Foreigner’s Community in Korea! is a truly great group on Facebook for people both in and out of Korean. It’s an open group with more than 4,000 members and its post run the gamut from advertisements for larger sized clothing, shared photos, jokes, observations and.. well, pretty much you name it. Speaking of names, however^^ when you look…
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…
KTLIT has moved its exciting(?) bookshow on TBS eFM’s 1013 Mainstreet to Wednesdays at about 10:05. (Listen Here) Today’s show mentioned two stories, one of which has a kind of funny scene to leaven its harshness (Chom-nye by Cho Chong-hui) and the other the quite funny Kapitan Ri (sometimes translated Captain Lee or The Constant…
Regular readers know that I have puzzled over the lack of translated Korean humor in the past, attempting to determine what the reasons for it might be (as in here where I talk about examples of it and here where I discuss why it might be difficult to translate). The one thing I have not…
Some time ago I wrote here bemoaning, or maybe just examining, the lack of humor in translated Korean literature. I wondered if something was hidden behind the drapes of translation? I wondered if there was something about Korean literature’s national nature that made it focus on serious subjects? I wondered if it was based on…
Posting may be light for the next few weeks as we travel around the United States (although this means the Translator and Editor will have a bit of time to get their drink on!), but for now, a sound-file with Charles Montgomery of KTLIT talking a bit about humor in translated Korean literature, some other…
Charles from KTLIT will be on TBS eFM tomorrow discussing the recent 10th Annual Korea Literature Translation Institute Awards, the Nanoomi/ReadBuild New Korea Files book, KCREPORT (where culture goes to die!), and recent recommendations in translated Korean fiction. Exciting authors to be named later will include Kim U-jeong, Kim Young-ha, and Ch’ae Man-sik (I’ll likely…
One of the cool things the Korea Literature Translation Institute does is put out a quarterly magazine called LIST. It’s aimed at overseas publishers and introduces them to Korean fiction that would be good translation/publication material. It’s out this summer, and KTLIT is in it with Charles Montgomery’s Sometimes You Have to Laugh: The Lighter…
On Monday I talked about the few pieces of translated Korean humor that I knew of. Today we’ll talk about possible reasons that so little humor has been translated; possible reasons that have to do with translation in general and Korean modern literature specifically. This is a problem I discussed in the PhD class I…
A reader asks about humorous translations of Korean literature (LOL, by which I actually mean translations of Korean humorous literature, not translations that make us laugh). As I make my list of translations of this kind of literature, I note how short it is. My list is complete at only five stories and in all…