet, translator, and professor. He has published six poetry collections, one essay collection, and numerous children’s books; he has also translated many children’s books, including Hans in Luck . He has won the Kim Su-Young Literary Award, Hyundae Literary Award, Isu Literary Award, and Midang Literary Award. His books Storm in the Needle Hole and Gum have been published in Japan and Mexico, respectively.

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

45

SPECIAL SECTION

I Don’t Know Who You Are but I Love You

by Shin Daechul

The horizon rising through the fog abruptly divides the land, south and north The dawn pushes trenches into the earth and returns, wrapped in fog, the glimpsed blue river washed in snow and wound around its neck and torso The wind blows, the Korean flag flies.

The wind blows, the UN flag flies.

Between the pair of fluttering flags Someone comes up the mountain path. Halt! He only pretends to halt. No hands-up, no waving of a white handkerchief, his head sags as he slinks towards me. Somewhere in my body someone shouts.

(Wait, there’s a barbed wire fence Wait, there’s a minefield Wait, show us your hands, raise them up and turn around!)

Kingfisher! Ibis!

Passwords exchanged at the last second, but a path lengthens whitely between the eyebrows.

The closer he gets, the more thorns I feel on me. At this line of division, we become a lump of lightning or rainstorm of anxiety or fear, hug each other until our breaths crack and we go our separate ways, and meet again two days early With the barbed wire between us, we wordlessly look at each other Who are we standing like stop signs?

Kingfisher ibis kingfisher ibis King-i-fish-i-er-i king-i-fish-i-er-i From fifty speakers, little by little 46

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

FICTION

Red House II #BFK2901, 2005 © NOH Suntag

code-deciphered lyrics fall into the rhythm of “Casa Bianca” on the hill The sleeper agents in their army boots walk up to the “Casa Bianca.” When they return, all they have thoughts as inerasable as the foot-stink of a damp mattress or a sleeping bag that’s lost its feathers, but they, too, follow the strains of the song and fall into their verse. Corporal Cho searches for his runaway wife, the love-letter scribe Sargent Kim gathers the squash vines on his garden wall and loiters around his hometown stream, and what about Private Kim who left his widowed mother alone at the southern end of the land? He postscripts his letters—telling them to thresh barley and hire hands on such-and-such day of such-and-such month, and only to plant vegetables in the garden—before falling asleep.

We go down to the bunker. You sit on the edge of the bed with your back to the dim light, you who have given up on your mission and come over the line of division and are crouching before it now, what do you hear? The team leader? The keeper? You’re beginning to lean to the side in the dark and whenever the comm rings you sit up and peer into the chain-smoking fog and push the comm into the corner and pull it towards you and fill your two hands with your face, (you are not my blood and you are not your blood, we are we, the blood of a nation, if not, if not-not, then what?)

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

47

SPECIAL SECTION

Last last night you burned your hair on the fiery rainstorm and today you burn your heart on the sound of footsteps ringing through the bunker, and I also wrap my fire-grazed face with my hands. If you follow where your heart flows, from east to west, drink a gourd or water and reach the blasted rice-paddy levees of your rural home, where the faces like apricot flowers and peach blossoms shall come out on the ice.

(But is there nowhere to return to if you survive Is it possible to be soulless while still alive) The black clouds of yesterday blot the sky The broken ankles of dead soldiers dangle and slap their knees The sun arcs and arcs across the sky towards you who have nowhere to return, past the checkpoint dust a jeep drives in, it darkens, whoosh a fire catches on my back.

The one you wanted to see, if only from afar? Who is neither mother nor lover? I shall keep close the cigarette stubs you left behind, your nervous eyes, your dark gestures, your trembling voice coming through the code, and while I live I shall, from where the trembling voice rises, write poetry from what I have, as I trembled, seen and heard and felt and dreamed and bled.

I shall transcend myself and you, abandon ideology for ideology, nation for nation Goodbye, you who are absent between the two flags and nowhere in our land, I don’t know who you are but I love you.

Translated by Anton Hur

Shin Daechul has published the poetry collections For the Desert Island , For My Friend from the Gaema Highlands , Baikal Kiss , and I Don’t Know Who You Are but I Love You . He has received the Baek Seok Prize for Literature, the Pak Tu-Jin Literary Award, and the Kim Daljin Literary Award.

48

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

POETRY

The Apprentice’s Dream

by Park Nohae

A long night at the factory Fatigue creeps over the shoulders like a cold front Drrr drrr drrr Riding the sewing machine, the dream-like sewing machine the frozen hands of the apprentice who bears the night on caffeine pills cuts the rose-colored dream snips the given-up dreams hauls the bleeding leather onto the machine over and over Still an apprentice she wants to tame the machine ride it with the cool face of a general and make warm clothes that wrap her frozen self and patch up life’s tears Still an apprentice goosebumps tremble all over her she scissors and hammers and irons.

The apprentice’s dream to stitch together the world’s fragments into one and with it she runs blind the wind-whipped factory streets and upon the skinny apprentice’s gestures and her pale forehead the dawn stars shine

Park Nohae is a poet, photographer, and revolutionary. His first poetry collection, The

Dawn of Labor (1984), sold nearly a million copies despite being banned. He formed the South Korean Socialist Workers’ Alliance in 1989. He was arrested in 1991 and imprisoned for seven and a half years, during which time he published the essay collection Only Humanity

is Our Hope (1997). He published his third poetry collection, So Please Don't Disappear , in 2010. He has held photo exhibitions in South

Translated by Anton Hur

Korea since 2010.

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

49

SPECIAL SECTION

The Crucible

by Gong Ji-Young

49 Jang, the section chief of Social Services at City Hall, stared off into the distance as he slurped coffee from a paper cup. He was a middle-aged man of middling height, thinnish frame, and magnificent wavy hair. He scratched his head as he heard Yujin out with a look of extreme displeasure on his face.

“This is a school matter, so you should take it up with the Education Office. Over here, we deal with children’s social welfare.”

Would it have been less infuriating if she had come here first instead of the Education Office? Yujin stepped right up to Jang. Doing her best not to show her seething fury, she spoke in a low voice.

“I went to the Education Office and was told to go to Social Services because it happened after classes at the dormitory.”

Still not deigning to look at her, Jang cocked his head and took a noisy swig of his coffee. Where had this man learned that foul habit of not looking at people when he spoke to them? But Yujin kept in her demure posture.

Jang cast a sidelong glance at her. “So you’re saying it happened at the Home of Benevolence?”

“I have a video of the victims’ statements and an affidavit, too. You’ll understand when you see the video. You see, after the children finished their classes . . .”

Yujin took a deep breath. She was explaining this for the third time already.

“After they finished their classes, they were going to the dormitory . . .”

“Right, it’s not for me to look into or understand the rest, so let’s stop right there. What I’m asking is did this happen inside the dormitory?”

“The location was the school. First, the restroom on the first floor. Then the principal’s office, then the 50

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

administration office . . .”

Yujin shuddered as she remembered Yuri’s statement.

Jang slurped his coffee loudy before responding.

“You need to go to the Education Office in that case. We only deal with children’s social welfare, budget allocation, stuff like that. Go to the Education Office.”

Jang took another slurp and swiveled his chair around, turning his back to her. If only she could punch that back.

As she stared at it, Yujin thought that maybe violence was not always a bad thing.

“The Education Office says it happened after classes so it’s not their jurisdiction. Besides, the children were abused inside the dormitory too. How can you say it’s not under your jurisdiction?”

As if it was too noisy for his liking, an official at the next desk slowly got to his feet and walked to the window, dragging his slippers. Yujin felt like a peddler who’d barged into the office.

“Listen,” she said. “The School of Benevolence and the Home of Benevolence receive four billion won in subsidies from the government. That money comes out of the taxpayer’s pocket. Isn’t it your responsibility to ensure the disabled children are well looked after? Do you understand that children were abused at the dormitory? Children!

And by the teacher who was supposed to be their guidance counselor!”

Yujin’s voice rose a pitch. Jang’s brow puckered as though offended by her tone.

“I told you, any teacher abuse comes under the Education Office’s purview. How can Social Services monitor teachers? And the City Council decides whether the budget has been used properly, so take it up with them if you want,” he shot back.

The middle-aged man next to Jang returned to his desk

FICTION

The fog had lifted, but the road was still covered in a milky haze.

Yujin closed and opened her eyes several times but still found it hard to see the road, as if she needed to open yet another eye.

and spoke in an undertone.

“Jeez, all this talk about abuse first thing in the morning is upsetting. Especially coming from a young lady.”

Unable to hold it in anymore, Yujin challenged the two men.

“How can you say that? You must have kids of your own. And, besides, aren’t you all paid to keep an eye on the Home of Benevolence?”

“I told you, go to the Education Office. Just because you show up here in the morning and raise your voice doesn’t mean we can take on what’s outside our jurisdiction . . .

I realize the circumstances are pitiable, but there’s nothing we can do.”

Both men swiveled their chairs around. Jang drained the rest of his coffee. His slurps rang out like thunderbolts.

As she pushed past the doors of the Social Services office on her way out, Yujin felt her knees go weak. She directed her trembling feet to the car park. Her phone rang. It was the assistant. He’d gone to lodge a complaint at the City Council, but he’d had no luck either. She weakly climbed into her car and sat there awhile, unable to start the car. She snapped her phone shut and buried her face in the steering wheel. The phone rang again. It was Inho this time.

“So I met Song Haseob. He’s hearing impaired, but he can speak. Remember I told you about him once, the guidance counselor who helped Yuri go to the cops. He was holding a one-man protest in front of the school gate, so I gave him your card. Are you listening?”

She paused a beat. “Uh-huh.”

“Can you talk to him if he comes? Yeondu and Yuri managed to sidestep the school’s questions, but there’s going to be trouble soon. What’s wrong? Are you crying?”

“Inho . . .”

Yujin spoke his name quietly. She could feel him pause on the other end of the line.

“I always knew our country wasn’t that great, but I never thought things were so bad. We have a difficult fight on our hands. The Education Office, City Hall . . . they’re all in it together . . . Mujin Girl’s High, Mujin High, the grade school, the We Love Mujin Club, the Church of Glory . . .

It’s four billion won, Inho. Four billion! Those people took four billion of our taxes in a year and this is what they did. I sent an assistant to register a complaint at the City Council where they oversee the budget, but it was pointless.

Some of the council members themselves have been booked on charges of sexual assault and harassment. One of them is accused of molesting an elevator operator. Inside the elevator . . . Isn’t that a hoot? Are we supposed to raise daughters here? In this country in heat?”

50 The fog had lifted, but the road was still covered in a milky haze. Yujin closed and opened her eyes several times but still found it hard to see the road, as if she needed to open yet another eye. A fog like a witch’s gray hair, this was Mujin’s fog that made people fervently pray for the sun and wind to cast it off. Even as she raised two kids on her own, Yujin had never felt lonely. Each day she prayed for her children to not fall sick that night, hoped to clear her apartment maintenance fee dues the next day, and was happy eating out at a pork-rib restaurant once a month. She felt she was rich if she didn’t feel a stab of fear when the children asked to order another portion of ribs. She would allow herself to feel lonely only after her children had grown up, after her second child born with a heart defect became healthy—this she’d promised herself long ago. But at this moment, the grains of the moisture-laden wind rushing in through the open VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

51

13Chuckies #BII0201, 2008 © NOH Suntag

SPECIAL SECTION

window stung like countless thorns on her skin. She was so lonely her cheeks smarted.

I took Yuri to the ob-gyn yesterday. I had her examined by a doctor and had a medical report made. Her hymen is ruptured, and she has severe abrasions and lacerations on her vulva. Infection has set in, so she didn’t sleep a wink last night . . . Listen, Yujin, do you think maybe Yuri was able to live through all that happened to her because she’s intellectually impaired? Maybe it’s better for her she’s that way, right . . .?

Yujin recalled what the head of the counseling center had recounted to her over her sobs on the phone last night.

Unconsciously, she pressed her foot down on the accelerator.

52

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

The reeds in the bay that extended all the way to the sea seemed to have turned pale in fright after being bitten by the retreating fog. The last time she’d seen a clear sea rolling under an azure open sky was long ago.

She learned she was pregnant with Haneul when her first child, Bada, was still young and she and her husband had already separated. Her bloated belly hung on her small frame, and her face was covered in dark patches and had taken on a dull sallow color. In that sensitive state, the thought of suicide would come to her several times a day.

One day, she was looking at books in a large bookstore when she felt a tap on her stomach. Thinking she must have

FICTION

bumped against the bookcase, she checked but that wasn’t it. It was too early for her to feel the baby moving, so she ignored the sensation and continued her browsing. She felt another tap. She stopped and felt her belly. With that soft touch, Haneul announced her presence, like a sprout breaking through the frozen ground on a spring day when the wind still had bite to it. She stood in a corner of the big bookstore and cried. It wasn’t out of sadness. Nor despair.

They were tears of awe that anybody would have shed in the presence of something grander and more majestic, the moment when someone proud realized her own smallness.

She gave birth to the baby alone. With no money to go to a hospital, she called a midwife to her small apartment.

More frightening than the misfortune that was upon her was the prospect of other people learning about it. She couldn’t deny this played a big part in her decision to move to Mujin with her infant baby. The baby was tiny. Its blue lips troubled her. Feeling it was all her fault for not getting proper prenatal care, she made up her mind that night as she lay the baby down to sleep beside her.

