Korea expecting too much from its writers?

Bookish . . .
Illustration by Nam Kyung-don
Korea Herald

Lee Sun-young holds Korea's writers to a high standard in a recent article for the Korea Herald, "The story of Korean fiction: Proud tradition, humble present" (October 23, 2015), observing not only that Koreans are reading many foreign novels this year, but that:

Korean fiction's poor performance this year is also attributed to the absence of new releases from the country's top-selling novelists such as Shin Kyung-sook, Park Wan-suh, Gong Ji-young and Hwang Sok-yong.

I think that Park Wan-suh can be forgiven for offering no new releases this year, as she passed away nearly five years ago, on January 22, 2011.

Update: The online copy has deleted mention of Park Wan-suh, so here are photos of the hard copy, dated October 24-25:

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.

Who Ain't I? - Ko Un

Ko Un
_list
Volume 25, Autumn 2014

The great Ko Un, poet and everyman, relates an amusing anecdote of an earlier, more innocent time:

Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, there were a number of cases of false Ko Uns appearing in various parts of Korea. One acted as president of the jury at a regional poetry festival; one gained people's attention by speaking in Sanskrit; one obtained money and valuables by saying that he was about to go on a journey overseas, which was something extremely rare at that time, but did not have enough for the fare. Worse still was that someone pretending to be Ko Un married a graduate from a women's university in Seoul.

One of those false Ko Uns got arrested. I dropped the charges against him. After slapping him once on each cheek, I bought him a drink, encouraging him to go back to his own life. At that time I reflected that perhaps I might be the fake and that false Ko Un might be the true one. (Ko Un, "A Dawn Soliloquy," _list, Volume 25, Autumn 2014, page 14)

I like that he bought the counterfeit Ko Un a drink and began to wonder who really was the fake. That's the sort of thing I think I'd like to do if I were confronted by doppelgängers . . .

More from Byeng-ju Lee Hadong International Literary Festival 2014: Pen Mightier than the Sword

Below are various photos that my wife took this past weekend at the Byeng-ju Lee Hadong International Literary Festival 2014 - to which I was invited to give a talk (as you already know from yesterday's blog entry):

This image inspired today's blog heading: The Pen is Mightier than the Sword - this pen anyway! Here's the man himself - Lee Byeng-ju (aka Yi Byeong-ju, etc.):

Or a close facsimile - life size, but bigger than life! And next a book of his translated by my friend Suh Ji-moon:

Meeting Lu Xinhua, Chinese author of "The Wounded" (aka "The Scar"):

Finally, meeting Yi Munyol (aka Lee Mun-yeol), author of Our Twisted Hero, among other novels:

I also met many more Koreans with creative credits, but I don't have photos at the moment . . .

Brother Anthony: Ready to ruffle feathers with remarks about Korean fiction?

Brother Anthony
Korea Herald

I've known Brother Anthony for more than ten years, though I can't say I know him well. He's an old-timer, an expat from Cornwall, UK, who's been here since 1980 and taught English literature for many years until his retirement in 2007. He has also worked as a translator, specializing in Korean poetry, Kim Hoo-ran tells us in "This is where my life is" (Korea Herald, August 29, 2014):

Brother Anthony, who has published 30 books of English translations of Korean poetry and fiction, embarked on translating Korean poetry in 1988. When he told a colleague that he would like to translate Korean poetry, he was introduced to the poet Ku Sang, whose works he has extensively translated. Brother Anthony is also well known for translating poems by Seo Jeong-ju and Ko Un, the perennial Korean favorite for a Nobel literature prize.

Brother Anthony therefore can speak with some familiarity concerning Korean literature, and about works of Korean fiction, he says:

They are not interesting.

Prodded by Kim Hoo-ran:

He offers a broad critique of Korean fiction writers today. "The way Korean fiction writers write does not conform to the world trend," he says. One reason for this may be that very few works of literature in foreign languages are available in Korean translations, he observes.

"In the outside world, fictions are entertaining," he continues. "They engage the reader with multiple points of view, ambiguity." On the other hand, "Korean readers are not accustomed to anything more than what you get on television soaps," he says.

I think Brother Anthony is being provocative, pushing a bit, maybe to rile writers into writing more interesting stories. He knows more than I do, but I can't agree with him entirely, for I read a very interesting book by Park Won-suh, Who Ate Up All The Singa, among other interesting books by other Korean writers. But, as I said, he knows more than I do, so his observation has more credibility than mine.

I'll be interested to see the reaction to his remarks.

