정말????

The other day I caught the 401 bus, just to see where it ran. After a bit, it went by the COEX in Gangnam, which contains a reasonably sized Bandi & Luni. So I hopped off.  After a cup of coffee in a Caffe Bene, I went down to Bandi & Luni look for some exciting new translation I hadn’t previously seen.

I went to the “translated Asian literature” section, which was one panel of a bookcase.

I  was utterly dismayed by incredibly small number of books in translation. There were three big books that I had never heard of, The Dwarf by Cho Se-hui, two books by Kim Young-ha, a soft and hard cover version of Shin Kyung-sook’s Please Look After Mom. And that was it. The total.

In fact, there were more books by Korean-Americans than by Koreans (don’t get me started on the risible notion that Korea seems to have that Korean-Americans are somehow actually Koreans and should count in with native Koreans when book numbers are totalled), with Chang-Rae Lee having all his books represented.

Far worse, Japanese and Chinese literature made up well over three-fifths of the total (please note, in the picture below, that the Japanese and Chinese books are so numerous that they must be stored library fashion, while the Korean works are placed with the front covers facing out).

It was eminently clear to me that Bandi & Luni has no concern at all for the success of translations of Korean literature. There was no Yi Mun-yol, no Park Wan-suh, and no Ch’oe Yun.  This is completely remarkable in a horrible way, and demonstrates that the pure profit motive has completely outweighed what I might call “patriotic” or “branding” approaches to what is stocked in this minute area of the store. This seems foolish at a time at which the number of foreigners is steadily increasing in Korea, and has reached 3%.

In the photo below, the Korean works are outlined in red, works by US authors are outlined in green, and works from other Asian countries are outlined in yellow. It gives a graphic idea of what I am talking about.

Found on the Web

A couple more things found on the web that don’t merit a full post, but deserve being noted.

First, an excellent interview with Yi Mun-yol, possibly Korea’s greatest translated man of fiction (partly because he’s had a relatively large number of works translated, partly because he’s just that good^^). The interview is part of a series with international pioneers among Korean artists that marks the 61st anniversary of The Korea Times.

Among other things the interview reveals that his 문학관 does exist and is open for business, which means that KTLIT will shortly have to take a trip out to it with the camera. There is a bit of orientalized hocus-pocus in the text, but in general it is worth reading and sums Yi up quite well, when it says:

Yi proves to be a most astute student of human psychology, history and sociology, and moreover, a master of transcending self and culture to evoke profound emotions and imagination. His 30-plus books, in the vastness of their genre, style and structure, defy categorization – the more works of his one reads the more impossible it becomes to define his oeuvre.

Announcement of the winners of the LTI Korea/Knopf 5-state Please Look After Mom essay contest. Residents of Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey,  New York and Pennsylvania were eligible to enter, and a quick look at the winners indicates that either ethnically Asian writers are better writers^^, or more ethnically Asian writers entered the contest.  Sadly, although the contest says the essays will be available on the Korean Cultural Service New York website, they don’t seem to be available to read, which seems to defeat part of the purpose of the contest (though some pictures of the winners can be found here).

Finally, a short piece on Chinese publisher Yilin Press, which has just released translations of Korean fiction:

The last issue, for example, is dedicated to Korean literature. Author Ku Hyo-seo’s novella, Rhapsody in Berlin, forms the centerpiece. Others featured are Young Kong-Ji (The Correct Way of Getting Along with People) and Kim Young-ha (Moving Home).

See you next time, on the web!

http://en.ce.cn/Life/book/201201/06/t20120106_22979590.shtml

• First, as the year began, Korea lost one of its great authors, and one well represented in translation, Park Wan-so. An international literary treasure as well a national one, Park’s literary career  spanned thirty years, and she wrote more than 20 novels and 100 short stories, a fair proportion of which were translated into English. Perhaps her most famous work was Who Ate Up All the Shinga, a semi-autobiographical novel of growing up in and after the Korean civil war.

• The year continued on a not-so great note as KTLIT noted that the Asian Man Literary prize did not include any Korean candidates, and that in fact, most prizes for translation seemed unaware of Korean works.

• Kim Young-ha, one of the most successful Korean writers in English translation, weighed in on the death of 0f aspiring screenwriter Choi Go-eun (a friend of Kim’s), and ended up quitting Twitter and blogging after a series of  online debates with literary critic Cho Young-il. Fortunately, by the end of this year he had at least returned to podcasting, and the news that a translation of his “Black Flower” by Charles La Shure should be published next year is good news to his fans.