“Mommy may not be able to dress you up like a princess.

She may not be able to buy you a lace bedspread. You may never get to take family pictures at the amusement park with Daddy. I’m sorry . . . I’m so sorry . . . But Mommy can promise you this: By the time my Bada and Haneul have grown up, I’ll have made this country better. I’ll make it so that you girls can walk tall. Even if it’s just a little, too little even to feel, Mommy will work her fingers to the bone to

make this world a better place where people can live the way people should.”

The phone rang again. It was the office. Yujin turned on her wipers because of the fog that still rushed toward the windshield and answered the phone. The voice of the assistant came on.

“Good news! I got word from Seoul. The media is going to do a special report on our case. The producers were about to start for Mujin, so I said yes. Can you get over here quick? We have to sort through all the documents and we’re short-staffed. I also heard from the National Human Rights Commission in Seoul. They said they’ll look into our case and they want us to send them more materials . . .”

She made a sudden U-turn. Crossing the yellow line was a clear violation, but Yujin barreled toward the Mujin Human Rights Center without a second thought.

Translated by Agnel Joseph Dogani (Changbi, 2009), pp. 127-134.

For publication inquiries, contact:

josephlee705@gmail.com

Gong Ji-Young has received the Amnesty International Special Media Award, Catholic Literature

© Lee Kwa-yong

Award, and the Yi Sang Literary Award. Her best-known works include Our Happy Time , The

Crucible , and My Sister, Bongsoon . Her books in translation include Our Happy Time (Atria Books/ Marble Arch Press, 2014), Nos Jours Heureux (Philippe Picquier, 2014), L'échelle de Jacob (Philippe Picquier, 2016), and Ma très chère grande soeur (Philippe Picquier, 2018).

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

53

SPECIAL SECTION

One Person

by Kim Soom

It was around Chuseok. They had no clocks or calendars, but the girls grew sick with longing for home as Chuseok drew near.

When the skies had cleared after four tedious days of rain, an outlying army base sent a truck. Six girls—Bong-ae, Sun-deok, Mi-ok, Yeong-sun, Han-ok, and she—climbed into the cargo bed. It was Bong-ae’s first trip to the base.

Hyang-suk was supposed to go, but Bong-ae filled in when she broke her arm.

Hyang-suk’s arm broke when a Japanese soldier shoved her. Takashi had stopped coming one day. Hyang-suk asked around for his whereabouts, but didn’t find out anything.

The girls said he must have died in a battle. Hyang-suk’s crying upset a drunk Japanese solider. The damned Josenppi, sniveling away instead of taking soldiers. When that didn’t stop her crying, he twisted and snapped her arm.

The ground was so muddy, clumps of dirt the size of cow pads would kick up and hit the girls in their faces when the wheels spun fast.

After half a day’s trip in the truck, they arrived at a river.

A wooden boat the shape of a clog was waiting for them by the riverbank. The water was frighteningly high after four days of ceaseless rain. Looking at the brown water, she felt scared and relieved at the same time.

The girls got off the truck and into the boat. When the girls settled down on the boat floor, a Chinese man, so completely bald he looked like a boiled octopus, picked up the oar and began to row. The man’s unclothed upper body was tan as if he’d painted himself with black ink.

She felt seasick but oddly peaceful as if the end of her life were near. She hoped she’d flow on forever in this boat. That when the boat arrived at the river’s end, she and the other girls would find their faces shriveled with age.

Bong-ae, her pockmarked face jaundiced, sighed, “Look—a village.”

The girl, who had been sitting with her eyes cast down 54

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

on the water with the winds blowing upstream caressing her face, looked in the direction where Bong-ae was pointing.

The village was far away and yet seemed so close she could almost reach out and touch it. It had a red glow and seemed cozy, like something out of a dream.

“I don’t think anyone lives there.”

“Really?”

“I don’t see a single person.”

“They must all be sleeping.”

“A few nights ago, I visited my home in my dream, and no one was there. Father, Mother, my younger siblings. I visited with the dead baby on my back—” Bong-ae rose to her feet and, as quick as a blink, jumped into the river. She reached out to grab her by the hem, but Bong-ae was already sinking to the bottom of the river.

When it dawned on the girls what had just happened before their very eyes, they cried Bong-ae’s name into the river.

They yelled so loudly they tasted blood in their throats, but Bong-ae did not resurface. The Chinese man stopped his rowing and shook his head at the girls as if to say it was no use.

The Japanese soldiers aimed their rifles at the panicked girls. The Chinese man resumed rowing as if nothing had happened.

Returning from the base, the girls saw Bong-ae. Groins inflamed and pelvic bones twisted after taking soldiers for five days in a row, they were sprawled uncomfortably in the boat. Their eyes were gaunt.

“Over there—isn’t that Bong-ae?” said Han-ok.

“Oh, it is her!”

Bong-ae sat reclined against a branch stuck upsidedown in the river, her head above the water and eyes wide open as if she had been waiting all this time for the girls to come collect her. Her belly was swollen from drinking too much water.

The girls asked the soldiers to help pull her out of the

Confession of Body #BCG0501, 2002 © NOH Suntag

FICTION

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

55

SPECIAL SECTION

water. They made a bed of sticks and branches, and laid her down on it.

Sun-deok wiped the water off Bong-ae’s face as she wept.

The chapped skin that had peeled off as if half-eaten by rats didn’t seem to frighten her or put her off in the least.

Flames shot up when the soldiers poured gasoline and lit the kindling. Leaving Bong-ae to crackle in the licking flames, the girls climbed back into the truck. Sparks like fireflies flew over as far as the truck. Imagining them to be a part of Bong-ae’s soul, she reached out to catch one in her hand, but the spark instantly turned to black ash.

She felt Bong-ae’s death was her fault. If only she’d reached out more quickly and caught Bong-ae by the hem of her skirt.

Each time a girl died at the comfort station, the girls felt it was their fault. * As always, she turns on the television the moment she wakes up. Fortunately, there is no news of the last one. The last one is still alive.

She pauses while folding her blanket to let out a deep sigh. It hits her that whether the last one dies first, or she dies first, or someone alive somewhere else dies first, there will come a day when not one of them will be alive.

Her head spins as her foot reaches below the deck to put her shoes on. A magpie. When had Nabi come by? She doesn’t see the cat anywhere into the yard.

The magpie seems to still be hanging on. Like Hu-nam, who was still breathing after Oto-san dragged her out of her room and tossed her into the field.

She gently pushes two fingers under the magpie’s wing.

She feels a pool of warmth like breath.

She holds up the bird with both hands and heads over

to the tailor shop to see the seamstress. She will know if the magpie is still alive or not.

The seamstress is sitting in front of the television and eating breakfast from a round floor tray. She is eating straight from the containers. Her TV is so loud that the noise carries out to the alley. The seamstress turns her upper body to look at her while tearing apart grilled yellow corvina with her bare hands.

“What’s that?”

She shyly extends her hands to show her.

The seamstress jumps. “Yech, isn’t that a magpie?”

“Could you . . . see if it’s still alive?”

“Good God! Did you go senile overnight, bringing me a dead magpie first thing in the morning?”

The seamstress shakes her head. The dog curled up on a cushion under the sewing machine gets up and starts barking at her.

She walks down the alley with the magpie still resting in her hands. The magpie might still be alive, and she can’t just toss it on the street.

In the alley bathed with slanting sunlight, she suddenly stops and holds the magpie up to the sky. Its feathers catch the light and glimmer. As if coated with the fine dust of briquettes they used at the comfort station in Manchuria.

The only things that glimmered at the Manchuria comfort station were the blood of the girls and the briquettes.

Translated by Jamie Chang Han myeong (Hyundae Munhak, 2016), pp. 215-221.

For publication inquiries, contact: koreanlitnow@klti.or.kr

Kim Soom has published nine novels, including One Person and L’s Shoes , and six short story collections. She has received the Yi Sang Literary Award, Hyundae Literary Award, Daesan Literary Award, Heo Gyun Literary Award, and the Tong-ni Literature Prize. She participated in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 2009.

56

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

Special Interview

Nora Okja Keller

Embracing Her Identity Nora Okja Keller made her fiction debut in 1997 with the publication of Comfort Woman, a story set in Hawaii that set light on the present-day impact of sexual slavery on the lives of a mother and her hapa, or mixed race, daughter. Fox Girl (2002) continued Keller’s exploration of mixed-race Korean identity and the complicated legacy of US military occupation in South Korea. Keller teaches at Punahou School in Honolulu.

Kim Stoker: You had the opportunity to visit South

especially given the caliber of the other writers there.

Korea last spring for the 2017 Seoul International

I was so thankful to be there and it was good for me

Forum for Literature and you were invited to speak on

because I started thinking of myself as a writer again

a panel. How was that experience?

instead of being in these modes like teacher and mom.

I hadn’t given that part of my identity a lot of attention

Nora Okja Keller: It was great. I was really honored

lately, so it was exciting and inspiring.

because I haven’t published anything in a while, and VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

57

SPECIAL INTERVIEW

Stoker: The title of your presentation was “Thoughts

The reception though was generally really positive.

about Being Hapa: Living on the Margins Both as ‘Self ’ and ‘Other.’” Could talk a little about your

Stoker: How was the reception for you in South Korea

inspiration for that lecture?

talking about that topic of multiple possibilities for Korean-ness? It would be very different from, say,

Keller: The inspiration for my talk in 2017 was my

speaking about the same topic in San Francisco.

experiences as a mother. How I identified myself as Korean, Korean American, and as a writer, and realizing

Keller: Oh yes. I realized that you can’t take any

how that translates to my daughters who are a quarter-

definitions for granted. I was surprised at how unusual

Korean, especially when they don’t have physical markers

that topic was. The interest is there because maybe South

that other people can label as Korean or as Asian. Like,

Korea has only recently become open to having those

how do they find or claim that identity for themselves?

kinds of discussions.

That was really important for me when I was raising my

There were people interested not just to have

daughters. These questions are coming up for my older

an intellectual discussion, but [one] on a personal

daughter especially.

level. A couple of people had mentioned that they had

Growing up in Hawaii and identifying as hapa and

children or grandchildren living in the US, and were

recognizing the multiplicity of their identities, I guess,

wondering how their experiences might be. Because the

they were more aware. When my older daughter went

world has gotten smaller there are wider possibilities for

to Boston for college she was hyperaware of how white

this kind of opening up of racial identities. It seems like

everyone was. And it made her realize how strongly she

there’s more acceptance and more interest and support.

wanted to hold on to her hapa identity.

Stoker: As a self-identified Korean American, how Stoker: You first returned to South Korea in the mid-

does your identity (and subject matter) position

1990s to support the Korean translation of Comfort

you in the broader literary landscape? Are there any

Woman. How was your most recent visit different

limitations or benefits to a categorization such as a

from back then?

“Korean American author” or an “Asian American author”?

Keller: The first time I went back to South Korea as an

58

adult—I was born there but my family left when I was

Keller: It’s funny—Korean American identity is so

around three years old, so I don’t have any clear conscious

important to me personally and as a writer I’ve identified

memories of South Korea—was after the publication of

as a Korean American writer, but when I go to South

Comfort Woman when it was translated. I was so nervous

Korea I am immediately recognized as American—a

about talking about the publication of that book especially

Korean but within the context of America.

because it was the nineties, and that topic was just coming

I know that there’s been some discussions about

out in the public consciousness in America. So I was

identity, and I totally get the perspective of some Asian

nervous to go back to South Korea because it was such a

American writers who think, “Why marginalize yourself

loaded emotional topic. I wasn’t sure how I’d be received

within American literature as a whole?” It’s a kind of

and worried that people would wonder, ‘How could she

ghetto-izing of yourself, but it’s the same discussion

write about this topic because she’s not really Korean?’

female writers have. “Why do you have to separate that

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

out?” But I think it’s because the issues that I think about are so central to being a woman and to crafting an Asian American identity. I feel that kinship— that that’s where my struggle as a writer and as a person lay, so I don’t have any problem claiming that identity, and it also forms connections with other writers.

Stoker: Could you ever imagine

© Kim Stoker

yourself not writing about Korea? Or Korean or Asian American-related subject

language. Those translators have to be artists to do such

matter?

a good job.

I’ve read Shin Kyung-sook’s Please Look After

Keller: I’ve done a series of short essays and they’ve been

Mom. And when I was in South Korea this past spring

more like personal narratives and I don’t explicitly go

I had the chance to meet Kim Soom, whom I think is

into that . . . they are very much family-centered and

brilliant. What a poetic voice. She’s pretty incredible.

only tangentially about Korean culture and identity.

Her language is so poetic and so powerful.

But I don’t feel like it’s true to myself to excise it from my stories, from what I write about, yet it doesn’t have

Stoker: Going back to your experience as a writer

to be the focus either. I think that for fiction, I don’t

from Hawaii, I’m curious what it was like for you in

think I would be comfortable having a totally imagined

the 1990, debuting as a writer. It was such a dynamic

character that didn’t have that kind of authenticity

time for literature coming from Hawaii with authors

and connection. Other people have put themselves in

like you, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Gary Pak, and Cathy

the shoes of the other, but it wouldn’t feel right for me

Song a little earlier, making their debuts in the

personally.

Hawaii-based Bamboo Ridge Press and participating in the Bamboo Ridge Writer’s Workshop.

