[_list: Books from Korea] Vol.28 Summer 2015

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VOL. 28 S U M M E R 2 0 1 5

Special Section

70 Years of Independence and Division:

The Flow of Korean Literature Through the Eras Featured Writer

Kim Kwang-Kyu VOL. 28

SUMMER

Spotlight on Fiction

2015

Wonderboy

by Kim Yeonsu

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

VOL. 28 9 772005

279002

ISSN 2005-2790

Copyright Š 2015 by Literature Translation Institute of Korea

S U M M E R ISSN

2 0 1 5

2005-2790

Foreword

Foreword T

his year marks the 70th anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japanese occupation and the division of the Korean peninsula into North and South Korea. During all this time, Korean literature has held a mirror up to Korean society and has served as a window into Korea’s turbulent modern history. Korean literature has faithfully reflected the lives and concerns of the Korean people through different perspectives and techniques, whether it was national division in the postwar years of the 1950s, the rise of military dictatorship and industrial society in the 1960–70s, the dawn of depoliticization and the emergence of female writers in the 1990s, or the postmodern digital age of the new millennium.

Editors and publishers overseas have shown great interest in literary works that portray the stories and interests of each generation of youngsters in Korea, covering everything from Korea’s dazzling economic growth, its rise as a world leader in cutting-edge technology, and the significant growth in its global profile thanks to Hallyu, reflected in its rapid climb up the Nation Branding Index. We have prepared this summer issue of _list: Books from Korea on the theme of “70 Years of Independence and Division: The Flow of Korean Literature through the Eras” to help overseas readers get a bird’s-eye view of the turbulent times that Koreans have lived through for the past seventy years.

This issue features renowned poet Kim Kwang-Kyu, a member of the “April 19 Generation” that led the student revolution of 1960 which toppled the 12 year-long dictatorship of the Rhee Administration. In the 1960s and 70s, Kim drew on his consummate poetic sensibility to launch scathing attacks on the authoritarian government by using metaphors and satire, and, like German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, to agonize over the meaning of life in such circumstances. Kim described everyday scenes using simple language, yet, at the same time, he delved into the meaning of life and denounced political repression using rich symbolism; his poem “The Land of Mists,” which won much acclaim in Germany, is a good example of this. Kim drew attention for criticizing the dictatorship using symbolic poetic language while not allowing himself to be shackled by political ideology.

The Younger Writers section features novelists Cheon Myeong-kwan and Jo Kyung Ran. In Modern Family, Cheon presents us with the unusual prospect of the modern Korean family where grown-up children return to the nest, seeking refuge in their mother. In Looking for the Elephant, Jo explores the individual’s physiological scarring and sense of loss through a death in the family and the symbolic character of an elephant.

Modern Korean literature has grown amid unprecedented social and political turmoil, for example, the liberation from Japan, the Korean War, the April 19th Student Revolution, and rapid industrialization. This issue of _list: Books from Korea will help readers get an overview of the mesmerizing ways Korean literature has reflected the socio-political milieu in each period of Korean history.

by Kim Seong-Kon Publisher _list: Books from Korea

Vol.28 Summer 2015

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CONTENTS

06 Kim Kwang-Kyu Featured Writer

06 Writer’s Profile Questioning the Way Life Is Lived 08 Essay Kim Kwang-Kyu:

A Poet Who Gives Meaning and Value to the Everyday

10 14 18 20 28

Interview Cherishing the Language of Everyday Lives Writer’s Insight In Search of the Mountain Essay Quotidian Life in Plain Truth Selected Poems Translated Works

30

Special Section 70 Years of Independence and Division:

The Flow of Korean Literature Through the Eras

Overview

31 70 Years of Independence and Division: The Flow of Korean Literature Through the Eras

Postwar and Division Literature

34 From the Maelstrom of the Korean War

Literature from Industrialization and Democratization to the 1980s

36 Literature Takes Up the Fight for Freedom and Equality “The Road to Sampo” 38

Post-industrial Literature after the 1990s

40 Towards Rupturing the Symbolic Order I Have the Right to Destroy Myself 42 44 Modern Existence and the Investigation of Sexuality “The Goat Herding Woman” 46

48 Cheon Myeong-kwan Younger Writers

56 Jo Kyung Ran

48 Essay An Author the Sum of His Characters Writer’s Insight 50

52

Writing About Special, Ordinary Lives Modern Family

56 Essay The Vastness of Not Understanding 58 Writer’s Insight

On Seeing Nothing of Worth

60

“Looking for the Elephant”

A LITER ARY QUAR TERLY

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V O L . 28 S U M M E R 2015

LTI Korea Translation Academy Graduation Ceremony 04 An Out-of-Classroom Experience PUBLISHER EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

70

MANAGING DIRECTOR

Interview 70 From Translator to Publisher: Deborah Smith

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF ASSISTANT EDITORS

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

EDITORS

01 Foreword

Kim Stoker James Godley

64 Poetry

TRANSLATORS

65 Reviews

Agnel Joseph Sophie Bowman Victoria Caudle

72 Afterword EDITORIAL BOARD

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

Spotlight on Fiction

OVERSEAS EDITORIAL ADVISORS

Kyeong-Hee Choi (USA) Oliverio Coelho (Argentina)

Wonderboy

Jean-Claude De Crescenzo (France)

By Kim Yeonsu

Grace E. Koh (UK) Michael J. Pettid (USA) Andreas Schirmer (Austria) Dafna Zur (USA) DOMESTIC EDITORIAL ADVISORS

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

Cover image by Seo Heun-Kang Date of Publication July 15, 2015

Andrés Felipe Solano ART DIRECTOR

Kwon Junglim

All correspondence should be addressed to the Literature Translation Institute of Korea 32, Yeongdong-daero 112-gil (Samseong-dong), Gangnam-gu, Seoul, 135-873, Korea

DESIGN DIRECTOR

Yoon Eunjung

Telephone: 82-2-6919-7714 Fax: 82-2-3448-4247 E-mail: list_korea@klti.or.kr www.klti.or.kr www.list.or.kr

PHOTOGRAPHERS

Copyright © 2015 by Literature Translation Institute of Korea ISSN 2005-2790

DESIGNERS

Kim Eunji Kim Jihyun Seo Heun-Kang Son Hongjoo Kim Hyojin

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LTI Korea Translation Academy Graduation Ceremony

An Out-of-Classroom Experience T

his year has been an exciting one: I have been taking classes at the LTI Korea Translation Academy. Aside from the course work, there were several opportunities to visit different parts of Korea, such as literary-themed trips and cultural excursions.

These trips were fun, and I have learned a lot. What I have so far are trivial, individual, and entirely subjective interpretations of parts, yet I feel nothing short of a pleasurable confusion.

Of my encounters during these trips was the chance to see some of the things the people of the Korean peninsula do to enjoy themselves. After a guided tour in the house of Official Choi’s family, the place where parts of Pak Kyongni’s epic novel Land takes place, our group came across a pungmul drumming performance by chance. As the bodies of the listeners reverberated with the sounds of percussion instruments, the excitement of the performers was transferred to, and shared by, the audience, and we stayed until the end despite having to make changes to our plans. The performance in the open yard, or madang of a traditional Korean house brought the audience closer, both physically and emotionally, to the performers. Some people in the crowd, apparently familiar with pungmul, shouted out chuimse phrases of encouragement like “eolsu” and “jalhanda” adding to the rhythm and also encouraging the performers, becoming a part of the performance themselves.

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_list : Books from Korea

During another trip, to Andong, we had a handson experience with pungmul instruments. Learning traditional music and trying to play the instruments was an exciting experience. There, we were also introduced to a traditional mask dance. We learned about the Hahoe byeolsingut talnori—a masked dance drama performance as a part of the annual shamanistic ritual to deities in the village of Hahoe. An expert showed us parts of the dance, and we learned some of the steps and movements.

After experiencing pungmul, I thought about the performance at the madang where the audience participated through chuimse. With the mask dance, my thoughts were about the idea of an activity for fun that also involved the entire village for the good of the village.

The stories about the origin of the masks that dated back about a thousand years to the Goryeo dynasty and the folklore surrounding the communal ritual made me consider the distance between now and the time of these traditions as being similar as the distance between the capital, Seoul, and the countryside. Like many countries in the old world, Korea also was made up of villages. Spending most of the year in Seoul, this thought had not occurred to me. The overlapping images of the villages from Hwang Sok-yong’s The Guest and Hwang Sun-Won’s “Cranes,” the people in those communities who must have taken pleasure in those

Event

communal activities, and the contrasting elements of tragedy in each work appeared before me. I also thought of Hwang Jung-eun’s “The Way Up,” a reminder of the vestige of those villages and communities.

Our visit to the Buddhist temple, Yongjusa, was my first temple stay. The difficulty of waking up at three in the morning and the bodily pain of doing the 108 bows were a part of the new experience. However, it was the attention paid by the monks to everything they did each moment that made an impression on me. Their practice never stopped—starting from avoiding unnecessary words to minding even the way they took each step to Barugongyang, a ritualized eating of meals where one eats only what one needs and wastes nothing by rinsing the bowls with water and drinking the remains.

During the morning ritual, a monk chanted the Heart Sutra. It was interesting to listen to a text translated from Sanskrit to Chinese and to some form of Korean more than a thousand years ago being read to me in the present. I wondered if my inability to decipher the meaning of those syllables was due to changes in the language or the religious function of such texts.

Ssanggyesa and Buseoksa temples gave me a chance to think about the relationship between buildings and their surroundings in traditional Korean architecture.

Both temples were built along steep hills and the walk up to the highest points where the main buildings were, was quite taxing. However, once at the top, the view in front of my eyes when I turned around was amazing leaving me speechless. From visiting these temples and seeing what I saw at the 500-year-old houses in Andong, I could sense the consideration and care taken towards how a building functions within its surroundings.

These trips also served as opportunities to experience various kinds of food. Each was good in its own way and owing to the fact that we were outside of Seoul, we had the chance to enjoy not only the food but also the genuine hospitality. Some of the dishes served to us in Andong at the house of the head family of a clan, such as pyeonyuk, a kind of beef terrine, and shredded dried fish, seemed like they would require a lot of work, and this was certainly the first time for me to try them.

I was reminded of the difficulties of translating texts

that contain the names of a lot of Korean dishes, such as Hwang Jung-eun’s “The Way Up” and Shin Kyungsook’s Please Look after Mom, but soon the food took over my senses and thoughts.

What I have gained from these new experiences, at the least, is knowledge of new Korean vocabulary, and a clearer understanding of the actual things whose names I already knew as words but did not know within their cultural context. There still remain many things I cannot clearly describe, or even identify about the whole experience and these things will surely keep me busy, curious, and wondering.

by Hwang Kyu Hyung Student LTI Korea Translation Academy

Vol.28 Summer 2015

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Featured Writer Kim Kwang-Kyu

Questioning the Way Life Is Lived K

im Kwang-Kyu grew up amidst the turmoil of the Korean War and its aftermath. He was born in 1941 in Seoul, and was a student at the time of the 4.19 Revolution in 1960. Kim studied German at Seoul National University as well as in Germany.

He first developed his poetic voice by translating German poetry into Korean, including satirical works

by Heinrich Heine, Bertolt Brecht, and Günter Eich, before ever beginning to write his own poems. He only began to publish poetry in 1975, when he was already in his mid-30s. Owing nothing to standard Korean poetic models, his work enjoyed immediate popularity as a model of new poetics for the new age that began in earnest with the assassination of the dictator Park Chung-hee in 1979.

Less than a week after Kim Kwang-Kyu’s first volume of poetry, The Last Dream to Drench Us, was published, the life of Park Chung-hee was brought to a violent end. Following this, Kim’s book was actively censored in the subsequent security clampdown, which only served to give it legitimacy as a work of resistance. For almost the first time in Korean literary history, a poetic voice characterized by satirical humor was speaking out, pointing its arrows at the evils of dictatorship and the wretchedness of modern city life in subtle, understated ways. Kim’s other early

collections, written during the ensuing military dictatorships, include poems that refer indirectly to the brutality of the regimes, which delighted young readers capable of grasping their hidden meaning.

In his work, Kim Kwang-Kyu is not interested in celebrating directly the beauties of nature, in part at least because he is very aware of the way human pollution has ruined them. He is one of the first Koreans to express alarm over looming ecological disaster. The voice of his poems often inspires a sardonic smile, but it is important to recognize in his work as a whole a deeply humanistic viewpoint. Kim Kwang-Kyu never speaks to draw attention to himself, but rather to raise questions about the way life is lived, or not lived, in today’s world. Kim Kwang-Kyu is still almost unique among Korean poets. He writes about topics that should make us want to weep in a way that often makes us smile.

by Brother Anthony of Taizé Translator and Professor Emeritus, Sogang University

photographs by Seo Heun-Kang

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Writer’s Profile

Kim Kwang-Kyu 06

Writer’s Profile: Questioning the Way Life Is Lived

08

Essay: Kim Kwang-Kyu: A Poet Who Gives Meaning and Value to the Everyday

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Interview: Cherishing the Language of Everyday Lives

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Writer’s Insight: In Search of the Mountain

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Essay: Quotidian Life in Plain Truth

20 28

Selected Poems Translated Works

Vol.28 Summer 2015

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Featured Writer Kim Kwang-Kyu

Kim Kwang-Kyu:

A Poet Who Gives Meaning and Value to the Everyday P

oet Kim Kwang-Kyu, born in Seoul in 1941, debuted at the age of thirty-four in the journal Literature and Intelligence. In light of the conventions of the time, his literary debut happened at a rather late age. However, Kim proved everyone’s fears groundless through his prodigious poetic output. Kim has published ten books to date, starting in 1979 with his first collection, The Last Dream to Drench Us, which shows just how faithful he has been in carrying out his duties as a poet. He has been diligently transforming everyday language into poetry, in other words giving meaning and value to life. Moreover, he has been pursuing balance and harmony between intellect and emotion by using both in equal measure in his poetry.

Through changes in syntax and line breaks, he has ceaselessly experimented with the aesthetics of form, variations in meaning, and the impact of emphasis.

Kim Kwang-Kyu has broadened the horizons of Korean poetry by presenting us with a new genre called everyday poetry. Through his poetic experimentation, he has given meaning and value to the domain of the petit bourgeois who had not received attention before by making them the subjects of his poetry.

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_list : Books from Korea

Kim’s appearance on the Korean literary scene served as a catalyst that breathed new life into the lyric poetry of the 1970s and 80s that was sidelined by a bias toward participatory realism. It would not be an exaggeration to call “Spirit Mountain,” his debut poem from his first collection, an autobiographical account of his wanderings in search of a literary motif that began in his teenage years. His search for the Spirit Mountain not only served as a motivation but also guided him as he wrote. The Spirit Mountain continues to appear throughout his poems, morphing into different forms such as the imaginary K’unaksan. “Spirit Mountain” is Kim’s representative poem about a poet who originally dreamt of becoming a writer and wanders aimlessly without realizing the inevitability of his vocation: to seek out the mysterious world of words and language.

This search for the Spirit Mountain has become the central theme of Kim’s life.

The most salient observation about Kim’s poetry is that he uses plain language, which lends itself to the absence of methodical devices of metaphor and metonymy, thus making the poems easy to read and the content deceptively simple. However, a close

Essay: About Kim Kwang-Kyu

reading reveals that the elaborate grammar and the systematic structure suggestive of a novel link together organically to center on a single theme. In this way, Kim’s poetry is thematically precise, formally aesthetic, and artistically appealing in terms of technique. This is an important literary methodology that Kim has been pursuing for the past forty years and it is what positions him on a pedestal of Korean poetry.

A notable feature of Kim’s second poetry collection, No, It’s Not So (1983), is his experimentation with prosaic techniques by using formal grammar, objective narrative, and the third person perspective while avoiding contextual leaps and omissions. For example, his poem “The Depths of a Clam” has no leaps or omissions and is composed entirely of orderly sentences. Another distinct feature is the use of the third person “she” or “husband” that leaves no room for subjectivity. This is one of the distinctive characteristics of Kim’s writing style.

Yet another notable feature is the thematic clarity and transparency acquired through a healthy middle class skepticism combined with the harmonization of clear and lucid images. Poems like “Back View” or “The New Door” from his third collection, The Heart of K’unaksan, are prime examples of this. Lines such as, “So that one single person / can go in and out about once a year / they have set up this enormous doorway / slap in the middle / with a dozen men guarding it day and night,” make it obvious at whom the sharp blade of his criticism and keen intellect is aimed.

The tenor poems in Kim’s fourth book, Like Someone Fussing and Fretting (1988), may seem at first indifferent to the everyday affairs of the petit bourgeois and ordinary people; however, on the flip side, the poems hide a twist that lays bare the reality and truth of life. His is a resolute voice that declares his refusal to end up like so much plastic bought in bulk quantities only to be disposed of later.

S t a r t i n g w i t h h i s s i x t h b o ok , Wa te r wa y s (1994), Kim’s poetry begins to show an increased introspection about aging and death, and a sensitive reaction to social changes. The poem “A Suit with No Pockets” from his seventh book, Nothing of My Own, But Still… (1998), portrays death as a journey one sets

off on without any money and subtlely hints at his disapproval of extravagance and vanity, and the futility of idle ambition. He says, “But why are there so many pockets / for a journey where there’s no need to pay a fare?”

Kim’s eighth collection, When First We Met (2003), has the same sharp-edged introspection. He does not let go of his interest in the past and present, in nature and civilization, or in truth and the contradictory nature of a false society. However, a much stronger equanimity and generosity than what was present in his early poems permeate this criticism and reflection.

This change stems not only from the fact that he has grown older but also from an ease of life. What is especially notable in this collection is the increased number of prose poems. The descriptive techniques and monologues lend to a feeling of reading a well-knit short story while maintaining poetic tautness. This prosaic proximity has influenced the world of Korean poetry to such an extent that it has been labelled as a “Kim Kwang-Kyu style of poetics.”

Kim’s most recent collections, The Soft Touch of Time (2007) and One Day, Then Another (2011) feature love and compassion for the marginalized, the wounded, and the weak along with contemplations on the passage of time. Cheap cotton gloves warm the poet’s hands on a journey through Europe, but on his return to Korea get mixed in with odds and ends, eventually getting lost.

K i m K wa n g - Ky u h a s m ad e a s i g n i f i c a n t contribution to modern Korean poetry by making poetr y more accessible through his prosaic descriptions, monologues, and use of everyday language.

by Kim Jae-hong Literary Critic and Endowed Chair Baekseok University

Vol.28 Summer 2015

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Featured Writer Kim Kwang-Kyu

Cherishing the Language of Everyday Lives Poet Kim Kwang-Kyu has been active in the Korean poetry scene for the last 40 years. We visited the poet at his home to hear his views on poetry and everyday life, poetic language and translation, and Korean and world literature.

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

Ahn Seohyun: I’m excited to have this little tête-àtête with you in your own yard—this beautiful space where your touch and easy going nature can be felt in every nook and cranny. I’m looking forward to asking you a few questions and sharing a conversation with you about your life and poetry in this beautiful setting that perfectly matches the feelings evoked by your poetry.

You pioneered and established the category of “everyday poetry” in Korea. What significance does everyday life have in your poetic world? Even while dealing with the everyday world, your poetry doesn’t stop at middle-of-the-road descriptions. Instead it brings to life the tension between the everyday and philosophical thought through a fundamental introspection about language and existence. How do you maintain this balance?

Kim Kwang-Kyu: Everyday life holds a lot of hardship

10 _list : Books from Korea

and suffering. Whether it’s the tedious repetition of making a living every day or the effort and patience required to endure an impoverished existence day after day. This everyday is the foundation of life. A life in which you put down roots, suffer, and persevere cannot possibly be detached from the day-to-day.

Everydayness started appearing in Korean literature in the early 1960s after the emergence of the “4.19 Generation.”

I haven’t yet reached the stage where I can achieve a one-on-one balance between the everyday and philosophical thought. Everydayness is rooted in the concrete, while philosophical thought belongs to the abstract. Everydayness is inductive, while philosophical thought is deductive. When I write I always start from the reality and experiences of the concrete day-to-day.

I strive to maintain a balance between the concrete and the abstract but in reality I tend to tilt towards the everyday.

Interview

Ahn: On reading your poems, readers get clues about certain thoughts and realizations drawn from everyday life since it is central to your poetry. You mentioned the 4.19 Generation. Are we to understand that this pursuit of everydayness is connected to you being part of that generation?

Kim: That’s right. The rise of everydayness is an important clue, whether in poetry or prose. Take novels for example. The petit bourgeois started appearing in the novels of the post-4.19 Generation instead of the heroic protagonists that appeared in earlier generations. A similar transformation of the poetic ego can be seen in poetry. Examples of such everyday poetry can be seen in my fourth poetry collection, Like Someone Fussing and Fretting (1988) and my fifth collection, Aniries (1990).

Ahn: Indeed, everydayness or petit bourgeois-ness is a significant characteristic of the 4.19 Generation. All of a sudden, I’m curious about your day-to-day life.

Could you tell us about it through words instead of poetry? There has to be a certain distance between the everyday life of the poetic ego in your poetry and that of your true self.

Kim: I’ve been planting and nurturing each and every one of the trees here in this yard for the past fortyfive years that I’ve lived here. This definite routine of life must have served as the foundation of my poetic ego.

I’m the head of a household who has been in the teaching profession for more than thirty years. I think this career is the foundation of my true self.

Writing poetry and earning a living can be in conflict at times. On the other hand, there certainly is a gap between the poetic ego that appears in poetry—the poetic ego doesn’t necessarily appear as “I” but can take on plural forms like “he/she,” “we” or “them.”

Rather, in poetry, “I” or “We” is a typified figure that observes me, the true self from a distance.

Ahn: You’ve been a student of German literature your entire life and have also translated German literature into Korean, so, consciously or unconsciously, a dialogue between translation and creation must take place inside you. Even if you weren’t influenced by a particular writer for example, your consciousness must have been influenced in some way, say, by the German pursuit of civil society. With German literature as the big Other, you must have written poetry that was “needed in this place” or “possible only in this place.”

Kim: I majored in German literature and have spent a lifetime teaching it, so it would be a lie if I said it didn’t influence me. Don’t writers, painters, and singers study under the masters? Artists seek out great teachers and learn from them, become influenced by them, and respect them as they would their own parents. But I wasn’t able to do that. I simply kept writing what I observed, read, and thought on my own. I have taught myself literature, so to speak.

I’ve written close to 800 poems, and have translated nearly 300 German poems. I worked hard on those translations. To translate poetry properly, you need to transfer both sound and meaning. It’s easy to transfer the meaning if you read the poem accurately, but it’s hard to keep the sound and meter intact. There were instances where it took me a week to translate a single piece of poetry. German literature has a lot of depth, and it’s like a dense primeval forest too extensive to be fully explored. I’ve concentrated on and researched and translated the works of 19th and 20th century German writers, especially Heinrich Heine, Bertolt Brecht, and Günter Eich.