• Even better news came in the first quarter of the year when Shin Kyung-sook’s Please Look After Mom, took the English speaking world by storm, hitting the New York Times Top 10 List, making Amazon’s 10 Best Books of the Year list, being published in the United States and Europe, and selling more copies than any other Korean translation ever had. Even better, as Shin’s work rose to the top of the bestseller list, it demonstrably dragged other Korean translations with it, as their popularity rose markedly on Amazon.

• In publication, special mention should be made of the excellent feminist collection of modern fiction by female Korean authors, Questioning Minds. The book was technically published on the last day of 2010, but its sales took place this year.

• Renowned author Yi Mun-yol (and translator Heinz Fenkl) also scored a triumph when An Anonymous Island was published in the New Yorker Magazine.

• LTI Korea, celebrated its 10th anniversary with a conference intended to help lay the groundwork for another successful decade.

• The year continued with a bit of silliness as some members of the GNP called for investigation of author Gong Ji-young for her book The Crucible (later made into a movie and released in the US). The GNP might well dislike Gong, whose politics are extreeeemely left, as her dressing down of protestors celebrating the death of Kim Jong-il demonstrated (Tip of the Hat to “Hidden Connections” for turning this up).

• The year ended with splendid news, as LTI Korea and the Dalkey Archive announced that they were partnering to translate 25 Korean books, which will be released (I think) in 2013.

All in all, a year with more good in it than bad, and it makes me look forward to what the current year will reveal!

For the purposes of the Wikipedia Project I also have the Who’s Who in Korean Literature (published by the Korean Culture & Arts Foundation), a vast tome of some 55o pages, containing biographies of 181 writers. Published in 1996 the book says the the publisher’s mission (partly) is:

Contribution to the creation of cultural environment of the future society that is rich and abundant as well as to the international cultural exchange.

Which is why I found it odd that of the 10 authors represented in Questioning Minds, only two were in the Who’s Who. Park Wan-suh made the cut, and so did Ch’oe Yun. But of course these two were unavoidable.

Authors who did not make the cut include: Kim Myong-sun and Na Hye-sok, two artists whose lives were essentially destroyed for their lack of conventionality; Kim Won-ju, whose views on sexuality were so unpopular that she eventually retreated to a Buddhist temple; Han Mu-sook, who is famous in Korean and internationally; Kang Sin-jae, whose official involvement with the Korean literary establishment was vast (e.g. she won the Korea Republic Academy of Arts Award in 1988 and was a representative  of the Association of Korean Writers); Song Won-hui (just exactly repeat the qualifications I listed for Kang Sin-jae); Yi Sun (whose tragic early memory loss had the unfortunate effect of removing her from the public eye), and; Yi Sok-pong, who won the Korean PEN Literature Award in 1989).

That is a rather remarkable list of writers to have missed, both trailblazers and accomplished artists, all publicly recognized well before publication of the Who’s Who. More remarkably, out of those 181 important writers in the Who’s Who, only 15 are women (the writers are conveniently categorized as M or F on the header of each biography). This is an astoundingly low percentage (I pulled out all my maths skills^^ and calculated it as less than 10%), and leads me to suspiciously ask if there is a bias here.

Some notes of warning to myself  -

• It is quite possible that there have been more male writers than female writers in the modern era, certainly the lives of Na and Kim Myong-sun would have scared off all but the hardiest potential writer.
• The inclusion of poets in this list might also swing the balance towards men (I have no idea what the ratio of male to female poets might actually be)
• The situation I am describing is also quite prevalent on the English side of literature

But still – it’s a remarkable list of omissions and a remarkable percentage of men in the final tally. I think it’s time to put out another one of these books and try to represent the actual, and increasing, diversity of Korean authors. In fact, of course it is time to do this.. I also note that Shin Kyung-sook (F) and Kim Young-ha (M) are not represented in the book.

Finally, kudos to LTI Korea and other translators, who have ALWAYS seemed to translate a higher percentage of female authors than the gatekeepers of the canon seem willing to admit.

While I express my preferences between the books, it is worth considering that while some are better than others, for a little over $100 dollars these 25 volumes are  a very nice overview of modern Korean literature. This is partially a credit to LTI Korea / Jimoondang cleverly choosing author-based and novella-length books. This allows a lot of territory to be covered in a way that more formal “collections” can’t achieve.