Stoker: It’s a pretty exciting time for Korean literature in translation with several new titles being

Keller: Those are people who guided me as a writer. I still

introduced in English each year, not to mention in

look to them as friends. They were such an important

other languages. Who are some Korean authors that

community for me as a young emerging writer, and as a

you’re familiar with or that you’ve read in translation

person.

or would like to read?

I went with Bamboo Ridge Press, I remember, for the first short story I wrote. I was still in college at the

Keller: Yes, translation is such an art form. It’s such a skill

time. And I remember Eric Chock reading it and he said,

to craft both meaning and the rhythm and flow of the

“Is this local?” Because at the time I had tried to make a VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

59

SPECIAL INTERVIEW

story that didn’t have any ethnic markers, to make a story

Keller: I started it five years ago and I then just kind of

that was completely white-washed, make it identifiable

put it on hold. I feel like that story is still waiting and I need

to “everybody.” I didn’t consciously think about erasing

to go back and find where I started with that and where

ethnicity or Korean culture. But later on I realized that the

I left off. It’ll probably be a different story from what

writers I was reading were all white, too. Ethnicity never

I intended because so much time has passed, but that’s

came up. We laugh about that today, but I was so shaken up

okay too.

by his question. I was scared away for a couple years! It really made me think about what I was doing in my writing.

Stoker: It’s an exciting prospect that there might be a

Going back to your earlier question about the

third book to complete the trilogy, and especially to

importance of Korean American identity in my writing,

see the evolution of ideas and you as a writer. Every

that’s partly where it all stems from: Write true to

writer has their obsessions that come out repeatedly.

yourself. Speak your life. These Bamboo Ridge writers

Can you talk about how your writing process or your

really taught me that and were role models. They

approach to narrative has changed over the years?

definitely shaped the direction of my writing and helped me realize the validity of my story.

Keller: I wouldn’t mind revisiting Fox Girl. I was purposely experimenting with some things with Fox

Stoker: You were saying that you’ve been busy with

Girl and had written Comfort Woman in one style—

family and teaching and doing some other kinds of

I was trying to tweak the narrative structure and be

writing, but where are you at right now with your

as different as possible. I would revisit that and do a

fiction?

different revision.

Keller: I put it on hold for a long time and I would

Stoker: Do you have any plans to visit South Korea

say that this last trip that I came home from South

again with members of your family?

Korea, I pulled up some old notebooks and have been immersing myself in that and thinking about myself in

Keller: My oldest daughter and my husband and my

that context again. Along with this trip inspiring me,

mom and sisters went during the Comfort Woman visit

there are still stories that I have that I want to tell

and then about five years later I brought my younger

that I’ve put aside. And I believe they’re still waiting.

daughter as well. Now we’re all talking about visiting

My older daughter is coming out with her first book.

South Korea next summer, especially because my mom’s

She’s writing and her audience is middle grade [students]

getting older so we definitely want to make this trip with

and the protagonist is a little hapa girl. We’ve been

her again.

talking a lot about the writing life and that has been inspiring to me. It’s been exciting for me to see that. She’s been talking about having writing days together. It’s neat to share that bond with her.

by Kim Stoker Freelance Editor and Writer

Stoker: I’ve heard that you’re currently working on your third novel, which completes the trilogy that started with Comfort Woman and Fox Girl.

60

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

Former Editor, KLN

BOOKMARK

A Fish Called Wanda by Baek Minsuk _62

Illustration © Amy Shin

Because I Hate Korea by Chang Kang-myoung _67 Modern Boy by Lee Jimin _72

BOOKMARK

A Fish Called Wanda

by Baek Minsuk

“Do you know where I’m headed right now?”

The Jerk left a chatty message expressed in a lazy purr on my pager’s voice mail. It sounded like a drowsy cat crawling onto my lap and asking to be scratched under its chin. There were two parts to his message, with only the first being recorded on the pager. All by himself, the Jerk had used up the voice record’s maximum capacity. “What’s this noise?” he muttered at the warning buzz. “Oh, it’s nearly full. Okay, I’ll call again when I get there. There’ll definitely be some fun!” This was the end of the first part.

I can’t stand people who lack respect or courtesy for someone else’s pager. I quickly erased the recording. Among all that verbiage, I didn’t even remember where the 16 mitgeona malgeona bangmulji

Jerk was headed. The second part of his message was left on my phone’s automatic

Moonji, 1997, 282 pages

answering machine. His voice this time was like a lion roaring. In his excitement, the

(Excerpt from pp. 23–31)

Jerk stressed almost every word. “Wow! Wow! Wow! It! Is! Time! I’ll! Stop! Here!”

For publication inquiries, contact:

koreanlitnow@klti.or.kr

Thus ended the second part.

In my annoyance at his disrespect and discourtesy, I also erased the second part after listening only once, so what comes next was written down from memory several months later. My report is naturally not entirely accurate—wasn’t the Jerk’s story itself gibberish?

The first part was about a fish and the fishermen who went to catch it. They called the fish “Wanda,” and their quest was “The Great Wanda Expedition.” The Jerk was with the expedition and, as a member, was on his way to catch the fish called Wanda.

The second part was about what happened after they arrived at the place where Wanda lived, or was rumored to live. The Jerk’s message by international call was left as a recording just before the Jerk and his colleagues—namely, The Great Wanda Expedition—entered the heart of Wanda’s habitat. This was after the Jerk and the fishermen had set up camp with all kinds of equipment, secured a local guide, and prepared themselves for the high desert’s unpredictable weather changes and storms.

The Jerk’s international call came from deep in the center of the North American continent’s western region.

The Jerk and the fishermen were in Utah or Nevada, some state in the western part of America. Maybe even California. They were somewhere along a border to the desert area around the Great Salt Lake. Or the Black Rock Desert. Or maybe the Mojave Desert. In the Jerk’s loud, excited voice, I also sensed a shiver of fear and horror. Such

62

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

FICTION

a thrill would be shared only by those who were entering a

Believe It or Not Museum located in a back alley of SoHo in

desert on a fishing expedition. My report operates on the

New York. There was a collection there called A Handful of

premise that the Jerk’s message might be true, or that I am

Soil from Singing Mountain. It was just a handful of soil placed

pretending to believe it is true.

in the middle of a room that blocked noise from outside,

✽

making it completely soundproof. The rules allowed only one viewer at a time to enter the room for five minutes. The

If I think over the Jerk’s chatty message in the first recording,

room was lit only by a single five-candela light bulb of the

I can understand why going fishing in the middle of a

sort normally used on a Christmas tree. Wondering what this

desert was so natural for them. The chief curator of Gallery

collection was all about, the curator had entered the room and

Comedism ordered them: Go catch the fish called Wanda.

come out five minutes later feeling strange, wondering if he

The chief curator wanted something special for his gallery collection, something to distinguish it from other

should believe it or not. He’d really heard a song sung by the soil.

galleries, something to make it stand out. Paik Nam June was

The catalog of the collection included a copy of the

in every gallery. That was cheap. As for James Rich or Roy

guarantee by a famous psychometrist. According to him, the

Lichtenstein, even the artists themselves couldn’t distinguish

soil had been taken from a hill in eastern Anatolia. From the

between original and fake. What’s worse, the copy sometimes

late thirteenth century to modern times, the hill had been the

had a higher degree of completion and more aesthetic value.

site of massacres, battles, and religious atrocities. The crusaders

Young artists are too young. For example, Sung Dong Hun

passed by in the thirteenth century, and the Mongols swept

has some diehard fans, but I can’t hide my suspicion that his

through in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. From the

taste is lowbrow.

late sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, sporadically, those

The chief curator wanted a believe-it-or-not collection

women suspected of witchcraft who had fled Europe for this

well-suited for the Gallery Comedism of the Great Believe It

pagan area were found, their limbs torn and burnt by their

or Not Knowledge Compendium. The curator recalled the

pursuers. In the twentieth century, the place was near the VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

63

BOOKMARK

Something that didn’t exist anywhere else, that existed nowhere else. genocide wreaked by the Turks upon the Armenians, as is well

For example, something like a fish called Wanda. The curator

known.

therefore sent his assistants, including the Jerk, aboard an

What was the song? According to the psychometrist, whose supernatural powers enabled him to read the history

airplane headed straight for the deepest part of the American West.

imprinted on matter, the song was an elegy for those who had

64

died torn apart, burnt black, or parched dry on the hill from

The fish called Wanda lives in the Utah or Nevada desert.

which the soil was taken. The sorrows of the dead, piled up

Wanda seems to belong to an unidentified family of monsters

over several centuries, could now by sheer strength of their

that have probably drawn the curious around the world since

accumulated quantity actually make themselves audible.

before Christ to the late twentieth century. That family has a

By standing before the handful of dust—a so-called field of

long, long never-ending, never-broken genealogy, including

spiritual energy—a listener could hear that song of sorrows

creatures from the biblical Leviathan to Jonah’s great fish, to

accumulated over centuries, an audible force field of souls.

the giant octopus Kraken, to Daedalus’ Giant Sea Snake, to

The soil in the room had been scooped up by shovel in

the carnivorous helminth of Northern Ireland (a giant leech),

that field of spiritual energy and delivered by airplane from

to the common giant squid and jellyfish, to the enormous

that hill in westernmost Asia to a back alley of New York City.

sperm whale Mocha Dick in the early nineteenth century

The chief curator maintained that in the soil’s presence, he had

(the real-life model for Herman Melville’s Moby Dick),

sensed an old, somehow familiar melody, bleak but possessed

and in recent times to the Loch Ness Monster Nessie and

of a tragic, divine beauty. From those five minutes absorbed

the Cornwall Monster. This long genealogy stretches from

in that meditative state, he suggested that the melody recalled

antiquity and continues insistently, longer than any genealogy

some measures from Pablo Casals’s performance of Bach’s

of the various human tribes. Wanda takes her place at this end

Sixth Cello Suite.

of the genealogy.

The handful of earth became a special attraction of the

The monsters noted above are unlike such monsters as

Believe It or Not Museum in New York. Comedism’s chief

fire-breathing dragons that appear in mythology, legend,

curator wanted something like that, a special attraction.

and fantasy, the sort found in movies performed in by Sean

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

FICTION

She’s never been captured in a photo, just whispered about in rumors and mentioned in song melodies handed down by word of mouth.

Wanda was like a desert mirage, never where she seemed to be, but never very far away either.

Connery, or the monster Dijiang, a fat, headless body with six

retirement. If I catch Wanda and return with her, he’ll offer a

legs and four wings that appears in the Classic of Mountains

special bonus of 1,000 percent of my salary and an evaluation

and Seas (Shan Hai Jing), or even the “monstrous” Little

of ‘Excellent’ for my personnel record. But that also means

Mermaid. Unlike these imaginary creatures, the monsters

if I return empty handed, I’ll be laid off!” the Jerk shouted,

above had at least left some physical evidence, although their

sounding upset.

existence is uncertain, leaving us in doubt. Blurry black-andwhite photos, even some documents of natural history left by

The name “Wanda” is said to derive from the one given to

a respected Catholic bishop from the eighteenth century, are

her by the natives who had lived in the area for centuries

such evidence.

before they vanished. The area, either the Great Salt Lake

As Wanda stands at the end of this monster genealogy, she

Desert or the Black Rock Desert, receives rainfall of under

has not yet become a well-known star monster. Moby Dick has

twenty millimeters several times every three to four years.

sold several hundred thousand copies in South Korea alone,

A few towns deep in the desert purify the underground water,

and the Loch Ness monster stretched out its long neck during

or even the seawater, and use it for drinking and cleaning,

the seventies and eighties, making headlines in the foreign

but most villages are located on the outskirts of the desert.

section of newspapers around the world. Unfortunately,

From Las Vegas, the boundary area can be reached in forty-

there’s no physical evidence for Wanda. She’s never been

one hours by jeep. The Jerk and his group of naifs enjoyed a

captured in a photo, just whispered about in rumors and

day in Las Vegas in ways that would have put their country to

mentioned in song melodies handed down by word of mouth.

shame. After a forty-one hour long drive, the Great Wanda

What skeptics always demand as proof of existence is at least

Expedition set up base camp. They were now ready to brave

a picture. Wanda was like a desert mirage, never where she

the driest depths of the desert.

seemed to be, but never very far away either, being only a local monster known solely to those who already knew of her.

The chief curator was thus desperately seeking Wanda with sleepless, blood-shot eyes.

