A Few More Kim Young-ha Things Kim Young-ha (김영하) Just a couple of things on the heels of meeting Kim Young-ha the other day. • The Wall Street Journal did a piece mentioning Kim. • The Herald covered his new collection of short stories (The stories are not translated into English). • Finally, and I’m not sure what to make of this, an event in Seoul called “Trust” (already I don’t, and I’m sure that is the ironic point) will occur in September. It’s blurb features some charming academic boilerplate:
That’s a totally dilatory way to say “Holy cow, new realities in technology and distribution interact in odd ways with our human desires for change and connection” (and even that seems theorized!). But in some way it will include some writing from Kim:
So I’ll check it out. Wikipedia Project: Up Goes Han Su-sanThe Han Su-san Wikipedia page has gone … From:  Before, and...... To:  Rapture! LOL.. actually that first screen-shot is the “logged-in” look. Suffice it to say he wasn’t there, and now he mysteriously is! Found on the Web #9
• Some time ago KTLIT posted about a trip to the “Buckwheat Season” restaurant with foodie Jennifer Flinn. A few days ago, at fatmanseoul, Jennifer posted about our experience. It’s weird that she refers to me as “Professor Montgomery” in the post, since we’ve shared Makgeoli, buckwheat food, and cruel japes at the expense of Joe McPherson, but its worth reading Jennifer’s post. • Another great find is at Koreana, where Park Hye-kyung analyzes Park Wan-suh’s Encounter at the Airport. Park Hye-kyung puts her finger on Park Wan-suh’s ouvre when she notes:
Park (the literary critic) is also quite good at pointing out, using the work of Park (the author), how the starvation of Korea helped to give Western goods iconic status, whether those goods were chocolate from GIs to children, or food Korean employees pilfered from PXs:
This is really good criticism, unfortunately I can’t seem to find this short story online in English. • Finally, a direct link to the entire Kwangju Blog book reviews by Elton LaClare. I’ll still link individual reviews when they sync with what KTLIT is doing, but the site is useful because LaClare generally takes a quite different review tack than KTLIT. It’s a great site to get another angle on Korean literature.
Under Korean Literature | Tagged editor, Elton LaClare, Encounter at the Airport, fatmanseoul, found, Kwangju Blog, Park Wan-suh, 박완서
My Meeting with Kim Young-ha Kim Young-ha at TEDx I almost missed meeting Kim Young-ha at TEDx. It wasn’t until the morning of the actual event that I realized it started at 1PM. Since this recognition occurred to me at 12:18, I was a bit late. Once there, the staff ushered me in to the auditorium so quickly that I did not have time to pick up the little ear-doohickey that would translate things into English. I got into the auditorium and snapped some quick pictures from very far away and through a rail and past several bushy hairdos. A few minutes later, after snapping these shots, I fought my way back out and got the translating device. I heard the end of Kim’s speech from outside, so that the highly amped Korean inside the auditorium wouldn’t overwhelm the speaker in my left ear. Kim talked pretty generally, at least the part I heard, about the artist in all of us and in creating more than one identity within each of us in order to strengthen that artist. I’m not so concerned I missed all of his talk, because it is supposed to go online with subtitles. Kim was obviously more funny before translation, as on several occasions he had the audience hooting. As far as I could tell, he was whisked away immediately upon conclusion of his speech, so there was no chance to talk or get an autograph. This was disappointing, but I decided to stay and hear the other speakers. This turned out to be a wise decision. When it was lunch break and since I was one of only about 10 obviously foreign faces in the audience, the video woman came to speak to me and when I said I had come to hear Kim Young-ha, she said, “Oh, I think he’s still standing way back over there in the corner.” And, she was right! I went over and introduced myself and we talked briefly. Kim is slender, surprisingly youthful and was extremely polite. His English is excellent. He was with his wife, who was too shy to be photographed, but Kim allowed me to take a shot. Kim noted that he has just published 13 short stories in Korean which he doubts will be translated quickly. With a laugh he noted that books of translated short stories are not usually very successful in the US. Also, he said, his time in Seoul is drawing short, as he will be soon be going to New York as a visiting scholar at Columbia University. He is also working on a novel which he described