Ed Park in The New Yorker on the Dalkey Archive Press Series of Korean Literature

Ed Park
Novelist and Editor
Google Images

In a recent article, "Sorry Not Sorry: Reading Dalkey Archive Press's Library of Korean Literature," to be found in the Books section of The New Yorker (October 19, 2015), the novelist Ed Park mentions my wife and me:

The novels in the Library of Korean Literature series are populated with the broken and the dispossessed, young drifters, like Jin-man and Si-bong, looking to carve out a place for themselves in an ungraspable, shifting world. Another such character introduces himself in the first sentence of Jang Jung-il's novel "When Adam Opens His Eyes," translated by Hwang Sun-Ae and Horace Jeffery Hodges: "I was nineteen years old, and the things that I most wanted to have were a typewriter, prints of Munch's paintings and a turntable for playing records." The nameless narrator (he's called Adam by a lover, in honor of his being her first man) hasn't scored high enough on the standardized exam to get into the university of his choice, so he plans to spend a year cramming.

Naturally, he doesn't lift a finger to accomplish that goal - which isn't to say that he does nothing. A hundred pages later, he buys a typewriter, and with it the promise of a different, differently programmed life. "If I write a novel, I will begin by depicting the portrait of my 19th year this way," he says, and then quotes the book's first paragraph nearly verbatim. This seems an optimistic conclusion - the narrator has made something of himself, and we've just finished reading the evidence - but, on the next page, Jang violently drops us into the novel's wildly discordant final section, "The Seventh Day." If the book's first stretch was a study in passivity, "The Seventh Day" is all action: sex, lots of it, between an unnamed man and woman, graphically described and mixed with literary chat. "No virgin finds climaxing easy in her first experience," Jang deadpans. "Except that this is a porno novel." (The transgressive 1999 film "Lies," which might be retitled "Fifty Thousand Shades of Grey," was based on another of Jang's novels.) Like the coda to Don DeLillo's "The Names" or Wong Kar-wai's "Days of Being Wild," the end of "When Adam Opens His Eyes" seems spliced in from a different work. Who are these nameless, insatiable characters? Maybe they are yet another product - concentrated, unbearably intense - of the narrator's typewriter, the vision that comes with Adam's newly gained knowledge of the world.

"When Adam Opens His Eyes" was published in 1990, before South Korea's great pop boom; the narrator's typewriter and cassette player are practical necessities, not ironic totems of a bygone age. But a number of more recent novels betray a certain nostalgia for an earlier, less technological time, when life didn't have to be constantly mediated by a screen.

My literary name is now associated with Jang Jung-il's stories of sex and violence. Hmm . . . well, all publicity is good publicity, or so I'm told, but I'd be more at ease to be known as one of the translators of Yi Kwang-su:

The most appealing novels in the Library of Korean Literature capture the existential turbulence of han while keeping a sense of humor about it. The didactic moments in Yi Kwang-su's "The Soil," a social-realist tome originally serialized in 1932 and 1933, are balanced with wry observations of customs and people, such as the modern man who has internalized Japanese values and looks down his nose at his country's educational system: "Yes, there's the Department of Korean Literature. I really don't know what students learn there. I think literature is useless anyway. And to study Korean literature? Even worse." (Yi, the most famous writer in the series, was one of the country's first modernists and a leader of the Korean independence movement, though he was later tarred as a Japanese collaborator.)

As most readers of this blog know, Sun-Ae and I also translated Yi Kwang Su's novel, and I'd like to have my fifteen minutes of Warholian fame associated with the high-minded Yi, but that's just my literary stuffiness talking. Actually, I'd most of all like to be famous as the author of The Bottomless Bottle of Beer.

Ed Park, by the way, is the author of the novel Personal Days, one of Time's top 10 fiction books of 2008. I've just downloaded it from Amazon onto my iPad and will report back when I start reading it.

Peter Raposo on Jang Jung-il's When Adam Opens His Eyes

Mechanical Typewriter
Peter Raposo

Peter Raposo, writing "When Adam opens his eyes," a blogpost on December 16, 2013 (though I only discovered it yesterday), offers some positive words on this novella (translated by Sun-Ae and me):

My favourite novel of this year has to be When Adam Opens His Eyes by South Korean writer Jang Jung-il. The Adam of this novel is a South-Korean literary guy, specialising in literary competitions, a loner, at times a bit loony too, and a young man who isn't afraid to experiment when it comes to sex.