These three poets share a common trait in that they didn’t conform to reality. I was young at the time when I was first introduced to their works and took a liking to their poetry. The poems I translated from Heine’s Loreley were met with a great response in Korea. I even corrected many mistranslations that dated back to the Japanese colonial era. I translated Brecht’s Ich, der Überlebende in the mid-80s, but it was banned as soon

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Featured Writer Kim Kwang-Kyu

as it came out. That was a time when our country’s political situation caused us to feel ashamed to be alive. A poet friend of mine remarked that reading the translations was like reading poetry by Kim KwangKyu. It must be because I empathized with the original and then expressed it in my own poetic language.

Ahn: You’ve been marching to the beat of a different drum, making a difficult journey towards simple poetry. You’ve even coined rather profound and mysterious words, for example K’unaksan in “The Heart of K’unaksan,” that combine the sounds and unique sensitivity of the Korean language.

Ahn: Let’s talk about the subject of language. Your poetry generally doesn’t extend beyond the scope of “everyday language,” which is why readers find your poems accessible. What is your idea of an ideal relationship between poetry and the reader or between the poet and the reader? Do you keep the reader in mind while writing?

Kim: K’unaksan is a combination of the meaning and sound of Korean words that mean “big mountain,” “lofty mountain,” and “remote mountain.” There’s a sedentary bird in Korea called K’unak that belongs to the woodpecker family. It lives in the remote mountains. To wit, K’unaksan, or K’unak Mountain, is my name for a mountain where the trees grow thick, where the waters in the valley flow clear, where birds of all kinds chirp and tweet, and where the bear and fox live together. In fact, Prof. Kim Jae-hong’s Dictionary of Korean Poetic Words records K’unaksan as a word that appears in the poetry of Kim KwangKyu.

Kim: Poetry is a textual tapestry created by weaving together meanings and sounds that are the warp and woof of language. The poem’s meaning is transmitted to and received by the reader who identifies with it.

On the other hand, the poem’s sound resonates with the reader, for instance, through the meter. These effects can also make a difference in the life of a reader.

It allows you to access different aspects of life like a new discovery of hidden beauty, or melancholic or remorseful ruminations.

I don’t write for just a select few readers but for ordinary people who share everyday life with me. The yardstick by which I chose the language or expressions of my poems is to create a text that can be read by anyone and not just a specialist. Poetry by nature is an attempt to express the inexpressible, so when you do manage to express something the reader should be able to decipher it.

Ahn: Writing simply might in fact be the hardest thing to do. A lot of labor must go into writing this way.

Kim: Some people say my poetry is “easy,” but as far as the writing is concerned, it isn’t easy. For a single poem, I can easily go through twenty drafts. Depth is as important as readability. It also isn’t easy to come across readers who can delve into the poem’s core.

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Ahn: The place we are in now lies in the shadow of Inwangsan Mountain. This must be where “The Heart of K’unaksan” was born.

You’ve met lots of readers from all around the world. Can you tell us about any significant meetings or productive conversations you shared on such occasions?

Kim: My poems have been translated and published in ten languages. I’ve met with many different kinds of readers while attending book readings all over the world. The local media covered these events, and I was also featured in literary journals. The most important meeting place for a writer and his reader is the published book. When a work of fiction or poetry gets published, it leaves the writer’s hands and sets off on its own path. My first collection in English, Faint Shadows of Love, was published in London in 1991.

After the book was published, I had no way to tell where or by whom it was being read. A few years later, I received a message from someone in the US informing

Interview

me that one of the poems in the book, “The Birth of a Stone,” was going to be included in a collection of world lyric poetry. This meant that, without my knowing it, my book had crossed the Atlantic Ocean.

In 2001, Scott Foresman Reading used the poem in its textbooks in Illinois. In 2013, “The Land of Mists” was broadcast as part of Poetry Please, a literary show on BBC Radio. The German translation of this poem was broadcast on Cologne Radio and Prague Radio.

German translations of my poems, including “Evening Snow,” were displayed alongside German painter Hans-Christian Jenssen’s paintings in an exhibition in Zurich. They’re still displayed in Hotel Altstadt’s Writer’s Room. My poems have also been adapted as songs in Korea and Germany. Poetry has moved beyond the constraints of language and letters and is living in many different art forms in various countries. The meeting of the poet with his readers has moved beyond the pages of the book.

Ahn: These days, Korean literature, along with Hallyu or the Korean Wave, is coming into contact with people all around the world. As part of the original literary wave, what suggestions do you have for LTI Korea for the global promotion of Korean literature?

Kim: I wouldn’t say I’m part of the original wave.

Korean literature had already started advancing overseas a century ago. Korean literature started being actively translated and introduced into foreign markets in the 1990s. A few cultural foundations paved the way in the initial stages, and, after its establishment, LTI Korea started actively supporting Korean writers and fostering translators, which has been a great help. It is important that we continue introducing our valuable cultural heritage to the world by translating our literature into foreign languages. For that, it is essential to widen LTI Korea’s sphere of activity and to expand its budget considerably. Exchanges between writers can be another way to gain a foothold in another country’s literary circle.

A tombstone inscribed with the poem “Epitaph”

The poet with his wife Chong He Yong

Ahn: Is there anything you would like to say to today’s young generation or young poets?

Kim: A poet is someone who lives with language and who cherishes his or her mother tongue the most. We have to hold fast to our love for our mother tongue.

Language is facing destruction today. Advances in digital technology have given rise to textspeak, which is making intergenerational communication difficult with its absurd contractions and comic-book-style wordplays. People spit out crass slang and words that we wouldn’t have dared to even write, let alone utter, in the past and even use them freely in their literary works. We need to restrain ourselves from doing this if we love and cherish our native language. Literature is an art form that tries to convey something through the text, but literary works that are being published nowadays seem to have given up on conveying anything, and as a result do not communicate with the reader. We need to regain our powers of communication if general readers are to read and identify with our works and if our literature is to be translated into foreign languages.

by Ahn Seohyun Literary Critic

Vol.28 Summer 2015 13

Featured Writer Kim Kwang-Kyu

In Search of the Mountain I

’m a late bloomer whose poems first appeared in the summer issue of Literature and Intelligence in 1975. I was a professor of German literature in his mid-30s with two kids under my care at the time, so I’m not exaggerating when I call myself a late bloomer.

My debut work, Tht Last Dream to Drench Us, carries a poem titled “Spirit Mountain,” written on the subject of mountains. Three-quarters of Korea is mountainous.

Baesan-imsu, literally “a mountain in the back and a river in the front,” is the guiding principle behind all forms of settlement and dwelling here. Even the capital, Seoul, has a mountainous terrain, unlike most other capital cities that are located in flatlands.

Seochon, west of downtown Seoul, seat of the government for 600 years, is my hometown. I spent my childhood in Inwangsan Mountain’s shadow in a tileroofed house in Tongin-dong, west of Gyeongbokgung

14 _list : Books from Korea

Palace. I grew up looking at Inwangsan through the window behind my home’s daecheong hall. A sickly child, unable to scale the mountain myself, I’d simply gaze at it through that window. On days the mountain was shrouded in dense fog, I’d even feel anxious for no reason.

Unable to escape down south during the Korean War, I experienced bloodshed, terror, and starvation under the occupation of the North Korean People’s Army. In the last week of September, after the long, humid summer had passed, UN fighter jets secured air command and bombarded the North Korean anti-aircraft positions on the mountain. Just before Seoul was recaptured on September 28th, our home’s daecheong hall collapsed from the naval bombing during the amphibious assault on Incheon. The mountain that was the object of yearning in my childhood became the

Writer’s Insight

site of fratricide in my boyhood.

According to Pungsu-jiri, or Korean geomancy, this imposing stone mountain is U Baekho, the White Tiger flanking the guardian mountain on its right. I went to a high school located in the Gyeonghuigung Palace grounds at the southern foot of this mountain. I spent my college days at the foot of Naksan Mountain, the Jwa Cheongryong or the Blue Dragon flanking the guardian mountain on its left. Dashing down Bukhansan, you come to an abrupt stop at Bugaksan, where you see Naksan and Inwangsan stretched out on either side. There in Seoul’s bosom was where I spent my teenage years. From my early thirties, I’ve lived in Hongjecheon Stream’s basin at the foot of Ansan Mountain, behind Inwangsan. This means my life has revolved around Inwangsan for nearly all of the seventy years that I’ve lived north of the Han River in

the area called Gangbuk. It’s only natural that my first book should include a poem about mountains.

Apart from “Spirit Mountain,” I’ve composed several other poems about mountains, including “Mount Inwang,” “The Heart of K’unaksan,” and “High Mountain.” Unlike the popular trend of the time, I avoided deconstructing sentences and using abstruse metaphors, trying instead to delineate reality in straightforward, everyday language. Admittedly, it’s difficult to translate this into poetry. Even if the poem makes for an easy read, it’s hard to come up with a model answer type interpretation for it. In the case of “Spirit Mountain,” the mountain is real and then again it’s not, or maybe it’s both real and unreal. Despite its utterly ambiguous form and deliberately dry prosaic narrative, the reason this simple poem has caught the attention of readers everywhere is the multiplicity of

Vol.28 Summer 2015 15

Featured Writer Kim Kwang-Kyu

The poet with his wife Chong He Yong

its meanings. Dreams and life, ideals and reality, the self and the world, the natural and the artificial, the mysterious and the ordinary, literature and society— no matter what meaning you infer from the poem’s semantic web, the imagery evokes the original form of an achievable universal existence. The existence or nonexistence of this mountain, cherished by all yet invisible to the naked eye and unscalable even in hiking boots, is an oblique representation of my poetics. This mountain has its origins in Inwangsan but transforms into the imaginary K’unaksan in my later poems.

I usually write in my study on the second floor of my home. Outside my window, I can see the silver magnolia’s rich foliage and a little of Ansan’s peak.

Not long ago, I could see this southern offshoot of

16 _list : Books from Korea

Inwangsan in its entirety. Whenever I had a case of writer’s block back then, I’d read a book or use the computer till my eyes grew weary or I’d become lost in reminiscence and contemplation, but my eyes would always turn to the mountain in the end. Now, however, the layers after layers of skyscrapers that have sprouted up block my view. Only Ansan’s tip with its tall TV transmission tower sticks out. Arrays of apartment windows stare back at me, peeking right into my study.

At least I have the cover of the silver magnolia and my neighbor’s pine tree acting as a screen, but the mountain is lost to me forever.

Downtown Seoul has long lost its privileged access to the vistas of the four mountains: Inwangsan, Bukaksan, Naksan, and Namsan. Even in smaller

Writer’s Insight

“ Urbanization has turned us into a republic of apartments. [ . . . ] Not far in the future, people might even ask why this country has no mountains.”

towns, it has become difficult to get a good look at the local mountain. Mountains, rivers, and fields once visible in the distance while riding the train, bus, or car have disappeared behind apartment blocks and factories. Urbanization has turned us into a republic of apartments. It’s no wonder that foreigners who travel to Korea often ask why this country has nothing but high-rises. Not far in the future, people might even ask why this country has no mountains.

The days when you could see mountains in Korea no matter where you looked are long past.

Now we’re forced to go in search of a mountain. You jump into your car, pay an entrance fee, follow a designated mountain trail, and snap pictures with your smartphone. Technological advances have enabled us to produce almost anything, but 3-D printing has yet to replicate mountains. We have only one option—hike up the mountain and cherish the view. My poem “The Heart of K’unaksan” portrays exactly this situation: “Since I cannot be born again, / on days when my heart

grows grim / I leave my quiet house / and go away to the mountains. // On the day I return from Mountain K’unaksan, / now a nameless little hill, / in house and the village / I am reborn.”

Creative writing is often said to be the fruit of fabrication. Even a poem’s text isn’t comprised entirely of a direct confession made by the lyrical self. It’s possible to have fiction in poetry too. Fabrication here, doesn’t imply making up something entirely, rather it means that experiences of life and reality are weaved into the text. I can’t point straightaway at Inwangsan when a reader asks me about the location of K’unaksan.

Even a lowly hill can be a “Spirit Mountain,” if you’re taken back to your childhood every time you look at it and if the simple fact that it exists, quietly moves and comforts you. Wandering in search of this mountain is precisely what I do by writing poetry.

by Kim Kwang-Kyu Poet

Vol.28 Summer 2015 17

Featured Writer Kim Kwang-Kyu

Quotidian Life in Plain Truth K

im Kwang-Kyu’s poems are easy to read. His poems depict everyday stories through simple language. However, simplicity of language does not imply that Kim’s poems contain a common message.

Behind Kim’s unpretentious wording lies a twist of plot; within everyday language hides an allusive motif hinting at a higher meaning. Kim’s poems help us grasp aspects of life that we might have never considered or perceived before.

Kim takes note of the different facets of our everyday lives. He does not believe that life’s truth lies in some mysterious place detached from our ordinary lives. He seeks truth in the specificity of life without relying on ideological or metaphysical ideas. Because life is specific, the language he uses to express it is

18 _list : Books from Korea

specific as well. Seen from this perspective, Kim’s seemingly straightforward narratives are in fact part of a sophisticated strategy directed towards discovering the truth about life. He creates a narrative structure suited for his unique and meticulous observation of life’s specific situations. This is why all of his poems have a different narrative and structure despite being written plainly: he is a poet who changes his technique to fit the theme of each poem.

In “One Leaf,” for example, the first two and the last two stanzas have different implications. In the first two stanzas, Kim refers to his obliviousness, while, in the last two, he alludes to a newly realized truth. He arranges the stanzas this way so that his obliviousness in the beginning emphasizes the significance of the

Essay: About Kim Kwang-Kyu’s Poems

discovery that follows. From a reader’s perspective, the poem’s first half generates curiosity about the nature of the poet’s ignorance: a curiosity quenched by the discovery in the latter half. With this strategy, the poet shares the joy of discovery with the reader. Kim has arranged the stanzas in accordance with the desired psychological effect on the reader.

The title, “One Leaf,” refers to the poet’s discovery and encapsulates the poem’s theme. We are accustomed to admiring the beauty of the verdure or the splendor of maple leaves in their entirety. Typically, we think of a forest or a mountain as being responsible for the beauty of nature as a whole. However, when the poet sees a leaf dangling at the tip of a branch of a gaunt tree fall, he realizes that change in the forest is brought about by each individual change. Each individual sprouting leaf gives rise to a forest of green; each individual falling leaf lays bare the mountain.

The logic here is manifest, but we always look at the forest and mountain without being conscious of this connection. Only after reading this poem do we realize the importance of the individual.

This unique technique can be seen in “The Land of Mists” as well. At the start, Kim says that in a land always shrouded in mist, nothing ever happens because nothing can be seen. In reality, it is not that nothing happens, but rather that people think nothing happens because they cannot see anything happening.

Accustomed to not seeing, the people of that land do not try to see. Their eyes atrophy while their ears grow bigger like a rabbit’s. The poet uses this allegory to satirize how a society where information is controlled causes man’s powers of insight to become paralyzed, leaving room only for an unnatural fascination with rumors. The line, “People like rabbits / with ears of white mist / live in the land of mists” seems to simply present an image of gentle rabbits, but the allusion is to an abnormal loss of an essential function. If the poet himself were in this situation, the poem could be read as a satire criticizing an oppressive reality. If readers placed in a similar situation read this poem, they might go through a process of serious self-criticism and arrive at a reflective awakening leading to a drastic change in in their lives.

Readers who are aware that Kim lives in a divided land can comprehend the profound meaning behind the simple wording of “North South East West” and can understand his distinct viewpoint. The Korean peninsula is split into the North and the South, one people divided into two nations, which leads to conflict and strife. Naturally, unification is a major issue for him.

Kim observes nature and looks for clues on how to overcome division within the ecology of plants that are unhindered by borders or lines. Spring journeys from the South to the cold North, while winter journeys from the North to the warm South. This is a natural seasonal change in temperatures. In spring, flowers that bloom in the South rise and spread northward; in fall, leaves that become tinged with golden hues in the North drop and spread southward. The poet uses the terms weolbuk or “cross[ing] the border north” and weolnam or “cross[ing] the border south” to describe this movement, terms that both nations avoid. Seasons cycle through the North and South unhindered. Even blizzards pay no heed to where they fall—whether it is the north, south, east, or west. Nature is unified to this extent and yet ideology has splintered a nation in two.

We can surmise why Kim Kwang-Kyu leaves out ideology and looks for truth in everyday life. Ideologies detached from real life suppress humankind. Religious wars and ethnic strife are caused by man-made ideologies. Humanity needs to rid itself of ideology and seek the truth in quotidian life. It is the same reason why you remember an ordinary “airport near the beach” where you had a “brief unscheduled rest” far longer than some “famed scenic sights” highlighted on a map.

by Lee Soong-Won Literary Critic and Professor of Korean Literature Seoul Women’s University

Vol.28 Summer 2015 19

Featured Writer Kim Kwang-Kyu

One Leaf When the valley in K’unaksan Mountain was all buoyant with pale green, when the trees were thick with fresh leaves, I mean, I had no idea at all as I passed by.

A Journey to Seoul Kim Kwang-Kyu Translated by Brother Anthony of TaizĂŠ With an Introduction by Kim Young Moo Dap Gae, 2006, 243 pp.

ISBN 8975742067

When the road to the temple beyond was all ablaze with orange maples and leaves were falling in mounds in the breeze when the dead leaves were falling, I mean, I did not feel anything at all as I strolled by.

One day when the year was virtually over and occasional snowflakes fluttered down, one leaf dangling at the tip of a branch of a gaunt jujube tree suddenly fell, all alone.

Each of them had sprouted separately, lived through the summer clustered together then finally each had fallen separately and as they did so, each of those leaves was showing what it is to vanish.

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

20 _list : Books from Korea

Selected Poems

Song for Five Friends Rocks and trees formed a screen.

When we first shared love, we were concealed, not by closed steel doors or drawn curtains but by scattered stones and bamboo leaves.

When we lay holding our breath in the pine forest, what sheltered us from those tenacious pursuers was not grenades or machine guns but the deafening sound of a waterfall pouring down.

When we hastened southward with starving steps, all the time looking back at the seven stars of the Great Bear, what guided us through the darkness was not some iron-hard ideology but the faint moonlight.

Note

This poem is inspired by a famous lyric by the scholarpoet Yun Seon-do (1587–1671) that many generations of Korean schoolchildren have memorized. The old poem is a celebration of the beauty of nature in six four-line stanzas, showing the poet withdrawing from society. The present poem echoes the images of nature found in Yun’s poem but from a very different perspective, evoking the horrors of the Korean War.

Vol.28 Summer 2015 21

Featured Writer Kim Kwang-Kyu

Wisdom Tooth

The Depths of a Clam Kim Kwang-Kyu Translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé and Kim Young Moo White Pine Press, 2005, 159 pp.

ISBN 9781893996434

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

22 _list : Books from Korea

It’s a nuisance.

It ought to come out.

It will just go rotten and damage the molars.

A wisdom tooth should come out.

I don’t know why they grow at all, you can’t chew with them.

(A doctor’s words are always medically correct) But will taking it out really be the cure?

(Frightened patients are invariably pig-headed) I think I will not get rid of this wretched tooth though its aching keeps me awake at night.

It may be a bothersome wisdom tooth but who if not I will chew on and be capable of patiently enduring and treasuring this part of myself that gives me my share of pain?

Selected Poems

The Birth of a Stone I wonder if there are stones in those deep mountain ravines that no one has ever visited?

I went up the mountain in quest of a stone no one had ever seen from the remotest of times.

Under ancient pines on steep pathless slopes there was a stone.

I wonder how long this stone all thick with moss has been here?

Two thousand years? Two million? Two billion?

No. Not at all.

If really till now no one has ever seen this stone, it is only here from now on.

This stone was only born the moment I first saw it.

Vol.28 Summer 2015 23

Featured Writer Kim Kwang-Kyu

Spirit Mountain In my childhood village home there was a mysterious mountain. It was called Spirit Mountain. No one had ever climbed it.

By day, Spirit Mountain could not be seen.

With thick mist shrouding its lower half and clouds that covered what rose above, we could only guess dimly where it lay.

By night, too, Spirit Mountain could not be seen clearly.

In the moonlight and starlight of bright cloudless nights its dark form might be glimpsed, yet it was impossible to tell its shape or its height.

One day recently, seized with a sudden longing to see Spirit Mountain—it had never left my heart—I took an express bus back to my home village. Oddly enough, Spirit Mountain had utterly vanished and the unfamiliar village folk I questioned swore that there was no such mountain there.

24 _list : Books from Korea

Visit www.list.or.kr to watch a reading of this work by the author (with English subtitles).

Selected Poems

The Land of Mists In the land of mists, always shrouded in mist, nothing ever happens.

And if something happens nothing can be seen because of the mist.

For if you live in mist you get accustomed to mist so you do not try to see.

Therefore in the land of mists you should not try to see.

You have to hear things.

For if you do not hear you cannot live, so ears keep growing bigger.

People like rabbits with ears of white mist live in the land of mists.

Visit www.list.or.kr to watch a reading of this work by the author (with English subtitles).

Vol.28 Summer 2015 25

Featured Writer Kim Kwang-Kyu

North South East West

Birds Feeding

In spring a flood of tender green goes rising, spreading northward, northward.

Unhindered by barbed wire or military demarcation line it journeys north.

Rising over mountains crossing plains, azaleas and forsythias cross the border north.

In summer the cuckoo’s call, the croak of frogs, are just the same in every place.

In fall a flood of golden hues comes dropping spreading southward, southward.

Unhindered by demilitarized zone or lines forbidding access it journeys south.

Crossing rivers passing over valleys cosmos flowers and crimson leaves cross the border south.

In winter the taste of ice-cold pickle the taste of spicy morning soup are just the same in every place.

North South East West: making no distinction, covering everywhere alike in white, no one can keep back the snowstorm.

As the back door creaks open it’s as if the housewife had called them— birds fly whirring down and gobble remains of food in the garbage area beneath the paulownia.

The magpies like bits of mackerel, pigeons gobble the tops of bean-sprouts and sparrows glean grains of rice.

They don’t clamor boisterously don’t fight over the food.

As soon as a feeding session is over with a whoosh of their wings they fly up to perch on eaves or branches preening their feathers with their beaks or chatter together.

They do not peck at one another’s sore spots.

The birds consort together naturally and occasionally peep from outside the bird cage or rather, outside the window into the bird cage or rather, into our house.