Wanda was reputed to live in the middle of the arid desert, a land with only an early morning dew to moisten it. She was to be found in a sand lake like a giant basin, a swampy, sandy area about the size of the large Jongno District in Seoul; and

“If we can’t catch her, he’s ordered us to at least get a

the sand of that swampy basin flowed around and around

picture of her,” said the Jerk’s voice on my answering machine.

several kilometers a day. Wanda remains hidden until the

“If I get at least a picture, the bastard will help me avoid early

day is past and emerges just after sunset, when she shakes VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

65

BOOKMARK

the whole area nearby and whips up a sandstorm that covers

end in something stumpy, like an inlet valve. As with the

everything with sand.

tentacles of jellyfish, these tongues can extend many hundred

That’s more or less everything known about Wanda’s

meters from the mouth into the surrounding air and gently

behavior. As for Wanda’s features, her skin is covered with

sway there as several hundred strands. Nothing is known,

hideous lumps like those of a skin cancer patient in the final

however, about the eyes, ears, and nose, neither from centuries

stages. Those lumps are more likely to be organs for sucking in

ago nor today.

as much moisture as possible during the night. The breathing

To stand before such a monster and try to figure out

pores probably developed that way. On both sides of Wanda’s

exactly what the eyes, ears, and nose look like on that creature

body hang some incredibly large, triangle-shaped fins. With

with never-before-seen fins, never-before-seen teeth, and a

these fins, she scoops sand, kicks, and jumps. At the end of the

never-before-seen streamlined body would be difficult and

body hangs another triangle-shaped fin, but cut in half. This

dangerous. Extrapolating from everything known about this

fin is ordinarily used for going straight, changing directions,

creature, I reached the conclusion that I could never imagine

or standing straight up, but can be used—as I’ll soon tell

Wanda.

you—for some violent work. On the back, another fin seems

No matter how carefully I try, I can never picture Wanda.

to function like a hygrometer, or perhaps a weathercock

I momentarily imagine a giant fish, but I honestly can never

wrapped in a gentle skin. That alone sticks out from the sand,

come up with a single feature of the damn thing. Maybe she

even during the hottest noontime sun, probably detecting the

looks like a plastic carp enormously swollen by wind and

direction of the moisture-laden wind.

blown about in gusts, possibly as large as the vast Yeouido

What takes up half of Wanda’s body is her enormous mouth. It’s like a wound torn wide from one side fin to the

area in Seoul. Despite all this uncertainty, the Jerk and the fishermen boarded a plane headed for the American West.

other, like the Jerk smiling broadly and drooling with desire while watching pornography; and it also reveals sparse,

Translated by Hwang Sun-Ae & Horace Jeffery Hodges

frighteningly big teeth. Most astonishing of all are Wanda’s tongues. I’d never heard of a creature with several hundred tongues before. They are thin, almost impossibly long, and

Baek Minsuk shocked the Korean literary scene with his hardcore, grotesque debut novel, I Loved Candy , in 1995, but stopped writing in 2003. He took up writing again a decade later and has been vigorously writing ever since. He has authored one novella, four short story collections, two essay collections, and six novels, including Bizarre Tales from the Cotton Field and A Century

of Terror . ▶

66

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

Visit koreanliteraturenow.com to read the rest of the story with audio.

FICTION

Because I Hate Korea

by Chang Kang-myoung

While setting myself up as landlord I went to check out Meriton Serviced Apartments on Kent Street near Darling Harbour. I fell in love with the flat at first sight. I put down six weeks’ rent as a deposit, took possession of the flat, and found ten boarders.

I stipulated in the contract that they strictly obey the house rules on cleaning. It was forbidden to bring friends home, too. So having Ellie over that night for a barbecue violated my own rules.

“If you want a meaningful life, Kiena, you have to take risks,” Ellie said to me as she leaned against the balcony railing. That’s why she did extreme sports. She had quit working at Girls’ Valley earlier that day.

“But what if something goes wrong? Aren’t you scared?” I asked. “You could wind up paralyzed, or get killed . . .”

“I’m not going to die. And, anyway, dying? Dying isn’t so bad.” That’s when she asked me to take her picture. I used the camera on my phone and took several shots of her leaning against the balcony railing. Then she asked me to video her.

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

67

BOOKMARK

Before I had a chance to stop her Ellie climbed nimbly over the balcony.

She gave me a wink and jumped down into the Sydney streets.

Throughout all this I left video mode running on my iPhone.

That was what she wanted me to film.

“Video? Why?” “I’ll show you what it means to live life on the edge.”

where he works. Are you that clueless about your own son?”

As she drank, Eun-hye kept grousing about her mother-

I had no clue what she was planning to do as she

in-law. The others’ reactions made it clear enough that they’d

shouldered the large backpack she’d brought with her. I was

already heard the stories a dozen times. Nobody was listening.

an idiot. She had on weird clothes, sort of like what pilots

“Do you want to know what I do when I can’t get

would wear. The straps from her backpack wrapped around

a website to cooperate? I give this a try, give that a try.

her legs rather than her arms.

I try everything that pops into my head until I can get it

Before I had a chance to stop her Ellie climbed nimbly

functioning properly. I don’t even know what it is I did in the

over the balcony. She gave me a wink and jumped down into

end to get it right. Do you think it’s only me who’s like that?

the Sydney streets. Throughout all this I left video mode

Everyone in the company is the same. That’s why experience

running on my iPhone. That was what she wanted me to film.

is important in this line of work. And people go on about

Gasping, I dashed to the balcony where I could make out a

systems integration blah blah blah. It’s ridiculous.”

white parachute gliding elegantly through the forest of tall buildings. A beautiful sight. Dazzling. I understood why Ellie had cajoled me into bringing her to our balcony.

Mi-yeon was working at an IT company as she did before.

And she was still computer illiterate, just like before.

I had to stifle yawns while listening to their gossip. If you paid close attention it was entertaining. They’d become more

When I went back to Korea to take the IELTS exam, I met up with my university friends for the first time in years. We started drinking in the daytime.

68

eloquent than before. But strangely, it didn’t interest me.

At first I thought it was because my brain was tired after sitting through the IELTS for eight hours. But my head

“A few days ago my damned mother-in-law sent me a

was clear. With some alcohol in me, my tongue loosened

special delivery package. So I tear it open and it contains the

and I even kept up with the others’ jokes and contributed

fixings for scorched rice porridge and stuff like that. And she

several biting remarks of my own. After Australia, had I just

sends me a text message along with it, telling me she sent the

lost interest in stories from Korea? But that wasn’t it. I was just

package because she thought it must be hard for me to make

as curious about trends in Korea and about dramas as before.

breakfast. Take things easy, she says. What is that supposed to

Gyeong-yun’s story about getting her teeth capped made me

mean? She’s ordering me to make breakfast for her precious

laugh so hard that my sides hurt. She’d been drinking with

little baby. But my husband doesn’t even eat breakfast. He

much younger classmates from pharmacology school and

says he hasn’t had breakfast since middle school. Helllllllo?

wanted to put on a show of being tipsy, but tipped right over

Mother, they offer free breakfast in the basement restaurant

and chipped her teeth. Something inside my heart ached at

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

FICTION

the news about Ji-myeong. After failing the exam, he gave it another try and in the end passed the test to become a broadcast journalist. Isn’t that amazing?

Actually, it was two specific sets of stories that bored me: Eun-hye’s chatter about her mother-in-law and

ninth-level civil service exam. But she’d met a guy through

Mi-yeon’s work tales. They kept jabbering for way too long,

some online game and they were dating. He played bass in

and what they said was no different from the stuff they’d

a band that performed in Hongdae clubs and had no steady

been saying a few years ago. Maybe they’ll be telling the same

job. He was just working part-time at a convenience store. You

stories a decade from now. Frankly, they had no intention

already know where this is heading, right?

of changing their situations. What they wanted was for

Her boyfriend had come up in conversation at dinner. “Just

me to sympathize with them: “Wow, I can’t believe what a

keep him as a lover, pass your civil service exam, and meet a

goddamned bitch your mother-in-law is. And your company

solid guy,” Mom had said half-jokingly, half-seriously.

is really pathetic. Why is Korea so backward?” That would

That appeared to kick off the argument. Ye-na said she

have been the basic approach to take. But that fundamental

was going to marry him whether she passed the exam or not

solution was hard because for them to put it into practice

and then Mom said, “We’ll see about that” to which Ye-na

would have demanded bravery. It’s scary to say “This is wrong”

responded, “Why are you interfering in my love life?” Then

to the boss or “I don’t like that” to your mother-in-law. The

Mom scolded her with, “A woman who’s studying for the civil

security and predictability of their lives was precious to them.

service exams shouldn’t even be talking about a love life.” So

Maybe because in Sydney I experienced adventures great and small every day, my old friends seemed a little shallow.

Ye-na shot right back. “What? If I’m not earning money, I can’t have a boyfriend . . .?”

I couldn’t say that I’d made a better choice than they did or

By the time I got home, Ye-na had gone up to the roof and

that my future was brighter, but . . . I said, “Get in touch if you

had been staging a protest for several hours. Our sweet mom

come to Australia. I live in a humongous apartment with

was beside herself. She wore a guilty expression. If it had been

a great view.” I gave them my cell phone number and my

me I’d have just told Ye-na to sleep on the roof for the night.

new email address and got up to leave first with the excuse

“Please go up, Gye-na. You two have a good relationship.”

that I had a headache.

When we were young, I used to boss Ye-na around and give her a hard time, but at some point she had become the

When I got home Ye-na and my parents had just waged a

one in the family I was closest to. And because Ye-na had a

battle. Ye-na had been preparing for a few years to take the

conscience, she felt guilty around Mom and Dad. Hye-na VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

69

BOOKMARK

If you fall from high up you can get your body into a brace position before hitting the ground. If you fall from somewhere low, you don’t have that time. While you’re still thinking, Oh shit , you’ve already smashed into the ground.

future. It was entirely possible that Ye-na, whose status was low enough as it was, could drag herself down by settling with a musician. Step back and think about it. Your future is already decided by the end of your twenties. It’s not easy to change in your thirties.

“He’s talented, Sis. He might hit it big one day.”

When I didn’t respond, Ye-na played me something on her phone that she said her boyfriend had composed.

I admit that his music had the power to make listeners feel melancholy, but I honestly couldn’t say whether it would be a

was so good-natured that hanging out with her could be

hit. I listened and continued to drink the Sansachun with Ye-

dull. Ye-na, on the other hand, didn’t have to feel guilty as

na. After emptying the bottle, I went downstairs and brought

far as I was concerned, and we got on well.

back soju.

I took a bottle of Sansachun wine out of the fridge and clambered up to the roof by the iron grate stairs outside the kitchen. Ye-na was playing a game on her phone. She saw me and quickly stashed her phone away.

“Is Mom really mad?” Looking crestfallen, she scanned my expression. Her lips were blue from exposure to the chilly wind. Half of me wanted to whack her upside the head and half of me wanted to hug her close.

I told Ye-na about a passage I’d read while studying for the IELTS. “Ye-na, do you think it’s more dangerous to parachute from an airplane or from the roof of a building?”

“Which one is more dangerous?”

My sister looked irritated, as if asking why I was bringing up an irrelevant question.

“Jumping from a building is much more dangerous. If you

“Hang on a sec. I’ll bring you something to put on from

fall from high up you can get your body into a brace position

downstairs.” I headed back down and brought a sweater, a

before hitting the ground. If you fall from somewhere low,

blanket, the wine, and a scented candle. I spread the blanket

you don’t have that time. While you’re still thinking, Oh shit,

on the platform in the middle of the roof, lit the candle, and

you’ve already smashed into the ground. Somebody who

drank the Sansachun with Ye-na.

falls from high up has time to open a reserve parachute if the

“Do you think it’s a stupid idea to go out with a musician too?”

“Well, he’s not exactly going to make a comfortable living in Korea playing in a band . . .”

main one doesn’t work. You can’t if you’re already low. If your main parachute doesn’t open, that’s it. So you need to be more careful when you’re low. Plunging from down low is more dangerous.”

Ji-myeong’s family suddenly popped into my head and I trailed off. If I thought it was right to stand in Ye-na’s way, I’d

They call it BASE jumping: parachuting from a building,

have to justify what Ji-myeong’s family did with him.

antenna, span, or something on Earth, like a cliff.

“I thought you’d be on my side.”

“Why?”

I had no idea that I’d soon see a real-life example. It’s the most

“You went to Australia even though Mom and Dad didn’t

dangerous extreme sport. The death rate is forty times higher

approve.”

I didn’t answer. Going to Australia was a completely different issue to me. I went to improve my prospects for the 70

When I gave Ye-na my analogy, I’d only read about it.

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

than sky diving. There’s a training center in the US for BASE jumping, but they only accept those who’ve already skydived more than a hundred times.

FICTION

Of course, Ellie hadn’t received that training. When she

service hotel? Get ready to be on the news if you drag me out.

landed on Kent Street she broke a leg. It so happened that

I’ll stage a one-person sit-in in front of Meriton’s headquarters

this incident occurred when Sydney was in the midst of a

if I have to. I’m not leaving until I get my deposit.”

terrorism alert. The police mobilized in force as soon as a

“Kiena, seriously, I’m telling you this for your own good.

parachute was spotted opening from a tall building. They

Don’t do it. Headquarters has already investigated. You had

even aimed their guns at Ellie as she tried to hobble away on

more than ten people staying here? And somebody was living

one leg. They arrested her on the spot and confiscated her

on the veranda? If you don’t leave quietly, Meriton will take

parachute.

you to court for violating your housing contract. They even

The next morning it was the top story on the news. In a

took pictures for proof. If you have a prior conviction, you

nation where dramatic happenings didn’t occur with great

can kiss your dreams of citizenship goodbye. Is that what you

frequency, it was repeated on the evening news, the following

want?”

day’s morning news and then the evening news again.

A few days later, an employee at Meriton came to our

Translated by Stephen J. Epstein & Mi Young Kim

flat without prior notice to have a look around while I was out. A few days after that, the building superintendent arrived with a slip of paper. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be an eviction notice. I had a choice between paying $100,000 as compensation for tarnishing the reputation of Meriton Enterprises or evacuating the premises by the end of the month without objection. I was gobsmacked.