Yes, and the author, Jang Jung-il, wasn't leery of explicit description, which made translating many passages rather harrowing! The genre is not, however, pornography. The story uses sex as a means of critiquing South Korea's harshly competitive society, a critique resulting in some rather disturbing consequences:

The novel spans the year between Adam's initial failure to gain admission to university in Seoul and his successful second exam, during which time he has two coming-of-age affairs. The first is with Hyun-jae, a melancholy and sexually promiscuous high school student who mediates her intimacies through the music she continuously listens to on her Walkman; the second with a mature artist who takes him for a model and lectures him about the accelerated state of contemporary media. The conspicuous problem which emerges through this narrative concerns character formation: what happens when the phoniness Adam detects in others' tastes extends to the tastes of people he values? His identification with Hyun-jae's love for 'the classics' -- 'the three Js': Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin -- is crushingly predictable, for instance, while his artist-lover's Bohemia can only be described by a list of glamorous locations such as Paris, Munich and New York, an image of an artist's loft, and a morning-after scene deliberately reminiscent of a pantyhose advertisement.

The protagonist actually has three lovers -- the two noted by Mr. Raposo, and a third one, Eun-Sun (responsible for the "list of glamorous locations"). Anyway, such a book depicting Korean life in the latter 1980s would naturally raise controversy:

Controversial at his time of release in South Korea in 1990 this novel still has the power to shock, and also to make you go back in time and remember your own teenage years. These are the first lines of the novel: I was nineteen years old, and the things that I most wanted to have were a typewriter, prints of Munch’s paintings (Edvard Munch famous painting Puberty is mentioned a lot throughout the book) and a turntable for playing records. For a moment I thought I was reading a biography. I always liked Edvard Munch paintings but was never a big fan of Van Gogh, but art is like literature and we all have our favourite artists in both arts.

Thanks to Peter Raposo, who blogs in London, England at The Great Cosmopolitan Attraction. He also does other things, but he doesn't tell us what they are in his profile. A search on Amazon determines that he's a writer.

From looking there, I see that he's written more than I have! I'd better get to work . . .

Columbia University Press Notes Translations of Korean Literature by Sun-Ae and Me!

Yi Kwang-su

Another review has recently appeared, though more on the KLTI's Library of Korea series generally (Dalkey Archive Press) than specifically on individual translations, but Esther Kim -- publicity assistant at Columbia University Press -- has at least mentioned the two translations that Sun-Ae and I did:

The editors of the "Library of Korean Literature" have included the writings of artists who have moved and still move against the grain, and their selection is key in implicitly working to undo the 'new depthlessness'. Some of the works are chosen from the canon, such as Yi Kwang-Su's The Soil. But some are transgressive and experimental and defy the conformity encouraged by Korean values. One example of this kind of writing is Jang Jung-il's When Adam Opens His Eyes (Translated by Hwang Sun-ae and Horace Jeffrey Hodges). Published in Korean in 1990, When Adam Opens His Eyes defies the conservative climate of South Korea with its frank descriptions of sex and a school dropout protagonist, who's obsessed with cultural theory and rock music in the 1980s. Inspired by Georges Bataille's pornographic writing, Jang Jung Il's novel is a transgressive coming-of-age story. These stories demonstrate how Korean literature has maintained a dialogue with European writing for the last two centuries. These stories are history, too, punctuations in a historical continuum. (Esther Kim, "Thursday Fiction Corner: The Library of Korean Literature Series," April 24th, 2014)

I have to admit that Jang Jung-il's "frank descriptions of sex" were at times excruciating to work on, but that's another story. Sun-Ae and I are each grateful for this brief review, which mentions both of our translations, but I see that I have a struggle ahead of me in getting reviewers to spell my middle name correctly -- not that I'm annoyed, mind you, for this sort of thing happens so often that I've come to expect it. But I'll notify the heterographic offenders anyway.

My name's at least rightly written here!