Visit www.list.or.kr to watch a reading of this work by the author (with English subtitles).

26 _list : Books from Korea

Selected Poems

Their Insurgence

One Day, Then Another Kim Kwang-Kyu Translated by Cho Young-Shil White Pine Press, 2014, 106 pp.

ISBN 9781935210542

They attacked us like an occupation force, brutally killing innocent citizens.

They set public buildings and private homes aflame, plundered stores and temples, then invoked martial law.

But they didn’t last.

They fled, mere stragglers, as another army of rebels claiming to be liberators marched in.

They indulged in bloodshed, arson and plunder, too.

But they won’t last long either.

Rumors are rife that a new military group has been formed under the banner of the National Self-Defense Force...

We’ve decided to sit silently on the fence.

We’re not like any of them.

Airport Near the Beach

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

A quiet airport near the beach.

A small jet leaves for Paris four times a day.

Its silver wings soar above the sea in the bright Mediterranean sun, through lavender-scented and crystal-clear air.

The staff closes the customs office at eleven a.m. and steps out for lunch.

A few foreigners who missed their flights have been lounging in the lobby but now walk to the restaurant on the second floor where they’ll drink wine from Provence while waiting for the afternoon plane.

They may remember this brief unscheduled rest longer than they’ll remember some famed scenic sights.

Vol.28 Summer 2015 27

Featured Writer Kim Kwang-Kyu

Translated Works

English

Faint Shadows of Love Kim Kwang-Kyu Translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé Forest Books, 1991, 112 pp.

ISBN 9781856100007

Tiếng Việt

Em đă sống vì ai Kim Kwang-Kyu Translated by Lê Đăng Hoan Publishing House of the Vietnam Writers’ Association, 2013, 228 pp.

Deutsch

Die Tiefe der Muschel Kim Kwang-Kyu Translated by Chong He Yong and Matthias Göritz Pendragon, 1999, 120 pp.

ISBN 9783929096637

Español

Tenues sombras del viejo amor Kim Kwang-Kyu Translated by Juana Burghardt, Lee Seong Hun, and Tobías Burghardt Verbum, 2005, 138 pp.

ISBN 9788479623418

28 _list : Books from Korea

Deutsch

Botschaften vom grünen Planeten Kim Kwang-Kyu Translated by Chong He Yong and Birgit Mersmann Edited by Heinz Ludwig Arnold Wallstein Verlag, 2010, 96 pp.

ISBN 9783835307476

Translated Works

日本語

金光圭詩集 Kim Kwang-Kyu Translated by Yun Sang-In and Morita Susumu Doyō Bijutsusha, 2004, 94 pp.

ISBN 9784812014288

中文

模糊的旧爱之影 Kim Kwang-Kyu Translated by Jin He Zhe Qunzhong Publishing House, 2007, 191 pp.

ISBN 9787501439430

Čeština

Země mlh Kim Kwang-Kyu Translated by Ivana M. Gruberová DharmaGaia, 2012, 140 pp.

ISBN 9788074360220

Français

La douce main du temps Kim Kwang-Kyu Translated by Cathy Rapin and Im Hye-gyŏng L’Amandier, 2013, 261 pp.

ISBN 9782355162220

‫ةيبرعلا‬

‫لويس ىلإ ةلحر‬

Kim Kwang-Kyu Translated by Cho Hee Sun and Mahmoud Ahmed Abd Elghaffar Kalema, 2013, 246 pp.

ISBN 9789775322227

Vol.28 Summer 2015 29

1950

Special Section 70 Years of Independence and Division: The Flow of Korean Literature Through the Eras

70 Years of Independence and Division:

The Flow of Korean Literature Through the Eras

1960

Editor's Note

This issue’s Special Section commemorates seventy years of independence and division on the Korean peninsula. We have sorted post-independence Korean literature into the following categories: Postwar and Division Literature; Literature from Industrialization and Democratization to the 1980s; and Post-industrial Literature after the 1990s.

1970

1980 Postwar and Division Literature 34

From the Maelstrom of the Korean War

Literature from Industrialization and Democratization to the 1980s 36

Literature Takes Up the Fight for Freedom and Equality Excerpt: “The Road to Sampo”

38

Post-industrial Literature after the 1990s 40

Towards Rupturing the Symbolic Order Excerpt: I Have the Right to Destroy Myself

42 44

Modern Existence and the Investigation of Sexuality

46

30 _list : Books from Korea

Excerpt: “The Goat Herding Woman”

1990 Images provided by the National Institute of Korean History, the University of Seoul Museum, and the Hankook-ilbo

Overview

Division, Industrialization and Democratization In modern Korean history, 1945 marks liberation from Japanese occupation and division of the country into North and South, thus beginning the “era of division” which casts a shadow over the lives of Koreans to this day. In other words, liberation and division came at the same time, and both were carried out by outside forces. The tragic circumstances of the latter are still ongoing and thus there is no refuting the fact that all Korean literature from 1945 onwards can be called “division era literature.”

Of course, such circumstances, while external to literature, have a major impact within the literary world, and while this year marks a full seven decades since division, in one way or another Korean literature is still burdened with the weight of the wounds inflicted by partition. There are many examples of poets and novelists who, within this difficult historical and social environment, have taken these conditions as subject matter and created incredible works of literature; and indeed this phenomena can be found not only in the literature of Korea but in writing originating from a great many countries. An old Eastern expression conveys this in “the misfortunes of the nation enrich the poet’s art.”

While this expression merely implies respect for the artistic achievement of such literature, the lives of the people from which these works derive cannot have been happy. This becomes even clearer if we consider the following terms used to refer to each stage of Korean literature from 1945 onwards. Literature from the period beginning with liberation to the start of the Korean War in 1950 is “space of liberation literature,” literature from 1950 to the armistice of 1953 is “wartime literature,” and writing from the armistice to the end of the 1950s is “post-war literature.” The ideological opposition between South and North that began during the “space of liberation literature” remained consistent throughout the war and post-war periods.

To be sure, in post-war literature there are many works that were engrossed in the need to depict the immediate task of their characters as one of survival, and to portray the defeat and defiance of the masses in the context of the social reality of confusion and devastation. However, it cannot be denied that such descriptions and depictions of the cruel realities of the day mirrored those that recounted

the turbulent times of the division era. On top of this, the severing of north and south along the border meant that citizens could no longer go back and forth, creating a new realm of literature by writers who had fled the North and settled in the South.

As a leading writer of division literature, Hwang Sun-Won depicted his own experiences with North Korean society and post-war South Korea in his novel The Descendants of Cain. In addition, his Trees on a Slope presents the lives of young people trying to deal with the war and cope in the destruction of its aftermath. Writers who presented the immense suffering of the late 1950s in particularly sharp detail include Son Chang-sop and Chang Yong-hak, while writers such as Choi In-hun and Lee Ho-cheol presented the same subject matter anew in the context of the relationship between North and South. At the same time, among the female writers who described such circumstances with a heightened sensitivity, Choe ChungHui and Pak Kyongni have come to be seen as the leading lights of the era.

Beginning in the 1960s the flow of literature became much more complex as conditions in Korean society gradually began to stabilize. From this time to the present day, ways of referring to Korean literature continue to emerge such as “divided literature,” “literature of separation,” “industrialization era literature,” and “literature longing for a unified age.” In particular, the creative and thematic angles taken in Korean literary works from 1960 onwards have at their core issues relating to division and industrialization.

As the generation that lived through the war as children grew up and began writing, many of their works revived memories of their desolate childhoods, and, as mentioned above, though these writers lived difficult lives, their creative endeavors were endowed with the weight and intricacy of lived experience. The poets and novelists who took on these themes and who thrived in the 1970s can still be considered to make up the mainstream of Korean literature to this day. The novels of Kim Won-il, Jeon Sangguk, Han Sung-won, and Yi Mun-yol are examples of this.

However, Korean society ushered in a new era following the influence of the 4.19 Revolution in 1960 when students became the driving force in the fight against the despotic rule and ballot-rigging of the Rhee Syngman regime,

Vol.28 Summer 2015 31

Special Section 70 Years of Independence and Division: The Flow of Korean Literature Through the Eras

and the May 16th military coup that followed quick on the revolution’s heels (as well as the era of economic development and industrialization these events gave rise to). Of course, literature followed suit, and works were produced which displayed a diverse social consciousness.

Works dealing with popular resistance and the longing for political democracy as well as workers’ awakening to the irrationality of industrialization began to float to the surface and occupy an important position in the literary scene.

Out of the parched and desolate literature of the early 1960s a new literary world opened up with writers like Kim Seungok and his short story “Journey to Mujin,” which tried to rediscover a lyrical sensibility, and Yi Chong-Jun’s “The Wounded” which replaced the interrelation between the self and reality with a single pathological phenomenon.

Works that addressed the social issues of the time in a more direct way include Hwang Sok-yong’s “Strange Land,” Yun Heunggil’s “The Man Who Was Left as Nine Pairs of Shoes,” and Cho Se-Hui’s “The Dwarf.”

In addition, works that displayed a critical stance towards the devastation of rural villages include Song Kisook’s Elegy for Jaratgol and Lee Mun Ku’s Gwanchon Essays. It is also important to note the literary works that focused on the pathological sensation of the city that arose as an unavoidable side effect of intensified industrialization.

The writings of Choi Ilnam, Park Wansuh, and Choi Inho are representative examples of this. The aftermath of economic development, which reached into every corner of the countryside and cities, can be found in contemporary literature as well, represented in even more in-depth and multifaceted ways.

Up to this point, most explanation has focused on novels, as stories are more straightforward when it comes to identifying the interrelation between social and literary history through narrative. In truth, this is not a proper standpoint from which to discuss literature. In Korean literature, there is such a wealth of superior quality poetry that it would be a grave injustice to skip over the genre. In a format such as this, however, it is difficult to handle such a vast corpus with the care that it deserves, so the discussion that follows is limited to a handful of poets representative of their eras.

In response to the downtrodden mood of the 1960s,

32 _list : Books from Korea

there were many poets that strove to overcome the doubt and despair of the times. Poets such as Kim Soo-young with “Blue Sky” and Shin Dongyup in his collection, Asanyeo, expressed the spirit of the age through verse. The history of poetry from 1970 onwards by far and away begins with the voice of popular resistance that arose from Kim Jiha’s “Five Bandits.” In this poem, Kim took a stand against the Park Chung-hee regime, calling the main culprits of the widespread corruption of the time the “five bandits” mercilessly lampooning their shameful conduct. As a result, he was imprisoned, but he stood his ground and became a legendary figure among the poets of the day as well as for later generations. In addition, Farmer's Dance by Shin Kyeong-nim, and National Territory by Cho Taeil share the same legacy.

Post-Industrialism and New Forms of Literature In literature as well as society, the 1980s were characterized by the unstoppable force of the issues that emerged following the 1980 Gwangju Democratization Movement, which exterted a powerful and lasting influence. Both poetry and novels could not help but be colored with the concept of “literature as a social movement” and this gave rise to the urgent feeling that literature had to fight against the military regime in power. This overwhelming current continued unabated until the late 1980s when the military regime was replaced by a civilian government and the political maelstrom began to calm.

Following these tumultuous years, Korean literature of the 1990s began to show very different literary sensibilities and techniques than in preceding eras. Not only had political and social conditions changed greatly within Korea itself, but internationally, the fall of the Eastern-bloc and the air of reconciliation brought about by the easing of Cold War tensions also exerted a significant influence on relations between North and South Korea. As literature is inevitably interlinked with such changes in the times and in society, a corresponding shift appears in the writing of the time.

Poets and novelists were free to elevate their own diversity and pluralism without repression or restrictions and make important statements about society, while changes in social conditions and the transition from print media and analog culture to digital media and image culture gave rise to a literary environment completely different

Overview

from that of the past. The emergence of the symptoms of post-industrialism in Korean literature also came about within this context.

The writer who really led the way in terms of literary change is Kim Young-ha, the author of I Have the Right to Destroy Myself. While clearly getting a kick out of storytelling, he has taken a keen interest in displaying various aspects of social change in Korea, while also representing a transformation in Korean literature towards an expanded awareness of other countries beyond the peninsula. Park Min-gyu, on the other hand, is another writer who has manifested the shift from traditional ways of life to the digital era in a whole host of incarnations. Lee Kiho has plied readers with in-depth depictions of everyday life in post-modern society through his novels. And yet, the writers mentioned thus far cannot be said to represent Korean literature in its entirety. In discussing the overall unfolding of Korean literature in the seventy years since division, I have merely referred to works and authors that demonstrate the nature of the changing times.

The changes in Korean literature have not only derived from within, but also from without, as external forces realigned the geopolitical landscape, affecting relations between the North and the South. While there are literary works which look towards a united future for the Korean people, they show that in reality the ideological opposition between North and South is not as clear-cut as once imagined. Works have emerged that display a transformation in the perspective, subject material, and themes of South Korean literature that touch on North Korea. In addition, the works of writers who have resettled in South Korea after defecting from the North in recent years are now as numerous and noteworthy as to afford their own genre, referred to as “defector literature.”

One of the ways in which people refer to Korean literature after 1990 is as “the era of women’s literature.”

When female voices come to narrate works of fiction, the reader discovers new ways of seeing the world, which may represent a more fluid or more meticulous approach to literary creativity. At the same time, as many in the literary establishment have felt remorse and done much soul searching regarding the status of women, unbridled depictions of Korea's stifling patriarchy and explorations of female sexuality—which had until then been very much

taboo—were taking the literary world by storm. Writers such as Shin Kyung-sook, Eun Heekyung, Kim Hyoung Kyoung, Kim Insuk, Lee Hye-gyeong, and Seo Hajin are some of the key writers who pioneered this era. Readers eagerly embraced the works of these writers.

Writers such as Jon Kyongnin, Han Kang, Yoon Sunghee, Chun Woon-young, Jo Kyung Ran, Ha Seongnan, and Pyun Hye-Young, to name a prominent few, joined the ranks of this central force. What readers discovered in the works of these female authors was not just a break with the literature of the past, but completely new conditions of awareness that developed in nuanced ways and directions leading to an incredible flourishing of Korean literature.

The general historical and social flow of Korean literature since division outlined above also represents the social conditions and turbulence of life on the peninsula over the past seventy years. Compared to the histories of many other countries, there have been many arduous and difficult periods in the history of Korea. Therefore in the representations of history in literature there are many painful and forlorn passages. After Korean society became more stable, there was a boom in literature from a pluralistic perspective. As the conditions for the formation of Korean literature have been based on events in world history, and as Korea has stood as a pivotal balancing point for power and conflict in the region, it is important to pay close attention to the interrelation between Korean literature and the lives of Koreans.

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

Vol.28 Summer 2015 33

Special Section 70 Years of Independence and Division: The Flow of Korean Literature Through the Eras

Postwar and Division Literature

From the Maelstrom of the Korean War

P

ostwar literature” is both a concept and a category used in literary histories of modern Korean literature. Following the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the term became prominent and now is commonly used to refer to literature written in the period between the armistice of July 27th, 1953 and the 4.19 Revolution of 1960. However, the concept of postwar literature occupies a very unclear position in contemporary Korean discourse. Many writers, including Son Chang-sop, Chang Yong-hak, and Pak Kyongni, are labeled as postwar writers, but in fact when works by such writers are mentioned, those written up to the mid-1960s are often referred to as postwar fiction. Therefore, before discussing postwar literature it is necessary to clear up this temporal uncertainty.

First and foremost, we must consider that while the war began on June 25th, 1950 and raged on until the armistice agreement was signed in 1953, the hostilities and the tensions of the system that followed are yet to be resolved. Korea remains a divided country owing to the perpetuity of the system that became established following the war. Postwar literature can be seen as the literary superstructure spanning this long and ongoing era. Therefore I propose to name the literature of the period up to the mid-60s that I will discuss as “first-phase postwar literature.”

Yet there is one more important provision to keep in mind before discussing Korean postwar literature: it is the fact that, in Korea, “postwar” has a dual and overlapping nature. Korea gained independence from Japan on August 15th, 1945. The independence of

“

34 _list : Books from Korea

Korea was a direct outcome of World War II, meaning that the historical events following liberation were already set in motion through the postwar structures put in place after the Second World War. Hence, “postwar,” which refers to literature after the Korean War, overlaps with a previous “postwar” concept originating with the Second World War. It can be said that these two postwar periods coexist even today.

On the other hand, another element to consider when discussing the postwar literature of Korea is the literature of those who journeyed south as refugees.

This “northern refugee literature” group refers to the works written by writers who fled southwards in the period between liberation and the fortification of the border along the 38th parallel. I suggest that a better way to refer to these writers is as “writers who lost their hometowns.” With such a concept, we can group together writers with different psychological and ideological characteristics in order to distinguish them from those who had their familial roots in the South.

In the eight years between liberation in 1945 and the end of the Korean War in 1953, young writers who had grown up in the South secured hegemony in the Korean literary scene. The writer Kim Tongni, critic Jo Yeon-hyeon, and poet Seo Jeongju—as well as the poets of the Cheongnokpa group such as Jo Ji-hun, Pak Mog-Weol, and Pak Tu-Jin—were seen as the leading lights of Korean literature. When the Korean peninsula was divided following liberation and many literary figures were espousing socialist ideology, these writers adhered to their belief in the inherent value of literature, especially in the face of

Postwar and Division Literature

totalitarianism. This became the rallying point for their justification of the importance and value of literature for literature’s sake.

In contrast to this group, poets, writers, and critics who had come down from the North had to continue onwards in a state of unsettled uncertainty regarding their everyday lives and their place in the literary community. Although they came south to escape the political system forming in the North, they could not help but be engulfed by the reality of deep disharmony in the South due to economic lack and decay, political dictatorship, cultural upheaval, and corruption. These writers who had lost their hometowns had to forge a new path for themselves through their literature, which we can classify into three basic forms of discourse: the return to one’s hometown, acclimatization to new surroundings, and the search for another idealized homeland. Sometimes each of these discourses can be found in the work of a single writer, or even a single novel, while in other cases we can identify writers who have pursued a single theme.

The literary critic who was most visibly active during this postwar period was Lee O Young. Lee was critical of the drive to rediscover and reinstate a “people’s” minjung tradition and the sublimation of postwar reality in through “pure literature” as espoused by Kim Tong-ni and Seo Jeongju. Lee called instead for the creation of literature that resisted reality, a new literature in opposition to the literary hegemony of the clique that had been active since before liberation. For him, this resistance implied the task of mediating between the exclusive focus on the identity of the outgoing era, the new age which had already begun, and the necessity of engaging with contemporary world literature.

The death and violence caused by war, the ruin left in its wake, the uprooted people and moral upheaval it created—as well as the global scale of the conflict that led to the opening up of Korean society—make the “first-phase postwar literature” completely different from the literature that came before and after.

The first example of such work is by Hwang SunWon. Through novels such as The Descendants of Cain,

Trees on a Slope, and Human Graft, Hwang depicts the destructive influence of ideological conflict and war on the lives of young people in particular, while trying to find ways to overcome adversity. In addition, Chang Yong-hak and Son Chang-sop are often referred to as having created the most typical examples of postwar literature. Using allegory, Chang Yong-hak’s novel Legend of the Circle frames the division of North and South, ideological opposition, and the Korean War in the context of world history. Whereas Son Changsop, through his beautifully structured series of short stories including “Surplus Mortal” and “Rainy Day,” makes a cutting critique of the pathological conditions characteristic of the war and postwar periods.

Choi In-hun and Lee Ho-cheol are writers who provide the last instances of first-phase postwar literature. In Choi In-hun’s The Square, by following the protagonists’ path in life—having traveled from the South to the North and then having chosen to be taken to a third country—the novel combines the unique awareness of a writer who fled south leaving his hometown with an uncompromisingly realistic attitude. By contrast, in Lee Ho-cheol’s Petit Bourgeoisie, by presenting the experiences and choices of a youngster who has fled south and is living in the temporary capital Busan, the novel seeks to trace the process of the new establishment of postwar society.

Many of the most prominent postwar works of literature were written by female authors. Among them, Pak Kyongni’s Market and Battlefield and Choe Chung-Hui’s Endless Romance are controversial works that depicted the violence inflicted on women during the war in intricate detail. In addition, short stories such as “Zelkova Sapling” by Kang Shin-Jae, “The Precipice of Myth” by Han Malsook, and “Standing Statue” by Sohn Jang-Soon, all convey the subtlety of the moral awareness of the so-called après girl.

by Bang Min-Ho Literary Critic and Professor of Korean Literature Seoul National University

Vol.28 Summer 2015 35

Special Section 70 Years of Independence and Division: The Flow of Korean Literature Through the Eras

Literature from Industrialization and Democratization to the 1980s

Literature Takes Up the Fight for Freedom and Equality The 1960s: Aftermath of a Revolution Denied Korean literature of the 1960s can be summed up in the themes of “aftermath of the 4.19 Revolution” and “introspective fighting back.” The popular revolution that came to a head on April 19th, 1960 was the result of a stirring from a society that was trapped in a victim mentality following the postwar years of the 1950s.

People were awakening to freedom and democracy, criticizing the excessive powers of those in control, and seeking historical recognition of the development of the nation. However, the aspirations of the 4.19 Revolution were trashed by a military coup which took place on May 16th the very next year. In the wake of the coup, the failed aspirations of the 4.19 Revolution were internalized and came to play out as a literary fight back.

First, as an existential search within the context of despair over the 4.19 Revolution, Kim Seungok’s “Journey to Mujin” (1964) used the theme of the prodigal son to portray the protagonist’s efforts to relieve himself of a string of past memories and embarrassments, but in the end fails to escape from the reality of experience. Rather than providing a path out of the maze of conscience, the protagonist’s hometown of Mujin traps him again in the rhythms of everyday life. As a space where things defy any set order, Mujin is inseparable from the symbolic fog it is known for, emphasizing the absence of hope in 1960s Korea.

In this same vein, using intelligent and ideologically aware lang uage, Yi C hong- Jun conveyed his observations and reflections on the bleak realities of the time in works such as “The Wounded” (1967). Here, Yi described the deep-rooted collective psychic scarring

36 _list : Books from Korea

that lingers long after the psychological experiences of war.

Secondly, the so-called division literature of the 1960s reflects the ways in which awareness of national division and its consequences grew in the moments of freedom opened out by the 4.19 Revolution. Writers went beyond the trends of unconditionally anticommunist or anti-war polemics and instead examined the causes from a more balanced perspective, searching for ways to overcome the rift. Choi In-hun pioneered this category of literature with The Square (1960), in which he called for more objective soul-searching with regard to the ruling ideologies of both North and South. Similarly in Lee Ho-cheol’s Panmunjeom (1961), the emptiness of the structures of oppression in both North and South are put into harsh perspective.