With that said, and in order of publication, here are the books.

1. The Wings, by Yi Sang
   An absolutely necessary read by the spiritual predecessor to post-modern Korean writers, this short story hints at the disconnection caused by Japanese colonialism. Also includes the excellent short stories Encounters and Departures and Deathly Child.
2. A Dwarf Launches a Little Ball, by Cho Se-hui
   An absolutely necessary read detailing the human cost of Korea’s “miracle on the Han.” The longer version, The Dwarf, is even better.
3. The Cry of the Magpies, by Kim Dong-ni
   A  fair story of trauma caused by civil war. Also includes the short story Deungsin-bul.
4. The Wounded, by Yi Chongjun
   A good, but complicated, evocation of the trauma caused by civil war. Also includes An Assailant’s Face.
5. Deep Blue Night, by Choi In-ho
   An interesting story of Korean expatriates in California embarking on a road trip, and a journey through their own pasts.
6. The Ma Rok Biographies, by Seo Giwon
   Amusing but inconsequential stories of characters linked by name.
7. The Land of the Banished, by Cho Chong-Rae
   An absolutely necessary read. One of the best pundan munhak stories – Cho uses a bit of misdirection at the start of the story to add real flesh to a real villain.
8. Three Days in That Autumn, by Park Wan-suh
   A good but lesser work from a great author.
9. The Rainy Spell, by Yun Heung-gil
   A good but minor work that is more important to Koreans than it could ever be to overseas readers.
10. The Other Side of Dark Remembrance, by Lee Kyun-young
    An absolutely necessary read that neatly manages to describe a very modern Korea, but still tie it back to its tragic history.
    
11. With Her Oil Lamp on, That Night, by Lim Chul-Woo
    Decent, but obvious and a bit dated (even considering that it is from a particular historical era)
12. Between Heaven and Earth, by Yun Daenyoung
    One of the vaguest and least focused of the series
13. An Appointment with My Brother, by Yi Mun-Yol
    A good but lesser work from a brilliant author. This is a political lecture wrapped in a book (a new translation is due in Spring, from Azalea Press). There are far better books by Yi available online.
14. The Camellias, by Kim Yu-Jeong
    An absolutely necessary read set of stories about love. The Camellias is comic and light, The Scorching Heat is tragic, and A Wanderer in the Valley is hopeful, if cautious.
15. Rust, by Yang Gui-ja
    Two good but minor works (the second is Swamp) by a really great author
16. House of Idols, by Choi In-hoon
    A good but minor work.
17. My Innocent Uncle, by Ch’ae Man-shik
    An absolutely necessary read if just for the title story, which is a clever political satire. Also includes A Ready Made Life, which while a bit obvious is a Korean classic. Once Upon a Paddy is a one-note satire. partly because it is trying to make a difficult point.
18. Photo Shop Murder, by Kim Young-ha
    An absolutely necessary read which is one of only two books in the series (mainly due to when the series was published) hinting at some directions in post-modern Korean fiction. Both Photo Shop Murder and Whatever Happened to the Guy in the Elevator are brutally modern, and the latter is laugh-out-loud funny.
19. The Chronicle of Manchwidang, by Kim Moon Soo
    A  quite good story, and amusing. Situational comedy mixed with unfortunate situations engendered by Korean economic development.
20. A Toy City, by Lee Dong-ha
    A  good story, rendered minor by a much more complete version published later.
21. The Last of Hanako, by Ch’oe Yun
    An absolutely necessary read that lays bare the pressure for social conformity in Korea. Basically, anything Ch’oe writes is worth reading.
22. Chinatown, by Oh Jung Hee
    An interesting coming-of-age story, allied to a kind of “wheel of life” narrative that I found completely charming, if occasionally bleak. The other two stories, Wayfarer and The Release are also sharply told.
23. A Man, by Hwang Soon-won
    An adequate book. The title story has remarkably crass sexual politics and is difficult to read. The first story, The Dog of Crossover Village, remains opaque to me, though man other like it. Bibari is an interesting story of Jeju life. If you like this, be sure to chase down “Lost Souls” which has much more of his work, and better.
24. Human Decency, by Gong Ji young
    In competition with Between Heaven and Earth for least important in the series. Too obvious.
25. Hong Gildong, by Seo Hajin
    A light but entertaining semi-retelling of a Korean myth, it is paired with another re-telling of Korean myth, The Woodcutter and the Nymph. Like Kim Young-ha, a very modern writer.

