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.

Chi-Young Kim

Chi-Young was gracious enough to step onto a semi-deserted (thus the occasional background noise)  mezzanine and undergo an interview – You’ll notice my interviewing skills are not strong.^^

Here is the first section of that interview (with a transcript below)

Chi-Young Kim Speaks

——————————————

CM: You have a family history of translation is that why you’re in the business today?

CYK: I guess so, my mom has been translating my entire life so I grew up with stacks of paper all around and as I got older I kind of helped her with certain phrasings since she is not a native speaker of English and she did Korean to English, so I was involved at a pretty young age and I’ve always been interested in translation because I was an avid reader both in Korean when I was younger and living in Korea, and also in English. So, I read a lot of translations of other works into Korean when I was younger; French, and Russian and English. And so it was always kind of there and available but I, I didn’t really make a career choice out of it until I started to work at a publishing company after college in New York, and we focused only on translations into English. So we kind of focused on that. I got more interested in, in translation personally and so I started translating a couple of short stories right around then and that’s how I got into it.

CM: I was interested when I talked to Kim Young-ha, not interested, actually kind of appalled at how hard he worked at his craft.

CYK: Mmm-hum

CM:  That he works basically 7 hours a day, 7 days a week.

CYK: Right.

CM: What’s your translation process once you have a manuscript on your table, whether you … or laptop or whatever

CYK: These days. Well, I like I to get as much done in one sitting as possible, which obviously drags on to several weeks to several months depending on the text and how busy I am. And I’ve never actually just done translation. I’ve always had another job.  So, for me its kind of like a, an evening thing and a weekend thing and you know when I go on vacation, on planes I’m always, I’m always doing it. So, then I’ll do an initial draft and then I’ll go back and until that point I’m pretty close to the original. And then after like the second draft or so I just put the original away and read it as if it’s in English.

CM: So that’s the point at which you vernacularize it, more or less.

CYK: Right, make it more natural, smoother.

CM: It just occurred to me as we were sitting here that I read “A Toy City,” which I really liked far, far better than the Jimoondang version, partly because it was more complete.

CYK: Oh yeah, I read that one.

CM: That was a little bit .. stiff. It seems to me you were at the peak of your skills maybe when you were doing “Your Republic is Calling You” do you feel as though you’ve gotten better through this process?

CYK: I think so. I think so.

CM: Not to say that Toy City wasn’t great I loved it, I brought it and I’m going to have you autograph it. But..

CYK: No I think I’ve been getting better and better with each book. I know that there’s a lot more to learn. Especially because I feel like the more I do it the less I feel ready to do .. do it. It’s like the more you learn the more ….

CM: You realize what you don’t know

CYK: So there’s that. And I think it’s pretty controversial at least from, translating from Korean to English to make it really an interpretation of the original text. Because my intention is for the American or English speaking reader to read it and get the same feeling and kind of oomph out of it as I did when I read it in the original. And in order to do that you really have to kind of break down all the barriers that come with the ….  you know, if you do a literal translation that’s what.. you  know, there’s there’s going to be barriers. There’s different literary traditions. So that’s what I really work on, trying to make it as smooth and, you know, trying to trick people into thinking that it’s not a translation.

CM: I think you’ve been pretty successful. One of the things I’ve looked at just started looking at, Dongguk is looking at in general. Is to try to see why it doesn’t seem like goals are assessed in translation, in Korea particularly there are goals that institutes have and then they never look at what they have produced and see if it has accomplished that

CYK: Right

CM:  So we’ve been using a really clumsy  metric. We’ve been using Google (Editor’s Note: This should have been “Amazon” not “Google) rankings and we’re ecstatic to see that basically, right now, Kim Young-ha has the 2^nd, highest rated Korean translation on all Google.  He bounces around. Now I was really amused to go back and discover that his Jimoondang book has popped into the top 400,000.

CYK: Oh Really?

CM: Yeah, it’s riding on the back of the book that you did. But people have seen that and they’ve gone out and they’ve bought Photoshop, Photo Shop Murder.

CYK: Yeah,

CM: You’re chosen for these translations right? Do publishers come to you or are you now allied with authors?