as “very dark.” That’s saying something, considering some of the darkness he’s already delivered in his translated work, particularly “I Have the Right to Destroy Myself” and “Your Republic is Calling You.” We began to talk a little bit about “Your Republic is Calling You” and then it was time to go back in for the next set of talks. I’m still feeling the fanboy excitement of this meeting, which is probably undignified for a 50 year old, but what the heck. How often do you get to meet your favorite Korean author? Kim also showed up for the after-party at the same table as me, but I felt the I had already pestered him enough and let him enjoy his dinner, A Responsible Adult Disagrees with me on “A Man” (Picked up in comments)Take a look over at SeoulPatch for a different view of Hwang Soon-won’s “A Man.” It’s a brief review, about halfway down the page, but it is a different take than mine. Review of Hwang Soon-won’s “A Man” "A Man" named Hwang Hwang Soon-won’s A Man is the 23rd book in the Jimoondang series, and it seems as though the editors were running out of things to translate (despite the fact that there is plenty still out there). It’s a bit of a dog’s breakfast, with three entirely unrelated short stories tossed together. The stories themselves are loosely plotted and seem more like vignettes tossed together than a narrative. The first story is, to use vernacular language to describe a literary feeling, super weird. The Dog of Crossover Village is told from at least three narrative positions and covers the relatively unremarkable life of a stray dog called ‘Whitey.’ The dustcover says The Dog of Crossover Village, “portrays life in a traditional rural village but can be read as an allegory of the Japanese colonial occupation or of the fate of an outsider in a highly stratified society.” Neither of those allegorical approaches seem likely (Whitey hardly seems colonized or colonialist and she actually fits her way into the local society of dogs) and that the editor would feel it necessary to toss out these unlikely and to some extent in opposition, allegories seems to hint that he/she was uncertain what to make of the story. The story that gives the book its title, A Man, is even more bizarre. The sexual politics are inexplicable – very nearly random – but always, here comes that word again, weird. Mr. Kim (“the man” of the title) is completely helpless with respect to women. This is partly because in his first marriage his insanely controlling mother sleeps between him and his bride, then blames the bride when she returns home, a decision which seems sensible enough to my eyes. As the mother dies she leaves a last request that paints the oddity of her relationship to her son, “I’ve known only two men in my life – your father and you. And I don’t want you trusting any woman but your mom.” With echoes of Tony Perkin’s mother from Psycho ringing in his ears Mr. Kim goes from unsatisfying relationship to unsatisfying relationship. The dustcover describes Mr. Kim as hapless, but it obviously goes beyond that. The particular relationships he enters are strung together like a child might string beads – loosely and without apparent logic and the concluding scene doesn’t seem to wrap much up.  A Book Called "A Man" The third story, Bibari, is also a bit off. It is also the easiest to read, because there is a plot to follow and it is interesting where it points out differences between Jeju and the body of Korea. Those differences have been at the heart of a great deal of trauma on Jeju, and Hwang does a good job of portraying them, even in small ways such as parallel vocabularies (The title, for instance, comes from the Jeju word that would be “agassi” in the rest of Korea). Bibari‘s plot revolves around a love story and a fratricide. The fratricide is relatively emotionally convincing in that the murderer explains the mercy she believes she did by the murder, but the love-affair killing result of the murder seems contrived and without real emotional heft. It seems as if Hwang just tossed a couple of plot ideas together without entirely working out how they would mesh. The dust cover (again!) says that, “Hwang Soon-won is modern Korea’s most successful short-story writer and perhaps its most consistently interesting fictional voice.” It is difficult to see that judgment drawn from this collection of short stories. Hwang also wrote the seminal Cranes (a short story) and Descendants of Cain (a horrific novel), either of which would be better introductions to his writing. Even Sonagi, which I found a bit predictable and pathos-drenched, would be better. I also have his collection of short stories “Book of Masks” which I hope to read and review shortly. This book, however, is not the one to buy.