So there you have it.. a clever collection of 26 novellas containing the work of some of the greatest writers of Korean modern fiction.

Here is an interesting video podcast from Arirang  called Globalization of Korean Literature (with a script). The authors it focuses on are  Shin Kyoung-Sook  and Han Gang.

Gang says:

“Literature is an art through language… and language by nature seeks communication. As an author, it is such a pleasure that my literary works are read in other countries.”

I am also interested in the dismissive attitude the videos seems to hold towards Kim Young-ha and Yi Munyol (where’s the respect?) and its silly emphasis on training competent translators. How about paying more for the competent translators that are out there? And then marketing the books right?

Kim Joo-youn the  President of the Literature Translation Institute says:

“Through translation, world readers can share our literary legacies.  We will keep strengthening our translation projects in the future.”

And the good news is that he seems quite serious about this.

In any case, I was ecstatic to get through the whole piece without hearing anyone mention the Nobel Prize for Literature!^^

Check it out.

What in the world does this have to do with Korean literature? Well, my wife is a crazy bookshopper and so one of the things we did was went on Google and mapped the used bookstores in every major town we visited. The map below, for example, shows the bookstores in Ashland Oregon. And we visited every one of them.

We stopped at somewhere between 40 and 50 bookstores.

At each of those bookstores I asked about Korean literature, and at each of those bookstores the cashiers/owners were utterly stumped.

I also asked for the books I knew should be there – Kim Young-ha’s Your Republic is Calling You and Shin Kyung-sook’s Please Look After Mom. To my dismay only three bookstores had either of the books (two stores had Mom, and one had Republic) and no store had both. At the stores that did not have the books I asked if the books had ever been stocked. As far as the clerks could determine, they never had.

I’m not sure what to make of this – it’s boggling, particularly with respect to Please Look After Mom, which was a legitimate NY Times bestseller.

As if it were necessary to drive the point in any deeper, in Berkeley CA the Eastwind bookstore which describes itself as:

Your source for Asian American literature, Asian studies, Ethnic Studies, language learning, traditional Chinese medicine and martial arts books.

had only 8 books on Korean culture (in total and you can seem them here) and one copy of Please Look After Mom stuffed away in a corner (and, yeah, that counts as one of the two copies I found on my three week trip).

I’m still trying to puzzle this out. Of course there wouldn’t be a lot of Korean literature out there – it’s success is still gestational – but its complete lack (and with two successful books in the last two years) suggests that the larger lack of awareness of Korea is having an impact on books. After all, if a reader walked into Eastwind and discovered no books from Japan, they would be rightly shocked if Japan were simply not represented.  Yet this is seen as normal for Korea.

My initial thought is that this means that a merely translational approach to the problem is bound to fail – the books will not show up in the bookstores.

Social media – it works for Hallyu, why can’t it work for Korean literature.

HINT: I mean the Wikipedia Project and support of fan-sites (they are coming out!) on the web…

Frankly, the whole thing left me a bit depressed.

Exciting authors to be named later will include Kim U-jeong, Kim Young-ha, and Ch’ae Man-sik (I’ll likely toss in a bit of Pak Min-gyu, just because he’s a funny fellow^^).

You can tune in using “radiology” here (the “listen live” button is on the upper left-hand corner and rest assured if you use an Apple computer or Firefox, your listening experience will be chock full of fail!^^)

Be there!

Agent of Misfortune

Mysterious commenter AskGodot left a response to the “All Modern Korean Literature Online” Project in which he pointed out another great resource, the Words Without Borders list of 31 articles translated from Korean to English. It is mainly poetry, but there are some nice fiction:

Earnie

Fiction by Lee Gi-ho

Camel’s Eye

Fiction by Hwang Sok-Yong

The Man Who Sold His Shadow

Fiction by Kim Young-ha

Garden of My Childhood

Fiction by Oh Jung-hee

Memories of Lily-Colored Photographs

Fiction by Jung Mi Kyung

Second Encounter

Fiction by Han Ung-bin

There are also several selections from other fictions… so check it out and wait for these to go up on the big database shortly…

Agent of Misfortune

A new project.  To find all the places online where you can read translated Korean Modern Literature, free (64 authors, as of today).  Here are the works so far (I still have to get all the Korea Journal articles before 1990).

If you know of a work that is NOT included here, please comment.