A slightly edited version of my essay for the 2nd Annual LTI Korea Essay Contest. An essay that did NOT^^ win anything – Kim In-sook’s Sea and Butterfly is, like several of her works, a sharply etched and powerful description of alienation, full of well-described incidents and characterizations that quickly draw readers into the…
Has an excellent page with links to his own translations of Korean fiction. This includes a range of short stories, but the bonus is three novellas and full novels by Yi Mun-yol, either still unpublished or out of print Winter that Year The Poet Son of Man And two novellas by Yi Oryong, the former…
Working on a comparative translation bit for my Uni. It’s on “Potatoes” (titles vary) by Kim Dongin. I come across an older post on the Korea Times in which Lim Sunjae (and, oh yeah, I emailed the dude) translates 24 super-short Korean stories. His translations (based on the ones I know) can be clunky in…
Heh, I found a modern video remake of a modern-classic Korean story, Sonagi. Rain Shower, also called Shower in English, 0r Sonagi (in Romanized Korean), is a short story written by Hwang Sun-won in 1959 (Hwang also wrote the seminal novel The Descendants of Cain – a horrific story of greed and betrayal). Sonagi is…
Earlier, I posted (after prompting!) a mention of the fact that I had read one story of Yun Ch’oe called The Last of Ha’nako. I really hadn’t liked it that much, as it hinged on a pretty obvious plot twist, although one that might have not been quite so obvious in Korea, at the time…
A rather long article on a writer of whom I had not heard. It sounds like Yun uses a pretty dramatic narrative technique: The story is divided into eleven sections. Ch’oe Yuns creates through the application of modern techniques and instruments a chaotic atmosphere that reflects the effects on the baffled society during and after…
I suppose it is a general credit to the level of translation of Korean literature into English that I have read quite a few works and have just now come upon my second example of atrocious translation. This case is particularly unfortunate as the story is a classic one – Both classically Korean in that…
The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 22 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul The Portable Library of Korean Literatures’ twenty-second imprint is Chinatown by Oh Jung Hee (Also romanized as O chonghui, O Chong-hui). This contains three stories, the eponymous Chinatown, Wayfarer, and The Release. These stories have been translated by the…
I just noticed over at my e-buddy’s site (Liminality) that he has a previously unpublished Kim Young-ha short story, Christmas Carol. Worth taking a look at, if you’re in to Kim.
The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 1 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul In a recently published essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mark Edmunson pleads for a contingency that I hope someone can help us achieve: If I could make one wish for the members of my profession, college and…