Whereas Pak Kyongni took a slightly different approach in Market and Battlefield (1964), taking a step back and using the examples, respectively, of a socialist, a staunch nationalist, and an opportunist to explore the way ideologies affected the lives of individuals.

Turning to poetry, Kim Soo-young and Shin D o n g y u p a re t w o m a j o r f i g u re s k n o w n fo r compositions that perfectly captured and gave form to the spirit of the 1960s. As the revolutionary awareness of the 4.19 Revolution crouched beneath the new military government, poems by Kim Soo-young such as “The Joke of Star Country,” “Blue Sky,” and “Grass,” captured the deeply felt skepticism and despair of the era with biting observations and satire aimed as Kim's own strata of society, the petit bourgeoise. Taking a very different approach, Shin Dongyup sang about how traditional values, including Eastern learning,

Literature from Industrialization and Democratization to the 1980s

could be the basis for recovering a communal way of life in his poetry collections Asanyeo (1963) and Geum River (1969).

The 1970s: Industrialization and Equality In the 1970s, Korean society underwent a variety of drastic changes in line with the rapid unfolding of industrialization. While material economic growth was achieved under the forceful hand of the government, modern industrialization was dependent on rockbottom wages, export-driven production, and a focus on heavy industries; thus the growth of the economy brought with it the alienation of rural villages, an extreme urban-rural development gap, an unequal distribution of wealth, and the dehumanization of laborers, as well as the devastation of the environment and serious pollution issues. Hence, there was a heavy focus in Korean literature of the 1970s on criticizing these problems of industrialization and the search for ways to overcome them.

The first trend to note in literature from the 1970s is the emergence of class conflict and workers’ issues as subject matter. In Hwang Sok-yong’s “Strange Land” (1971), we get a detailed account of wage exploitation and the conditions suffered by construction workers following a strike. In “The Road to Sampo” (1973), Hwang examines the lives of wandering laborers and the emotional discord caused by the dismantling of fishing and farming villages. Continuing along this line in “The Man Who Was Left as Nine Pairs of Shoes” (1977) by Yun Heunggil, we can see the conditions of the urban poor who were first rural farmers, then were uprooted and became itinerant laborers before finally settling in the city slums. In “The Dwarf” (1976), with her characteristically exquisite prose, Cho SeHui tackles the realities faced by laborers and the conditions of labor-management issues brought about as industrial social structures became engrained.

The second theme is the increased critical awareness of rural devastation. In this category of literature, the main focus is the break-up of rural villages as a consequence of the urban-focused policies of the 1970s. Han Sung-won's "In the Heart of the Mountains" (1976) deals mainly with the folksy

sensibilities and vitality of the fast disappearing farming villages. In Song Kisook’s “Elegy for Jaratgol” (1977) we are shown the awakening and adaptation of rural villagers to the structural inconsistencies and pressures of society. In Lee Mun Ku’s works such as “Dream of Lingering Sorrow” (1970), “The Ballad of Kalmori” (1978), and “Our Neighborhood” (1978), the devastation of rural villages and the abnormal ballooning of the urban labor force are brought to light by the use of rustic language and rural sentiment.

The third trend can be categorized as the description of the pathological conditions of city life brought about by industrialization. The rapid spread of industrialization brought about the extreme side effects of human alienation, boundless materialism, and moral unrest. Through Choi Ilnam’s “Seoulites” (1975), the social conditions of class alienation and the loss of basic humanity are described with razor sharp accuracy. “Staggering Afternoon” (1978) and “Year of Famine in the City” (1979) by Park Wansuh brought to the forefront the negative realities of city life, thus emphasizing the importance of living humanely.

Poetry from the 1970s, on the other hand, pursued an aesthetic through the return of inherently Korean lyrical forms and styles. Adopting the narrative pansori style for his “Five Bandits,” Kim Ji-ha created a cutting satire of the structure of oppression instituted by the ruling government and the decadent corruption of that era. Farmer's Dance (1971) by Shin Kyeongnim meanwhile presented a realistic depiction of the conditions in which the lives of farmers were played out, having been alienated from the process of industrialization. In National Territory (1975), Cho Taeil used the “Series novel” form to create an honest portrayal of the history of the divided lives of the Korean people.

by Hong Yong Hee Literary Critic and Professor of Media, Literary Creative Writing Kyunghee Cyber University

Vol.28 Summer 2015 37

Special Section 70 Years of Independence and Division: The Flow of Korean Literature Through the Eras

Short Story

“The Road to Sampo”

Hwang Sok-yong Translated by Kim U-Chang Asia Publishers, 2012, 118 pp.

ISBN 9788994006260

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

38 _list : Books from Korea

W

ell, I must be on my way.” The man didn’t even look back as he walked away towards the bank of the stream. He climbed onto the bank, changed his sack to the other shoulder and started down the other side. He disappeared over the bank, first the lower part of his body and eventually the tip of his dog-fur hat. Yŏng-dal stood at a loss for a while, unable to decide upon a particular direction or road to take. What he needed was a fellow traveller.

It would be better, even if the company lasted just for a little while—just somebody to talk to, while he was on the road. Coming out of his bemusement, Yŏng-dal hurriedly followed the man who had just disappeared beyond the river bank. As he reached the top of the bank, he could see the man in the dog-fur hat walking very fast in the distance. He was already entering the path leading to the roadway lined with two symmetrical columns of poplars, looking like bamboo brooms standing upside down. As he ran down the bank, Yŏng-dal called out, “Hey, you there!”

The man in the dog-fur hat paused a moment and turned around, but then kept on walking, Yŏng-dal ran after him. When he caught up with him, he said, gasping for breath, “Let’s go together. I’m going in the same direction as you are, at least up to Wŏlchul.”

The man did not answer.

“Damn it. I never saw a winter like this,” Yŏng-dal spoke again to the back of the other man’s head. “It was good last winter. We had a room, there thousand won a month, me and the barmaid with whom I lived.

This winter is terrible. Frozen stiff, that’s what I may become any moment now.”

“Well, one gets used to that sort of thing,” said the other man. “Do you have any idea how far Sampo is? At least several hundred li, that is, to the sea coast, and then we have to take a boat.”

“How long has it been since you left Sampo?” asked Yŏng-dal.

“Over ten years,” answered the other man, and he continued, “There won’t be anybody who will recognize me there.”

“Why do you want to go back then?” asked Yŏng-dal.

“For no particular reason,” said the other man. “As I’m getting old, I just feel like visiting it.” “

Excerpt The 1960s and 70s

Excerpt Literature from Industrialization and Democratization to the 1980s

70 Years of Independence and Division:

The Flow of Korean Literature Through the Eras The two men turned onto the roadway. It was easier to walk on the street, as the road was covered with gravel and clay. Yŏng-dal kept his hands in his pockets. He constantly worked them to keep them warm as best as he could. “So damned cold! If only there was no wind,” he said.

The man in the dog-fur hat did not seem to feel as cold as Yŏng-dal did. It was true that he was heavily dressed with a fur hat and a field jacket, but he also looked unusually healthy and robust. He spoke to Yŏng-dal, showing some warmth for the first time: “Did you eat anything for breakfast?”

“No,” Yŏng-dal smiled shame-facedly. “I could barely make my escape in the dark.”

“I haven’t eaten yet myself,” said the other man, “But we’ll have to wait at least until we get to Chansaem. I should have left earlier this morning. I’m now getting to the age when one doesn’t like moving in winter.”

“I didn’t introduce myself. My name is No Yŏngdal,” said Yŏng-dal.

“I am Chŏng.” The other man gave him his family name.

“I know how to work machinery. Once I get a job, I’ll have nothing to worry about him,” said Yŏngdal to let Chŏng know that he had no intention of sucking around.

“I know,” said Chŏng. “Didn’t you work with the rock-drill? As for me, I can do carpentry, welding, and cobbling.”

“Wow, having all those skills, you must feel very secure,” Yŏng-dal said admiringly.

“I’ve been doing them for more than ten years,” said Chŏng.

“Where did you learn them?” asked Yŏng-dal.

“There’s a very nice place where they teach you all those skills,” answered the other man.

“I wish I could go there,” said Yŏng-dal naively.

But Chŏng said with a bitter smile, shaking his head: “It’s easy to go there, but I’m not sure you would really want to go. It is a very big place—only too big.”

“Too big?” Yŏng-dal stopped in the middle of his sentence and looked at Chŏng’s face. Chŏng was

walking steadily in silence, with his face lowered a bit. The uphill road became a downhill road. Below them, they could see the road winding along a stream and distant fields. The winter fields lay bleak with hardly a farmer’s hut as far as the eye could see. The dry rushes swayed in tangled confusion and the wind whirled up sands on the other side of the stream. “The village of Chansaem lies over that mountain there,” said Chŏng. “We had better cut across the stream if we want to make better time.”

“Do you think it is frozen solid enough?” asked Yŏng-dal.

The stream was, in fact, frozen very solid. The ice was rough and not slippery, the water having frozen over several times after repeated freezing and melting. The wind picked up loose bits of ice and slapped the two men hard in the face.

“Perhaps we should have waited for the bus by the bridge,” gasped Yŏng-dal, out of breath from walking too fast. “ The buses are never on time,” said Chŏng.

“Besides, we must watch where our money goes. Even when you haven’t eaten, it feels good and secure to have money on you.”

“You’re right,” agreed Yŏng-dal.

“At Wŏlchul we can take a southbound train,” said Chŏng. “Are you going south or what?”

“I had better wait and see,” Yŏng-dal hesitated.

“Which way is Sampo?”

“South, that is, as far south as you can go,” said Chŏng, vaguely pointing his chin to the south.

“How big a place is that? Are there many people living there?” asked Yŏng-dal.

“Ten houses or so,” explained Chŏng. “It’s a pretty island, Sampo is. The soil is good, lots of land. Fishing is good, too. You can catch as much fish as you want.”

“If it’s as good as you say, why not pitch our tents there and call it home?” said Yŏng-dal, skating over the ice on the road.

“Why not, indeed?” said Chŏng. “But not you.”

“Why not?” Yŏng-dal looked up.

“Because you’re not a native.” pp. 19 - 29

Vol.28 Vol.28 Summer 2015 39

Special Section 70 Years of Independence and Division: The Flow of Korean Literature Through the Eras

Post-industrial Literature after the 1990s

Towards Rupturing the Symbolic Order Korean Fiction After the Mid-90s Korean literature underwent significant change in the mid-1990s. With the cessation of the Cold War, which had sharply polarized the world after the Second World War, South Korean society was freed from the anxiety of being stuck in a quasi-state of war.

Moreover, the South was formally released from a “state of exception,” as postulated by Giorgio Agamben, in which a state power can arbitrarily suspend the rule of law. With the transition from analog to digital, Korean society also underwent a great upheaval. In sum, post mid-1990s, Korean literature moved on from the issue of national division that had preoccupied it for such a long time and started confronting the problems of being a post-industrial society.

Yet, the epistemic topography of literature does not change simply due to changes in the times. Someone has to bring about that change. Kim Young-ha was this agent of change in post mid-90s literature. In his debut novel, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, Kim presents a so-called “suicide advisor” as his narrator.

The narrator contends that in this (post)modern age in which only a life controlled by the big Other is possible, the only autonomous action that humans can take is voluntary death. Kim’s narrator assists in the suicide of those who lack the courage to take their own lives.

His shocking, contradictory protagonist signals the passing of Korean society into a new dimension.

In a similar vein, Black Flower, also by Kim, uses magic realism to portray the peculiarity of Korean modernization through the perspective of Korean

40 _list : Books from Korea

laborers who immigrated to Mexico, representing how Korea assimilated unilaterally into Western universalism without inheriting almost any of the uniqueness of Korean culture. In another novel, Your Republic Is Calling You, Kim chronicles a day in the life of a North Korean spy who, after sneaking into the South decades prior, has turned into another docile body obedient to the South’s symbolic order. The protagonist is left in a daze after receiving a sudden directive from the North. It is a gripping account of the exhaustion and suppression of Korean people’s freedom on account of the state of exception due to the division of the peninsula. How a Murderer Remembers presents a serial killer battling Alzheimer’s disease, who, while sensitive to the gaze of others, feels no guilt about the murders he has committed. Through the murderer’s “way of remembering,” Kim gives us a surprising portrayal of how modern man’s compulsion to simply survive in a society of endless competition turns him into a monster.

Another representative author of post mid-90s work is Park Min-gyu, by far the most exotic among the current crop of Korean writers. Park is a sort of mutant. Influenced by foreign pop culture while growing up, he syncretizes Korea’s age-old ethos with the soul of foreign pop culture in an entirely new way.

In stories like “Near,” “Yellow River and a Boat,” and “Nap,” he paints the pathos of the lonesome declining years of the elderly who die after having lived without resistance to a traditional way of life. Years ahead of the Avengers movies, Park gathered the icons of American

Novels Post-industrial Literature after the 1990s

popular culture together and novelized their stories in Legends of the World's Heroes. Then, by transposing the hero of martial arts novels to the modern age in “Jeol,” he symbolically showed how modern society enervates all human beings. Park painted a frightening picture of modern man, already turned into a monster by endless competition, using the road movie genre à la Mad Max. By using such kitschy imagination and subculture tropes, Park’s novels criticize the winner-take-all jungle that modern society has become. However, in Sammi Superstars’ Last Fan Club, he maintains that we should lead a pleasant life in which people “don’t strive to hit a ball that is hard to hit or catch a ball that is hard to catch.”

Lee Kiho, is a writer with a unique perspective about (post)modern society. He presents thugs as the protagonists of his stories as an alternative to the problematic individuals that typically appear in novels.

The thugs that appear in “Birney” and “Confession in Profile” are imprisoned twice over. One day, they are expelled to the fringes of the symbolic order because of an accident. Unable to utter a word in their own defense, they are branded as public enemies. While they cannot possibly be good, turning evil proves to be even more challenging. His novels define modern society as a one-sided battle between petty criminals and plain-faced evil. He rereads the world through the eyes of the thugs who suffer unilateral defeat.

His latest work based on this perspective, The World History of Second Sons, a rereading of not just Korean history but also world history, is being hailed as one of the greatest Korean novels of the 21st century.

Writer Cheon Myeong-kwan is a writer who criticizes modern political structures through unusual yarns. His breakthrough work, Whale, shows how modern governments reduce humanity from wild, superhuman beings into cowardly, calculating beings through the story of three generations. Confrontational scenes between characters saddened by their lot in life and cold, calculating characters appear repeatedly in Cheon’s novel. The characters saddened by their lot in life stand up to the colossal order of capitalism and inflame its epic primitiveness, and yet are unable to defeat it. The novel’s comic tragedy and tragic comedy

“ Unable to utter a word in their own defense, they are branded as public enemies. While they cannot possibly be good, turning evil proves to be even more challenging.”

become elevated in this process. Whale presents an animated portrayal of how thoroughly modern governmentality reduces human beings to docile bodies. On the other hand, Modern Family presents a cheerful and elaborate portrayal of how modern man has gained many things (that is, being calculative) but has also lost many things (such as the communal bond) through events that befall a dysfunctional family.

Post mid-90s, Korean fiction encountered the sudden advent of neoliberalism. This abrupt encounter changed the entire topography of Korean fiction. It has also given rise to valuable accomplishments in the development of the novel. Works like Black Flower propose that one way forward for modern society is towards a “small community that does not try to be something” instead of a community that aspires to be something (compelled by the big Other). Only this can rupture the current symbolic order, and only by rupturing the current symbolic order can upcoming communities be realized. This falls in line with the suggestions of Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Žižek to a large extent, and while not an exact parallel to their ideas, it is a significant result of Korean literature’s reflection on modernity.

by Ryoo Bo Sun Literary Critic and Professor of Korean Literature Kunsan National University

Vol.28 Summer 2015 41

Special Section 70 Years of Independence and Division: The Flow of Korean Literature Through the Eras

Novel

I Have the Right to Destroy Myself

Kim Young-ha Translated by Kim Chi-Young Harcourt Books, 2007, 119 pp.

ISBN 9780156030809

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

42 _list : Books from Korea

Part 1 The Death of Marat

I

’m looking at Jacques Louis David’s 1793 oil painting, The Death of Marat, printed in an art book. The Jacobin revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat lies murdered in his bath. His head is wrapped in a towel, like a turban, and his hand, draped alongside the tub, holds a pen. Marat has expired—bloodied— nestled between the colors of white and green. The work exudes calm and quiet. You can almost hear a requiem. The fatal knife lies abandoned at the bottom of the canvas.

I’ve already tried to make a copy of this painting several times. The most difficult part is Marat’s expression; he always comes out looking too sedate.

In David’s Marat, you can see neither the dejection of a young revolutionary in the wake of a sudden attack nor the relief of a man who has escaped life’s suffering. His Marat is peaceful but pained, filled with hatred but also with understanding. Through a dead man’s expression David manages to realize all of our conflicting innermost emotions. Seeing this painting for the first time, your eyes initially rest on Marat’s face. But his face doesn’t tell you anything, so your gaze moves in one of two directions: either toward the hand clutching the letter or the hand hanging limply outside of the tub. Even in death, he has kept hold of the letter and the pen. Marat was killed by a woman who had written him earlier, as he was drafting a reply to her letter. The pen Marat grips into death injects tension into the calm and serenity of the scene. We should all emulate David. An artist’s passion shouldn’t create passion. An artist’s supreme virtue is to be detached and cold.

Marat’s assassin, Charlotte Corday, lost her life at the guillotine. A young Girondin, Corday decided that Marat must be eliminated. It was July 13, 1793; she was twenty-five years old. Arrested immediately after the incident, Corday was beheaded four days later, on July 17.

Excerpt Post-industrial Literature after the 1990s

70 Years of Independence and Division:

The Flow of Korean Literature Through the Eras Robespierre’s reign of terror was set in motion after Marat’s death. David understood the Jacobins’ aesthetic imperative: A revolution cannot progress without the fuel of terror. With time that relationship inverts: The revolution presses forward for the sake of terror. Like an artist, the man creating terror should be detached, cold-blooded. He must keep in mind that the energy of the terror he releases can consume him. Robespierre died at the guillotine.

I close my art book, get up, and take a bath. I always wash meticulously on the days I work. After my bath, I shave carefully and go to the library, where I look for clients and scan through potentially helpful materials. This is slow, dull work, but I plod through it. Sometimes I don’t have a single client for months.

But I can survive for half a year if I find just one, so I don’t mind putting long hours into research.

Usually I read history books or travel guides at the library. A single city contains tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of years of history, as well as the evidence of their interweaving. In travel guides, all of this is compressed into several lines. For example, an introduction to Paris starts like this: Far from just a secular place, Paris is the holy land of religious, political, and artistic freedom, alternately brandishing that freedom and secretly yearning for more of it. Known for its spirit of tolerance, this city has been the refuge for thinkers, artists, and revolutionaries like Robespierre, Curie, Wilde, Sartre, Picasso, Ho Chi Minh, and Khomeini, along with many other unusual figures. Paris has fine examples of excellent 19th-century urban planning, and like its music, art, and theater, its architecture encompasses everything from the Middle Ages to the avant-garde, sometimes even beyond the avant-garde. With its history, innovations, culture, and civilization, Paris is a necessity in the world: If Paris did not exist, we would have to invent her.

One word more about Paris would be superfluous.

Such succinctness is why I enjoy reading travel guides and history books. People who don’t know how to summarize have no dignity. Neither do people who needlessly drag on their messy lives. They who don’t know the beauty of simplification, of pruning away the unnecessary, die without ever comprehending the true meaning of life.

I always take a tr ip when I’m paid at the completion of a job. This time, I will go to Paris. These few lines in the travel guide are enough to pique my curiosity. I will spend the days reading Henry Miller or Oscar Wilde or sketching Ingres at the Louvre. The man who reads travel guides on a trip is a bore. I read novels when I’m traveling, but I don’t read them in Seoul. Novels are food for the leftover hours of life, the in-between times, the moments of waiting.

At the library, I flip through magazines first.

Of all the articles, the interviews interest me the most. If I’m lucky, I find clients in them. Reporters, armed with middlebrow, cheap sensibilities, hide my potential clients’ characteristics between the lines.

They never ask questions like, “Have you ever felt the urge to kill someone?” And obviously they never wonder, “How do you feel when you see blood?” They don’t show the interviewees David’s or Delacroix’s paintings and ask them their thoughts. Instead, the interviews are filled with meaningless chatter. But they can’t fool me; I catch the glimmer of possibility in their empty words. I unearth clues from the types of music they prefer, the family histories they sometimes reveal, the books that hit a nerve, the artists they love. People unconsciously want to reveal their inner urges. They are waiting for someone like me. pp. 3 - 6

Vol.28 Vol.28 Summer 2015 43

Special Section 70 Years of Independence and Division: The Flow of Korean Literature Through the Eras

Post-industrial Literature after the 1990s

Modern Existence and the Investigation of Sexuality I

t is fair to say that in Korean literary history the 1990s was a decade that belonged to female authors.

During this period, the focal point of literature moved away from an excessive political imagination. Rather than as master narratives of history or “the people,” close-range examinations of everyday life from a female perspective took center stage. Two trends define the period: examining existence in the context of a rapidly industrializing society and investigating sexuality as a way to break through the impotence brought about by rationalism. While works of fiction

by Eun Heekyung, Ha Seong-nan, Pyun Hye-Young, and Yoon Sunghee fall into the former category, authors such as Jon Kyongnin, Han Kang, and Chun Woon-young represent the latter.

In Eun Heekyung’s novel A Gift from a Bird, we meet a character that a “1990s personality” with striking accuracy. Jinhee, the protagonist, tells us that “from the age of twelve there was simply no need for me to develop.” She divides herself into “the seen me” and “the visible me,” objectifying her own self as if she were the other, a target of exhaustive observation.

This “cool character” appears repeatedly in Eun’s short stories including “Talking to Strangers” and “Her Third Man.” In Ha Seong-nan’s Blooms of Mold, from beginning to end, the characters are referred to only as man, woman, and guy, reflecting the callous reality of a world from which communication is absent. Ha has developed a reputation for her elaborate realist descriptions, evincing an interest in the physical world where the inner thoughts or psychology of characters is excluded. Told from the perspective of a cold observer,

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this world of suffocating realism excels in displaying the dark side of modern everyday life in cities where all communication has been severed.

With her early collection of stories Mallow Gardens, Pyun Hye-Young displayed an apocalyptic imagination and an innate talent for describing an existence turned to rubbish. Taking on the form of a science fiction novel, Ashes and Red is a harrowing depiction of one man’s life gradually degenerating into “absolutely nothing,” representative of an extreme form of wasted life in industrial society. However, in her recent short story “Evening Proposal,” a thread of redeeming light is visible even in the midst of the waste. One man, having witnessed a sudden death, breaks free from his usual apathy and inaction and in an instant confesses his love to a woman. It may well be that as we are in a state of utter vulnerability, constantly confronted with the possibility of unexpected accidents and disasters, moments such as these are the only things that give meaning to our existence.