“Leave by the end of the month? No possibility of getting my deposit back? Richard, there’s no reason even given for eviction.”

“Kiena, are you asking because you really don’t know the reason?”

“It wasn’t me who put on a parachute and jumped.”

“But you let her into your flat. If that parachute girl had forced open your door, you could prosecute her for breaking and entering. But opening up your flat to her was your responsibility.”

“That makes no sense. I need to talk to the person in charge of your company. Is this building some high-class

Hangugi sireoseo Minumsa, 2015, 204 pages (Excerpt from pp. 117–127) For publication inquiries, contact:

koreanlitnow@klti.or.kr

Chang Kang-myoung has published eight novels, one short story collection, and one essay collection. He has received the Hankyoreh Literary Award, the Jeju 4•3 Peace Prize, and the Munhakdongne Writer Award. He worked as a journalist for over a decade and received the Journalist of the Month Award from the Journalists Association of Korea, the Kwanhun Club Press Award, and the Dong-A Ilbo Press Award.

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

71

BOOKMARK

Modern Boy

by Lee Jimin

An exhibit of works by the famous Japanese western-style painter Oba Yojo was held on the second floor of the Mitsukoshi Department Store. It wasn’t a massive event like the New Military Arms Expo or the Ito Hirobumi Collection that had the Japanese from all corners of the peninsula dragging their geta in a deafening roar all the way to Seoul. But the artist and his modern style, already quite fashionable in Japan, were on the rise and deserving of the enthusiastic attention of cultured society.

It was early in the day, but the wives of the Gyeongseong bigwigs were already there. They were looking at the paintings in twos and threes, holding hands like Modeon boi

schoolgirls. They spent more time socializing than looking at the art. But what really

Munhakdongne, 2008, 240 pages

made it impossible to enjoy the paintings was not the merry hubbub. It was the hats—

(Excerpt from pp. 17–27)

hats of all shapes and sizes perched on the women’s heads. Cloche hats that covered the

For publication inquiries, contact:

eyebrows (worn by half the female population of Gyeongseong), toque hats with dried

koreanlitnow@klti.or.kr

or fake flowers, cute little sailor caps for the nautical look, silk turbans for the just-got-

72

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

FICTION

out-of-the-shower look, coy school bell-shaped hats, broad-

bare her flaws so casually and delicately. That would only

brimmed hats, rimless hats, hats with flowers, hats without

be possible for someone both honest and charming, traits

flowers, tall hats, squat hats . . . Some hats were larger than the

that Yukiko and Shinsuke had in common, like siblings. The

painting, others the same color as the painting, and still others

nature of Shinsuke’s honesty was a little different from hers,

obscured the face of the portrait and didn’t budge. The hats

but they made such a perfect pair all the same that it was hard

floating about on all levels between the ceiling and the floor

to believe they were each married to someone else.

made it impossible to even see the paintings. This made me,

Yukiko, wearing a diamond-shaped silver veludo hat with

a hatless patron, feel cheated. I was with Shinsuke that day.

a black veil, amiably exchanged dull greetings with the wives

We’d made some excuse about looking into affairs concerning

while signaling at Shinsuke in a code only they understood.

the Bank of Chosen and had slipped out of the office that

I couldn’t tell what was going on, but it appeared something

afternoon, not because we were great connoisseurs of art, but

or someone was demonstratively being blamed for something.

because of women—what else? Earlier that morning, a pale

Shinsuke pretended to be absorbed in the paintings while

Shinsuke came up to me after getting a call at the office.

furtively and quickly exchanging glances with Yukiko. Just

“Yukiko wants to see me. She sounded serious. Come with me?”

Yukiko and my friend Shinsuke had a relationship as complicated as any other extramarital affair. Shinsuke was

then, a voice interrupted.

“Why are you blocking this piece?”

While I was busy playing spectator to someone else’s affair, something had wandered my way.

trying hard to end things with Yukiko, who was absolutely not

Her nasal voice, like someone just waking up, traveled

done with him. They were planning on discussing the matter

through the din of the gallery and landed on my ear like a bug.

in the morning at the art show.

Her voice was nothing out of the ordinary, but my ears didn’t

Shinsuke, so proficient in the choreography of such

wish to think of it as so. It was soft and special, like something

liaisons, coolly pretended to look at the paintings by the exit

I would like to pin down and keep forever in a viewing case

in case he needed to slip away. I took my position in front of

made of fine paulownia wood.

Eve’s Tongue—a round, flat bronze sculpture that looked like

“Well, it’s nothing special.”

an enormous, damaged coin—to watch the gripping secret

When a man is being rude for no particular reason, he

rendezvous.

Accompanied by a small group of adoring fans in the foyer, Yukiko, wife to Sima the Head of Personnel at the General

has a good reason for it. I had to use something, anything, to capture that voice, and that something happened to be rudeness.

Affairs Bureau of the Governor-General’s office, mistress to my

“I would like to see for myself at any rate.”

friend Shinsuke, and perhaps the only Japanese woman whose

I wanted to see her with my own eyes. I turned slowly,

charm I admitted to falling under, made her entrance.

trying to still my heart. I was startled by the fact that the

She was captivating. What most Japanese beauties

woman was looking up at me from an inch away. She must

displayed—the world’s greatest docility and hospitality that

have been examining the back of my head from up close for

sometimes just made you want to go slap them hard on their

some time. She wore the satisfied look of someone who had

kimono-clad backs just to get a rise out of them—she had

just seen everything from my cowlick to all the contents of my

none. She was an infamous seductress who knew how to enjoy

head.

her infidelities with grace and mirth. I’d always admired that

“If I can’t see it, can you at least tell me what it’s called?”

about her. In a society where everyone was so keen on hiding

She continued our little game, smiling.

their schemes and corruption, it couldn’t have been easy to

“Eve’s Tongue . . . that would be the title,” I offered, pleased VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

73

BOOKMARK

hurry back to the Governor-General’s Office, where a week’s worth of reports were turning into a small hill on my desk, but I didn’t take the rickshaw or the trolley or a cab.

I walked.

Spring. April sun. The trees and street signs had turned so dusty during the recent dry spell that they seemed about to sneeze at any moment, but they were clean and fresh to my eyes. The budding green leaves on the acacia trees that lined the streets were so radiant, and the silvery sunlight trickling with the answer that was sure to puzzle. But she didn’t miss a beat.

“And what’s the message of the piece?”

She smiled playfully, like Eve grinning with both cheeks

down through the leaves looked like flakes of falling snow.

On the street where everyone was hurrying on their way, I was the only one strolling and smiling.

People on rickshaws, trolleys, bicycles, taxis, and in the

full from a big bite of the apple.

streets all had the same blank expression on their faces, but

“Probably . . . Original Sin.”

I was smiling. Dust kept rushing into my grinning mouth,

I couldn’t believe I gave her such a banal, conventional

but I pushed it around in my mouth like granules of sugar

answer at such a crucial moment without so much as a

and let it melt on the tip of my tongue. When I passed by

moment’s deliberation. I was usually such a clever man.

Gyeongseong City Hall, the guards saw me and whispered

I could not forgive myself. She caught on, as I’d expected.

amongst themselves suspiciously, but I gave them a big smile

She snickered at me and said, “I don’t think I want to see that sculpture anymore. Well then, let’s meet again next time in front of a better piece.”

because their bowed legs were so cute. I was happy.

Why was I so excited over a brief conversation with a woman whose name I didn’t even know ? The male

With that, she turned to go.

instinct, completely different from a woman’s incomparably

She disappeared like the outside scenery flashing by a

convenient instinct that kicks in when, say, she sees a memo of

streetcar window, leaving in her wake only the sensation of a

a suspicious meeting place in her lover’s notebook, works only

cool breeze on my eyelid. A sea of hats instantly swallowed

a few times in his lifetime. However, when it does kick in, it is

her up. She was definitely not wearing a hat, but I couldn’t

mercilessly spot on. This was it.

find her. She was a woman who knew how to keep her head inscrutable without the help of a hat.

I stood there for a while, wrapped in a numb, sad feeling that comes when I wake up from a dream. The feeling was

That day, with the optimism of a child seeing a rainbow for the first time, I predicted good fortune, love, and above all, a miracle coming my way.

The miracle happened. I met her again a week from that

incommunicable. The dream I dreamed was the kind that lasts

day.

for a brief moment right before you wake up, the kind that

leaves you astir with sentiment, but never, ever any memories.

The theater was full of lovers reluctant to go home after the last show of the day had ended. They were running their

74

I left Mitsukoshi and began to walk. I could not have

hands all over each other in the hopes of happening upon a

cared less where Shinsuke and Yukiko went. That day may

hotter, deeper place. The only ones watching the movie with

have been very important for them, but not for me. I had to

any degree of concentration were a bunch of elderly men and

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

FICTION

No, she was the destination for all the light in the world.

Light had survived and traveled from everywhere and for millions of years for the sole purpose of meeting her. I, too, turned into light and traveled toward her. I must have been especially radiant, for she turned toward me.

me. I quickly rose and left the theater as soon as the movie

and cars, the cigarette on a man passing by, and even the

ended.

starlight couldn’t get anywhere without passing through her.

The streets of Jongno were the same as any other day. In

No, she was the destination for all the light in the world. Light

every alley, men in a drunken stupor mumbled wistfully up

had survived and traveled from everywhere and for millions

at the night sky. At the bus stops, people craned their necks

of years for the sole purpose of meeting her. I, too, turned

in heedful watch for the bus, only occasionally looking away

into light and traveled toward her. I must have been especially

to check the time. Girls leaning against inns bounced their

radiant, for she turned toward me.

purses on their knees for no apparent reason.

On one of the Danseongsa posters, some rogue had made

We walked in the direction of Hwashin Department Store

cigarette burns on the eyes and nipples of the buxom Hyeon

and went into the Pagoda Café, right behind Tower Music

Bang-nan. I giggled at the image as I searched my pockets for

Hall. We sat across from each other and exchanged extremely

matches. I couldn’t find them. I was looking around to see

business-like questions, as is customary. Between the lines, of

if there was someone young in the vicinity to borrow a light

course, we exchanged nervous glances to decipher each other’s

from.

intentions.

A full bob casting a gentle shadow below the earlobes, a

“I work at the Governor-General’s Office.”

white blouse hugging her breasts and waist, the hem of a navy

Her eyes widened as she tucked her hand under her chin.

skirt tickling her white, round kneecaps as it fluttered in the

“What do you do there?”

wind, creamy silk stockings wrapped tight around her full

“It’s a secret.”

calves, and a black pair of heels with toes as sharp as pen nibs.

I knew that all women were drawn to anything labeled

She was standing adorably and helplessly in those heels like

a secret. She was no exception.

a child begging for candy. She must have said something to

“I’m intrigued.”

herself, for a white cloud of breath rushed out from her lips.

She leaned in as though she were dying of curiosity.

But it was a warm spring night. I wonder what tricks my eyes

“I work for the Greater Gyeongseong City Planning

were playing on me that I saw her breath. There was a garish

Committee in the Investigation Division of the Governor-

advertisement for a Japanese Ford behind her, and it seemed

General’s Office. After the Japanese failed in its first attempt

like the lighting fixtures in the shape of golden eggs were set

at city planning—that was Najin—they organized our

up there explicitly for her—to let her shine. Shrouded in light,

committee under special regulations in the hopes of taking

she was an apparition. All lights were shining forth through

a more systematic and educated approach to city planning.

her. The neon lights, streetlamps, headlights on the trolleys

You could think of it as a later version of the Temporary Land VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

75

BOOKMARK

Survey Bureau. The Japanese are no longer interested in the

wearing a pink silk shirt with a satin trim, the kind I’d have to

land itself. They want to know what’s happening on the land.

submit a formal explanation for if I ever wore it to work. She

Especially here in Gyeongseong. It goes without saying that

could arouse all these sentiments with just her face, but the

I’m doing this because I’m interested in what’s happening in

one sentiment running through them all was that every time

the city, too. My job is to conduct research on the everyday

I looked at her, I felt like stripping down to nothing.

happenings of Gyeongseong, to calculate the numbers, and to underline things.”

“Maegungno?1 I’m not doing anything to liberate Korea, but I’m not doing anything to stop it, either.”

She seemed a little disappointed. So I quickly sent the next batter to the mound.

She softly rubbed her eyes like a sleepy child. “Not many young men these days do what you’re doing. They’re all either

“I once read in a magazine about a poet who said that everyone who works at the Governor-General’s Office is frankly involved in some form of treachery.”

I knew that women liked big, relatively uncirculated words like “treachery.” She tapped the table three times with the palm of her hand and beamed.

aeguk or maeguk,2 but you—” “Well, look who’s talking! Women these days are all preoccupied with passionate relationships and bloody revolutions, but you—you don’t care about that stuff, do you?”

She gave a shy shrug. “Well, I look like your average

“How interesting! Stories of treachery are always fun.”

modern girl on the outside, but honestly I’m just an old-

That was the first time I saw her face up close. There,

fashioned girl . . . who can hardly handle romance.”

under the light amber stand at the Pagoda Café. My

Before we parted that night, I asked her out in the modern

impression of her then was not that she was pretty or ugly, but

fashion. She accepted after much contemplation, the old-

that she somehow looked a little different each time I saw her.

fashioned way.