CYK: Not officially, and not with any particular author officially. But I’ve done two of Kim Young-ha’s. He hasn’t said anything about any future project. I think he’s .. and this is just a presumption on my part … but I think he’s waiting to see how “Your Republic is Calling You” is going to do in the States and then maybe decide what next to do.

CM: So was it the publisher who hooked you up with Kim Young-ha twice?

CYK: It was. So, well, for “Toy City” I found the publisher myself and that was the only book where it happened that way. And then for “I Have The Right to Destroy Myself,” Harcourt had purchased the book already. They saw the translation and the reason that they purchased the book was because the editor speaks French and she read the French version and fell in love with it.

CM: And it was a success. That makes it easier for a publisher.

CYK: Right

CM: It has sold

CYK: It’s safer. And the way I got involved is, in college I had done readers reports for Harcourt for French books. And so I knew one of the editors there and I had also worked with that editor because he’s also a translator from the German, when I was working at the publishing company in New York. So he knew that I also translated and so when they were looking for a Korean translator he said, “why not Chi-Young?” So then they had me do like kind of a test. So they had me do like, I can’t remember how many pages but, let’s say like a 30 page sample.  And then the editor compared the French version and the English version and said, “why did you choose this word?” Why….

CM:  That’s an interesting approach rather than the Korean.

CYK: Yeah

CM: You alluded to briefly something that I just thought was interesting. That, in some ways your translation style is …  contestable because there are some people who feel that that is not how you want to do it. I personally completely agree. I come to all of this from a marketing perspective. So to me it’s sneaking the culture into the target culture.

CYK: Right … Right

CM:  And you start doing that any way you can. Has there actually been any, have you had any professional repercussions because of your translation style, or….?

CYK: Yeah, I think it’s more of a general sentiment out there. Whenever I get into any sort of discussion with other translators. And, … there was this one time when I was asked to do a translation of a short story for an agency. They didn’t like how I did it. So what they did was, they changed every single word. So the entire manuscript was redlined. I mean “the,” “a,” everything! Everything was changed. So there was a little bit of a fight and they went with a different translator.

CM: Was that an English speaking agency?

CYK: It was in Korea, but the person who was in charge of it spoke English. They actually had an American editor correct it. So, it was like…

CM: Shot by both sides!

(Laughs)

We Strike Again!

This was a very rough draft of a paper which will be given at a conference in two weeks. The final paper will certainly have some of the comments in previous posts added in in some form or the other. Feel free to attack this brutally!^^

—–begins here—–

“genre” filter serves as a brief and necessarily sketchy reminder of the vital importance of assessing the genre-membership of texts, and discovering their genre-related characteristics (Hervey et. al. p 217)

One of the less explored relationships between translation and success of that translation is that between genre and impact in the target culture. This paper will discuss the role of genre on several levels. On the macro level it will explore the fits, and misfits, between Korean literary and English-language genres and how this impacts choices of translations and their successes. At the micro level, this paper will briefly discuss how genre affects translation at the most granular level.

Some Macro Concerns

The macro level has to do with success and it derives from the observation, first anecdotally, that works from Korean into English that had a comfortable genre into which they could settle, were easier for the author to read. This led to speculation that others might feel the same way.

Certainly, in reading Kim Young-ha’s Photo Shop Murder, the author of this paper was lulled into a relatively comfortable state by the first line, “Why do murders always seem to happen on Sundays.” To a westerner this was the familiar voice of the hard-edged detective – Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, or even the more modern James Rockford.

This recognition led to a line of informal research that initially focused on the excellent Jimoondang/KLTI series of 25 small novels, novellas, and short stories. Looking at the Amazon success rates of at these stories one thing was clear: Among the only five volumes to rank in the top two million on Amazon, a convenient “western” genre could be assigned to each. A majority of the remaining works were difficult to even assign to a genre.In an informal online canvass,three literary westerners currently in Korea could not even assign genres to many of the Jimoondang books that sank in the Amazon ratings.