M. A. Orthofer - Review of Jang Jung-il, When Adam Opens his Eyes

M. A. Orthofer
Critical Mass

Mr. M. A. Orthofer, depicted above from an interview by Critical Mass, has reviewed -- in his Complete Review -- the translation by my wife and me of Jang Jung-il's novella When Adam Opens his Eyes. Orthofer's summary is that the book is a "fine, quick Korean Bildungsroman," but he has more to say than that:

A young man's novel, youthfully exuberant and unpolished, and with a mix of the predictable and the experimental (not all of which works -- "If I cried, neon would flow from my eyes" -- but points for trying), it offers enough that it is certainly of interest and worth the quick read.

This is about as close as Orthofer comes to commenting on the success of the translation effort. Most of the review is summary, so if you want that -- with all its plot spoilers -- follow the link given above (or here).

I'm taking the general silence of reviewers on the quality of our translation effort as meaning that they have no complaint.

Review by Barry Sheils: When Adam Opens His Eyes, by Jang Jung-il

Barry Sheils
Swansea University

With that pint in hand, apparently a Guinness, Dr. Sheils looks to be a man after my own heart! (That's a biblical idiom for "having a lot in common," not something else you might perversely imagine.)

Anyway, I want to call attention to his remarks on Jang Jung-il's novella When Adam Opens His Eyes in quite an insightful review despite the book being outside of his specialized field, though sufficiently fitting to his understanding, nonetheless, for he offers the following praise about the translation that Sun-Ae and I did, in that the voice chosen by us apparently rendered the novel's complex significance well:

If this [complexity] sounds hard-going, be assured, it is not; the translators' English is simple, almost to the point of flatness, reflecting the dry, self-defeating aspect of the narrator's character, and even the most jargon-filled passages about information culture or the condition of contemporary art pass quickly in ironically digestible chunks.

At least, I think Sheils was praising our choice of authorial tone, namely, simple and matter-of-fact. Anyway, these words and many more by Sheils -- on the novel, I mean -- appear in the November 17th issue (2013) of The Literateur. Sheils seems to have understood this 'kitschy' novel at great depth! I use this adjectival form of "kitsch" advisedly, for Sheils himself employs the term "kitsch" as a compliment in Jang's case, as an instance of the dry, ironic stance assumed by the author toward his material.

Or ought I say "narrator"? Anyway, I have some experience in the dry and ironic style . . .

"Koreanische Literatur auf Englisch, Folge 3"

Visit Korea!

The website Visit Korea has a review in German -- Koreanische Literatur auf Englisch, Folge 3 (i.e., Korean Literature in English, Number 3) -- of the English translation that Sun-Ae and I did of Jang Jung-il's novella When Adam Opens His Eyes, so if you read German, get thee thence and read! Here's what the review briefly says about us:

"When Adam Opens His Eyes" wurde ins Englische von Hwang Sun-ae und Horace Jeffery Hodges, Professor an der Ewha Womans University, übersetzt. Sie sind auch die Übersetzer des achten Romans in der Serie der Library of Korean Literature, „The Soil“, geschrieben von Yi Kwang-su.

In English, that reads:

When Adam Opens His Eyes was translated into English by Hwang Sun-Ae and Horace Jeffery Hodges, Professor at Ewha Womans University. They are also the translators of the eighth novel in the series of the Library of Korean Literature, The Soil, written by Yi Kwang-su.

At the end of the review, we learn that the review was written by Sohn JiAe, an editor with Korea.net, and was translated by Gesine Stoyke. Nothing is said about the quality of our translation, but I assume no complaints.

I was just about to bring this entry to a close, but on a hunch that there must be an English version of this review, I Googled and found it, so we can now check how close my English translation above is to Sohn's English original:

“When Adam Opens His Eyes” was translated into English by Hwang Sun-Ae and Ewha Womans University Professor Horace Jeffery Hodges. They also translated the eighth novel in the Library of Korean Literature series, “The Soil” written by Yi Kwang-su.

I guess I was close enough . . . though I'll redo it now for better English than my original attempt:

When Adam Opens His Eyes was translated into English by Hwang Sun-Ae and Ewha Womans University Professor Horace Jeffery Hodges. They have also translated the eighth novel in the Library of Korean Literature series, The Soil, written by Yi Kwang-su.