Exactly how can one explain this subtlety? If I had to compare it to something, I would have likened it to the way you feel

Translated by Jamie Chang

differently in different outfits. Seeing her for the first time at the gallery was like trying on a new winter coat for the first time, wrapped in the weighty embrace of a luxurious thrill.

Looking at her unusually shiny hair, I felt lukewarm sweat trickling down my body. Seeing her in front of the theater was like spotting a black dinner jacket that would be perfect for me. Something I had to have, whatever the price. And looking at her under the dim light of the Pagoda Café, I felt I was

1. m aegungno : “country seller,” or derogatory term for pro-Japanese collaborators.

2. aeguk : literarily “love country,” or patriot; maeguk : “sell country,” or traitor.

Lee Jimin made her literary debut by winning the Munhakdongne New Writer Award in 2000 for her novel Modern Boy . The novel was adapted into a movie of the same name in 2008. Her notable works include the novels Despair is Taboo , Marilyn and I , and Youthful Extremes , and the short story collection He Asks Me to See Him Off .

76

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

REVIEWS | ENGLISH |

Existentialist Dreams of the Way We Were

Sweet Potato: Collected Short Stories Kim Tongin, trans. Grace Jung Honford Star, 2017, 288 pages

REVIEWS

the birth of a new national literature

classic iteration of the “fallen woman”

through a body of exquisitely wrought,

narrative. Pongnyo gives up her miserable

profoundly philosophical fiction.

job as a moth larvae collector to become

One early story, “Boat Song : A

a prostitute, until a rich farmer blackmails

Brother’s Lament,” published in 1921

her into becoming his mistress after she

when its author was just twenty years

steals a few yams. When the farmer takes

old, is a classic example of Kim’s work: an

a wife, Pongnyo disrupts the wedding,

Asian blend of naturalism and narrative

and the farmer kills her in a violent

experimentation. The story opens on a

struggle. Adhering to the grim naturalist

laughably banal note, which almost dares

paradigm, he suffers no punishment.

the reader to put the book down: “Fine

The most interesting works in the

weather we’re having.” Yet it quickly

new collection are those influenced by

segues into an idiosyncratic description

European existentialism, which occupy

of the weather, which makes it clear that

a slippery terrain between Tolstoyesque

Kim firmly controls his story with a fine

verisimilitude and Kafkaesque fantasy.

irony: “It’s the kind of sky that seems to

In “The Old Taet’angji Lady,” the author

want to come down and hold us by the

proclaims the random meaninglessness

wrists with its lumpy pink clouds. It’s a

of human life, and then casually transfers

sky of love.”

it to his own work: “The so-called ‘fiction’

Kim uses the framing device of a story

I’ve been writing for ten or twenty years

within a story, a staple of early twentieth-

all share more or less the same voice and

century modernism. On this fine spring

same noise except that the characters

day of lumpy pink clouds, the narrator,

have different names, and to this, I laugh

Modern Korean literature may be said to

wandering in a park in Pyeong yang,

with satisfaction.” It would be interesting

have begun ninety-nine years ago with

hears the plaintive strains of Joseon court

to know if Borges knew Kim’s stories,

the publication of Creation (Chang jo),

music. Intoxicated by the song’s beauty,

which strongly anticipates the Argentine

the first literary magazine in the Korean

the narrator finds the singer, a man whose

master’s philosophical ficciones.

language. The journal was launched in

lined face reveals his “past sorrows and

Kim’s life spans the period of the

Japan by Kim Tongin, a precocious young

sincere character.” When the narrator

Japanese occupation of Korea almost

writer from Pyeongyang. His name is

learns that the singer has not been to his

precisely. His death, in 1951, came early

familiar to contemporary readers (albeit

hometown in twenty years and asks him

in the Korean War, before the peninsula’s

in an alternative spelling) as the eponym

why, the singer replies, “Does everything

division was firmly established. As a

of the prestigious Dong-in Literary

go as one pleases?” He concludes with a

result, his warm, affectionate portrait

Award, posthumously established in

sigh, “Fate is much stronger.” The singer

of life in Pyeongyang “produces a deep

his honor in 1955 and given to the best

then proceeds to tell him the story of his

longing for these settings, while current

short work of Korean fiction published

life, a naturalist narrative in the tradition

events remind us of the national divide,”

each year. Now, a new collection of

of Zola and Gorky, about the tragic

as Grace Jung writes in the preface. The

Kim’s short stories translated by Grace

conflict between two brothers.

exquisite lyricism of Kim’s account of

.

Jung provides a compelling glimpse into

The title story, “Sweet Potato,” is a

Pyeongyang in “Barely Opened Its Eyes”

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

77

REVIEWS provokes an intense pang of nostalgia even in a foreign reader.

Grace Jung ’s polished Eng lish renderings of the stories make good reading, marred only by two minor, yet

| FRENCH |

An Intimate Quest for a Memorable Woman

one: a painstaking descent into the memories of the young narrator, Jjang-a, who invites us to join her on an intimate quest for a memorable woman named Bongsoon.

common, translators’ bad habits. She

At the beginning of the novel,

sometimes transliterates Korean words

Jjang-a learns from her mother that

and defines them in a footnote. What is

Bongsoon has disappeared. At the age

gained by using tanso in the text, with a

of almost fifty? Leaving four children

note that says simply, “bamboo flute”?

behind? Why has she left? In order

And in an apparent effort to strike an

to find Bongsoon, Jjang -a decides

idiomatic note, Jung occasionally employs

to recount her own life from the

slangy synonyms that only approximately

beginning. It is as though she needs to

convey the meaning, such as a reference

recapitulate her own story in order to

to the “perks” of a well-sited cathedral.

understand that of this slightly peculiar

Short for “perquisites,” the word describes the privileges of a job or position, not the desirable qualities of an inanimate object.

Nonetheless, this definitive collection of Kim’s brilliant, highly original short

Ma très chère grande soeur (My Sister, Bongsoon)

“older sister.”

That story begins at birth, when

Gong Ji-Young, trans. Lim Yeong-hee

Jjang-a was a baby “as red as an apple.”

& Stéphanie Follebouckt

Bongsoon was already with her then.

Philippe Picquier, 2018, 194 pages

At the age of twelve, she had run

stories is an admirable introduction to

away a number of times, seeking to

contemporary Korean literature at its

escape poverty, starvation, beatings,

inception.

and humiliations. She found refuge in The 2016 Salon du Livre in Paris

Jjang-a’s family where she looked after

by Jamie James

gave French readers the chance to

the baby girl like her own little sister,

Author, The Glamour of Strangeness:

learn more about the literature of the

carrying her on her back wherever she

guest of honor, South Korea. This

went, protecting her, telling her scary

included not just the major names of

stories about pots of boiling water and

the twentieth century, but also those

rabbit-skin sellers.

Artists and the Last Age of the Exotic

78

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

of more recent generations. One such

However, in Jjang-a’s house, Bongsoon

discovery was novelist Gong Ji-Young,

is never considered a member of the

two of whose works, Our Happy Time

family. Nor is she treated entirely as a

and Jacob’s Ladder, had already been

nanny. As a result of this in-between

translated into French by the publisher

status, Jjang-a gains access to another

Philippe Picquier. This remarkable and

world, that of cigarettes and boys, and

subtle writer now returns with a new

an awareness of the reality around her.

novel, My Sister, Bongsoon.

Distinctions of class. The reasons for

Our destination is Seoul. But the

being accepted or rejected by a group.

journey will above all be an internal

The nature of attachment, too (here,

REVIEWS

a physical, almost animal closeness).

leaves the house with her baby, or again

A powerful connection, evoked by the

during a chance encounter, thirty years

smell of Bongsoon and the icy sweat

later, in a metro carriage in Seoul.

forming on her back.

It is always risky to discuss the

But one day, all this tenderness will

trivial: these fragments of reality can

evaporate. Jjang-a’s mother’s diamond

seem so fragile with hindsight, so

ring has disappeared. And Bongsoon

insignificant once expressed in words.

is suspected—wrongly—of stealing

To prise out their true meaning and

it. The event marks the end of their

set them in their rightful place, like

harmonious life together. Bongsoon

the diamond on the lost ring , takes

runs away. Meanwhile, Jjang-a begins

the talent of Nathalie Sarraute in

her bitter immersion in the world of

Childhood or, indeed, the sensitivity of

adults, where the activities on offer

Gong Ji-Young in My Sister, Bongsoon.

include learning to lie, learning about

Hers is the kind of deeply sincere

middle-class selfishness, and gaining

writing so rare that, when we do

an understanding of the fundamental

encounter it, we can only rejoice.

ambiguity of people.

All this because of a ring! The plot is thin on the ground, almost naively so, at least until the wonderful final

by Florence Noiville Foreign Fiction Editor, Le Monde Author, A Cage in Search of a Bird

| FRENCH |

A Family and a Fortune

Trois générations (Three Generations) Yom Sang-seop, trans. Kim Young Sook & Arnauld Le Brusq Editions Zoé, 2018, 560 pages

denouement in the Seoul metro, when Jjang-a is thirty-six years old. But there is a clear intention behind this stylized approach. Gong keeps her

Yeom Sang-seop is recognised in South

writing simple, like the fairy tales that

Korea as one of the country’s greatest

Jjang-a reads as a little girl and which

writers. Finally available in French,

the author occasionally brings into

Three Generations, a novel initially

dialogue with the story. To describe

published in serial form in 1931, will

the way a child’s conscience forms

surely fascinate readers in France and

between birth and the age of six, Gong

establish this author’s reputation there.

takes the risk of seeking to describe

First, we should note the scale of this

the indescribable: the mass of tiny

writer’s vision as he holds up a mirror

details we are struck by in our earliest

to a society undergoing drastic change:

years and which remain lodged in our

that of Korea in the 1920s under

memory forever. Why those details and

Japanese rule. This ambition is served by

not others? A difficult question. They

a narrative that is so skillfully executed,

are minor details—the death of a dog

so well-paced in its episodes and twists

after eating rat poison on the night of a

and turns, that the reader cannot fail to

storm, Bongsoon’s expression when she

be gripped for all five hundred pages.

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

79

Three Generations is the story of

now open and stuffed with envelopes,

like you and your generation?” This

a typical yet extraordinar y family.

Deok-ki perceives “for the first time

intermediary generation, burdened

Through the riveting adventures of

the terrifying cruelty of money.” Deok-

by the now-outmoded values of their

Sang-hun, Deok-ki, and a host of other

ki is also still in contact with a friend

fathers, is unable to find its own path.

characters, we gain insight into the

from his student days, Byeong-hwa,

For the next generation, meanwhile,

tidal waves of change sweeping through

a bitter, ironic dropout who has lost

there is a glimmer of hope.

society. The head of the clan is an

faith in the world, giving up on working

The female sex here includes plenty

ancient and stubborn grandfather with

for a living in order to defend the

of victims-the wives, generally-but

outmoded ideas. His only concerns are

communist cause. Byeong-hwa lives in

also its fair share of schemers and

ancestor worship and the key to his safe,

hiding to avoid persecution from the

witches. But the novel asks: Is it possible

a symbol of the family's recently acquired

regime. But as the novel’s bloody ending

for women to escape the conditions

power. He despises his son Sang-hun,

makes clear, he cannot outrun this fate

imposed on them? Some admirable

a recent convert to Christianity, for

forever. Their friendship, punctuated by

figures do emerge from this tight web

breaking with tradition, preferring

long letters of explanation and heated

of characters. One is Pil-sun, a poor,

his grandson Deok-ki, an honest man

conversations, provides an insight into

young , and pure-hearted woman,

whom he intends to make his heir.

the class struggle of the time, while also

unsullied by bourgeois prejudices or

Various plots revolve around the safe

addressing issues so fundamental that

feelings of superiority based on money

and the inheritance, while the old man’s

they remain relevant today.

or education. If Pil-sun has escaped the

health deteriorates along with the feudal

Byeong-hwa finds his soulmate in

influence of her environment, if she has

age that, when he dies, “ends forever.”

Gyeong-ae, a beautiful woman who

managed to hold on to her underlying

There are jealous wives and scheming

is the former mistress of Sang-hun.

nature, it is because she was born with

mistresses. The “daughter of Sunwon,”

A daring rebel like him, she defies

a “noble spirit.” This explanation is

the grandfather’s concubine, whose

the laws that enslave the bourgeoisie

enough to make one believe in the

dark side is soon revealed, has teamed

and subjugate women. We see this

“supremacy of the mind.”

up with some penniless gangsters. She

extraordinary woman first as victim,

And perhaps that is the message of

wants to see Sang-hun and then Deok-

and then as manipulator, confronting

this rich novel: that believing in the

ki disinherited by slandering their wives.

her mother and then her lover, plotting,

power of the mind can free us from the

The wives, helpless victims, have only

suffering blows, achieving her revenge.

tyranny of money.

words and insults with which to defend

Sang-hun, who once loved her and

themselves, and as a result, are doomed

remains fascinated by her, suffers a

by Christine Jordis

to endless frustration. Plenty of insults

gradual breakdown, eventually losing

Writer, Editor, Literary Critic

and home truths are traded in this

both his religion and the respect of

novel; it is a feast of slander, betrayal,

his son. Sang-hun becomes a pathetic

and hatred. As the saying goes, money

puppet in thrall to his worst instincts,

is the sinews of war. Its power creates

drinking, and debauchery. The young

an insurmountable barrier, separating

policeman who arrests him gives him a

the rich from the poor, the weak from

lecture in front of a shamefaced Deok-

the powerful, and the bourgeois from

ki: “Who are we to blame for Korea’s

the rebellious. Looking into the safe,

current situation other than people

80

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

REVIEWS

| FRENCH |

The Subtle Power of Ra Heeduk’s Poetry

colors are captivating. But the tree

some of Korea’s countless mountains.

is immediately at a distance, already

This description of the moon may seem

located in the past. No sooner do these

prosaic, even somewhat comical. But

poems bring something close to us

to evoke its brilliance further, the poem

than it slips away again. It seems to be

offers a sublime image from the Bible:

precisely this experience that awakens

the lips of the prophet Isaiah touched by

poetic desire.

burning coal.