On the other hand, when one starts to look at the recent successes in translated Korean literature, there is a uniform ability to assign a genre to those works that have been successful. The last two examples of this, of course, have been Kim Young-ha’s Your Republic is Calling You and Shin Kyung-sook’s breakthrough Please Look After Mom. It is important to note that to some extent this might be a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is to say that the successful translations are also marked by other substantial similarities: They are published outside of Korea; they are translated by a small group of translators who frequently seem to achieve success and, perhaps most critical; they are published by major publishing firms and have strong marketing support in the English-speaking world. These similarities, however, are clustered around the works that can be genred, precisely because these are the works a good translator and foreign publisher would choose. A quick look the New York Times Bestseller List reveals that un-genred works are absent even for writers of English.

There is another point to consider, and one that is presented here, for the moment, as anecdotal. That is that, in the old U.S. economic saw, “a floating tide raises all boats.” And this seems to be true with genred success in Korean translation. When Park Wan-so’s Who Ate Up All The Shinga became a minor success in English, it buoyed up all her other translated works (again, as measured on Amazon ratings). When Kim Young-ha’s Your Republic is Calling You became a larger hit, it buoyed up all his other translated works. Most likely any collection containing works from Shin Kyung-sook will shortly undergo the same phenomenon. In fact, this will likely work across Korean translated literature in general, as Amazon and Barnes and Noblehave a recommendation feature that suggests similar literature to browsers. Successes in Korean translated literature will, in this way, lead to other, related successes.

There are other genre issues as well, and ones that don’t seem to always occur to translators or translation institutes. Consider the highest level of genre for literature: Novel; short story, or; poetry. It is received wisdom in the west that short story collections simply do not sell as well as novels. In 2007 Newsweek noted:

There’s no doubt that short fiction has disappeared from the zeitgeist. Today, stories are communicated to wide audiences only if they’re made into movies. Any publisher will attest that short story collections don’t sell well.

And yet Korea, as a translating entity, has spent millions of won on translating collections of short stories (most of which suffer from the lack of western genre which is the general topic of this paper). Deeply involved readers of translated Korean modern literature are happy that these works exist, but would scarcely recommend them to friends, both based on content and form. It is also worth noting that these collections of short stories tend to contain massive amounts of content repetition. An example that I frequently use is the Korean classic, Buckwheat Season. This work is in at least six anthologies, in fact, it has an anthology dedicated to it alone; Buckwheat Season reproduced in five languages in one slender volume. Even if a reader is tempted to purchase short story collections, they might sensibly be wary of unknown collections of Korean fiction (this problem is amplified by the fact that author names are frequently Romanized differently and the same stories sometimes get different titles). And Buckwheat Season is also a classic example of a story that has no genre in the west. It might be called “romantic/bucolic” in Korean, but since Thoreau died in the United States, that genre has faded into obscurity. A great work in Korean, a great work for serious students of Korean culture or literature, a work that should never be translated again.

In fact, the only genre for which short stories should be translated is the “best stories of..” and academic anthologies. Why? Because these short story genres have built in audiences. The “best of” compilations appeal to a small demographic, but a loyal one. Academic anthologies, on the other hand, are forced on students, but eyes can be opened this way, nonetheless. Even given these audiences, the stories submitted should be genred (or exceptional) in a way that lends itself to Western audiences.

What happens when good genred work is translated? Figure 1 shows traffic for the last year for www.ktlit.com, a website dedicated to Korean literature in translation. By going back and checking the spikes on the graph against the daily posts, it is immediately clear that all the spikes were driven by news, in the Western world, of authors who hit genres, In this case Kim Young-ha and Shin Kyung-sook. When a genred work is released, it also releases general interest.

Figure 1: KTLIT Traffic

Genres, it turns out, are important. Thus it comes as no surprise that Please Look After Mom is such an epic success, already, in the United States. It fits nicely into the Amy Tan / Oprah niche of stories of sainted/interesting mothers. As Joseph Lee, president of KL Management, the firm dealing with the copyright for the novel notes:

“Mom is universal material for a novel because everyone has a mom. And every one loses mom some how. That feeling of loss resonates with people not only in the U.S. but in other countries,” Lee told The Korea Herald. (Kim Yoon-mi)

Which is true as far as it goes, but remember, this version is genred in a way English speakers will get. On the other hand, the “loss” of the mother in Yi Pom-son’s Stray Bullet to madness, the pre-existing loss of the mother in Hwan Sun-won’s Stars or the hideously ironic loss of a mother portrayed by Kim Yong-ik in his Mother’s Birthday? These land in no comfortable arena for English speaking readers, and thus are difficult to read, more difficult to digest, and in Stray Bullet, at least, for incomprehensible reasons to most English speaking readers.