By breaking from the common attitude towards life, Yoon Sunghee seeks to find new meaning. In her short story “Burying a Treasure Map at the U-turn” she calls into question the way our daily lives focus solely on getting ahead. As Yoon sees it, our lives are made plentiful not by traveling as fast as possible to some ultimate destination, but by taking a daring U-turn that is necessary to contemplate the rareified aspects of life so easily overlooked. With speedy scene changes, optimism, and lighthearted characters, the different elements of Yoon Sunghee’s stories culminate as a consolation in the face of the sorrows of rapid industrialization.

Post-industrial Literature after the 1990s

While these writers investigate forms of existence in an industrial society, there are others who seek to bring sexuality to light through the imagination of the female instinct. In this context the writer who must be mentioned first and foremost is Jon Kyongnin.

Many of her novels embody woman’s organic sense of adventure as aroused by a desire for deviation or escape. Notable examples include The Goat Herding Woman, where in the final scene the protagonist turns her back on her apartment complex at night, and departs in search of her very own “forest” with nothing but a suitcase and a goat in tow. And in “Nighttime Spiral Staircase” there is an image of a woman standing completely alone at a bus stop, exhausted by family relations in which nothing but obligation remains and housework repeats in an endless cycle. On the surface there is the tedium of everyday life, but brimming within is an adulterous sexuality that floods into everyday existence. With these two conflicting worlds as the starting point, Jon’s fiction has a tendency to push her characters to the far limits of longing and desire.

Han Kang’s The Fruit of My Woman brings to the forefront the world of fundamental desire which lies within a woman’s instinct. The Fruit of My Woman begins as a couple who have been married for four years finally secure an apartment of their own thereby achieving the middle class dream. In the end the story comes to a close with the wife having transformed into a yellow-green plant. This tale of metamorphosis as told by Han is every bit as mystical as the story of a woman who turns into a wolf, and is not without elements of the grotesque. On one level it is a sorrowful cry of resistance to reckless redevelopment, while at the same time it can be interpreted as the manifestation of the feminine desire to follow one’s instincts and live as an unbridled soul.

Chun Woon-young’s Needle amounts to a veritable feast of this female desire. With, for example, a scene detailing the process of tattooing with a needle—a more general interest in people with unusual jobs, and an exploration of the sexuality of women who, because their work involves their bodies, have been forced to the periphery of society—Needle can be understood

“ On the surface there is the tedium of everyday life, but brimming within is an adulterous sexuality that floods into everyday existence.”

as the blueprint for Chun’s subsequent works. Above all, by affirming women’s experience of their bodies in contrast to masculine strength, Needle calls for a renewed interest in the female body that draws critical attention to its public disavowal as the target of taboo, and its representation as an object for masculine voyeurism. In this vein, she describes the needleshaped tattoo on the chest of the emasculated “man in flat 801” as looking like “a shallow crevice like a young girl’s vagina,” written in such a way that the tattoo is a source of strength, so much so that it is “as though the universe could be pulled in through that gap.”

This incredible world of femininity opened up by the female writers of the 1990s represents a significant new realm for Korean fiction. Eun Heekyung’s cynicism and Ha Seong-nan’s excavation of every day life come to fruition in the writings of Pyun Hye-Young and Yoon Sunghee, which amount to an investigation of the new possibilities of modern existence. With Jon Kyongnin’s longing for deviation, Han Kang’s transformation into plant life, and Chun Woon-young’s needle as a metaphor for the affirmation of female sexuality, we are witnessing a new chapter in the history of Korean fiction. There is no way the discoveries made by these women could be overemphasized. This is because the new writing of our literary history begins precisely with their work.

by Shin Soojeong Literary Critic and Professor of Creative Writing Myongji University

Vol.28 Summer 2015 45

Special Section 70 Years of Independence and Division: The Flow of Korean Literature Through the Eras

Short Story

“The Goat Herding Woman”

Jon Kyongnin Munhakdongne Publishing Group 2014, 338 pp.

ISBN 9788954624831

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

46 _list : Books from Korea

T

hough the tap in the kitchen was dripping, there was not a single speck of water on the gleaming sink, and not even a cup left out to dry. It felt like the kitchen of someone who was away on a long trip.

“It sure is quiet in the afternoon. What do you usually do? After you’ve done all the clearing up like this...”

“Not much… I don’t do anything at all. There’s nothing I can do.” Jeongyeon said, and heaved a deep sigh like a wilted vegetable. “Even the baby is sound asleep, so when I’m sitting here alone it’s as if I’m waiting for something. If only someone would show up… right now if someone could just come in and look around and just say, that’s enough now, give it up, and draw a full stop at the end of this repetition.”

My gaze was lowered to below her chin.

“I mean a complete, final finish,” she said.

“But that would be death. If it wasn’t that, what else would come along and say that’s enough now, time to stop.”

“Yeah, you’re right. But even so I wait. I don’t even feel like it would be death that came along. I’m just waiting.”

“There’s no way to be rid of it. All we can do is make the repetition something trivial. We need some other important task to do. We weren’t put in this world just to do nauseating housework two, three times a day, making our eyes grow wide and fraying away our fingers. […]

“Anyway, you can’t know until you’ve lived together. Because you build each other’s dreams as you go along. I don’t even know myself . . . whether I should call it a dream or a dud. One thing’s for sure, my dream reeks of failure. If I suddenly disappear one day you can just think, ah, that untameable egoist has finally had her dream come true. . . . Jeongyeon, by the way . . .”

Jeongyeon, who had once been an outrageous idealist, stared at me with a questioning look. I blinked a few times and began to speak. I have a habit of blinking to draw out time in awkward situations.

“What would you do if someone asked you to look

Excerpt Post-industrial Literature after the 1990s

70 Years of Independence and Division:

The Flow of Korean Literature Through the Eras after their goat for a few days?”

Excitement bubbled up in Jeongyeon’s eyes and her face became animated.

“What are you talking about?”

“You know, a goat. For three months now, some guy has kept calling asking me to look after his goat.

He says it’s the soul of his late stepmother, that she came back as a goat.”

Jeongyeon’s eyes grew distant.

“It’s a strange story, huh? But it’s true. They really believe it. They say it came out from behind her tomb on the forty-ninth day after her death. Of course I don’t believe that. It must just be that the baby goat broke away from its herd and passed by the grave while the mourners were bowing down during the rites.

The problem is that the widower adamantly believes that the goat is his late second wife reincarnate. He’s convinced that the goat is the vessel of her soul and he treasures it more than his own life. He’s sick and needs to go up to a big hospital in Seoul but he’s refusing to go because there’s no one else to look after the goat.”

Almost dumbfounded, Jeongyeon began to speak, “It’s so befitting, this kind of thing always happens to you. The egoist and the soul-vessel goat... it has a certain ring to it. It was just meant to be. Miso and the goat, sounds good to me.” At the end of her sentence, Jeongyeon broke into a smile.

“Do you think the goat really could b e a reincarnation of his step mother?” I asked.

“Well, you never know, but the point is that those people really believe it. Didn’t you say he treasures it more than his own life?”

“There’s no denying that. But I can’t understand why they’re asking me of all people. Then again, he did say my voice sounded familiar. And I get that feeling, too. Like he must be someone I used to know.”

“You never know, he might be a friend’s relative or something.” Jeongyeon’s expression grew serious, and she muttered in a low voice, as if only to herself.

“Some random guy pestering you to look after his goat isn’t that strange. If you think about it, living like this is so weird no one would believe it was true . . . In the quiet of the middle of the day if I look out at the other apartments, each separated with a single wall like some

“ . . . then one day, she’ll wake up in the middle of the night and find her feet hardened stiff and be eternally unable to get up and walk out.”

battery chicken coop, I’m arrested by the feeling that it’s even more absurd than the most eccentric story.

There’s one woman inside each box, they make food for their husbands and do the cleaning, then at night when the man comes home, they let them have sex with them, and when it’s time to do ancestral rites they go off to help their husbands’ relatives . . . then they have one, two children, and the man starts to grumble on about how he can’t even die because he has to provide for his wife and kids. Inside that chicken coop, a woman in her prime is left in limbo for five, ten years at a time looking after her children without any help . . . then one day, she’ll wake up in the middle of the night and find her feet hardened stiff and be eternally unable to get up and walk out.”

Jeongyeon heaved a long sigh.

“The bigger problem that I just can’t stand is that those lined up boxes all shine so brightly. Like the weird brightness of women on display in the show windows of some red light district, posing happiness.”

“Yeah, the lights are really bright.”

We sat side-by-side facing the living room wall nodding our heads for perhaps a little too long. The baby woke up and as Jeongyeon was lifting her up in an embrace the thought suddenly struck me that looking after a goat for a few days wouldn’t actually be so bad. The sacred vessel of a soul and a raging egoist would be a fitting pair after all.

Translated by Sophie Bowman

Vol.28 Vol.28 Summer 2015 47

Younger Writers Cheon Myeong-kwan

An Author the Sum of His Characters W

ould I recommend Cheon Myeong-kwan’s books? Of course.

I’ve read all his books. That’s why I’d gladly recommend them. Each of his books is different. His short stories are different from one another and so are his novels. But if you were to ask me if his books all feel different then I’d have to say no. His books are all different and yet, they feel the same because he wrote them. Cheon’s a specialist. He’s a pro who manages to make distant, unrelated stories like Whale and The Turkey and the Running Laborer his own. He’s an unrelenting raconteur and a technician who transforms simple events into bizarre, poetic narratives. All I can say is that his writing is powerful. You can pick up any of his books and it will be good.

Would I recommend Cheon Myeong-kwan the writer? Well…

I hesitate all of a sudden. The truth is that I don’t know Cheon very well. I’ve read all of his books but there’s not much I know about the man himself. But I’m not entirely uninformed about him. Our paths crossed accidently once in a pension by the Yellow Sea. After exchanging awkward greetings, we ate lunch, drank coffee, and then conversed over drinks in the evening.

That’s all. I’ve met him just that once. But he’s asked me to write this article about him. I gladly accepted the request of a senior whom I like and respect, but later I felt curious as to why he’d asked me to do it.

I have a few ideas I’ll just throw out there: First, he’s taken a liking to me even though we’ve met only once.

Second, it doesn’t matter who writes it or what they write.

48 _list : Books from Korea

Third, he likes the impression he’s made on me.

I like the last one the most. Because, though we’ve met only once, I, too, like the memory of the conversation that we shared.

So, this is what I know about Cheon Myeong-kwan.

He says he’s on the outside but really he is in the middle. He’s always cracking jokes but infuses them with serious reflections and sincerity. He says he roughs out drafts but his face betrays the fatigue of writing. He says, “I’m not sure about this…” but, in fact, knows everything. He’s a wife-less man who’s well informed about married life, and an old bachelor who knows everything there is to know about women (I’m a bit doubtful about this). One moment, he seems like a senior who’s well versed in life but the next instant he is the very image of the depressed modern man. His baby face, which leaves you guessing his age, lulls you into talking with him informally even as you feel the conflicting urge to address him respectfully. He says, “I write books that make money and can be made into movies,” but I think only half of that statement is true.

Because some things can’t be conveyed through the big screen and work only as novels.

To summarize, Cheon seems to be the sum of the different characters in his stories. He’s a writer who is in command of the unpredictable spectrum between Whale and The Turkey and the Running Laborer, one who can write and wants to write about everything he can. I guess I’d call him a cheerful yet gloomy physical writer.

by Jung Yong-jun Novelist

Essay

Cheon Myeong-kwan Cheon Myeong-kwan made his literary debut with the short story “Frank and I” that won the Munhakdongne New Writer’s Award in 2003. In 2004, he won the Munhakdongne Novel Award for Whale, his first novel. Cheon’s works include the short story collections Cheerful Maid Marisa (2006), The Turkey and the Running Laborer (2014), and the novels Whale (2004), Modern Family (2010), and My Uncle, Bruce Lee (2012). Modern Family was adapted into the sleeper hit Boomerang Family in 2013.

Vol.28 Summer 2015 49

Younger Writers Cheon Myeong-kwan

Writing About Special, Writing About Special, Ordinary Lives Ordinary Lives Visit www.list.or.kr to watch a teaser video of the author.

photographs by Son Hongjoo

I

started writing fiction in my forties. Before then, I’d never nursed the hope or dream of becoming a writer. I had always thought literature was the realm of very special people.

For a long time, writers occupied an exalted position in Korea. They were regarded as people gifted with great knowledge, lofty consciousness, profound insight and inspiration about the world, and so there was something mysterious about them. At least that was how I felt. Not even in my wildest dreams could I imagine someone ignorant and ordinary like me becoming a writer.

Before turning to fiction, I worked in the film industry. I handled petty jobs, worked in production, and even wrote screenplays. My ultimate objective was to see my screenplay turned into a movie. At the time, I was possessed by the desire and anticipation of making my own movie. But, moviemaking involved a

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lot of money and arranging funds wasn’t easy. In the end, I had to leave Chungmuro, Korea’s Tinseltown, without having made even a single film. I was forty at the time.

I turned to fiction solely at the urging of my younger brother. If it weren’t for his suggestion, I’d never have dared to become a writer. I always thought the world of writers was poles apart from mine. That was how I felt as I sat irresolutely in front of the computer screen.

Okay, so fiction, you see, is… umm…. Jeez! (Scratches head) All the same, I wasn’t scared. Because I didn’t identify as a writer. Nor did I have a reader to read my story or a critic to critique my writing. Without any literary vision or expectations, I simply started writing out stories that sprang to my mind.

A week before Chuseok, somewhere near Gwangju in

Writer’s Insight

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

Gyeonggi Province, Daeso waited to take a left turn at a three-way intersection.

This is the first line I ever wrote. It has no literary embellishment or fabulous metaphor. It simply mentions the time, place, and character.

The protagonist shares my friend’s name. Anybody could’ve written this sentence. For me writing concise statements of facts, with nothing to add or subtract, was no different from writing stage directions for a screenplay. As I neared the end of that first sentence, I wondered if I’d get away with writing such lines, but, lo and behold, the next sentence was already waiting for me. As I finished writing the second sentence, the third sentence was standing by... Someone seemed to be whispering in my ear as I jotted down the lines. In less than a month, I completed two short stories and one novella. That was a time when I was waiting for my final ruin with an empty heart, so it wasn’t as if I had

anything better to do.

It’s been more than a decade since I started writing fiction, and I’ve published a few volumes in that time.

My conception of writers as special people has all but disappeared. But I find the label of writer as awkward as ever. I never aimed to write a certain type of fiction or become a certain kind of writer, and it’s the same even now. So, if possible, I write my story. That doesn’t mean the story is about me but rather that the story is one I like or know quite well. No matter how splendid a story might be, if there’s something awkward or uncomfortable about it then it isn’t mine. I simply write my stories and the rest is up to the readers and the critics. That’s all.

T he stor ies I k now b est are those of the commoners. I’ve always enjoyed the company of the poor, the unlearned, and the marginalized. Of course, I was one of them too, never having come out of their living space. I don’t know anything about the cultured elites. I’m clueless about what they think or the lives they lead. So they don’t appear in my novels because theirs is an unfamiliar world to me.

Despite this, the consciousness that our lives are all more or less similar lies at the root of my stories.

Rich or poor, Korean or Russian, in the end they all lead similar lives and, unless there’s a natural disaster, the experiences they go through are, for the most part, similar. That’s why I’m not particularly interested in the special or unusual.

But then again, our lives might be similar but each individual’s life is special in its own way. If a person’s life were to be drawn on a canvas, it’d make for a painting filled with resplendent and surprising images.

I think everybody leads special and remarkable lives.

It’s not writers who I find mysterious, but the lives of the people they paint. No matter what the age or place, writers have endless material to write about.

How fortunate it is to be a writer who can draw on this enormous and amazing resource to his heart’s content for his entire life!

by Cheon Myeong-kwan Novelist

Vol.28 Summer 2015 51

Younger Writers Cheon Myeong-kwan

Novel

Modern Family

Cheon Myeong-kwan Translated by Park Kyoung-lee White Pine Press, 2015, 177 pp.

ISBN 9781935210672

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

52 _list : Books from Korea

▲▲▲

H

alf-asleep, I heard the sound of someone laughing and talking. When I opened my eyes, the television in the living room was on, and a giant of a man was scooping chicken stew from the pot while watching a comedy. It was quite chilly, but he was wearing a shortsleeved shirt, and his pot belly hung out from below. His fleshy mid-section sloshed about every time he burst into laughter.

Man, what a sight. Watching him lap away at the pot of stew, I found myself growing distraught.

This oversized man was the firstborn son in my family, otherwise known as my brother Oh Han-mo.

Age fifty-two and weighing 260 pounds; a pervert with five criminal convictions including assault, rape, fraud, and theft; a mentally retarded freak… All in all, a good-for nothing. In his youth, he went in and out of prison like it was home. Then, a few years ago, he left for Cambodia to start a latex business and returned penniless two years later. He crept into Mom’s place at some point, and three years have passed since.

After finishing the stew he began scraping up the bits stuck to the bottom of the pot. Since I’d last seen him, he’d turned into a fat and bald middle-aged man.

Age had caught up with him. As I sat up on the sofa, he sensed my presence and shot a glance at me.

“What’re you doing here?” he asked, still scraping at the leftover stew. (The crust at the bottom is tasty!)

“I’m staying here.” The words fell out of my mouth on their own. If I planned on staying, I suppose it’d be better to get it out in the open.

“Here? You?” he scowled and asked in an aggressive tone. He seemed to think an invader was entering his territory.

“Why not? Can’t I stay here?” I shot back with my head held high.

Brothers reunited after two long years, and we glared at each other. It was the epitome of absurdity: a turf war between two middle-aged men who’d failed in life.

When I was young, he was my worst nightmare. He

Excerpt

studied at a notorious technical high school; instead of books in his schoolbag, he carried a file, a scraper, and a steel triangle. These tools were used in class for practical training but also wielded as lethal weapons if need be. Being dim-witted by nature, he wasn’t cut out for studying, but when it came to using his fists, he was a legend, even in that infamous school of his.

At that time, he was nicknamed Hammer, in reference to the large hammers that are used for crushing rocks at construction sites. Like a bull seeing red, he lost all capacity for reason when provoked. He’d start throwing just about anything within reach, including bricks. One time, I was what was thrown at his target.

True story.

Growing up, I was beaten countless times by Hammer. He gave me nosebleeds, broke my teeth, and even slashed my face. I always wished that he’d end up dead. For all I cared, he could have been beaten to death in a fight or hit by a car while in a drunken stupor. I longed for him to disappear. Now, tens of years later, he was still alive and standing right in front of me.

As anticipated, he made the first move. He flung the pot right at my face. “What are you staring at!”

Hammer was a step ahead of me in anything that involved fighting. The pot smashed into my face, and I wavered. I see you haven’t lost it, Hammer!

I couldn’t back off now. There was no place else on earth that would take me in. What’s more, the one person who didn’t deserve to live here was my brother. The money we received from Father’s death was enough to get ourselves a larger place, at least a thousand square feet. After persuading Mom to give him his share of the money, he squandered half of it on opening an adult video arcade. What nerve he had, trying to kick me out of a house that he never even partially owned.

I completely lost control when the pot struck my head, sprang up and flew at him like a missile. I flung my fists forward and roared like a mad man, “Damn you! Why should you give a fuck when it’s not even

your house? Fuck!”

Hammer seemed to hesitate slightly as I went hurtling toward him. Then, like the seasoned fighter that he was, he pinned me to the floor and started trampling on me. He’d aged, but so had I. Over the years, alcohol had taken its toll on my body.

“Are you out of your mind? I was going to let you off easy, but that’s it. You’re dead meat!”

Hammer stomped on me mercilessly. As he was beating the crap out of me, I grabbed onto his trouser legs. When he lifted his leg, I slammed my head right into his groin. He let out a loud “argh” and rolled onto the floor, hands clasping his crotch. Not wanting to lose this chance, I sat on his belly and flailed at him with the pot. He screamed while blocking the pot with his arms, and eventually threw both hands in the air as a sign of defeat. “Hey, alright, alright. Stop it!”

I stopped and glared at him, fuming. I got off his belly and popped a cigarette in my mouth. Scraps of chicken stew had been smeared all over my clothes, and I could taste the salty blood that gushed from my nose. Looking around, I saw that the living room had been turned upside down from our little scuffle.

Hammer, who had been lying down to catch his breath, got up and released a long burp.

He spoke jeeringly, “Fancy you wanting to move in.

Director Oh must be down in the dumps, eh?”

He called me “Director Oh” when being sarcastic.

Just then, Mom opened the door and entered.

Her eyes widened at the sight of the mess in the living room. Like a kid snitching on his brother, Hammer reported, “Mom! In-mo, that asshole, wants to move in!”

Mom hesitated for a moment before giving a nonchalant reply, “We have an extra room, so what’s the big deal? It’s not like the house will come crashing down.”

Had Mom sensed that I was in a dire state?

Hammer watched in great disappointment as Mom walked into my soon-to-be room. She seemed to have made up her mind. “I’ll clear out the clothes, while you move the other stuff out to the veranda. Clean up next

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Younger Writers Cheon Myeong-kwan

time.”

I was slightly confused by Mom’s attitude but went into the room and did as I was told. Leaning on the door jamb, Hammer sucked on the empty spoon in his hand and mumbled broodingly, “Damn. That asshole shouldn’t be allowed in here.”

Then he clenched his buttocks together and ripped a loud fart.

Poot! ▲▲▲ It’s been a month since I moved in with Mom. Everything has changed. Almost as though I were in a foreign land in a different time zone, I lost my grip on reality. Even while watching television, smoking, or sleeping, it was like I was in someone else’s skin.

I was always in a daze, like I’d been drugged, and my intestines seemed to have been sucked out of me. Yet, I felt strangely at peace. Whatever had been choking me before had released its grip, and my heart’s violent thumping subsided.

I slept for more than twelve hours a day, as if I’d not slept a wink for the past ten years. I spent most days asleep, getting up only for meals. In the rare moments when I was awake, I sat on the sofa and watched television or walked along the railway with a head full of thoughts—disconnected fragments that didn’t last long. I did ponder my crisis and the bleak future ahead, but such thoughts left my head after a night’s sleep.

Mom was as quiet as ever. She didn’t ask a single question about how my filmmaking career was going or what had made me move back. Between making her rounds selling cosmetics, she always remembered to prepare my meals. I was like a silkworm. I ate what Mom prepared and crawled back to my room for more sleep.