Let us return to the peach tree.

Sometimes, in Ra’s poetry, language

The poem tells us that it seems a little

itself is subjected to cruel material

bored. In Ra Heeduk’s poems, do plants,

transformations. Words have barely

or even things in general, experience

been spoken when they freeze in the air

feelings? Are they alive with intentions?

and become spider’s webs. “My heart”

Are they capable, in fact, of uttering a

becomes nothing more than a “handful

form of language?

of soil” thrown into a flowerpot. In

Another poem gives us an oak tree; one that we hear, rather than see, as it

a moment of pure dread, a “pupil” is revealed to be made of “mud.”

tosses its acorns into the forest. Does

In b e t w e en th e s e tro u b l i n g

Le ver à soie marqué d'un point noir (The Silkworm with a Black Mark)

it want to make itself heard, even to

developments, the poem seem to point

speak? Ra imitates the resulting sounds.

furtively to a central void—a historical,

Ra Heeduk, trans. Kim Hyun-ja

Will these become onomatopoeic words

social, and symbolic emptiness.

Cheyne Èditeur, 2017, 144 pages

(as often happens in Korean)?

At the heart of the strange events

In Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti

that her poems reveal or create, we sense

sees the process of transformation as an

the activity of this dangerous void,

essential resource for certain modern

implied throughout but never overtly

works. Gone is the pretense of a cosmic,

declared as such.

Le ver à soie marqué d'un point noir is a

or even a social, order; on the contrary,

And then, suddenly, the violent

wonderful and unique collection from

through this kind of transformation,

history of Korea in the twentieth century

poet Ra Heeduk, now available in a

any sense of belonging to a stable whole

imposes itself. In the magnificent

bilingual edition from French publisher

is shaken. And yet, are the works of

poem entitled “He Was inside the

Cheyne. Kim Hyun-ja, already known

many modern Korean authors—the

Dark Clouds,” we discover what at

as a translator of Korean poetry into

extraordinary poet Yi Sang, for one, and

first seems to be a human presence.

French, provides a remarkably lucid and

in particular poems written by women—

But no—in fact, the entity gazing at us

natural translation, with a preface from

not full of disturbing transformations?

from afar is “Mount Mudeung.” The

poet and essayist Jean-Michel Maulpoix.

One of Ra’s poems speaks of a “new

mountain has “dark green eyes” and a

It must also be said that, physically, this

moon.” With a degree of humor, this

“gentle and profound” expression. Its

is a beautiful book.

moon here becomes a human body, or

presence is marked by pain—its “chest”

Ra’s poems all convey the experience

more specifically, a human “behind.”

bears an “oozing wound”—but also,

of fleeting , sensory events. Here is

And the shape of this behind appears

by remarkable kindness. During the

a flowering peach tree; its delicate

to leave its imprint on the ridges on

night, the mountain descends step by

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

81

step to watch over “my troubled sleep” before departing just as mysteriously.

However, in the middle of the poem, we discover that this mountain is a “crater of memory”; “its eyes” have “witnessed a great massacre” (that of Gwangju in

| JAPANESE |

The Achievements of Contemporary Korean Literature

literature, suddenly increasing the number of works available in Japanese.

The novels being published are full of variety, from humorous to serious and running the gamut from mysteries to literary fiction. And while all of these

1980, as explained to French readers in a

works are fascinating in their own right,

translator’s note).

Kim Young-ha’s Memoir of a Murderer

In these poems by Ra Heeduk,

(translated into Japanese by Nag i

individual and collective tragedy lie half-

Yoshikawa) is particularly intriguing.

hidden, glinting at us from among the

The novel is set in a rural village in

fleeting presences whose unforgettable

contemporary South Korea. The main

qualities they convey.

character is a seventy-year-old veterinarian, Byeongsu Kim. In his past, Byeongsu

by Claude Mouchard

murdered dozens of people and buried

Emeritus Professor, Paris 8 University

their corpses. He stopped killing some

Assistant Editor-in-Chief, Po&sie

twenty-five years ago, and currently 殺人者の記憶法 (Memoir of a Murderer) Kim Young-ha, trans. Nagi Yoshikawa CUON, 2017, 168 pages

lives with his twenty-eight-year-old daughter, Eunhui. Between their county and the neighboring one, three women are kidnapped and murdered in quick succession. The police begin investigating these crimes as the work of a serial killer.

The story begins with Byeongsu driving.

He bumps into a jeep. Blood drips from

82

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

In the past few years the number of

the trunk. The driver is a man in his early

translations of Korean literature into

thirties. His name, Jutae Park. Byeongsu

Japanese has increased noticeably. Four

intuitively senses that he may be the

works by Park Min-gyu, whose novel

criminal at large. A fourth woman falls

Castella won the Japan Translation

prey to the killer. Byeongsu repeatedly

Prize in 2015, have been translated into

spots Jutae, discovers that he’s seeing

Japanese, as have several by Han Kang

Eunhui, and begins plotting his first

and Kim Yeonsu. Furthermore, whereas

murder in a quarter of a century.

the majority of Korean novels used to

In form, this novel is a mystery that

be published by small presses such as

tells the story of an old man who has

CUON, Crane, and Shoshikankanbō,

himself killed dozens of people and

medium-sized publishers like Kawade

who now plots to murder again for his

Shobō, Hakusuisha, and Shōbunsha have

daughter’s sake. But it is also more than

now recently started to publish Korean

that. The main character suffers from

REVIEWS

Alzheimer’s disease, and has already

mental to being a human, but he’s also a

undergone brain surgery. His memories

talented poet, well-versed in both classical

grow increasingly incoherent. This fills

and modern literature, and often quotes

the entire work with an uncanny tension.

the classics to express his emotions.

Amidst those vanishing memories are

He starts with The Great Heart of

the ones of murder. They stretch from

Wisdom Sutra, moves on to Montaigne’s

Byeongsu killing his father when he was

The Essays, Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke

sixteen to his last murder at forty-five,

Zarathustra, and Shakespeare’s Othello.

to a truly bizarre scene where a small-

He draws on these works to talk about

time yakuza cuts his finger off at an

himself. Toward the end, he compares

anti-Communist Party meeting. But

his own predicament to Oedipus’s return

those powerful and solid bits of the past

to Ithaca, claiming that “My plan to kill

intersect with the crumbling present, and

Jutae Park is also a kind of return.” But

amidst it all, the instability of Byeongsu’s

the moment he sees a dog with a woman’s

mind becomes clear. The reader is drawn

hand in its mouth, he makes a decision.

into the darkness. Then, another woman’s

“Oedipus finally achieves enlightenment

body is found. Here, the development

when he’s old and dragging his leg. He

of the story, the cutting between scenes,

becomes a mature human. But I will

the creation of the narrative, is truly

become a child.” And then, at the very

astounding. This is not just a carefully

end, he returns again to The Great Heart

crafted mystery, but also a detailed

of Wisdom Sutra.

psychological novel, and a horror story about memory as well.

| JAPANESE |

Humor, Baseball, and Park Min-gyu

三美スーパースターズ 最後のファンクラブ (The Sammi Superstars' Last Fan Club) Park Min-gyu, trans. Mariko Saito Shobunsha, 2017, 361 pages

Byeong su may be an utterly unsympathetic character. But by placing

The depiction of Byeongsu also

themselves in his position, following him

The Sammi Superstars’ Last Fan Club is

sets this novel apart. The first lines he

along the path he chooses, and watching

a multifaceted novel. One could read it

speaks are:

his powerful will clash with reality,

as the memoir of a boy growing up in the

readers, I believe, will experience relief

early eighties, a time that also coincided

The force that moved me was not what

and a certain peace of mind along with

with the birth of professional baseball in

the people of this world think. It wasn’t

the hopelessness.

South Korea. It also reads as a record of

the urge to kill or deviant sexual desire.

This work certainly speaks to the

the narrator’s meditations on the country

It was the lack. It was the hope that

achievements of contemporary Korean

of South Korea itself. But to me, the most

there must be a more complete pleasure.

literature.

important aspects of the novel are humor and baseball. Both of these things bring

Whenever I buried my victims, I’d whisper to myself:

by Mizuhito Kanehara

people pleasure. Yet neither has held

Next time will be better.

Professor of Sociology,

much influence over literature anywhere

I stopped killing precisely because that

Hōsei University

in the world.

hope vanished.

Literature, too, is multifaceted.

There, we find stories of death, love, life,

Byeongsu lacks something funda-

family, religion, war. And we should be

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

83

surprised by the fact that these elements

and it perfectly expresses Park’s sense of

goal is to establish their own baseball

have been arranged into a hierarchy.

humor:

which is described as follows: “Don’t

To put it bluntly, the heavier or more

hit balls that are hard to hit. Don’t catch

serious something is, the more value it’s

“When we’ve made some money, let’s

balls that are hard to catch.” This is more

considered to have as literature.

raise seahorses,” I told my wife when I got

than just a protest against preexisting

home. “We can do whatever you want,”

rules. In fact, it’s not a protest at all. It’s a

stylistically humorous, that follows the

she responded, smiling. She’s so kind she

gesture that gives life to rules.

story of well-to-do boys and girls who

didn’t let it show on her face, but the

I’d like to end by adding that in the

go on an adventure, find themselves in

truth is, we were so poor we’d be better

past few years the amount of Japanese

a series of dangerous predicaments, and

off if we could get some seahorses to raise

translations of literature from all

then, in the end, wind up happy. No

us . . .

across Asia has increased dramatically,

For example, let’s say there’s a novel,

matter how great that work is, it will

a n d that tr a ns l ati o ns o f Ko re a n

never be considered as valuable as a novel

There’s a lot of information in this

literature in particular are thriving

based on someone’s experiences in prison

passage. This couple is poor but happy.

in Japan. Mariko Saito, the Japanese

during World War II. This leads us to

The husband seems to like seahorses.

translator of The Sammi Superstars’

one of the ironies of literature. Despite

And the choice of seahorses also suggests

Last Fan Club is a leader in the push to

the fact that literature itself is considered

the husband’s odd personality. However,

popularize Korean literature in Japan.

rather unimportant in the real world,

what’s most important is the way that

Her joint translation with Jae-hun

the same standards used to judge the

talk of “a couple keeping a pet” instantly

Hyun of Park’s Castella won 2015’s

importance of real events are employed

transforms into talk of “a pet keeping a

inaugural Japan Translation Award.

to determine the value of a work of

pair of humans.” Humor often contains

The Sammi Superstars’ Last Fan Club

literature as well.

within it this sort of transformation

is a thoroughly engaging novel, loved

There are, of course, exceptions. Mark

of perception and has a powerfully

by readers. As readers across the world

Twain’s works are held in high esteem. As

philosophical side to it as well. Henri-

discover Park Min-gyu’s works, their

are those of writers like Kurt Vonnegut,

Louis Bergson writes in “Laughter” that

universality will only grow clearer.

Richard Brautigan, and Barry Yourgrau,

these perceptual shifts are tied in an

who fused American poetics with humor.

essential way to regulations and rules. Or,

by Ken Nishizaki

Twain did become a terrible pessimist in

to put it more clearly, they are a protest

Author and Translator

his later years, and it’s said that Brautigan

against regulations and rules, as well as

committed suicide after losing his

the people who establish and maintain

readership, but let’s put that aside for

them.

now.

And now, reader, maybe you can see

Pardon the long introduction, but

why humor and baseball are juxtaposed

there is a reason I brought up these

in this novel. After all, is there any sport

American authors. I feel that Park’s work

with as many rules as baseball? Try

shares a certain style of humor with the

comparing it to soccer. The difference in

work of those American authors. The

the number of rules is enough to make

following quote is from the afterword

one dizzy!

of The Sammi Superstars’ Last Fan Club,

84

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

The Sammi Superstars’ Fan Club’s

REVIEWS

| RUSSIAN |

Sea at Heart

Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea,

novel and strange, even a bit alarming.

for example). Or even like fairy tales. As

Then you realize that your perspective

in many fairy tales, common people find

has changed. Now you see everything

themselves confronted and challenged

through the islanders’ lenses, heedful

by almost magical forces beyond their

of the direction of the wind, the ebb

control, which in Han’s book are

and flow, and other things of vital

economic processes and forces of nature.

importance, and you no longer think that

The writer manages to present the

only city events really matter. It strikes

fishermen’s lives as particular to islanders

you how fragile the island world is, and

and also universally human, yet he doesn’t

how threatened it is by globalization and

forget the personal dimension either;

urbanization.

the actual turns of fate and mind are all individual.