Moving to the Micro Level

The fact that genres are related to success and consequently should be considered in translation also has impacts on the translation process, from choice of translator to choice of translation process, even to consideration of the impacts that genres might have on idiom and trope usage. First let us consider the importance of translator. Please Look After Mom has been a massive success, but as translator Chi-young Kim notes. “Korean novels can meander and repeat words or phrases or parts of scenes, but that doesn’t translate well into English. It tends to read like a mistake. (Chung)” Korean novels often also don’t always end up at a point. These realities break conventions in modern English literature. Chi-young Kim (successful on four successive translations) is aware of this and makes adjustment. In fact, in an interview with ktlit.com she notes that she has been lucky to work only with living authors, which makes emendation much easier.

Chi-young Kim also notes that when she translated Kim Young-ha’s Your Republic is Calling You, she was frequently forced to resort to Kim Young-ha to understand aspects of Kim’s post-modern genre:

Kim Young-ha’s books, for example, contained scenes around card games/hwatu, cars, sports, and video games. Stereotypically, I know next to nothing about those topics, so a major concern was conveying those scenes authentically. So, for example, I didn’t know anything about StarCraft, and in Your Republic Is Calling You, there is a whole section detailing the action on someone’s computer screen. I looked up the terminology of different characters and weapons, did a draft of that section, then found someone who plays StarCraft to read it over and give me pointers. That person edited that section with the language StarCraft aficionados use.

In essence, Chi-young Kim used “multiple” target culture editors, but she didn’t do this in order to check the grammar or structure of her work, instead she was concerned that the language be appropriate for the work’s genre and/or niche.

Finally, and a small point, but one that needs to be clear, the choice of genres to translate also has impact on the technical translation process. Some idioms, tropes, grammatical structure, etc. are tightly tied to their genres. Consider even the simplest idiom in Korean, “licking the outside of the watermelon.” If this is were used in the Korean pastoral/romantic genre (particularly) this needs to be taken into account in translation. It might be tempting to translate this as “beating round the bush” in English, except that is a very non agrarian idiom, as it is redolent of rifles, feudal class structure, and pheasants on the rise. Translating a genred work, as suggested above by Chi Young-kim, requires a translator with command of the idiom of the genre.

Conclusions

In many ways, it might be that this paper is being obsoleted at the time of its own delivery. The last year in translation of Korean modern literature has been a watershed year. The last two years, really. Success has followed success.

Still, it seems not a waste of time to look at issues like the role of genre, or for that matter why overseas marketing of Korean literature is not the default approach, here in Korea. This is where many of us live. We are the people most deeply interested and involved in translated Korean literature, and while overseas successes are grand, it is the mission of everyone here to increase those successes.

With that in mind, it is good to have discussions that help us maximize success. The message today is simple. Consider genre when choosing works to translate, who should translate them, and how they should be translated.

The message not given here today is also simple. Marketing is NOT all, and the desire of Koreans to express their culture, both in differences and similarities, is no different from the desire of any other nation. Don’t stop translating non-genre, difficult, or historically specific work. Korean modern literature has been intensely a national literature and that reflects the nation. But be wise on how to get that literature out there. And part of that wisdom begins in understanding what is likely to work and what is likely to fail.

Very few westerners began eating hanshik with 홍어 and while Koreans in general, the government, and newspapers note with approbation the impact of 한류 they seldom seem concerned that it is largely composed of relatively lightweight pop-culture. Pansori, so to speak, is not selling in Thailand.

The same should be true of the introduction of Korean literature to the west. Begin with what works, and make those things work for Korea. It was only 40 years ago that Japanese literature landed in the west; now Tom Cruise can be a Samurai. Continue the successes of recent translations by following the genre trail for a period, and Korean literature, along with its food and products, will assume a fitting place in the international world of literature.

So to your palette of tools, says someone who generally sits on the sideline, to those of you here who do the real work, consider adding the genre filter.