One time, Hammer grumbled about the house reeking of fish as he walked in. Mom had just fried a large salted mackerel. While sitting at the table eating my bowl of rice, I was struck by a sense of déjà vu. The

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same thing had frequently happened in our house a long time ago.

No one else in my family, including Father, liked fish. Because I enjoyed mackerel and hairtail, Mom would cook fish especially for me, even when the rest of the family complained. I suddenly realized that the dishes Mom laid out on the table every night were foods that had been my favorites since I was young.

Mallow soup and Korean lettuce kimchi, salted clams and potatoes in soy sauce, dried whitebait—these were all dishes that Mom remembered as my favorites, even after more than twenty years. Feeling a tingle at the end of my nose, I bowed over the table and poked around with my spoon.

I weighed myself at the bathhouse and saw that I’d gained seven pounds. Still, it was less than a fraction of Hammer’s weight gain. I turned around and saw, in the mirror, a middle-aged man with sunken eyes and every other part sagging. Looking at my reflection, I was reminded of something told to me by a woman I’d first met my junior year in college: “From the naked bodies of women at the bathhouse, I have some idea about how they’ve lived. History is clearly written on their bodies.” My eyes searched the mirror for traces the bitter years had left on me. It could be something— or then again nothing—but life seems to leave deeper imprints on the bodies of women than on men. The woman who’d told me that had stretch marks on her abdomen from two pregnancies. She was embarrassed by the scars, but there was a time when I was in love with her soft and abundant body, once swollen with life.

How’s she getting by in Canada? I wondered while I was bathing. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. We’d met through the university’s film club; she was small, inquisitive and lively. She used to write scripts in Chungmuro, but her youthful liveliness and passion for films faded with marriage, children, and age.

She turned into a moderately realistic and lethargic housewife. Through her, I watched the course of a woman’s life. We had sex twice a month, but this never

Excerpt

“ I’m not sure whether I started drinking because my life wasn’t working out or whether it was the other way around. Whatever the case, I’d spent more time drunk than sober since the divorce.”

complicated our relationship. We knew how to keep a distance from each other and did it well.

Five years ago, she emigrated to Canada with her family. She called me a few times after that, but I was too preoccupied with the toughest period in my life.

Did she mention something about changing her name to Catherine? I left the bathhouse and walked through the market, reminiscing about the times we shared. I regretted that I’d never actually reached out to her.

About two miles behind the apartment houses, behind a low hill, there’s a small reservoir. Almost empty and surrounded by overgrown weeds, the reservoir itself is useless, but visitors can enjoy the fresh air and a pretty good view from its elevated position. The reservoir probably served as a source of water for the town’s vast granary before the new city was built. Now, it’s a deserted place sought by adulterous couples for their shady affairs—or by helpless bums like me.

I walked along the bank of the reservoir and saw dandelions poking out from the yellow grass. At the end of the bank, I sat down and lit a cigarette. There were no shadows in sight, and it was dead silent all around. Clouds fluffy as cotton floated in the sky, and the whitlow grass sparsely distributed along the bank swayed in the wind. Perhaps because I had just taken a bath, my body felt as light as a patient discharged after a long struggle with illness. It was a peace I had not experienced for a long time. Looking at the heat haze glimmering above the water, I, for some reason, felt like crying.

Then, I noticed an empty soju bottle lying on the

grass. Several more bottles, probably left behind by springtime picnickers, rolled about below the bank.

My throat burned with a sudden thirst for alcohol. I remembered that I hadn’t had a drink in more than a month. I’m not sure whether I started drinking because my life wasn’t working out or whether it was the other way around. Whatever the case, I’d spent more time drunk than sober since the divorce. I’d misbehave when drunk and often blacked out. There were times when I got worried that I might end up an alcoholic, but this was forgotten as soon as I began drinking. I drank until I could hold no more.

Once, when I was lying in my room with a bad hangover, I saw a large insect crawling over the sheets.

I reached out to grab the creepy creature, only to find myself groping at thin air. A mirage. I was having my first attack of delirium tremens, and I was suddenly afraid. Driven by a twinge of desire to live, I was gripped by the fear of dying alone in an empty room.

I had no intention of dying in such a miserable and meaningless way. Looking back, Mom’s phone call asking me to come over for chicken stew was a rescue signal I’d received while standing in the desert of death.

I instinctively followed that signal, and that was how I’d come to survive and bask in the warmth of spring. pp. 15 - 21

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Younger Writers Jo Kyung Ran

photographs by Son Hongjoo

Jo Kyung Ran Jo Kyung Ran made her literary debut in 1996 when her short story “The French Optical” won the Dong-a Ilbo New Writer’s Contest. She is the author of the short story collections Looking for the Elephant (2002) and The Story of a Ladle (2004), I Bought a Balloon (2008), Philosophy of Sunday (2013), and the novels Time for Baking Bread (2001), Tongue (2007), and Blowfish (2010).

She is also the recipient of the Hyundae Munhak Award and the Dongin Prize, among others.

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Essay

The Vastness of Not Understanding

T

here are two ways to meet writers. One is to read their books first and make their acquaintance afterwards. The other is to meet them socially and then read their books. In both cases there is a slight disenchantment, a kind of disconnect. Either the book is better than the writer, or the writer appears to be a nice person who wrote a mediocre book. This happens because deep down we can’t really accept that books are written by normal people. What is “normal” anyway?

Was Virginia Woolf normal? Or Flaubert? Or Goethe?

Let me tell you about the one and only time I met a writer who was as promising as her books. I first saw her on a bus in busy Shanghai, where all the writers participating in a residency program gathered to be taken to their hotel. She sat behind me and I remember that I turned my head over again and again to admire her face which reminded me of a white marble sculpture. She was silent and discrete and beautiful. She would smile a lot, putting her hands in front of her face.

She wouldn’t talk like most people do, merely to fill in the gaps. In this, she reminded me of a good book. But in this kind of book, although the narrator appears to constantly talk or describe something, there is a quality of silence and deep mystery—like words not made of words but of thin air.

Jo Kyung Ran, the writer I am talking about, is now a dear friend. Every attempt to objectify her fails. She introduced me to the prose of John Cheever, to Korean delicacies, Japanese hydrating masks, and long walks by the lakes. And although my friend is a real person I still think of her (perhaps because of the distance, as she lives in Korea and I live in Greece) as a character in a novel.

This character is a fragile woman named Ran who wrote poetry in her youth, spent years in her room

reading books, and still lives with her family. She goes to sleep in the morning, sleeps until noon and never Googles anything. She has an inner compass that allows her to move around with ease (Ran wouldn’t get lost in a foreign city) and I admit that I used her calm way of getting oriented in my last novel, when I created the most complicated character of my writing life, God Himself. God is visiting the world with his wife and never stops to think where to go. He has an inner machine of orientation. I owe this machine to Ran. God and his wife even visited some of the places Ran and I would go, the water cities close to Shanghai.The first story of hers I read back then, “Looking for the Elephant,” was an Eastern dystopia. But it was her own dystopia. By being truthful to her own fears and sorrows she writes from the deepest part of herself. The metaphor of an elephant in the room acquires a new meaning when it is treated as a hyper-realistic detail. Critics see in this metaphor the urge for a family, whereas Ran herself talks about her need to lean on something heavier than she, for protection. Let me tell you what this elephant standing in the room means for me—it stands for the unexplored feelings, for the words that have no words.

In this sense, we are all looking for the elephant in this life and Jo Kyung Ran gives us a map to explore this “elephant feeling”; the vastness of not understanding, which is as common in life as it is in good literature.

by Amanda Michalopoulou Novelist

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Younger Writers Jo Kyung Ran

On Seeing Nothing of Worth I

was twenty-five when I started college with the goal of studying literature. The usual age that Koreans get accepted to university is around eighteen or nineteen, after graduating high school. When I was that age, I failed my entrance exam. After that, since I didn’t have any particular skills, even finding a job was difficult. A bigger problem was that I didn’t know what I wanted, nor did I have a clue about what type of person I wanted to be. I wanted to find whatever it was that could answer these questions. So, from the age of nineteen to twenty-four, I isolated myself and sat in my room, immersed in books. After spending five years like that, I finally plucked up my courage and got accepted to a certain college’s creative writing department. Fortuitously, I made my debut as an author right as I was graduating. That was exactly twenty years ago.

Sometimes people ask me what my stories are about. Since that is a terribly difficult question, I often fall into different streams of thought. For example, thoughts about things I have that you might also have, or thoughts about things which none of us can have.

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Beauty and hope are not the only things which give people life.

William Faulkner said that an author must write about the eternal truths. Those truths are “love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” I think there are a few more which should be added such as trepidation and communication, and imperfection and sadness.

What I feel about the world of literature is thoroughly subjective, as is what I choose to write as an author, as well as what I choose to read and whether or not I like it as a reader. As an author I don’t have an astounding number of readers, but I write what I please and of course seek out works by authors I enjoy. I isolate myself from the outside world for a great amount of time as well. Twenty-first century multimedia platforms, including the Internet, have the tendency to spew out far too much information. If you don’t seclude yourself from time to time, all of that noise, all of those awful playthings will take hold and corrode your insides. I believe that literature, novels in particular, should be an escape from the noise of the

Writer’s Insight

world. These thoughts have come to me now, seeing that this year marks my twentieth year of writing novels. Isn’t it much harder these days, more than writing stories, to create and maintain an environment conducive to writing?

Simply put, it seems that I need to write more gripping stories than anything that I have written up until now.

I read every single day, but I do not write daily.

When I’m not writing, I usually listen to music or cook.

These two things are unbelievably helpful in relieving the tension and anxiety that writing brings. For someone like me who lives in a small house and works in a small studio, music is one thing that I cannot be without. Music changes the atmosphere. When music and cooking are of no help, I go outside and start to walk aimlessly. All of the characters in my head follow along. On occasion we even talk. I do this because the characters are not only figments of my imagination, their stories are also there for one special reader. The author, the characters from a story she has yet to write, and the reader of that story all walk together.

Sometimes there is a clash of opinions, and there are times when our thoughts are in tune, and some when they even make suggestions. This is because we, the characters, the reader, and I, all want one thing— the completion of a satisfactory story. It would be impossible to complete my stories without these singular occasions. Furthermore, there is a moment where the verb “walk” becomes equated with “think.”

This is how my work and the way I spend most of my time relates to my writing. It is possible that this is the result of my aspirations, rather than the result of training.

Sometimes I wonder, how did I become a writer?

Until I was twenty-four, no one knew my name and I had not taken a single literature class. When I start thinking like this, those five years I spent in my tiny room just reading day and night come to mind. There are times when all I can do is nod as I realize that it was then that I had my “water moment.” Everyone knows the story of how Anne Sullivan taught the deaf and blind Helen Keller about language. When Miss

Sullivan was debating how she could teach Helen, she took the girl’s hand and put it under a pump to let her feel the cold stream of water. As she did this she spelled the word “water” on Helen’s other hand. They say that that moment was the first time Helen Keller discovered language. That was her “water moment.” I’d like to think that the time I spent reading good books, be it time spent reading works of world literature that everyone has read or time spent focusing on Korean literature, could be considered my “literature moment.”

I had never felt anything so vivid and intense, nor been so completely captivated before then.

In this way, the stories that I write are like letters to all the imperfect others in the world. People like me, or rather, people with whom I differ. I don’t know how these letters will reach them, but the possibility that someone might be captivated by some part makes it impossible for me to give up. It is not possible to love, understand, or hate one person in each moment.

However, it is possible every moment for me to be thinking about a person who is imperfect, a person who is broken, a person who is exhausted, or a person who wants to communicate with another, wherever it may be that they are in the world. In Korea we have an expression that means “nothing worth seeing.” Perhaps what I am really interested in are the people, things, memories, and moments where there is nothing worth seeing. But of course, these continue to be difficult subjects on which to write.

by Jo Kyung Ran Novelist

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

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Younger Writers Jo Kyung Ran

Short Story

“Looking for the Elephant”

Jo Kyung Ran Moonji Publishing, 2002, 305 pp.

ISBN 8932013349

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

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T

he Polaroid camera I have is a Spectra. It uses film about 1.5 times larger than an ordinary Polaroid, and it’s more expensive. He bought it for my birthday a few years ago. I remember how happy I was when I unwrapped the present and saw it was the camera I had wanted so much. He took the first picture. I’m looking down a little, my head slightly bowed. The lipstick smudge on my wineglass is still plainly visible.

I must have asked him, Should I take one of you? He shook his head. With one pack of film you can take ten pictures—there were nine left. He didn’t want me to, but I wish I had taken one of him to keep that day.

Because we suddenly broke up shortly after that. And now I can’t love him, and I can’t hate him anymore. The camera—I brought it back home and got a shot of my family gathered around the table.

I usually sleep lying straight, flat on my back. When my stomach bothers me, I roll over onto my left side and fall asleep facing the wall. But no matter what position I sleep in, one of my arms stretches out— like it’s a habit—and ends up dangling down from the bed. Suddenly, I feel the sensation of someone gently holding my hand. I wake with a start. The room is dark. The warmth lingers on my palm. I try flexing the fingers of the hand that dangles from the bed. I feel like somebody sneaked in—he’s lying on the floor sitting at the foot of the bed, not even a tremor of movement.

But I don’t even consider leaping out of bed or quickly snapping on the light. For some reason I don’t think it would be right. It wasn’t easy at first. The presence terrified me—so much that I had to sleep with the light on for a long time. But now I’m quite accustomed to the presence. Slowly, I force out my breath. I mean, I’m hoping it will figure out that I’m awake. After a little while I switch on the light. There’s nobody there.

Not a trace of anybody having been there. But now I know. He’s been here. At first I wondered if it might be one of the spirits of this house. Or is it my dead grandmother, or my aunt, or my uncle?

My father is from Yeosu. I’ve been there only once since I became an adult. I don’t like it, because that’s where my father was born. Too many bad things

Excerpt

happen there. My father’s half brothers and half sisters drink way too much—they’re always fighting and crying. One of my uncles goes out onto the savage ocean for months at a time to catch the fish he sells at market. My father left his hometown when he was nine, after his mother died. She died on her birthday.

For once, my grandfather, my seafaring uncles, and my aunts all gathered together in one place. My grandmother must have waited a long time for that day. She cooked a puffer fish soup and committed suicide by eating it all by herself. And not just any day—it had to be her birthday. I saw my grandmother in the one picture that’s left of her. Like my mother’s mother, who died young from breast cancer, she was dressed all in white, frowning. Both my grandmothers had thick black eyebrows. I decided I liked my father’s mother—because I think her death was dramatic.

After she died, my father left home and came up to live in Seoul, and when he got married, he registered this place as his permanent address. But I know he loves Yeosu. I know that he privately dreams of going back there someday. I also know that whenever something about Yeosu comes up on TV shows like My Hometown at 6, he looks at me. Ha! Not a chance! I jerk my head and look the other way. Aunt Yonsook is the youngest of my father’s siblings. She’s especially fond of my father’s children, that is to say her nieces: my sisters and me. Every season, she would send us fish by courier—dried sole, croaker, and skate—and she called us all the time. She wanted to move up to Seoul, but after I was grown, she never came even once. Every holiday or memorial service she’d say, I should go, I should really go and see you all, and she would cry.

She was the one who cried the most of all my father’s siblings. That’s why I was afraid of her. When she got married, she was prettied up in a long dress with her black hair hanging all the way down to her waist. I heard that her sailor husband (I only saw his face once) used to beat her. She had two kids with him before she got a divorce. I also heard that she was sending the money she made from her shop and her side job at the seashore to pay for the children’s education. They said she was tough. My mother liked Aunt Yonsook a lot.

That young thing, she would say. Come to think of it,

there wasn’t much difference in our ages even though I was her niece. Then Aunt Yonsook had a fight with her lover and jumped out of his fifth-floor apartment.

A suicide. My father’s siblings berated her lover and accused him of murdering her. On the day of the autopsy, my father’s younger brother, Uncle Dosong, went to the morgue instead of him. My father was drunk—he couldn’t stop the dry heaves. Up to now, my father has given up smoking exactly three times. The first time was the day he came back after cremating my aunt. The autopsy wasn’t able to determine whether her death was a suicide or a homicide. They said that the man who had been her lover took care of the funeral. I guess that meant he paid the expenses. I heard all this from up here in Seoul. Go down to Yeosu?

I shuddered. The funeral turned into utter chaos. The five surviving siblings were all drunk, and they yelled and cried, clutching one another by the collar. That was the night I first felt the strange presence in my room.

After holding my breath and lying there for a long time, I floated up from my body. I looked at the foot of the bed and down at the floor. I called my dead aunt’s name in the dark room, Aunt Yonsook? I felt a coldness brush past my face. Those nights went on for a very long time. I didn’t say anything about it to my mother or my sisters. My family was afraid to talk about the dead. I just got used to it by myself. And after a while I didn’t feel the presence at all, not until the night after my uncle died. Uncle Dosong, who saw Aunt Yonsook’s autopsy with his own two eyes, was diagnosed with liver cancer at Severance Hospital two years after she died. He came and stayed in our house while he was an outpatient. My father’s siblings are all tall and well built—but Uncle Dosong became emaciated, his face grew dark. In that condition, he turned down my parents’ offer of their bedroom and slept in a fetal position on the living room sofa. When I had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I couldn’t go downstairs. I was afraid my uncle might be lying there dead. It felt like my bladder would burst. My uncle went back down to Yeosu with his face black as a goat’s.

He died two months later. Even then, I didn’t go to Yeosu. My father quit smoking again. I started waking up often around dawn. I couldn’t shake off the feeling

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Younger Writers Jo Kyung Ran

that somebody was sitting at the foot of my bed or curled up on the floor where there was hardly space for a person to lie down. My palms were always clammy with sweat. I tried calling, Uncle Dosong? Nobody answered—not Aunt Yonsook, or Uncle Dosong, or my grandmother who killed herself a long time ago.

Finally, I fell asleep with my Polaroid camera still in my hand.

Every Polaroid picture has a serial number printed on it. The first picture he took—the one of me on my birthday, sitting in a local café with my head bowed— has the number 0318 4149 printed on the back. If I had gotten a shot of his face after that, it would have the number 0318 4150. But number 0318 4150 is the picture of my family. They had just returned home after their evenings out and were all gathered around the table with a small cake on it. All right, everyone, look this way! I had just broken up with him when I clicked the shutter. I took up to the tenth picture in the pack, number 0318 4158, a portrait of my friend on her birthday—and when my youngest sister’s boyfriend came over, I got a shot of the two of them posed in the living room. I shot a magnolia just beginning to bloom, and I shot my old sneakers. While I used up 4152, 4155, and up to 4157—having already shot number 0318 4151—winter passed, spring came, and summer went. I never got another chance to get a picture of his face. I was down to the last shot, number 0318 4158. I slept holding my Polaroid. I woke up. I held my breath and—click—I pressed the shutter as if I were on an ambush. The film popped out like I had snatched it from the camera. I quickly turned on the light, pressed the film hard against my hot, sweaty palm to make it develop faster. Slowly, faint forms started to emerge.

The joy of Polaroids is the short time you wait while they develop, being able to see your pictures right away, right there. It’s like the anxious waiting at the door, and each time it opens, you think it might be the person you’ve been watching for. But I couldn’t feel that kind of excitement that night. Excitement!

I was scared, like someone was clutching the nape of my neck with both hands. I look quietly at the picture, at the colors and the shape so vivid in those 9 x 7.3

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centimeters. It isn’t my dead grandmother, or Aunt Yonsook, or Uncle Dosong, and it isn’t some spirit of the house. There it is—a great big elephant.

I started living in this house eleven years ago. It’s multifamily housing now, but eleven years ago it was a small single-story home with a narrow yard. My father bought that house. He tore it down and built one based on his own sketches. While the new house was under construction, our family of five all lived in a single room nearby. When they had to raise their voices to argue about something, my mother and father would go to a local inn. My father built one more room on top of the roof. That’s the rooftop room where I’ve lived until now, where I am writing this. This was supposed to be my youngest sister’s room. I used to write downstairs, squatting on the floor. I wanted to have a huge desk. When my youngest sister went away for a while, I called some of my other sister’s male friends and they helped me empty my room downstairs and move up here. That night I wrote my youngest sister a letter. Her reply: Well done, sis. The rooftop room had no space to put a desk, so I bought a shiny little table. Now the lacquer is peeling from the edges in spots and the legs wobble, but it’s still usable. Even if I get a bigger room, I don’t feel like changing my desk anymore. But I still do dream of a big desk with lots of drawers and compartments. People have to learn to be satisfied with less than enough, my mother always said. In my rooftop room I would read, write, and make phone calls in the middle of the night. Years passed in the blink of an eye. When I couldn’t write, or every time I had a bad fight with someone in the family, I felt like leaving this house. When I went downstairs at night to use the bathroom, I would accidentally step on the legs or stomachs of my family members sleeping in the dark on the floor of the living room. We’d startle each other in the dark and scream, Who’s there! Who are you? I banged the wall of my room with both fists.

It didn’t crumble. The house my father built was more solid than I thought.

Sunday afternoon I went to the Seoul Grand Park in Gwacheon. It was a few days after I saw the

Excerpt

“The elephant that came to my room lay on that cramped floor and slept with its massive body curled up tight around its trunk. As if I might try to steal it or something.”

elephant. A very windy day, and it was jam-packed with people. In the zoo, a chrysanthemum festival was opening. People were taking pictures in front of the multicolored chrysanthemums in full bloom, and in the flamingo cage next door, the flock of longlegged flamingos were flapping their wings. I went straight to the front of the elephant pen. An African elephant, with its long trunk swaying, slowly walked around inside the broad S-shaped enclosure. I couldn’t help feeling disappointed. The distance between the elephant and me was farther than I had expected. It was too far—it wasn’t worth taking a picture. I got closer to the elephant. When it went left I ran that way; when it turned its body around, I quickly ran back to the right. The elephant is really popular. Every gap in the long, curving fence was jammed with children and adults. I guessed the elephant in that pen was an old bull. Old males live alone. In the early morning and evening they forage for plants, and they rest in the shade of trees during the day. They sleep standing up— though there are times when they sleep lying on their side. The elephant that came to my room lay on that cramped floor and slept with its massive body curled up tight around its trunk. As if I might try to steal it or something. I couldn’t tell whether it had big tusks, so there was no way to know whether it was a male or a female. The elephant had been walking back and forth on the same path through its pen; once in a while it seemed lost in thought and paused with its thick legs bent, gazing out at us. Then, as if to say that it was nothing after all, it went clomping back again, retracing its steps. Each time the elephant flapped its ears, it sent a cold breeze through the front of my clothes.