This now differs by only a verb tense and a comma from Sohn's English version (if we set aside the question of quotation marks vs. italics for book titles). The tense is a stylistic choice, for either present or present perfect works, but the comma is grammatically necessary. Otherwise, not bad, though I think this bio ought to have mentioned Sun-Ae's doctorate in German literature (and perhaps my novella).

Anyway, Jang Jung-il is definitely worth reading, especially for readers interested in a young Korean man coming of age during a time when Korea itself was coming of age and opening up, but be forewarned: sex and violence fill his writings, rather explicit, in fact.

Opening lines to Jang Jung-il's story When Adam Opens His Eyes

Amazon

I've mentioned that my wife and I translated Jang Jung-il's story When Adam Opens His Eyes, and since I have nothing to blog about this morning, I'll simply post the opening lines:

I was nineteen years old, and the things that I most wanted to have were a typewriter, prints of Munch's paintings and a turntable for playing records. Those things alone were all that I wanted from this world when I was nineteen. But so humble were my desires that, compared to them, my mother's wish for me to enter Seoul National University or my younger cousin's dream of joining the Samsung Lions baseball team when he grew up, seemed even more out of reach.

If my desires hadn't been for such trivial things, but for something larger like becoming the president, I could easily have fulfilled that desire by driving a tank or randomly firing an M16. Or I could have fulfilled it deep in the night by ejaculating in a wet dream. Or by giving up completely. I mean, I could have fulfilled my dream simply by throwing it away. In the sense of being freed from the desire, completely giving up might be nothing but my desire's fulfillment. So whoever discovers how to empty himself of all desire will become a free person, one who controls himself so perfectly that he becomes his own master.

That year, I failed to gain admittance to the university my mother wished for me in the major that I wanted to study, and I began cramming for the next year's entrance exam. Sending a child to university was hard for a poor family, and supporting him for an extra year of cramming was even harder. Not only was the cost of repeated tutoring hard to bear, but even worse was the gossip of close relatives who sometimes dropped in or neighbors who lived in the same one-story building paying monthly rent for cramped quarters. At that time, my mother was working downtown as a cleaning lady in an underground shopping area.

After I failed by only seven or eight points to gain admission to the English department at the university, I briefly considered going to any of the provincial universities in my hometown that would offer a scholarship, but I decided to accept my older brother's advice. The reason that I found his advice persuasive was that an extra year cramming for the entrance exam had gotten him admitted to business school in the university that I had applied to. Besides, I was hardheaded enough to insist on meeting my own stubborn goal. Even if that aim was first expected of me by my mother, why shouldn't we do a favor for our parents, who gave us life? (Jang Jung-il, When Adam Opens His Eyes, translated by Sun-Ae Hwang and Horace Jeffery Hodges, Dalkey Archive Press, 2013, 5-6)

In re-reading this now, a few years after translating it, I can see many things I'd change to make the lines flow better, but if this opening passage should happen to strike your fancy, you can get the book through Amazon, but recall from a previous post my forewarning that Jang Jung-il is not for the faint of heart . . .

Proofreading Yi Kwang-su and Jang Jung-il

Friday morning early, I received two emails from Dalkey Archive Press with the galley proofs of the following two works of fiction attached, respectively:

Both of these images are borrowed from Amazon: Yi Kwang-su's The Soil and Jang Jung-il's When Adam Opens His Eyes. Both are translation that my wife and I did as a team, sponsored by the Korea Literature Translation Institute. These two English versions represent several years' work, so I was happy to receive the galley proofs -- but a little disconcerted to read that I had only 24 hours to proofread both, for the former is 528 pages and the latter 144 pages, making for 672 pages to read closely within a single day!

Proofing The Soil took all day Friday and more -- from 5:00 a.m. Friday till 12:30 a.m. Saturday -- so I didn't meet the deadline for When Adam Opens His Eyes. The Dalkey people were understanding, however, and gave me an extra day for Jang Jung-il's book.

Anyway, I finished. Sort of. Proofreading is never truly finished. It's just halted.

Good News from Korea Literature Translation Institute . . .