Charles La Shure on Yi Kwang-su's novel The Soil

Professor Charles La Shure
Department of Korean Language and Literature
Seoul National University

An acquaintance of mine, Charles La Shure, has written a review of the LTI Korea translation project, "Korean Literature Series for English-speaking Readers" ("Library of Korean Literature," Volumes 1-10, various authors, Dalkey Archive Press, 2013), for the quarterly Koreana (Spring 2014) that mentions Yi Kwang-su's novel The Soil:

The first stage in this project is already complete, with 10 books published in November 2013; the remainder are scheduled to be published in fall this year. The series begins, at least chronologically, with a work that is often considered to be the first modern Korean novel, Yi Kwang-su's "The Soil." First serialized in a daily newspaper in 1932, the novel follows a social activist who attempts to enlighten the farming village in which he was born, bringing those who live there into the modern era. It paints a vivid picture of the social conditions in Korea during the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945), which led World Literature Today to include the work in its list of 75 Notable Translations of 2013.

I think Charles meant to say that The Soil is "considered to be [one of] the first modern Korean novel[s]," the consensus among Korean literary critics being that Yi Kwang-su's earlier novel Heartless is actually the first modern Korean novel.

No word on the quality of the translation, so I suppose that means Charles didn't hate it . . .

Charles Montgomery on Yi Kwang-su's Novel The Soil

Charles Montgomery
Dongguk University

Professor Charles Montgomery (Dongguk University) -- who has a professional interest in Korean literature and has been officially recognized for this interest -- offers a review of Yi Kwang-su's novel The Soil on his blog, Korean Literature in Translation, from which I excerpt:

The Soil (흙) is also strange artifact from a strange author. The first thing a reader notices is that this book is big -- some 510 pages big, and that can be daunting. On the other hand, since it was originally published in serial form (this is how much of Korean fiction was published prior to the 1960s), it is broken up into convenient little chunks, with some mini-chapters barely clocking in at over a page, so it certainly can be read in little chunks. The Soil might not be the book that a potential reader of Korean fiction would start with, but it does have its charms and once a reader gets past the large cast of characters and plots, which are introduced at a lickety-split rate as the book opens, the story begins to flesh out.

Charles then gets into some plot-spoilers, so I'll stop there and merely quote his words on the quality of the translation:

The translation, by the husband and wife team of Hwang Sun-Ae and Horace Jeffery Hodges, is quite good. There is an occasional lapse into passive constructions, but for the most part the translated text flows in perfect accord with the story, and makes reading a pleasure.

As I told him in a comment:

Thanks for the kind words (and I'll keep an eagle eye out for passives from now on).

Advice on writing is always useful since it leads a writer to reconsider and remain alert . . .

Seoul International Book Fair 2014: I am a Keynote Speaker!

Seoul International Book Fair

Two days ago, I received this bone-chilling invitation from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, requesting that I serve as a keynote speaker this coming June 20th at an international workshop on translating Korean literature:

This [email] is . . . from [the] LTI Korea . . . . During the Seoul International Book Fair, we will hold the 13th International Workshop for Translation and Publication of Korean Literature in COEX building on Friday, June 20 [and] . . . . would like to invite you as a keynote speaker in the workshop; our president Kim Seong-kon strongly recommended you, and he kindly asks you to accept our request. You are expected to have a presentation for about 30 minutes as a keynote speaker . . . . [on the] theme . . . "The Role of Translators and Literary Agents in Globalizing Korean Literature", and you will participate in the first session which will be about educating and nurturing culture and literature translators. In presentation, we would like to have your experience and ideas about . . . working as a translator.

I blanched at the request, fearful of presenting myself before the kindness of strangers, for I really know little about the craft of translation -- and absolutely nothing about the role of "Literary Agents"!

My wonderful wife, Sun-Ae Hwang, is the real translator -- she transfers the Korean text into clear English -- whereas my job is to transform that lucid text into literary English.

I, therefore, am a transformer. No, not this kind! More like this kind. But what I really ask myself is, "Well, how did I get here?"

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 . . .