I took the Polaroid camera out of my shoulder bag. I

put in a new pack of film. If there had been a Polaroid better than the Spectra, he probably would have bought it for me. But it wasn’t easy to find film for it. I ordered it specially from the owner at the photo shop.

When I went to pick up the film, the owner told me that the Spectra wasn’t widely distributed, so it would always be hard to get film for it. He said if I took it back to the place of purchase, they would exchange it for a regular Polaroid. Like a refund. I ordered three packs of film at once. It was his last present to me. Suddenly, the elephant stopped walking and—with a thump— put its front feet up on the inner rail on our side of the pen. There was another pen two or three meters away, and the gap in between was dug out like a ditch. It looked as if the elephant could jump right across. I was tense. I couldn’t be sure if the elephant would come flying up at me like a bird. I pressed the shutter just as it raised its long trunk. The print popped out. The elephant took its front feet down and turned its body around. Clever beast.

Translated by Heinz Insu Fenkl

Vol.28 Summer 2015 63

Poetry

Yi Yuksa

In July in my native land Purple grapes ripen in the sun.

Village wisdom clusters on the vines As distant skies enter each berry.

The sea below the sky opens its heart, A white sail moves toward shore.

The traveler I long for would come then, Wrapping his wayworn body with a blue robe.

If only I could share these grapes with him I wouldn’t mind if the juice wet my hands.

Child, take out a white linen napkin, Spread it on our table’s silver platter.

Modern Korean Literature: An Anthology Complied and edited by Peter H. Lee University of Hawaii Press, 1990, 468 pp.

ISBN 9780824813215

64 _list : Books from Korea

Illustrated by Woo Juri

DEEP-PURPLE GRAPES

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Excerpt

Wonderboy

photographs by Son Hongjoo

By Kim Yeonsu Translated by Sora Kim-Russell

Chapter 1 1984: When All of the Stars in the Universe Stopped in Their Tracks

T

he year I turned fifteen, I learned that time can stand still. If I had told people what I meant by that, they would have thought I was crazy. Wisely enough, I didn’t breathe a word of it to anyone. When time started moving again and I finally opened my eyes, the first words out of my mouth were, “The spoon broke.”

The nurse in charge of the intensive care unit told the reporters camped outside of my hospital room, and the next day those words appeared in all of the newspapers.

According to one article, I had been “declared clinically dead after a week in a coma,” but “thanks to the ardent prayers of citizens from all walks of life, including Our Esteemed President and First Lady, a miracle happened,” and I “was revived after ten minutes.” The spoon was mentioned at the end of the article. It read, “His first words upon awakening were, ‘The spoon broke,’” and added, “From these unconscious words, we can fathom the immense patriotism with which the late Kim Gi-shik charged into the suspect’s vehicle.”

I don’t remember saying those words, but I thought I knew why I might have. 1984 began with Nam June Paik’s video art installation “Good Morning, Mr. Orwell.”

On January 1, through a satellite feed linking TV stations in New York, Paris, and Seoul, Paik showed 25 million viewers that the earth could shrink to the size of a bean. In the autumn of that same year, an Israeli

psychic named Uri Geller visited Korea and appeared on a television show broadcast by KBS. As countless viewers watched, he bent a spoon and fixed a broken clock using only his mind. Through radio waves and telekinesis, the two men showed us how wonderful our world really is.

And then it was my turn. I showed everyone that if they put their minds together and wished for something badly enough, they could make miracles happen. The news report did not lie. Every Korean from every walk of life really did come together as one to pray for my recovery.

The headline read, “Wonderboy Opens Eyes of Hope.”

Everyone started calling me Wonderboy after that.

The person who turned me into Wonderboy was Colonel Kwon. Called “Colonel” to his face but “The Mole” behind his back, he was a forty-something-year-old man who wore sunglasses even at night and had long hair and was always dressed in civilian clothing, quite unlike other soldiers, and was a two-faced member of the elite minority who ran Korean society, always with an extra face at the ready the way other people might have a double chin. Since his face was the first thing I saw when I awoke from my coma, I could tell at once how my new life was going to unfold. Colonel Kwon put his hand on my forehead and comforted me, feigning attentiveness, but his voice was low and dug down deep into the weakest roots of my heart.

“Son, stop your crying. You are now the mascot of hope for this country. If you feel like you’re about to start crying, picture a monkey in a zoo. Hordes of people walk past that monkey, but all the monkey does is hang from his branch and watch them go by. You are that monkey,

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son. The things that are happening to you right now are like those people walking by. It will all pass. Whether you laugh or cry has nothing to do with those people. Tears are nothing more than a bodily fluid to wash the dust out of your eyes.”

At the time, having just awakened, I questioned everything: Where was I? Who was this person? Was I alive or dead? Why was the monkey hanging from a branch, and where was everyone going? Most of all, why wouldn’t these tears stop falling from my eyes?

“What do you mean I’m the mascot of hope?” I asked, as the tears continued to flow from my swollen eyes, my head wrapped in a bandage and tubes coming out of my nose.

“You’re like the Olympic mascot. You know how Hodori the tiger is always smiling and twirling the streamer on top of his cap? Now that you’re a mascot, too, you have to model yourself after Hodori: smile all the time and never show your tears. That way, you can fill people with hope. We need hope in this world because there are too many people who are weak. After all, who needs hope if you have strength? But do you know what those powerless people have done? They raised over 200 million won in donations while praying for your recovery.

A boiler company even pledged to pay your tuition until you finish college. And another boiler company has not only offered to pay your tuition but has also promised you a job after you graduate. Maybe now you can tell just how much the people of this nation are hanging their hopes on you.”

Why boiler companies? But it didn’t matter. Instead,

I asked, “Why didn’t they leave me to die?”

“Just because we live in the fatherland of Free Korea doesn’t mean that you’re guaranteed the freedom to die whenever you want. If you feel like sending anyone a thank you card, send it to the Blue House. The president showed a particular interest in your survival. You were even taking up the top spot on the nine o’clock news. The president yielded that spot to you. When he heard you were out of your coma, he said the fatherland created this miracle so that you might do great things for our nation. Those words left a deep impression on me.” “ This is considered a miracle? Where has the fatherland been all this time, and what does it want from me now? Things must be going pretty well in the world if there’s nothing better to report on in the nine o’clock news…”

I was still fuzzy from the drugs and wasn’t making much sense.

“Son, you showed us yourself that our country can overcome any difficulty if we put our minds to it. Your body is proof of that miracle. This country will take care of you.”

“Barely surviving a car accident, and coming out of it alone, without my father, is proof of a miracle?” I protested.

“That’s an odd thing to say.” Colonel Kwon stared at me.

Terrified of the dark sunglasses that hid his eyes, I started crying again.

“Surely no one has told you yet that you were the only survivor. How did you figure it out?”

“I know something happened to my dad. Nobody had to tell me. He’s the only family I have.”

“I, too, have a son… but he wouldn’t know if I was alive or dead. Too busy kicking around his soccer ball. I’ll admit that your situation is sad. But that’s not why we’re treating you this way. We’re doing it because your father did something great, on the level of the great martyr An Jung-geun, who assassinated Hirobumi. You are the great son of a patriot. The mascot of hope who conquered death and was reborn.”

In that case, I really should be spinning a streamer on top of my cap, but there I was with my neck in a brace. When Colonel Kwon talked about my father, I felt something start to burn inside my chest.

“Your life is going to be very different from now on.

But regardless of what happens, you can be sure that it will be a great deal better than when you lived with that alcoholic father of yours. You’ll be able to do things that you couldn’t even imagine before. You’ve earned it. And in exchange, all you have to do is trust me and follow me, just as you would a father. Understand? From now on, I’ll think of you as my son.”

I had started crying loudly even before Colonel Kwon was done talking. I didn’t just weep but kicked the sheets and thrashed my arms and legs. I ripped the oxygen tube from my nose and tore off the bandage that secured the IV needle to my arm. Colonel Kwon held me down with one arm. I heard someone ask, “Is something wrong?” over the intercom next to the bed. Colonel Kwon said something in response, but his voice was drowned out by

my screams.

I bawled at the top of my lungs, “What’s going on?

I don’t know what’s going on! Where is my dad? I’ll do whatever you tell me to do, just please bring me my dad!

Hurry up and bring him to me! Why did you save me?

Hurry—” That was as far as I got. Colonel Kwon pressed down hard on the pit of my stomach with his right thumb.

With the wind knocked out of me, my body went limp. I was like the Energizer bunny after someone had yanked the batteries out. I wondered if I was dying, but the tears that kept streaming down my face told me I wasn’t. To tell the truth, I had somehow known from the moment Colonel Kwon entered my hospital room that my father was dead. When the two cars collided head-on, the steering wheel crushed my father’s chest, and his ribs splintered like twigs. Each one of those shards became a fine-tipped needle that ripped his heart and lungs and stomach to shreds. Pop! Boom! Bang! I felt like I was looking up at the night sky as it exploded with fireworks, standing alone in my hospital gown at the grand opening of Seoul Grand Park packed with crowds of people.

The tears that would not stop were the dregs of my loneliness. *** The reason I am so prone to crying is because I am my father’s son. My dad—who was, as Colonel Kwon said, an alcoholic—cried whenever he got drunk. When

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I think about the fact that he started drinking in order to hide his weaknesses from me, it’s so funny I could die. I used to think that my dad was the coolest man in the world. That is, as long as he wasn’t drunk. When he was in a good mood, he talked about his wishes. So as not to be left out, I told him my wishes too, and after a while, it became a game—one in which we took turns telling each other what we wished for. Winning a 100 million-won Olympic Lotto jackpot, pitching for the OB Bears, driving a Daweoo Lemans all the way across Asia to Paris, running a thousand meters in two minutes and three seconds in a pair of Nikes, and so on and so on. The key to the game was only naming wishes that could absolutely never come true. My father swore that if we kept talking about things that seemed impossible, they would gradually become possible. He had a point, and after a while, we moved on from naming our wishes to talking about what we would buy with a 100 million won, or how to sign an autograph to make it look like a professional baseball player’s, and other such things, as if those wishes had already come true. Other people would have said we were counting our chickens before they hatched, but in our minds we could already hear the clucking of baby chicks. One of my wishes was to go to the grand opening of Seoul Grand Park in May and watch the dolphin show, but I never told my dad for fear he would say, “Foul ball! It doesn’t count as a wish because there’s nothing impossible about it.” Did he really think my wish was just to go watch a dolphin show? I also had to have my mom and dad by my side. Now that was a

wish!

Whenever I brought up the subject of Mom, my dad looked at me as if he had no idea who I was talking about. He would ask me, “Do you know why I started drinking?” How could I know what was in the depths of my father’s heart? “No, why?” I would ask. And after a moment he would say, “Huh. I used to know, but now I forgot.” Once, he said he remembered the reason. It was when I asked him what my mom was like. “Come to think of it,” he said, “I started drinking so I could forget someone’s face.” I knew whose face he was talking about.

After one bottle of soju, my father had what it took to be a great man who could do anything and everything for his son; opening his third bottle of soju meant that the face came back to him no matter how hard he tried to forget it. I never asked, but when I look back on it now, I think that’s what happened. As he got drunker, my father would turn into the weakest man in the world. When I was younger—that is, up until the third grade—my father would get drunk and cling to me, and I would cling right back and cry with him. I didn’t cry because I was sad—I was sad because I was crying. I had never known my mother. I was told she died right after giving birth to me. There were no photos of her. The only person who remembered what she looked like was my father, and he drank soju everyday to try to forget it. According to our relatives, our father had shown up in his hometown, out of his mind, a total wreck, and with a baby in tow. I was breastfed by village women. Most of the time, I did not miss my mother. But whenever I got upset because of

my father’s drinking, I always thought about her. I guess thinking about my mother was the same thing as feeling upset. If she had been here, she would have soothed my father instead of me. Of course, if she were here, he would not have been drinking to forget her face.

My father used to go through three bottles of soju at a time, up until the day I finished off the rest of his soju while he was in the toilet and proceeded to collapse on the floor and experience firsthand just how fast the earth was spinning. Those three bottles of soju were like Dr. Jekyll’s mysterious potion, and in short course they would turn Dad into Mr. Hyde. Violent when drunk, Dad would yell that he was too tired to go on living, and that I would be better off if he just died right then and there. Then he would get even more worked up and pull a medicine bottle out of the wardrobe. He told me the bottle, which was no bigger than his thumb, contained poison. At the time, I didn’t understand why he had to hold on to something so terrible, but when I look back on it now, I am struck by the irony that maybe that bottle was why he was able to go on. Since drinking the poison would kill him immediately, maybe, paradoxically, it was his way of telling himself to keep going, until he absolutely could not go on any more.

Whenever he was drunk to the point of passing out, he would get really weak and become convinced that that moment was the decisive moment. Without a second to spare on telling him just how stupid that idea was, I would squeeze his arms so he couldn’t move and yell, “Dad! Don’t die!” And I would drop to my knees in front of my dad as he was holding the bottle of poison and rub

my hands together and beg. It would get so loud in our room that the landlord would fling the door open and curse at us, “Shut the hell up, take the damn rat poison, and drop dead so we can all get back to sleep!” In fact, the person who warned me that when my father got drunk like that he was no longer my father but a mangy son of a bitch who crept around in alleyways and therefore I shouldn’t even think of getting near him, and the same person, who taught me the trick to cutting off my father’s terrible drinking problem with a single stroke when I was in the sixth grade, was none other than our landlord. Only after having seen me projectile vomiting my skimpy dinner and the soju I had guzzled earlier, at the landlord’s silly advice, did my father come to his senses. After that night, my father stopped drinking to the point of threatening to kill himself, and only drank enough to lament that we were the loneliest, saddest, and most pathetic father and son in the world.

The blue, one-ton truck, which they said crumpled like a piece of paper, was my father’s store. He sold fruit year-round from the back of his truck. He worked in the street all day long and around ten o’clock at night when all that was left were drunks getting drunker he started packing up his goods. On the night that Colonel Kwon told me about, I had met my father around ten o’clock to help him pack up the unsold apples and pears and other fruits. Since fruit bruises easily if you handle them too roughly, I sighed as I transferred the fruit, but my father stopped me, saying that even fruit has ears. It took so long to transfer all of the fruit without bruising any that almost twenty minutes had passed before we managed to

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pack everything up.

“What’s that you got in your hand?” My father asked as he put the truck in gear. “A student like you should be holding a pencil!”

I didn’t know what he was talking about and stared at him for a moment before remembering the spoon in my hand.

“Oh, this? I saw a psychic on TV named Uri Geller who can bend spoons by rubbing them with his finger and chanting, ‘Bend, bend.’ He bends them with his mind. They call that telekinesis.”

“Television lies about all sorts of things. Don’t believe anything you see on TV. It’s all a trick.”

“But the whole country was watching, not just one or two people. How can he fool everyone? It’s not a trick.

He said when he focuses his mind, energy comes out through his fingertips. Even if I try to bend it using both hands, like this, it doesn’t work.”

As I said that, I squeezed my hands hard, and the spoon actually did bend a little. If I squeezed harder, I probably could have bent it just like Uri Geller did.

“I got superpowers, too. Give me that. I’ll snap it in two for you,” Dad said.

“The important thing is that all he did was rub it gently. He bent it using his mind. His mind! He just thought about it. He also fixed a broken clock using telekinesis. He said that with practice anyone can do it.

Do you think that’s true?”

“Even without practice, you can do anything as long as you have money. If you have super-powers, you should use them to pick a winning number in the Olympic Lotto.

Who cares about bending a perfectly good spoon?”

Dad drove out of the marketplace and merged onto the main road. There were no other cars out at that hour.

“It’s not true that you can do anything you want if you have money. No matter how rich you are you can’t go back in time. I want to go back in time.”

As I spoke, I held the stem of the spoon in my left hand and gently rubbed the part of the metal right below the bowl between the forefinger and thumb of my right hand. The spoon would never laugh at me, right?

“You’re barely fifteen. Why are you going on about the past as if you’ve got something dark in yours?”

“I mean before I was born. Don’t you ever wonder, Dad? I’m so curious. For instance, where were you and who were you with and what were you doing?”

My father coughed several times like something had gotten caught in his throat. I pretended not to notice and focused on the spoon. Bend, bend.

“What do you think I was doing? Getting drunk on soju, that’s what. Shall we have a drink when we get home?”

“I told you I quit.”

“You have to have been a real drinker before you can say you quit. That time didn’t count. Let’s have a drink later, and I’ll teach you how to keep drinking without throwing up.”

“No thanks. I can’t stand the thought of having to learn something.”

“But if you learn how to drink, you’ll have a trusty friend for life…”

Dad roared with laughter. I raised my head and rolled

my eyes at him. Beyond his laughing face, the road was dark. There were few streetlights. But the lamplight spilling from the windows of every house in the distant hillside villages full of darkened buildings that we passed glittered like the Milky Way. A speck of light, another speck, and then sometimes a cluster. Against that backdrop, my father looked like an astronaut making his way across the galaxy. An astronaut laughing so hard that the entire universe bounced with excitement.

“By the way, about that article you read to me earlier,” I asked as I lowered my head again to concentrate on the spoon.

When I met my father at his truck earlier, he had been reading his notebook by the light of a carbide lamp.

It was a large notebook the size of a textbook that he used to record what happened every day, and he also pasted articles in it that he had clipped from newspapers and magazines. Each time he filled up a notebook, he bought a new one and wrote “備忘錄” on the front cover. I asked him what it said, and he explained that the characters meant, “A Record of Things You Should Remember No Matter How Time Passes.” That night, Dad read to me from his memorandum a news article entitled, “Animals in Exile: 237 Deaths over 11 Months in Seoul Grand Park.”

237 animals of various species housed at Seoul Grand Park have died due to neglect and poor conditions, park officials admitted. These deaths took place over the past eleven months, after the zoo began importing animals from foreign countries in

September. The largest number of deaths were the ‘gentoo penguins.’ Five of these rare animals were imported last November. Three were already dead when the park officially opened on May 1, and the remaining two died soon after due to the hot weather.

One orangutan, a favorite of young visitors, died late last month when it started a fight with the other orangutans and drowned in the moat surrounding the animals’ play area.

“What are you trying to remember by saving that article?” I asked.

“A long time ago, I learned that ‘orang’ is Malay for ‘person,’ and ‘utan’ means ‘forest.’ Someone told me orangutan means ‘person of the forest,’ and I don’t want to forget that someone,” he said.

“So it’s not the orangutans you want to remember.

The people of the forest would be sad to hear it. You must’ve been really grateful to the person who taught you that.”

“How can you tell?”

“Because people always say things like, ‘I am forever grateful to you.’ Since you never want to forget this person, you must’ve been really grateful. What else did you write down in there, in your memorandum?”

“I wrote down things that will happen in heaven.”

“Such as?”

“Such as, hmm, let’s see. Going on a hot date with a young lady before I die?”

“You can’t die in heaven!”

“If you can’t die whenever you want, then what kind

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of heaven is that?”

“Are you starting another wishing contest?” I asked, still rubbing the spoon.

“Sure. Tell me your wish.”

“In that case, I want to go on a hot date with a young lady, too.”

Dad snorted.

“Young lady? No matter how young she is, she’ll still be an older woman to you. That’s your loss. How about someone in elementary school?”

“What difference does it make? None of this will ever come true anyway.”

“Why do you say that? I’m single. It could happen for me. Fine, then. My wish is to cross the Pacific Ocean in a yacht with that young lady from my other wish.”

He started to sing, “One fine spring day, Mr. Elephant was riding a fallen leaf across the Pacific…”

My father was always going on about young ladies, and I hated it.

“My wish is to go to Seoul Grand Park on Sunday and watch the dolphin show!”

“Miss Whale saw Mr. Elephant and fell in love at first sight…”

“While holding hands with you and Mom.” Dad stopped singing. As soon as I said it out loud, I regretted it. I knew I shouldn’t have, but the milk was already spilt. Embarrassed, I rubbed harder at the spoon.

Hard enough to rub the tip of my finger raw.

“Is that really so impossible…?” he mumbled.

That’s when it happened. I began to feel a strange heat in the tip of my thumb. The neck of the spoon

slowly began to bend. My eyes widened. I was so focused on it that I did not hear what my father said next. It might have been, “The thing about your mom…” Or maybe he said, “What’s that guy doing?” Anyway, what I do remember clearly was that the spoon miraculously started to bend. But when that moment finally came, what I felt was not so much awe at having bent the spoon with my mind, but more the feeling of my entire body breaking out in goose bumps.

“Oh, oh, Dad, look… Dad! Dad!” As the neck of the spoon snapped right before my eyes, I shouted for my dad to look. But by then, it was already too late. I had missed the opportunity, for the first and only time in my entire life, to tell my father that I didn’t want him to die. The last I saw of my father’s face was his profile, just like an astronaut’s, as he flew into the light. *** After a few days, I admitted to myself that the wishes my father and I had taken turns telling would never come true now. During those few days, I couldn’t stand how pathetic I felt for stupidly believing in stupid things like supernatural powers while my dad was dying. Telepathy was useless. I was an orphan now. When Colonel Kwon brought me the head of the broken spoon that had been found in the truck, I wanted to throw it out the window. But I couldn’t bring myself to do that. That object held my last memory of Dad. Colonel Kwon told me the vehicle that collided head on with our truck was

driven by an armed spy. That strange and stupid spy, who lived on the outskirts of Seoul and worked as a boiler repairman, took a pistol equipped with a silencer into a local restaurant and murdered the owner, then broke into a neighboring beauty salon and fired three shots at the lady who worked there, leaving her in critical condition.

The owner of a nearby shoe store heard her screams and came running. The spy threatened him with the gun and then tried to strangle him to death, but the shoe store owner kicked him in the leg and knocked him over. The spy sprang right back up, ran in front of a passing Bongo to stop it, pulled the driver out, stole the Bongo, and fled towards downtown.

When Colonel Kwon got to this part, he examined the look on my face then pushed his glasses up and said if I didn’t understand any part of it, I should go ahead and ask.

“I don’t understand any of it,” I went ahead and said.

“Of course. All sorts of things happen in this world that you can’t understand,” he said.

“If he was a spy, then why did he only shoot a local restaurant owner and the lady at the beauty salon?”

Colonel Kwon looked annoyed at my question, but he said, “According to the joint investigation, it seems that the North sent him here on a mission to kill the restaurant owner. The fact that they target ordinary citizens just goes to show how vicious the North Korean puppet regime really is.”

“If he was sent here to kill the restaurant owner, then he would have escaped right after killing him. Why did he also go into the beauty salon and shoot the employee?”

“Your teacher should have taught you this in school!

Spies are brutal, cold-blooded killers who view human life as lower than a fly’s. That’s why we have to eradicate them.”