John O'Brien and Kim Joo-yeon

Korea Herald

November 30, 2011



I see from a recent Korea Herald article by Claire Lee, "American to publish Korean literature series in U.S." (November 30, 2011), that John O'Brien, founder of Dalkey Archive Press, has signed an agreement with Kim Joo-yeon, director of the Korea Literature Translation Institute (KLTI), to publish a Korean literature series in English. The plan is to publish 25 in a series simultaneously. That sounds like good news for my wife and me since it opens up the possibilities for publishing one of our translations! But wait . . . what's this? Dalkey Press is looking for a specific sort of literature?

Q: It's been said that you would use the word "subversive" for a one-word description for the kinds of books Dalkey publishes. What's the reason behind this and under what criteria did you select your choices for the upcoming series? What would you say to those who think such "unconventional" works' translations would be harder to market?

A: Years and years ago I was asked in an interview to find one word to describe the books that Dalkey publishes, and the closest I could come to a one-word description was "subversive." What I intended by "subversive" is that a reader is presented with something unpredictable in terms of character, style, and structure. The books that we publish usually make demands on the reader, but demands that I think good readers want from fiction. But yes, these kinds of books, whether translations or books originally written in English, are indeed harder to market, and this is due to the harsh reality that literature in general is harder to market in the United States, partially as a result of the ever-shrinking book-review space in newspapers and magazines. So, this is a challenge for us, and has always been a challenge. Readers look to Dalkey Archive books in order to find fiction that's different and satisfies particular aesthetic needs. The books that we selected for this series are ones that we believe at in keeping with the other books on our list, and it is a very impressive list of major authors from this century and the past one.

Subversive. Hmmm . . . have Sun-Ae and I translated anything subversive? Well, there is Jang Jung-il, but he might be too subversive, maybe even subversive. And he might belong to a different era already.

If you want to learn more about Mr. O'Brian, his literary tastes, and his vision for Dalkey Archive Press, the Los Angeles Times has a same-day, two-part interview in its "Jacket Copy: Books, authors and all things bookish": "John O'Brien of Dalkey Archive Press, Part 1" (July 16, 2009) and "John O'Brien of Dalkey Archive, part 2" (July 16, 2009)

Leonard Cohen: "Tower of Song"

Leonard Cohen, 2008

(Image from Wikipedia)

I've been listening a lot to Leonard Cohen lately as I rework my previous reworking of my wife's translation of stories by the contemporary Korean writer Jang Jung-il. I could probably draw out some lines of connection between Cohen and Jang if I tried . . . but I won't try because I feel like Hank Williams these days, so I'll just leave you with Cohen's reference to Williams in "Tower of Song," while I get back to work:

Well my friends are gone, and my hair is grey,
I ache in the places where I used to play,
And I'm crazy for love, but I'm not coming on.
I'm just paying my rent every day
In the tower of song.

I said to Hank Williams: How lonely does it get?
Hank Williams hasn't answered yet,
But I hear him coughing all night long,
Oh, a hundred floors above me
In the tower of song.

I was born like this, I had no choice,
I was born with the gift of a golden voice,
And twenty-seven angels from the great beyond,
Well, they tied me to this table right here
In the tower of song.

So you can stick your little pins in that voodoo doll;
I'm very sorry, baby, doesn't look like me at all;
I'm standing by the window where the light is strong.
Ah, they don't let a woman kill you,
Not in the tower of song.

Well, you can say that I've grown bitter, but of this you may be sure,
The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor,
And there's a mighty judgement coming, but I may be wrong.
You see, you hear these funny voices
In the tower of song.

I see you standing on the other side,
Don't know how the river got so wide,
I loved you baby, way back when,
And all bridges are burning that we might have crossed.
Feel so close to everything that we lost,
We'll never, we'll never have to lose it again

So I bid you farewell, I don't know when I'll be back,
They're moving us tomorrow to the tower down the track,
But you'll be hearing from me baby, long after I'm gone.
I'll be speaking to you sweetly,
From my window in the tower of song.

Well my friends are gone, and my hair is grey,
I ache in the places where I used to play,
And I'm crazy for love, but I'm not coming on.
I'm just paying my rent every day
In the tower of song.

In case you missed it, I've linked to Cohen's performance of this song with U2 on You Tube. Go there and listen . . . and click on some other Cohen performances.

As for me . . . I'm getting back to coughing my way through a lonely editing of Jang Jung-il.

