Found on the web
A couple of short thing of interest found whilst hopping, skipping, and jumping across the internet.
• First, the news that Han Kang (always my favorite Korean author name, even if it is a nom-de-plue), whose Wikipedia page KTLIT was proud to create) has had her work Vegetarian, translated in Argentina. This work has been translated into several languages, but not English. Seems a bit odd as it seems like it would have a chance to find an audience in English:
The story of a young mentally disturbed woman who thinks she is becoming a tree, and thus the purest form of life on the planet. The world is a mess. She stops eating meat. The cruelty of meat-eating is a metaphor for the cruelty of the world today, thus her vegetarian habits are symbolic, spiritual ones in the literary work that was a sensation in Korea. Kang is among the new wave of Korean lit stars who are gaining an international following.
Han has an English language agent (at the Barbara J Zitwer agency), and apparently an English translation has already been completed, so perhaps something will be forthcoming.
• If you are in Seoul this weekend, the indefatigable (and sworn enemy of this blog!) Barry Welsh (who is unaccountably Scottish despite his deceptive name) is hosting an event at Sookmyung Women’s University featuring the amazing story of 82 year old North-Korean prison camp survivor Young-Bok Yoo:
On August 30, 2000, a commercial passenger jet arriving from China touched down at Gimpo International Airport in South Korea. There was nothing unusual about the plane or about the flight. What was miraculous was the seventy-year-old gentleman who walked down the ramp into the waiting arms of his family. That traveler was Mr. Young-Bok Yoo, and this was the end of his fifty-year journey through the darkness of hell into the daylight of freedom.
• The august New York Times Sunday Book Review published (last year, we’re a bit slow getting to this) a nice article , Me Translate Funny One Day. This article discusses the difficulties of translating humor, a subject that’s been written about a couple of times here at KTLIT, but this is worth checking out. Among other things it makes an interesting distinction between translating humor as ‘jokes’ and translating humor dependent on ‘tone.’
• Finally, James Logan High School has a paper, The Courier, which has a lovely article on Na Hye-sok, (They seem to, awesomely, have taken the article down) unfortunately lifted directly from the Wikipedia without attribution. Really? LOL