Under Korean Literature | Tagged A Man, Bibari, editor, Hwang Soon-Won, PLKT, review, The Dog of Crossover Village, 삐빠리, 황순원
Yun Heung-gil’s “Group Beating” and Other Things… It's Possible This Will End Badly An interesting combination of things involving Yun Heung-gil (who, lo and behold, has a Wikipedia entry) and particularly his short story Group Beating. Yun Heung-gil is the author of Rainy Spell and The Man Who Was Left as 9 Pairs of Shoes. The first thing is the PDF of Group Beating from the indispensable Korea Journal website (It is downloadable here as a scanned document, and only a tolerably readable one). The story is good on several levels. Yun can flat out write, and his cinema-verite/noir introduction to the building in which the story largely takes place is brilliant. Then, his cleverly plotted story, clearly limns how social pressure can conspire to destroy individuality. Yun does this in parallel but intertwined plots. In the first plot the stories’ protagonist loses his dream of ‘leaving’ and in the second a man is driven to suicide. The cleverness of the second plotline is that while society drives the man to suicide it is not by any formal method – the government is only slightly involved and even then merely as a trigger – in fact it is ‘just’ the mere fact of society existing that allows it to bring its inexorable weight to bear. This is a sad story which packs quite a lot of meaning into not so many pages. The translation is only adequate, with at least one howler awaiting the attentive reader. The second thing here is a short article entitled “Society’s Group Mentality and the Fate of Individuals” from Koreana magazine. This talks a bit about Yun and the story, and is a useful sidebar to the story itself. The article is sometimes a bit simple. Finally, from the GwangJu (sic) Blog, a review of Rainy Spell by Elton LaClare. LaClare writes with a bit of tweed in his ink, but the review is a good (and, since LaClare evaluates Rainy Spell the same way I do, I’ll upgrade that “good” to “best.” ^^). LaClare’s final point as to why Rainy Spell works is a key one – the drama of the story comes before the drama of “historical consciousness,” which often threatens to drown other translated Korean works. Pak Wan-so (Just one of the many romanizations of her name): Tiny UpdateAfter completing the Wikipedia page, I have also posted a more complete Park Wan-so page (but one that contains critical judgment, which the Wikipedia frowns on), in the authors section of the KTLIT website. Park Wan-so was NOT in the Wikipedia!
Still, it boggles me that an extremely (I mean EXTREMELY) famous writer in Korea, and a successfully translated one in English, would not have any entry. Someone is asleep at the switch. Despite the fact that she now has a Wikipedia page, it is horrifically incomplete. Because I was taking my information from things that have been translated into English, her “biography” jumps from dropping out of SNU as a youth to where she currently lives as a grande dame of Korean letters. Surely Korean authors should have Wikipedia pages with complete information, information ported from Korean? LOL.. I guess I’m a dreamer.. Anyway.. What you got before:  Oh No! Say it isn't (Park Wan) so! What you have now:  It's a Day in the Park (Wan-so!) Super-Cool post from Indieful ROK about Aeon (yeah?) Posting a ‘Trailer” for Kim Young-ha’s new book
That post title was perhaps a bit too much… But check Indieful’s post out, because it combines some news about a new book (in Korean) from Kim. Indieful begins with:
BTW – I should say that I”m completely boggled that the Korean I see as “무슨 일이 일어났는지는 아무도” is translated as (Nobody knows) What happened. Which to me looks more like “Does anyone <WHAT?> what work happened.” Oh well.. my Korean is lame. ^^ Indieful also saw Kim in Sweden:
Which would make me very jealous, except I’ll be seeing Kim this weekend in Sinchon. ^^ Check out the post and the video, which I don’t understand, but even an old coot like me recognizes is super-cool to watch. Let’s just hope that Kim Chi-young is already hard at work translating this! |
. It can be found in the collection, 