Kim Young-ha (김영하)

Just some Kim Young-ha reviews that popped up as I was culling the internet. They like his work, and two of them comment on the covers.

First, perhaps my favorite just because of its title:

Short, Sexy and Suicidal by dardenitaaa over at her fine blog Assorted Paperjams.

She says:

I was drawn to that strong, thesis-statement-sounding title not only because it’s in a lengthy declarative form, but also because there’s obviously something so cynical and defensive about it which, yes, prematurely betrayed a spoiler on the novel plot, but for the most part, intensified its come hither-aura already embodied by its sleek cover design

Which just tickles me pink, since it is one of the marketing points I have often tried to make about most Korea translated fiction – its covers are turnoffs. Good point about the excellence of the title, as well.  But once she began reading, it became more than that:

it was so beautifully written, it’s somewhat painful. Young-Ha Kim has definitely mastered crime aesthetics and the elegance of death as his style and niche. Over-all, I have the right to destroy myself has been an exhilaratingly existential read. It moved me in ways that made me feel sorry for the characters. But above all, it paradoxically evoked a sense of gratefulness in me—I appreciated that I could still appreciate life and all the small things.

So I’m taking that as a thumbs up. ^^

Along the same lines, at Everyday the Wonderful Happens the unnamed author comes right out and admits that she only read “Your Republic is Calling You” because of the cover:

I just finished reading my first Korean novel.  I say “first” as if I have a slew of other Korean novels lined up to read, which is not the case.  This one was a fluke as it was on the new fiction wall at my library, and the cover caught my eye.

Of course, she still liked it^^:

It was really, really good, and I think I’m going to try to read another book by this dude (“I Have the Right to Destroy Myself”) if my library system has it.

The excellent Clare Dudman from Keeper of the Snails talks about “Your Republic is Calling You” and notes the existence of  “Monster” which can be found on his web page. The Keeper says:

On AuthorTrek’s Young-Ha Kim’s page there is a great essay about what the US might mean to some of the rest of the world, and ends musing about the role of writers:
‘Novels and poems allow us to stand in other’s position and see ourselves through their eyes.‘

Young-Ha Kim provides some more good quotes in his book Your Republic is Calling You. I particularly like ‘Life is a continuous cycle of once terrifying things becoming normal.’

Finallly, at Young, there are two reviews of “Your Republic is Calling You,” one that really likes the book and one that finds the author liking the book the next day.  Here’s a money quote:

if you have for the Kindle edition and 5 hours of your time, go and buy the book and while your time away in laughter. If not, it’s worth a call and detour to your local public library. If Korean literature is or will become characterized by this solemn humor, I’ll eagerly await future translations of Korean works.

Interesting to see that people are still coming to Kim’s books – it’s a good sign.

Found on the web

Also, a review by Mark Schrieber in the Japan Times online of two Korea works . One is the excellent Your Republic is Calling You and the other is Into the Light a compilation in English of 10 novellas, short stories and free verse by members of Japan’s Korean minority.

About Republic, Schreiber says:

Young-ha Kim concocts a mixture of wickedly black humor that clashes head-on with North Korea’s dogmatic “Juche” (spirit of self reliance) state ideology, and the result is a rollicking read from cover to cover.

Finally, the Chosun-ilbo reports that Korean actor Bae Yong-joon’s book “A Journey in Search of Korea’s Beauty” has been nominated as one of the best literary works of 2010 by China News, one of the largest newspapers in China. Not exactly fiction, but the wave keeps rolling.^^

MY INNOCENT UNCLE, by Cha Man-sik. Jimoondang Books, 2003, 118pp., $7.00 (paper)
YOUR REPUBLIC IS CALLING YOU, by Young-ha Kim. Mariner Books, 2010, 326 pp., $14.95 (paper)
INTO THE LIGHT: An Anthology of Literature by Koreans in Japan, by Melissa L. Wender. University of Hawaii Press, 2011, 226 pp., $22 (paper)
A JOURNEY IN SEARCH OF KOREA’S BEAUTY, by Bae Yong Joon. Hollym, 2010, 432 pp., $37.29 (paper)

Kim Young-ha at TEDx

Bloomberg takes a look at “Your Republic is Calling You” and rather likes it.