The Times Literary Supplement: Review of The Soil, by Yi Kwang-su - Translated by Sun-Ae Hwang and Horace Jeffery Hodges

Times Literary Supplement

Professor Mark Morris (University of Cambridge) recently published a brief review, "Resting Against the Sunlight: South Korean Fiction Comes in from the Cold," in The Times Literary Supplement (April 18, 2014) of the translation my wife and I did of Yi Kwang-su's novel The Soil within a broader review of seven stories from the entire ten-volume series of Korean literature supported by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea and published by Dalkey Archive Press:

Park Wan-suh, Lonesome You; Translated by Elizabeth Haejin Yoon.
Yi Kwang-su, The Soil; Translated by Hwang Sun-Ae and Horace Jeffrey Hodges.
Kim Joo-young, Stingray; Translated by Inrae You Vinciguerra and Louis Vinciguerra.
Li Ki-ho, At Least We Can Apologize; Translated by Christopher Joseph Dykas.
Jang Eun-jin, No One Writes Back; Translated by Jung Yewon.
Jang Jung-il, When Adam Opens His Eyes; Translated by Hwang Sun-Ae and Horace Jeffrey Hodges.
Jung Young Moon, A Most Ambiguous Sunday and Other Stories; Translated by Jung Young Moon et al [The "et al" are Yewon Jung, Inrae You Vinciguerra, and Louis Vinciguerra].

Alert readers will note that my middle name, "Jeffery," was misspelled. I also noted it and figured that I ought at least dispel the 'mispel' amd have it be corrected online, so I wrote to the reviewer, Professor Morris, and explained the problem. He regretted the misspelling, adding that one of the editors was likely responsible, and he told me whom to contact. He also added some kind words about the translation by my wife and me:

You two have done heroic work to bring the book to life in English, not falsely up-dating the style of language, trusting your readers to check background/contextual info rather than inserting clunky detail, etc. I just wish TLS had allowed me more than a handful of words to cover the translation.

That was nice to hear. Anyway, I contacted the editor suggested by Professor Morris. The editor also regretted the mistake, corrected the misspelling, and sent me the entire review, from which I excerpt the following:

There are now . . . signs that South Korean fiction may finally make a dent in the consciousness of British readers. Last week the London Book Fair devoted its "Market Focus" to a range of Korean publishers. Since February London's Korean Cultural Centre has been hosting monthly literature nights. And then there is the new partnership between South Korea's well-funded Korean Literature Translation Institute and Dalkey Archive Press. A series of twenty-five books has been agreed -- The Library of Korean Literature -- covering prose fiction from the colonial era until the present day.

The oldest and weightiest in content of the series so far is Yi Kwangsu's The Soil. First serialized in a newspaper between 1932 and 1933, the long, sprawling narrative is one of the classics of colonial East Asian literature. Its author first made his mark as a writer in 1917 with the novel Heartless, set during the Japanese occupation of Korea, which had begun seven years before. Like The Soil, it is concerned with Korea's diminished status as a colony. The protagonist of The Soil is Heo Sung, a poor but bright young man who migrates from the countryside to Seoul -- known then as Keijô to the conquerors and Gyeongseong to the new "natives". He becomes first a live-in tutor, then a member of a wealthy aristocratic household. Sung clings to the memory of the girl he left behind, but falls under the spell of Jeong-seon, the beautiful daughter of his patron, Mr Yun. When Yun offers Sung his daughter's hand, the young man executes an intellectual and moral somersault to persuade himself to accept. The result is disastrous for all concerned.

The novel contains a cast of minor characters who seem to function more as colonial types than clearly delineated individuals. There is the upper-class playboy who schemes for a soft job in the colonial hierarchy while seducing his friend Sung's wife for the sport of it; the young female intellectuals with new ideals but few viable independent means; the mentor who seeks to convert university students to the cause of liberation for their captive country; the handsome intellectual who returns from America with a PhD, only to find that it is of little use. The answer to this urban malaise is offered in the title. Eventually, Sung and his adulterous wife yield to the pull of the land. Gazing from the window of a train, Sung "felt the sunlight filling the sky and the life-giving power of the earth were there especially for the farmers". And yet the "paddies no longer belonged to their clans. They were all nowadays the property of a company, a bank, a co-operative, or a farm". The later chapters dealing with Sung's return to the countryside contain scenes of power and lyricism. But the idealism shared by the author and protagonist -- "I'll see how much can be improved without changing the social structure" -- is embedded in contradiction, the unconvincing happy ending a case of wishful thinking.

Morris then notes that one of Park Wan-suh's stories refers to Yi Kwang-su's influence and mixed legacy:

In . . . [one] of Park Wan-suh's stories from Lonesome You, "That Girl's House", Man-deuk is the village intellectual who, back in the colonial days, got others interested in Yi Kwang-su: novels such as Heartless and The Soil "circulated among young people and were read until the pages became tattered". Among the ten stories gathered in the collection [by Park], this is the only one that looks back with any sense of nostalgia; it reminds us how passionately readers once engaged with Yi's fiction -- writing that now looks creaky and old-fashioned, and tainted by Yi's eventual collaboration in Japan's war effort.