Jang Jung-il's "Pelican" and the current "Beef Rage"

Jang Jung-il

(aka Jang Jeong-il, Chang Chong-il, Chang Chŏng-il, etc.)

Portrait of the writer reflecting on Korea

(Image from Shinwon Agency)

My wife and I are currently translating a collection of short stories, When Adam's Eyes Opened (아담이 눈뜰 때), written by Jang Jung-il (장정일). More accurately put, Sun-Ae is translating the collection from Korean into English, and I am correcting the translation.

Yesterday, I was proofreading a story titled Pelican ("펠리컨"), which was originally published in 1988, when South Korea was only just emerging from dictatorship into democracy, and which tells of a man accused by an 'institute' of kicking a sick pelican that had flown onto his lawn. The man did, in fact, kick one pelican, but his 'crime' grows into a rumor that he has tortured and killed 120 pelicans, and the entire Korean public is outraged at his brutality to the poor creature.

Yeah, I know, a willing suspension of any well-informed reader's disbelief is difficult on this point, for if mistreatment of animals in Korea would spark public outrage, then tens of thousands of Koreans would already be marching in the streets demanding a boycott of every dog-soup restaurant in this country as protest against the dog butchers for deliberately torturing dogs to give the dog meat more 'potency'. The story "Pelican," however, is not really about animal rights but about . . . well, in part about the Korean national character, I suppose.

Anyway, given the recent "beef rage" that has gripped Korea because of a great deal of media exaggeration about the dangers of American beef, because of the role played by 'civic' groups in fomenting and directing much of this rage, and because of the volatility of the Korean public and its apparent gullibility in accepting obvious distortions, I found the following passage from "Pelican" rather interesting:

While I was being investigated by the institute, such mass media as newspaper and television reported daily on my crimes with bold headlines and loud announcements.

- Neighbors Witnessed First Attack! Citizen Report Played Crucial Role!

- Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Petitioned Institute! Sparked Investigation!

- Sadist Killed About One Hundred Twenty Pelicans, Especially the Pitiful and the Lost!

- Institutional System Urgently Needed to Protect Pelicans!

Citizens, inundated by mass media reports, grew outraged and marched daily in rallies.

- Who maltreated the pelicans?

- People who act less than pelicans are less than pelicans!

- I am also a pelican!

- Stand up, pelicans, against the darkness of this age!

I was arrested. Imprisoned behind iron bars, I glimpse birds flying beyond my cage. Public opinion boils up like lava and citizens rage like a volcano.

Given the events of the past several weeks, this description of rumor, exaggeration, and rage in the streets sounds all too familiar.

For those who -- unlike me -- can read Korean, here's the original passage:

내가 기관으로부터 조사를 받는 동안, 신문, 티비 등의 매스컴은 나의 범행을 연일 대서특필해대고 있었다.

-- 제일 처음 이웃이 목격! 시민제보가 결정적인 역할을 해!

-- 동물애호협회에서 모 기관에 진정! 사건화되는 계기마련!

-- 백이십여 마리의 불쌍하고 갈 데 없는 펠리컨만 골라 죽인 사디스트!

-- 펠리컨을 보호하기 위한 제도적 장치 절실 요망!

대량 언론 세례를 받은 시민들은 분노했고, 연일 성토대회가 열렸다.

-- 누가 펠리컨을 학대하는가?

-- 펠리컨보다 못한 인간은 펠리컨보다 못한 인간이다!

-- 펠리컨은 바로 나다!

-- 시대의 어둠을 뚫고 일어나라 펠리컨!

나는 체포되었다. 그리고 철창 속에서, 철창 밖을 나는 새 본다. 여론은 용암 같이 들끓고, 시민들은 화산 같이 분노한다.

"펠리컨", 장정일, 아담이 눈뜰 때 (김영사, 2005), 292-293.

I hope that I've transcribed all of this correctly, but I'm not especially proficient in typing languages that I don't really understand (though it has now, three hours later, been checked and corrected by my wife).

Anyway, as I told my wife yesterday, "I see that there's more to Jang Jung-il's stories than just sex and violence" -- an important point to note because Jang Jung-il is 'infamous' in Korea for his explicit treatment of these two themes.

Actually, I'd already realized that Jang Jung-il offered more than just those two disturbing themes, but I'm now proofreading translations of his works with a more trained eye.