With its casual style (a triumph of translation by Chi- Young Kim) and its hectic plot, it would do fine as a beach book. Yet it’s something much deeper: an eye-opening depiction of the globalization of Eastern society. Apart from the names and the foods, little in the book will seem unfamiliar to a Western reader.

This has the book back in the Amazon top 5,000. Which is a good thing. ^^

Yesterday

And even better today:

Today

The first one is a review of The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost. LKL says:

Looks like an interesting new book about to hit UK bookshops on 29 September, from Columbia University Press: The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost by Kim Sok-pom

And reprints the publisher’s blurb so we can check it out. It’s an interesting looking book, and the cover is just great looking (which sounds like faint praise, but as a marketer I can tell you it’s not). I’ll come back to this one, once I’ve read it, because from the blurb it seems like a very interesting, very complicated book, that will be a very big failure to sell or do anything to advance Korean culture outside of Korea.

Next is a an essay on Park Wan-suh’s Who Ate Up All The Shinga, a book I really liked and reviewed here. The essay is by Alice Bennell, who won last year’s Korean Literature Translation Institute essay contest on “There a Petal Silently Falls.” She only won this contest, of course, because it was limited to people in the UK, and thus I could not send in a submission.^^ Here is an excerpt:

What is remarkable about Who Ate Up All the Shinga is that we witness the life events that shaped the author as an artist, alongside a backdrop of a difficult period of Korea’s modern history. As she grows into an adolescent, not only does her personal life become more complex, but Korea’s political situation darkens and culminates into full-blown civil war. The universal theme of growing up, of the turmoil of one’s developing identity during adolescence, is amplified by Korea’s own identity crisis.

Finally, a review of “Your Republic is Calling You” that focuses on some slightly different things than KTLIT focused on in our review. The line that struck me hardest has little to do with the book per se:

Kim Young-ha’s latest novel to be translated is a breath of fresh air compared with much Korean literature available in translation. It is to be hoped that it reaches a wide audience: it certainly deserves to.

In fact.. that line seems to me possible to apply (in a reverse fashion) to The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost.

I hope I’m wrong……

Buying the book will tell…

Kim Young-ha’s “Your Republic is Calling You”

The Item

“Wearing that coat, you look like an amateur spy.”
I Could Use an Angel
(John Hiatt)

Kim Young-ha’s “Your Republic is Calling You,” has a decent chance to be a breakthrough Korean novel in English. Kim, who has shown brilliant flashes in his past works, creates his most integrated and human work here – this is the work of an author who has substantially mastered his themes and tools. The story, a web really, reveals the clandestine agent common to humanity through the tale of one particular spy and his family.

Intricately plotted and multiply narrated, “Your Republic is Calling You” begins a bit angularly, as if Kim is trying to work too many things into too little space. There is lots of expository internal-monologue revealing histories, judgments, and  nostalgic presentations of past events.

The  book quickly settles down  however, and as it focuses on characters for longer periods of time, it catches its stride. At about 20 pages in author Kim takes a breath, and the book itself breathes.

The plot is deceptively simple – it follows one day in the life of a North Korean spy who is apparently being called back home.

This call unravels his life in ways that are predictable and unpredictable.

Kim Young-ha

The “spying” metaphor is at the heart the book as all its characters are, one way or another, undercover. It is one of Kim’s skills that he reveals in a matter-of-fact fashion the difference between the public images of his characters and the lives they lead in their heads, in seedy motel rooms, prosaic offices, schools, and even in shootouts on the beach. Kim never shows his cards early, and as he makes each reveal, the tension and angst increase. By the end of “Republic,” the undercover agent in each character has been exposed and each character squirms in the unexpected light.

Readers of Kim’s previously translated works will see much here that is familiar and comfortable. Kim’s writing is semi-existentialist, internationally oriented (his “North Korean” protagonist imports foreign films and drinks Heineken), and socially modern. These have always been features of Kim’s writing that has recommended it to me, but at times in previous works, particularly in some passages of “I Have The Right To Destroy Myself,” (reviewed here at KTLIT) Kim has seemed to be trying these approaches on for size, not entirely certain how to internalize them. This is, of course, the process of growth in an author, and in “Republic” this growth has borne fruit. In this book, with one exception, Kim’s themes and internationalization seem integral to the story and flow seamlessly within the plot.