Th e i s la n d er s e x i st in a n d o f themselves and also in contrast to the

Han’s heroes are ordinary people

mainland dwellers; and sometimes even

with fears and flaws. But they face

to their own children. Of course, the

choices and have to decide whether they

older ones, especially the fathers, are

can take responsibility for themselves

hardly models of moral behavior, swayed

and their beloved ones. As in reality,

by passions and sometimes rude to their

sometimes the choice is to be made at

family. It is not that they are better than

once and sometimes you have all your life

their children, but that they are just

to ponder it. Thus, the old fisherman in

unique and have their own special way

“The Words on the Wind” does not call

of living. They are loyal to their past.

on his friend’s widow for forty years after

The book’s title, I Like it Here, has quite

Six out of the eight stories in Han

witnessing his death and bringing the

a bit of irony to it, but also, as Han puts

Changhoon’s collection I Like it Here are

news to the island. And, perhaps having

it, “some manifestation of elementary

dedicated to inhabitants of small islands

never forgiven himself for his cowardice,

willpower.” The older folk know how to

tucked away far off the Korean Peninsula.

he is still forgiven by the friend, forever

defy circumstances. Thus, the woman in

Born on an island and living there again

young, and the widow, long grown old.

“Snowy Night” (though not an islander

Мне здесь нравится (I Like it Here) Han Changhoon, trans. Lidiya Azarina Literaturnaya Ucheba, 2017, 240 pages

after years of wanderings, Han knows

Sweating, struggling, and suffering,

in this story) keeps an old promise

firsthand the joys and hardships of island

people are daily beset with existential

between her and her lover not to meet

life.

conundrums. Society has almost no

each other. But this is exactly where she

Wishing to capture the unique

place in this world, as it often just moves

finds joy: “The reason our love is a success

character of island existence, Han is

humans away from the big questions,

is quite simply because we played by the

a true master of realistic narrative.

obscuring pain, making one forget about

rules.”

But the simple lives of his heroes,

death and responsibility.

The biggest fear of the fathers in

their compactness, which is not just

Karaoke, the personal computer,

their islands or half-deserted villages is to

geographical but metaphysical as well,

an airplane carrying elderly passengers

not be able to fulfill their destinies. And

make the stories look, in some respects,

from Samdo Island to Jeju Island—all

their key destiny, according to an old

like parables (they bring to mind

these suddenly jump out as something

man in “The Lightest Life,” is to provide

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

85

the children with a lesson in “dying and disappearing.” Life is but a long preparation for death, so a lesson in dying is the same as a lesson in living properly.

It s h o u l d b e n o t e d t h a t d a r k

Sports with a Dash of Literature

tones do not dominate the book. The questions of life and death, of destiny

While athletes from all around the globe were bonding through sports on

and responsibility, which are of primary

the ice rinks of Gangneung City, site of the 2018 Winter Olympics’ ice

interest to the author, are also treated

events, journalists from the international community were connecting with

ironically. For example, “Let Go All

literature in a cozy corner of its Media Village.

Lines” and “The Seniors of Samdo and

The impetus for the sportswriters’ exploration of literature during all the

Their Trip to Jeju Island” are almost comic

excitement of the Pyeongchang Olympics was a special exhibition hosted

tales, and this is by no means a dismissive

by LTI Korea. Titled “Literature without Boundaries,” the exhibition was

characterization.

located right in front of the dining halls, allowing journalists and guests

An important positive theme is

to easily access it. The exhibition showcased Korean books translated into

pronounced in the book’s closing story,

English, German, Spanish, French, Chinese, Japanese, and others, so that

“Father and Son.” Yong (whose fisherman

guests from any country could find something to read. Journalists were free

uncle lost his yacht, wife, and purpose in

to take or borrow books.

the first story) initially seems to be a good-

Such an event is unprecedented, as Philipe Cantin, a journalist from La

for-nothing, opting to spend his life on

Presse, noted: “This is my seventh Olympics coverage and I've never before

the island together with his parents and

seen such an interesting cultural initiative for journalists.” Journalists seem

uncle. But in helping his elderly father,

to enjoy this unusual combination of sports and literature, which served as a

he proves to be a deft and competent

great introduction to Korean literature and culture.

fisherman. Thus, different generations

“I think it’s a very good way of getting to know Korean literature,” said

have a chance for understanding and

Petrus Dejong from AP. “I read a novel by Han Kang for the first time, and

rapport, and remote spots may have a

now I’ve picked up her second novel to read on my flight back home.” He

future with the world retaining all its

also read The Story of Hong Gil-dong, a Korean classic, which he said was

diversity.

a “real page-turner,” although he is usually less inclined to read old novels.

Besides, Han has learned a secret from

Toni Rufflo from WPXI-TV commented, “I am so glad to have had this

poet Ahn Sang-hak as revealed to readers

opportunity. I would not have been able to get to a library in South Korea

in a 2016 interview. We are all islanders in

otherwise.”

a way, but our island is a drop of water, for

Donna Spencer from the Canadian Press expressed her delight after

“the planet we live on is a drop of water

reading Our Happy Time by Gong Ji-Young, which was her first Korean

floating across the Universe.”

novel. “I really liked it. It was a redemption story centered on a sad event but had an uplifting ending that suggested hope for the future.” Indeed, many

by Dmitry Rumyantsev Editor, AST Publishers

guests of the exhibition found Korean fiction and poetry incredibly relatable.

Furthermore, the exhibition allowed sportswriters to spend their time fruitfully until the next event. “Sometimes I’ve got nothing to do after

86

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

© Keunssak Photo

LTI AT THE OLYMPICS

breakfast, so I think it’s a great idea to have a library in such a convenient location,” said Christoph Winterbach from Spiegel.

The success of the exhibition proved that there are indeed no real boundaries among great literature. In fact, great books may be the best reflection of and an approachable introduction to a culture.

To quote La Presse’s Cantin, “Literature opens our horizons and these books are, for me, a window into the Korean reality.

Bravo!”

by Kim Kyu Eun Editor, KLN

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

87

Translators K a l a u A l m o n y i s a t ra n s l a t o r a n d researcher of Japanese literature. His translations include the works of Nao-cola Yamazaki and Fuminori Nakamura. pp. 82-84 Sophie Bowman is starting a PhD in East Asian studies at the University of Toronto.

She has an MA in Korean literature from Ewha Womans University. She won the 2015 Korea Times Translation Award grand prize and has received LTI Korea translation grants to translate Lee Ho-cheol and Jon Kyongnin. pp. 18-22, 31-33 Lizzie Buehler is a freelance translator and editor at Asymptote Journal based in New York City. She studied comparative literature at Princeton University. Her translations are published or forthcoming in Ploughshares , The Massachusetts Review , and Litro . pp. 6-10 Jamie Chang is a literary translator. She teaches translation at Ewha Womans University and LTI Korea’s Translation Academy. She has translated The Great Soul of Siberia . pp. 54-56, 72-76 Chung Eun-Gwi is a professor of English literature and culture at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. She earned her PhD in poetics at SUNY Buffalo. She has translated many contemporary Korean poets into English. pp. 11-13 Stephen Epstein is an associate professor of Asian studies at the Victoria University of Wellington. He has published several translations of Korean and Indonesian fiction, including Who Ate Up All The Shinga? by Park Wansuh. His latest works are A Sourcebook of the Korean Wave (coedited with Yun Mi Hwang), and the short story collection Apple and Knife by Intan Paramaditha (Brow Books, 2018). pp. 67-71 Horace Jeffer y Hodges has a BA in English and American literature from Baylor University and an MA and PhD in history from UC Berkeley. He teaches at Ewha Womans University in Seoul. He has published articles, stories, poetry, and one novella as well as various translations from Korean with his wife, Sun-Ae Hwang, including Yi Kwang-Su’s The Soil . pp. 62-66 Anton Hur is the winner of a PEN Translates award, a Daesan Foundation grant, and multiple LTI Korea grants. His translations include Shin Kyung-sook's The Court Dancer (Pegasus Books) and Kang Kyeong-ae's The Underground Village (Honford Star), as well as stories in Words Without Borders, Asymptote Journal, Slice Magazine , Anomaly , and others. He teaches at Ewha Womans University's Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation. pp. 46-49 88

KOREAN LITERATURE NOW

Sun-Ae Hwang has a PhD in literature from the University of Munich, Germany.

With her husband Horace Jeffery Hodges, she has translated several Korean stories and novels into English, including The Soil

by Yi Kwang-Su and When Adam Opens His Eyes by Jang Jung-il. pp. 62-66 YoungShil Ji and Daniel T. Parker are a married translation team living in Daegu.

Ji graduated from Keimyung University and is a freelance translator specializing in contemporary Korean poetry. Parker has taught at Keimyung University since 2001 and is an assistant professor of English language and literature. pp. 14-15 Agnel Joseph is a recipient of the 2017 GKL Translation Award, 2016 Writers’ Centre Norwich Emerging Translator Mentorship, 2015 Daesan Foundation translation grant, 2013 LTI Korea Award for Aspiring Translators, and 2013 Korea Times Translation Award grand prize. His book-length translations include Double by Park Min-gyu. He tweets as @AngelMisspelled. pp. 50-53 Dan Khazankin studied English and Germanic philology at Moscow State University. He currently works as an English tutor and freelance translator. p. 85 Mi Young Kim holds a master’s in applied linguistics from Victoria University of Wellington and a graduate diploma in teaching Korean as a foreign language from Seoul National University. She teaches Korean at Victoria University's Centre for Lifelong Learning and is the principal of the New Zealand Korean School of Wellington.

With Stephen Epstein, she has co-translated the novel Contradictions by Yang Gwija and short stories by Park Wansuh, Kim Dong-in, and Kim In-suk. pp. 67-71 Won-Chung Kim is a professor of English literature at Sungkyunkwan University.

He has translated twelve books of Korean poetry into English, including Kim Chiha's Heart's Agon y, as well as translating John Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra and H. D. Thoreau's Natural History Essays into Korean. He published his first book of poetry, I Thought It Was a Door , in 2014. p. 42 Jesse Kirkwood studied modern languages at Oxford before spending a year in Japan on a Tsuzuki Scholarship. He currently works full time as a literary and commercial translator and is a member of the Unitrad network of independent translators. pp. 78-81 Ji yoon Lee’s most recent publication is Kim Yideum’s Cheer Up, Femme Fatale (Action Books, 2015). She is the author of Foreigner’s Folly ( Coconut Books, 2014), Funsize/

Bitesize (Birds of Lace, 2013), and IMMA (Radioactive Moat, 2012). She received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Notre Dame. pp. 23-25 Jake Levine is a poet, translator, and sometimes scholar. He teaches creative writing at Keimyung University and stylistics at the LTI Korea Translation Academy. He translates and writes about contemporary Korean poetry. pp. 23-27 Christopher Merrill has published six collections of poetry, including Watch Fire , for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and translations; and six books of nonfiction. His honors include a Chevalier from the French government in the Order of Arts and Letters. p. 42 Lucina Schell works in international rights for the University of Chicago Press, and is the founding editor of Reading in Translation and a member of the Third Coast Translators Collective. She translates from Spanish. p. 1 Soeun Seo’s translations have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review , Circumference , and Poetry and Criticism . Her original poems can be found in Hayden’s Ferry Review , Potluck Magazine , Witch Craft Magazine , and Fuck Art , Let’s Dance . pp. 26-27 Deborah Smith won the Man Booker International Prize 2016 for her translation of Han Kang's The Vegetarian . She has also translated Han’s Human Acts and The White Book and Bae Suah’s A Greater Music , Recitation , and North Station . She is the founder of Tilted Axis Press. pp. 37-41 Brother Anthony of Taizé is a professor emeritus at Sogang University and a chair professor at Dankook University. He has published over forty volumes of translations of Korean poetry and some fiction. He took Korean citizenship in 1994. An Sonjae is his official Korean name. pp. 11-13 Yang Eun-Mi has an MA in creative writing from the University of Edinburgh, where she won the Grierson Verse Prize. Her poems have been nominated for 2015 Best of the Net Awards in the US, and shortlisted for the 2016 NOLO Prize. Her translations have appeared in Asymptote Journal , the Guardian , and others. She is doing her PhD at the Academy of Korean Studies. p. 45 Yu Young-nan has translated several Korean works into English, including The Naked Tree

by Park Wansuh and Yom Sang-seop's Three Generations . Yu was awarded the Daesan Literature Prize for her translation of Yi Inhwa's Everlasting Empire . pp. 35-36

Welcome of Welcome to to the the Archive Archive of

KOREAN CULTURE & ARTS ARTS KOREAN CULTURE & Koreana Magazine www.koreana.or.kr Koreana Magazine www.koreana.or.kr

· ·Special Special Feature Feature · ·Cultural Cultural Focus Focus · ·Heritage Heritage · ·Art ArtReview Review People · ·People Travel · ·Travel Entertainment · ·Entertainment Lifestyle · ·Lifestyle Food · ·Food Literature · ·Literature

VOL. 39

|

SPRING 2018

In this Spring 2018 issue dedicated to Korean testimonial narratives, readers will encounter book-islands by Korean authors who look at that “compressed madness” squarely in the eye.

Andrés Felipe Solano

Copyright © 2018 by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea.

9 7 7 2 5 08

3 4 5 0 06

ISSN 2508-3457