“But why didn’t he shoot the shoe store owner to death? Why did he strangle him instead?” I went ahead and asked again.

“Guns aren’t the only way to kill a person. Spies are killing machines. Their entire bodies are deadly weapons.

They can kill someone using a single plastic bag and not leave a trace.”

“But the shoe store owner kicked him in the leg, and he wasn’t able to kill him even though he had his hands around his throat. Why is that?”

Colonel Kwon raised his voice. He sounded annoyed.

“There is no logic to killing a person. It transcends logic. When it comes to killing, I know this better than anyone. Listen up. You are now an orphan. Do you know what that means? If you laugh, the world laughs with you, but if you cry, you cry alone. So you have to make a choice. Do you want to laugh with the world? Or cry alone? Now, I will explain this to you one more time and then we will never speak of it again. The spy went into the beauty salon and murdered the employee and then tried to strangle the shoe store owner but got kicked in the leg. Right at that moment, your father was passing by in his truck and witnessed that awful scene. And out of devotion to his country and to his people…”

If you asked me what my father loved best, I would probably say orangutans. His country and his people?

C’mon. I realized for the first time that I was Wonderboy

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because my father had knocked out a spy with his truck.

“Hold on a second,” I interrupted Colonel Kwon. “We didn’t see any of that. We were just on our way home.”

“You said you had your head down when it happened.

You had no way of knowing what was going on. Just because you didn’t see it doesn’t mean that your father didn’t. According to the investigation, your father served in the forward ranks during his military duty, so we believe he grasped the situation instantly. Furthermore, all of the witnesses, including the shoe store owner, already testified that the truck driven by your father charged headfirst into the oncoming Bongo. Think about it. Did you see it? Did you witness your father’s death?”

I stared at Colonel Kwon. I tried to remember the details of that night, but all I could recall was my father’s wish to go on a hot date with a young lady. And how he told me that his wish would never, ever come true, even though it could have if he only put his mind to it. I missed him so much. Not only did I not get to say goodbye to my father before he died, but I wasn’t even looking at him when it happened. Goddamned spoon.

“I can’t remember. We were just driving fast down a dark road.”

“Take your time. There’s no rush. Your father clearly saw something. Just never forget that you have only one choice to make: laugh with us, or cry alone. Now then, that’s enough for today. Get plenty of rest, and think about what I told you. And don’t forget that you’re an orphan now.”

Yes, I was an orphan. My fate was my own to determine.

“Can you do me a favor?”

Colonel Kwon turned and asked, “What is it?

“I’m anemic. The medicine I usually take for it is at home.

Could someone bring it to me?”

“You’re in a hospital. Why do you need to go all the way home to get medicine? That’s like looking for a tree to hang yourself from in the middle of a minefield.”

“It has to be those pills.”

Colonel Kwon looked at me like he smelled something fishy. I was shocked by his comment about the minefield.

“I also need my schoolbooks and my notebook. Oh, and if you look through my notebook, you’ll find an essay on anti-communism that I wrote for a school assignment in June. I could probably put that essay to some good use now.”

“Makes sense. If you show your essay to the reporters, it will probably help them to further explain your father’s splendid feat. Okay. Where can I find your anemia medication?”

I told him where the box that held my father’s poison was hidden in the wardrobe. After jotting down my directions in his notepad, Colonel Kwon said he had to be going and walked to the door. But before he got there, he suddenly stopped and turned to look at me.

“By the way,” he said. He stared at me, and my heart jumped.

“Your anti-communism essay. That’s a great idea.”

Wonderboy Kim Yeonsu Munhakdongne Publishing Group, 2012, 320 pp.

ISBN 9788954617482

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

For publication inquiries, please contact Joseph Lee / KL Management: josephlee705@gmail.com

REVIEWS 69

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Modern Family

Putain de pupitres!

Cheon Myeong-kwan

(A Filthy Desk) Park Bum Shin

Vaseline-Buddha Jung Young Moon

Vol.28 Summer 2015 65

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Functional Family Dysfunction

Modern Family Cheon Myeong-kwan Translated by Park Kyoung-lee White Pine Press, 2015, 177 pp.

ISBN 9781935210672

Throughout Modern Family, Cheon Myeong-kwan’s 2010 novel, the narrator, In-mo, describes the story he is telling as a soap opera. Indeed it has all the hallmarks of the genre: sibling rivalries; long-held secrets; high emotion; money troubles; and a long-suffering mother, striving to hold her family together.

However, Cheon—who cut his literary teeth as a screenwriter— is not writing a traditional soap opera. Instead he uses the

66 _list : Books from Korea

format’s tropes to build a nuanced picture of a contemporary family and to examine the commodification of personal relationships.

In-mo, a failed, middle-aged movie director, has been pushed by bankruptcy to move in with his mother and recidivist elder brother, Hammer. Just as they are settling into awkward co-habitation, a younger sister, Mi-yeon, who has split up with

her husband over a fight about her infidelity, arrives with her teenage daughter, Min-gyeong. The pressures of living cheekby-jowl soon begin to test the family’s loyalties and affection.

In 1939, Kim Namcheon published the Korean classic, Taeha (published in English as Scenes from the Enlightenment), in which he describes late-19th century Korea transforming from a traditional society into a modern one. Modern Family covers similar ground, examining a South Korea once again in transition. Just as the concerns in Taeha revolve around who owns what, eats where and marries whom, so the plot of Modern Family revolves around money, debt, food, and sex.

Throughout the novel, Cheon draws parallels between finance and work, which are clearly transactional, and the way intimate and sexual relationships have become commodities that can be traded.

Food acts as a symbol of these transactions. It is a currency in the newly-reformed household. Hammer, obese and ravenous, eats everything in sight. In-mo, malnourished from alcoholism, gorges on the plenty his mother provides. In a key early scene, their niece, Min-gyeong, buys herself a large pizza, but refuses to share it with her uncles. The disrespect this represents, the filial rivalry it reveals, and the unexpected loyalty it highlights persist to the end of the novel.

In contrast to this pizza incident is the “meat-eating competition.” With all her family once again under her roof, Mom finds from somewhere the money to serve her children vast quantities of beef and pork: “Mom acted like she’d staked her life on meat,” In-mo observes. For her part, Mom sighs and says, “You kids turned out so weak from eating only rationed rice.”

What Mom is doing is repaying her children for the indiscretions of her youth. The rationed rice represents the limited love and attention she gave them growing up. Because, it transpires, Hammer and Mi-yeon are In-mo’s half-siblings: Hammer is not Mom’s biological child, but the son of her husband by a previous marriage; and Mi-yeon is her daughter by an extra-marital affair which briefly broke up the family. Now Mom is attempting to give all three children equal attention and an equal right to her home.

Hammer ends up acting in the same spirit. In In-mo’s eyes he is the “wild boar” who consumes and destroys everything.

However, though he is unrelated to his niece by blood, Hammer

sacrifices his freedom and puts his life in danger to save her.

Min-gyeong runs away, prompted by a combination of events: her mother finds yet another new partner; Hammer steals her panties; and, significantly, In-mo blackmails her (in order to take a woman on a trip, he forces Min-gyeong to buy his silence about her smoking). Unlike In-mo, Hammer feels a huge sense of guilt over his part in her disappearance, and through his gangland contacts, manages to trace Min-gyeong and bring her home. However, Hammer has to make a trade—in exchange for the gang’s help, he must take the fall for their crimes.

In-mo resents Hammer for his noble behavior, illustrating one of the most fascinating aspects of the novel: Cheon’s ability to tell the story from the point of view of a character who is unaware of his own shortcomings. In-mo is spoiled and selfish; the only child of both parents in the oddly configured family, he was regarded as the most gifted of the children, with a university education and the promise of a successful career ahead of him. In his own eyes, however, while the behavior of his criminal brother and promiscuous sister damage the family’s honor and wear his mother down, he is simply a failure.

He resents the way the neighborhood gossips align him with his defective siblings. But it is clear his resentment stems from his suspicion of the truth—a truth he only acknowledges when Hammer’s persecutors beat him almost to death.

The beating not only makes In-mo realize how his family have privileged him, it also forces him to see the error of his belief in the transactional nature of sex and relationships.

During a brief affair, he describes sex as having either “value in use or in exchange”—it either satisfies desires or is something to be traded for money, security, or position. However, when an old girlfriend pulls him back from the brink of death, for no selfish reason of her own, he understands Mi-yeon’s struggles, sees how Hammer has ultimately acted with integrity and realises that sex can be given and received as part of a loving partnership. Most importantly, he comes to appreciate the unconditional, non-tradable love his mother has given her children, just like in any traditional—or modern—family.

by West Camel Freelance Writer, Reviewer, and Editor

Vol.28 Summer 2015 67

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Getting Lost Means Finding One’s Way

Vaseline-Buddha Jung Young Moon Translated by Jan Dirks Literaturverlag Droschl, 2015, 278 pp.

ISBN 9783854209614

Indeed, most readers will find VaselineBuddha hard to read: an endless, unfiltered flow of thoughts and memories, strange, ordinary, complicated, simple, philosophical, trivial. After all, that is exactly what most of our thoughts are like—long-winded sentences, a jungle of words, the more complex the grammar, the less clear the meaning—no storyline, no noteworthy characters, no emotional development. And after fifty pages at most, when the author-narrator is still worrying about how he could begin this novel in an appropriate manner, fans of easy-reading literature will have already thrown in the towel.

After explaining explicitly to the reader what kind of text he wants to write: “something that is not even anything, or something that is not even not anything,” and therefore doing his very best to muddle and bungle everything that could possibly develop into a cohesive story, the middle-

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aged, male, first-person narrator who is constantly suffering from insomnia and ver tigo, takes us on an er ratic journey through real, unreal, and surreal geographical and mental spaces.

In Nepal, he enjoys an apple, completely calm, while his plane almost crashes into the mountains. In a small provincial town in France, he sees an inflatable rubber dolphin drifting by on the river.

In Budapest, he discovers a set of false teeth on a snow-covered bench near the Royal Palace. In Paris, he desperately tries to ignore the omnipresent Eiffel Tower.

In New York, he spends most of his time watching TV in his hotel room. In Venice, on the mist-shrouded Piazza San Marco, he catches sight of a little girl holding a blue balloon in her hand. In Amsterdam, he meets a stoned-looking woman with spinach between her teeth. In Berlin, he watches a young woman jumping up and down on a trampoline in a park at

midnight. Nothing really spectacular, but everything slightly odd, one might think.

Despite of, no, thanks to the strict rejection of conventional narrative patterns, Vaseline-Buddha is truly meaningful literature. What makes this novel so fascinating is its permanent liminality and ambiguity: it is exactly the completely obvious which remains ultimately cryptic; it is exactly the linguistic hyper-precision which leads to confusion; it is exactly the “boring” stuff which becomes thrilling at another level; and it is exactly the humorous, ironic attitude of the authornarrator which proves his deep seriousness.

If we trust in the benevolence of author Jung Young Moon, there are many possible readings of this novel: we can read it from the perspective of depth psychology, existentialism, deconstruction, or Zen Buddhism. But there is never the need to interpret or understand anything. This text does not want to be studied, it wants to be experienced. For Jung, looking for truth does not mean creating order. It means facing the inevitable, never-ending chaos of mind. In this sense, he invites us to join his open meditation: we don’t have access to anything outside the human mind, so let’s just watch the human mind as it is. The chaos will remain, but the inner eye will become clear.

by Jan Dirks Translator

Contacting the Beautiful, Dark Truth

Putain de pupitres!

(A Filthy Desk) Park Bum Shin Translated by K.O. Kwang-dan and Eric Bidet Decrescenzo éditeurs, 2014, 228 pp.

ISBN 9782367270111

The Park Bum Shin novel A Filthy Desk is a tale set in the wretched sixty to seventyyear period of an impoverished Korea, before and during Park Chung-hee’s Yushin government. With special consideration given to the perspective of the populist elements, the realistic background and its descriptions can seem especially violent and brutal, as it takes place under military dictatorship. The country suddenly moved from a traditional and poor society to a modern and industrialized nation, and the young protagonist (also named Yushin) illustrates perfectly the atmosphere of disorientation that followed the destruction of the older society during the reconstruction period.

The main character is an adult narrating his youth, and so the point of view alternates from adolescence to adulthood.

The two “faces” of the narrator/protagonist portray different periods and also different narrative styles, mixing past and present,

remembrance and contemplation. The young man is obviously marginalized, lost, and a bit rebellious. He is also strongly attracted by tormented writers (Genet, Baudelaire) who tend to see in the suffering, self-destruction, and death that surrounds them a better way to grasp and control the “humiliating” world they live in.

It is a humiliating world not only because of the dress codes, the imposed curfew, the ruined sceneries, the hunger, and the prostitution that represents his everyday milieu, but also because of the many crazy things happening in the world at the time, such as the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, McCarthyism, and so on.

The novel’s title refers to the education s y s te m h e d o e s n’t wa n t to acce p t , symbolizing what he hates and fears the most: predestination (the youth have to submit their lives to study in order to improve their country), and the ideological dreams and illusions taught to the youngest

child in order to build a better future.

But this crazy place has changed over the years, and so does the protagonist. The 50-year-old Yushin feels surprised when he realizes how much he loves his country, feeling guilty towards his younger self, as though he is betraying him. The mature man who finally ended up teaching at a university, and peddling the “dream” he had despised years ago, comes to understand that Korea has changed to the point that the young generation is very far from realizing the realities that their parents and grandparents had to face, and that he is presently witnessing a profound generation gap.

As the world undergoes perpetual change, Yushin shows us how to keep questioning our environment, and most importantly, ourselves. He reminds us that bad parts of ourselves have a reason to be—the alter ego that he tried to kill and forget so many times becomes a source of nostalgia, inspiration, and love. He misses his past spontaneity and non-conformist attitude. Above all, he pursues again the capacity to establish direct contact with the “truth,” the dark and beautiful essence of things, which mature and wise reasoning had separated him from. This connection between good and evil, life and death, beauty and monstrosity that the older narrator (and Park Bum Shin) successfully underlines through moving, authentic, and beautiful prose, is finally what makes this story far from being what it looks like at first glance: a deeply pessimistic novel.

by Julie Fagot Editor, Keulmadang

Vol.28 Summer 2015 69

Interview

From Translator to Publisher Deborah Smith Deborah Smith, the translator of The Vegetarian by Han Kang (Portobello Books, 2015), has recently opened a publishing house, Tilted Axis, in the UK. She has just signed a Memorandum of Agreement with the Literature Translation Institute of Korea to publish a Korean literature series. Through this interview with Yoonie Lee of LTI Korea, she shared her vision as a new publisher and also as a prolific translator.

Yoonie Lee: How long does it take for you to complete the work of translating a Korean book into English?

Deborah Smith: Of course that depends on the book, not just the length, but other factors such as whether there are a lot of specific historical or cultural references that need checking—if the style is particularly dense or abstruse, or if it involves dialect.

For example, The Vegetarian was less than 200 pages and didn’t have many specifically Korean references, so I translated that in around four months, which left another couple of weeks to go through the edits with the publisher.

Han Kang’s new novel, Human Acts, is a bit longer, plus it has a lot of historical and political context that I needed to research—Park Chung-hee’s Yushin Constitution, the unionization of female factory workers in the late 1970s, Korean burial practices, and beliefs related to death. And then there was a

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chapter written in Gwangju dialect, which I found pretty incomprehensible in some places! Luckily, Han Kang has excellent English and goes through each manuscript meticulously. She’s always more than happy to explain anything I haven’t understood, and to give me a bit more of an insight into her intentions as an author. But she also understands that as the translator, it’s then up to me to decide how and to what extent I can convey those intentions in English.

Actually, I did Human Acts in about four months too, even though it was more “difficult” than The Vegetarian. Perhaps because The Vegetarian was my first translation, I didn’t have much experience and needed to take my time a bit more. But I can’t see myself speeding up any further in the future. Four months seems about the limit for a novel. The Salmon Who Dared to Leap Higher by Ahn Do Hyun only took two months, but that’s because it’s very short and has the simple, straightforward writing style of a fable.

Event

Lee: What made you interested in Korean literature?

What is it that makes you feel special about Korean literature compared to other international literature?

Smith: Initially it was the mystery. In 2010, when I decided to do an MA in Korean Studies in London, I knew nothing about Korea. I’d never even eaten Korean food or met anyone Korean! And I’d never read a Korean book, because the few translations that did exist were usually only available in the US. But I knew South Korea was a rich, developed country and so I guessed that it would have a strong literary culture; I chose to start studying Korean because I’d always loved literature (my BA was in English) and dreamed of becoming a translator. I moved straight into a PhD in contemporary Korean literature, and as soon as my Korean was good enough for me to start reading novels I realized that my guess had been correct! The contemporary writing is extraordinarily diverse and dynamic, particularly in terms of form. Short stories have always been more prominent in Korea than in the UK or US, and the fact that most Korean writers debut with a story collection or two means that the novels they end up writing afterwards tend to be fascinatingly different from what’s common elsewhere.

Lee: It seems that you like works with less of a narrative or storyline and more of a strong and dense writing style. What are your criteria in selecting works?

How are they different when you select works as a translator and a publisher?

Smith: Writing that’s stylistically unusual or experimental is a hook for me, because it instantly gets me thinking about how I might translate it. I enjoy the challenge I get from translating a writer like Bae Suah. Beautiful, lyrical descriptions are another draw; translating Han Kang, for instance, gives me the opportunity to make something beautiful in English.

The story, on the other hand, is something I’ve so far enjoyed more as a reader—though close reading is a big part of translation, and I can enjoy the story of a book while I’m translating it, but that’s not the initial draw. Of course, I would still only choose to translate

something if I think there’s a realistic chance that a publisher will take it on. Now, as a publisher myself, I’m focusing even more strongly on what readers want, especially as I’m not publishing my own translations.

Narrative and subject matter are as important as style.

Literary quality is still the main criterion, but I also want to focus on books that are daring and original, that don’t fit in with the established stereotype of a given country or culture.

Lee: You are about to open your own publishing company. What made you decide to open a new publisher in the UK? Can you tell me which Korean authors you plan to introduce through Tilted Axis?

Smith: I’ve always read a lot of fiction in translation, and since becoming a translator myself, I’ve got to know a lot of other translators working with “underrepresented” languages who’ve shown me that there are so many rich, exciting literary cultures that English speakers still have practically no access to. Plus, getting an insider’s view of the publishing industry (through translating, but also through an apprenticeship at a London publishing house) has revealed the implicit biases which means this is unlikely to change. So founding Tilted Axis felt both necessary and doable—I know there’s great writing out there, I know people who can translate it, and I know commercial publishers are never going to take the risk. As a not-for-profit company, thanks to the support of organizations such as LTI Korea and the UK Arts Council, we can. There are three Korean authors I plan to publish, all of whom I’ve read and loved in Korean, all for different reasons—Hwang Jung-eun for her dark, obliquely fantastical stories of the Korean underclass; Han Yujoo for her daring experiments with language and grammar; and Kim Yeonsu for his freshly imaginative storytelling. With thoughtful marketing and tireless, passionate promotion, I’m confident that their books will connect with UK readers. We might even have a new Korean Wave on our hands!

by Yoonie Lee LTI Korea

Vol.28 Summer 2015 71

Afterword

Encounter with Korean Literature in Prague T

his May, the Czech public had the unique opportunity to meet two eminent Korean writers, Yi Mun-yol and Kim Young-ha, guests at the Book World Prague 2015. Both writers have been known to Czech readers due to the translations of their works into Czech. Yi Mun-yol has met success with his novel, The Poet, while Kim Young-ha has been introduced through two of his novels, Empire of Light and I Have the Right to Destroy Myself.

During the event, the authors read excerpts of their books, attended a press conference, and signed books. For the authors, it was all simply a matter of course for one of their routine visits abroad: the faces of foreigners, predictable questions, an unfamiliar language.

The public may have other opinions. For the average Czech reader, attending a Korean author’s reading or meeting with him or her can be quite a new experience. Nevertheless, the joy that Yi Mun-yol and Kim Young-ha brought to the students in the Department of Korean Studies was unforgettable. The students talked about how they felt after the event, writing enthusiastically about their experience on Facebook. This week, I received the semester evaluation of my course on “The Modern Korean Novel.” My students could not restrain their happiness about meeting with the writers.

I understand how my students felt. As a child of two intellectuals, I used to live among books and their authors.

Sometimes, famous writers and scholars visited my home. For me, it was as if they had appeared from straight out of the blurbs on the back of their books. It was a real mystery. In a similar way, my students came to know Korean writers: they read their novels and knew their faces. And now, finally, they had the opportunity to see them in person—smiling, talking, being real. At first, my students seemed embarrassed as they asked questions in hushed voices. But as both authors showed their amicability and humor, the students opened up to them as though they were good friends. Since this meeting was held on the last day of the semester, my students evaluated it as the very best conclusion of the Korean literature lectures.

Transmission of an “other” culture is not seemless even in the 21st century. Each understanding depends on many aspects: the commonalities of experience in both countries, the frequency of encounters with foreign cultures, the liberal and unreserved behavior of a society. Yet, as Asian literature entered the Czech Republic more than one hundred years ago, our people are now well prepared. Moreover, we fulfill the most important prerequisite: we like to read. Korean literature has been translated since the 1930s and, up to today, many Korean titles of both classical and modern works have been published. Every year for the last twenty years, our public has enjoyed at least one or two Korean books in translation. These are primarily not adaptations or translations from English or another language. From the beginning, the Czech readers’ demands for translation stressed quality. Books were provided with footnotes, commentaries, prefaces, or afterwords. In this respect, the Samguk Yusa chronicle published in 2012 is the best example of such an approach. Besides the full translation of the text, it contains more than 1,000 commentaries, notes, appendices, explanatory texts, and so on. This is standard for every translation of classical literature.

Three years ago, the Czech publishing house Argo signed an exclusive contract with LTI Korea, which has brought the opportunity to publish ten works of contemporary Korean prose. Six novels have already been published, with one complete and three others awaiting translation. This unique support makes an intimate view into Korean literature possible. These novels demonstrate how today’s Korean literature is accessible and uses a narrative strategy commonly found all over the world. The selection of these publications also documents that Korea has finally become recognized as a world literature.

by Miriam Löwensteinová Professor of Korean Literature Charles University, Prague

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VOL. 28 S U M M E R 2 0 1 5

Special Section

70 Years of Independence and Division:

The Flow of Korean Literature Through the Eras Featured Writer

Kim Kwang-Kyu VOL. 28

SUMMER

Spotlight on Fiction

2015

Wonderboy

by Kim Yeonsu

52

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

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ISSN 2005-2790

Copyright Š 2015 by Literature Translation Institute of Korea

S U M M E R ISSN

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