I got an x-ray camera hidden in your house
That sees what I can’t see
And that man you were kissing last night
Definitely was not me!
I Spy For the FBI
(John Hiatt)

That one exception is my other slight cavil with “Republic.” Kim works in a strongly sexual vein in this work and at the outset of the book he has a sexscene that does not seem completely integrated into the story. The scene seems hurried in  just to get a sex scene in. This quickly introduced and then discarded scene had the unfortunate effect of making me initially distrust the critically important sex-scene that slowly comes into being through the second half of the book. And this later scene provides one of the most “undercover/revealing” moments in the book.

Not Totally on the Same Page

This is a trivial complaint about a work that kept me riveted as it went along and Kim has also, to some extent, stepped back into more ‘traditional’ modern Korean themes as this “Republic” is strongly premised on issues of separation. Kim Jae-gon (KTLIT’s Korean contributor), did a quick translation of a Korean review (from the 한겨레 ) of this work that noted Kim Young-ha’s theme:

Ki-young was born in 1963 and sent to South Korea in 1984 and now gets the order to return to home. His 42years of life is divided into two 21-year-long periods in two countries. The inner conflict about whether he follows the order is also the one between the former life of North’s 21-years and the latter life of South’s 21-years. The agony of struggling 24-hours implies his complete 42-years of life, or the division of 60 years between two Koreas.

Interestingly, that review also comments on Kim Young-ha’s sexual themes, but focuses on the sex that betrays a marriage vow, rather than a random hookup between a young woman and an older man for a bit of semi-not-really-consensual urination (noted above). To my western eye, the latter seems much less likely than the former and it is revealing that a Korean reviewer would focus on what to me is the much more likely event.

Kim’s writing is razor-sharp. Any reader who has been faced with the threat of loss will recognize Kim’s description of the “premature nostalgia” that such a threat engenders. His writing about this general condition is specific and clever. A good example of Kim’s specific descriptive ability is when he describes the illicit but often silly (and still dead-serious) thrill that comes with youthful rebellion:

For Southern youth in their early twenties, having been indoctrinated in anti-Communist education in schools, speaking this way felt vulgar, much like hearing a prim woman refer to a penis as a cock. At first, it was difficult for them to refer to the two heads of state as Dear Leader or The General, but once they did, they shivered with the excitement that came with breaking the law.

That’s a passage that brilliantly outlines the borders and overlaps between “Big R” rebellion and the “Little R” rebellion of all young rebels. “Republic” is full of this kind of brilliant writing.

Kim Chi-young

Which leads to a word related to translation: Kim Chi-young, who translated “Republic,” has done a job that even surpasses her previous excellent translation of “A Toy City.” Kim Chi-young is one of the few translators whose name alone, on a dustcover, would persuade me to purchase an unknown book. I counted exactly two instances in which I wondered at a phrase, and that would be a low number for a book written by an English author in their native language. ^^

As a novel, “Your Republic is Calling You,” is a triumph, but it could also be important on a larger scale. It is notable that this was NOT translated through the traditional Korean national translation institutions. This means, wonderfully, that it does not seem to have been chosen in order to show “representative” Korean culture or history. This work was chosen for translation because it is interesting to potential readers, not for pedagogical reasons. Above and beyond my respect for Kim’s work in general, and this work in particular, I root for its success hoping that such a success could open up the eyes of Korea’s national translation institutions to the opportunities in translation.

This is an outstanding book and as the important threads tie together at the conclusion it moves at relentless speed. “Your Republic is Calling You” is taut, engaging, ironic, scathing, brutal and resigned in turns. The last 40 pages are exceptionally tightly written and the screws tighten, page by page, as life and a history of subterranean decisions conspire to strangle the lives of all the “agents” of the story.

In a brief coda Kim leaves us with a vision of a “new day” that can be read as ironic, hopeful or merely repetitive – In a world where everyone is a tout and ‘hopeful’ is lagging at the rail.

Buy this one. It comes out in September and can be ordered now.