I infer that by "not falsely up-dating the style of language," my wife and I successfully preserved Yi Kwang-su's "writing that now looks creaky and old-fashioned." I suppose that's a compliment. Anyway, Morris says nothing negative about our work, so I'll take that as a positive!

And if Yi Kwang-su's modern classic is too long, there's this other 'classic' of a man lost in our postmodern world . . .

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!

EBS 'Report' on Yi Kwang-su's Novel The Soil

EBS Morning Special 1224

Headlines + News Close Up
Posted December 23, 2013

I just happened to stumble across this four-month-old announcement (and grammar lesson!) yesterday on Korea's Educational Broadcasting System (EBS), specifically, at EBS Morning Special's You Tube site, starting at 2 minutes and 19 seconds into the video:

U.S. Journal Recognizes 2 Korean Translations

English translations of two Korean literary works - Yi Kwang-su's The Soil, and Hyesim's Magnolia and Lotus - were included among 75 Notable Translations in an American international culture and literature magazine's December edition. Hwang Sun-ae, one of The Soil's two translators, said it was difficult to use natural English without any of the original novel's meaning getting lost in translation.

EBS's English grammar lessons are often played on city buses, so a lot of Koreans may have heard our translation of The Soil used as an example of how easily things get lost in translation. (Thanks a lot, there, EBS.) The broadcaster then goes on (in the video's notes) to explain this idiom, "lost in translation," for the benefit of Koreans:

1) to get lost in translation (v.)
the original meaning of something is misunderstood or not clear because of differences between languages
번역 한계 때문에 뜻이 어색해지다

ex) This song sounds strange in English because a lot of it is lost in translation.

The magazine -- coyly referred to as "an American international culture and literature magazine" -- was, of course, World Literature Today, and I've previously noted the honor.

Anyway, those of you interested in a great big grammar lesson can order a copy of The Soil at Amazon Books.

And while you're there at AB, check out my novella . . .

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 . . .

Backed the Wrong Horse?

Yi Kwang-su

Wikipedia

One of my favorite columnists, Professor Kim Seong-Kon (SNU, KLTI), recently lamented:

Koreans would be unlikely to select Yi Kwang-su for a list of great Korean writers . . . . To Korean eyes, . . . Yi betrayed the . . . country and thus can never be condoned, regardless of . . . importance and eminence as [a] writer . . . . I am saddened and ashamed that for these reasons, Koreans are often labeled . . . parochial and nationalistic (Kim Seong-Kon, "Embracing those who are different," Korea Herald, March 5, 2014).

Regrettable, then, the fact that Sun-Ae and I chose to translate Yi Kwang-su's novel The Soil, as we will perhaps be forever linked to a 'traitor' . . .

World Literature Today Recognizes The Soil

Riffle Books

My wife and I received the good news yesterday that one of our translations has been recognized as numbering among the "WLT's 75 Notable Translations 2013," as the WLT noted that "working with the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, Dalkey Archive launched its Library of Korean Literature, bringing out several titles," including Yi Kwang-su's novel The Soil:

Yi Kwang-su, The Soil, Hwang Sun-Ae and Horace Jeffery Hodges, tr.

I was in seventh heaven, so to bring me back down to earth, my wife observed that our translation was undoubtedly selected more for Yi Kwang-su's stature than our work's quality. That's likely the case. (Dammit!) But we can pretend!

One thing is certain: Yi Kwang-su never imagined that an Arkansas boy from the Ozarks who can't even speak Korean would play a contributing role in rendering The Soil into English.

I can hardly believe it either -- though I quickly remind myself that without wonderful Sun-Ae, this wouldn't have been possible . . .

Korean-Lit Wave Beckons to America

Craig Fehrman
Home[run]page

The LTI Korea is making waves . . . Korea Waves:

The Library of Korean Literature's first ten titles appear this November, with the rest arriving next year. Already, the initial batch offers that bird's-eye view. A Western reader can start with The Soil, [a] . . . novel by Yi Kwang-su first published as a serial in 1932. But there's also When Adam Opens His Eyes (1990), the Jang Jung-il novel that stirred up a scandal with its explicit descriptions of straight and gay sex. (Craig Fehrman, "Korean Lit Comes to America," The American Prospect, November 13, 2013)

Both were translated by my wife and me, so nothing new there, but Fehrman's synopsis of Yi Kwang-su major novel, The Heartless, was new . . . and yet familiar:

Under Japanese rule, . . . Korea's writers turned to novels and short stories, with Yi Kwang-su's The Heartless (1917) generally seen as the key book. It's a bit like Robinson Crusoe in this respect -- tough to pin down as the earliest but easy to see as a turning point. Yi belonged to a wave of thinkers and writers who'd watched their country collapse. Now they wanted to embrace Western ideas like educational reform and marrying for love.

