Injae and Yi Pyong-ju

Korean Astronomical Observatory

Sighting Two Stars in the Korean Literary Firmament

(Image from Wikipedia)

As my regular readers have long recognized, I don't know much Korean despite my long years in this country. It seems that I'm always teaching English, including during my evenings, when I teach it to my two children, which takes about two hours each weekday between 7 and 9 p.m.

Nevertheless, I am very interested about this land in which I'm living, and I try to learn a bit about it. So, I co-author articles with Kim Myongsob (Yonsei University) on Korea's place in East Asian politics, and I help my wife, Hwang Sun-Ae, translate Korean books into English.

Recently, I've had the opportunity to proofread two excellent translations of Korean literature by a couple of other individuals.

One is a translation of a book of poetry by the somewhat obscure Injae (Lee Jong-Hak), son of the far-better-known Neo-Confucian philosopher, writer, and poet Yi Saek (李穡, 1328-1396), also recognized by his pen name Mokeun. Both Injae and his father Mokeun remained loyal to the old Buddhist kingdom of Goryeo (918-1392) despite being Neo-Confucian themselves. In one of his poems, Injae speaks of his political exile to the southeastern tip of the Korean peninsula, where he finds himself sitting in a Buddhist temple reflecting upon the teachings of the Buddha and of Confucius, and he concludes that there is no fundamental contradiction between the two systems of thought. In writing such words, he was implicitly expressing his loyalty to the old Goryeo dynasty at a time when the new Joseon dynasty -- strictly Confucian and oppressively anti-Buddhist -- was rising to replace it. Since the book of poetry has not yet been published, I cannot quote Injae's poem (nor will I mention the translator's name), but I was impressed by the poetry and by the man. I am told that Injae and his father, Mokeun, are cited by Koreans as models of loyalty for their faithfulness to the old dynasty despite political pressure, social exclusion, and personal danger. Both are said to have been killed by supporters of the new dynasty.

The other work of Korean literature that I've had the privilege to proofread is a short story, "The Wind and Landscape of Yenang" (예낭 풍물지), written by Yi Pyong-ju (이병주 [李炳注]), who was born on March 16, 1921 and who died in 1992 (which happens to be the year that I met my wife-to-be). The story concerns a Korean man in his thirties suffering from tuberculosis contracted while imprisoned for political reasons. The setting is Korea in the mid-sixties, a place shadowed by America's political and military presence, but I sense a European nuance from a possible literary influence of Kafka and Dostoevsky in the way that Yi Pyong-ju describes the protagonist making deals with the germs that infest his lungs, as if germs were conscious organisms and cared about coming to a mutual understanding with their host.

I had never heard of Yi Pyong-ju, though my ignorance of Korean literature should surprise no one. According to the translator (who will remain unnamed for now), the author romanized his own name as Yi Byeng-ju, which looks a bit odd for 이병주, though no more odd than the romanization Yi Pyong-ju. I'll never understand why Koreans transliterate Korean words quite the way that they do. I can never be certain from the romanization just how to pronounce a Korean word. The author 이병주 would be more closely approximated by transliterating it as "Ee Byoung Joo."

Anyway, I very much enjoyed "The Wind and Landscape of Yenang" and would like to read more by this author Yi Pyong-ju -- or Yi Byeng-ju or Ee Byoung Joo or whatever one wishes to call him -- but I don't know if anything else has been translated. I did manage to find some English titles online: Pierrot and Chrysanthemums, Alexandria the Novel, The Folding Fan, and The Chirisan Mountains. I think that these are all novels, so I've italicized them, but whether or not these English titles imply that the texts have been translated, I don't know. I'd guess not since they don't show up much online.

There's also not much on the author himself. On a website for Korean literature scholar Yimhunyoung (임헌영), we read the following, which provides a bit of information on Yi Pyong-ju but says far more about Yimhunyoung:

Representative ideological division literature prior to the eighties are Choi In-hoon's The Square, Yi Pyong-ju's The Chiri-san Mountains and Kim Won-il's The Sunset. While The Square consists of criticism of the ideological reality of North and South Korea by a sceptical liberalist, The Chiri-san Mountains is a criticism of the leftist struggle through the portrayal of an authentic person. The hero of The Square, a sceptic, could live either in the North or the South, but he deserts both to go to a neutral nation; in this case, this fictional premise is possible because that is the only place a true liberalist could choose, as possible survival signifies submission to the petrified order that is in reality too remote from the ideological world the hero is seeking. Yet it is none the less questionable if their observation leaning to one intellectual's selfish prejudice can by justified in view of the situation that most of the masses were facing in the fifties and the necessity to eliminate national absurdities as a historical phase for development. In comparison, the characters in The Chiri-san Mountains assert distinct ideological preferences. The Chiri-san Mountains can by evaluated as an outstanding attempt to determine the functional relations of national division and ideologies of our times, historic idealism and reality, and individual man and the collective masses, although there is much felt to by desired in fiction aesthetics and technicalities concerning the obvious intentional anti-Communist attitudes here and there in analyzing world history from the set viewpoint of the divided reality of the nation instead of the authentic view of that time. It still remains to be determined how much the author should imbellish the facts while basing his story on historical materials.

Korean Literature scholar Yimhunyoung -- president of the awkwardly named Institute For Research In Collaborationist Activities -- sounds uncomfortable with the anti-communist political stance of a writer whom he otherwise genuinely admires. Yimhunyoung's implicit critique reminds me of the diamat criticism characteristic of literary studies in the former Soviet Union and among vulgar Marxists in the West. I often have the impression that the more nuanced literary analysis by Western Marxists of the Frankfurt School -- such as Horkheimer, Adorno, and Benjamin -- simply passed the Korean Marxists by. Perhaps they're more influenced by the 'Marxism' of North Korea.

Be that as it may, can anyone direct me to English translations of or information about the Korean writer Yi Pyong-ju?