The Heartless dramatizes those ideas through a love triangle between a representative Korean man, a traditional woman, and a more Westernized woman. In other words, it barely dramatizes them at all, with Yi prioritizing his causes over his characters and imagery. The writers who followed chose new causes -- some calling for further change, others lamenting what had been lost -- but they joined Yi in producing a largely didactic body of literature.

Much the same summary could also have been written of The Soil. Fehrman doesn't say what he thinks about the translation result of The Soil and When Adam Opens His Eyes, but he at least says nothing disparaging.

For the rest of the article, which has some intriguing observations deserving of discussion, follow the link!

Opening Lines to Yi Kwang-su's The Soil

Amazon Books

Yesterday, I noted that a couple of translations done by my wife and me are being published by Dalkey Archive Books, so for readers with interest, here is our translation of the opening lines to Yi Kwang-su's novel The Soil:

After returning from the night school where he taught, Heo Sung lay down, resting his neck upon his schoolbag and lacing his fingers behind his head to form a pillow. Lying still, he could hear mosquitoes buzzing to and fro as they tried to get around the mosquito-repellent smoke. Now that the seventh month of the lunar calendar was half past, the wind felt a bit cool after nightfall.

For a couple of years, Heo Sung had lived in Seoul with little possibility of hearing the mosquitoes' buzz. In his hometown, even listening to them again pleased him.

"How tall and beautiful Yu Sun has become," Heo Sung murmured to himself. Her image appeared before him, healthy and strong with gently rounded features. Though her face was tanned dark from the mountain region's strong sunlight, her eyes, nose, and mouth stood out sharply without losing the softness of a young woman's features. Reflecting moonlight, her face had been beautiful, almost like moonlight itself. Only her roughened hands did not fit. Used for weeding fields and working in water, they were not the porcelain hands of a city woman. She wore a stiff skirt and a traditional summer jacket of hemp cloth, along with black rubber shoes. She went without socks, which left the tops of her feet darkly tanned. Equally dark were her hands, wrists, and neck, as well as her calves below the short bloomers and shorter skirt, as if the summer sunlight had wished to kiss her body whenever offered a chance, desiring her beautiful and healthy skin . . .

The novel opens in a slow, somewhat understated manner and gradually builds in intensity towards tragedy that wants to resolve itself in a happy ending of Dickensian proportions . . .

Yi Kwang-su's The Soil and Jang Jung-il's When Adam Opens His Eyes

Korea Herald

(LTI Korea)

My wife mentioned to me that the Hankyoreh, Korea's left-leaning newspaper, had announced the upcoming publication of Yi Kwang-su's novel The Soil in English translation, the very one that we translated, as well as our translation of Jang Jung-il's When Adam Opens His Eyes. That Hankyoreh article, however, appeared in Korean, so I waited another day for an announcement in English, and sure enough, the Korea Herald came through with one, an article by Claire Lee titled "English translations of Korean literature published in the U.S." (October 18, 2013). The article does not go into much detail and does not mention us by name, but does have a few words about the books that we translated:

The 10 volumes to be published next month include Yi Kwang-su's 1932 fiction "The Soil," which tells the story of a lawyer and an idealist who dedicates his life to helping the residents of a rural community during Korea's Japanese colonial period . . . . [Among o]ther inclusions in the 10 volumes . . . [is] Jang Jung-il's "When Adam Opens His Eyes."

According to the article, "The first 10 volumes of Dalkey Archive Press and the Literature Translation Institute of Korea's Korean literature series will be hitting U.S. bookstores on Nov. 16." That's about a month away, but by a happy coincidence, our complimentary copies arrived the same day as the Korea Herald article. Here are two clearer images:

I borrowed both images -- Yi Kwang-su's The Soil and Jang Jung-il's When Adam Opens His Eyes-- from Amazon. If you click to enlarge and clarify, you can see my wife's name first (as is proper), then my own.

Support Korean literature by purchasing and reading the books, but be forewarned on Jang Jung-il, whose writings are 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.