nanoomi

Last September I was lucky enough to catch up with Chi-Young Kim at the 4th International Translators’ Conference at the COEX in Seoul. She was coming off of the success of Kim Young-ha’s Your Republic is Calling You, and waiting for the publication of Shin Kyung-sook’s (now) wildly successful Please Look After Mom.

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.^^

You can find the mp3 file here and the transcript is below.

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.

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NOTE: This article was published in a slightly different form in 10 Magazine

If you’ve worked your way through all of Stieg Larsson and the Twilight series is beginning to become predictable (Find neck, insert teeth. Repeat as necessary)? Then it’s time to delve into Korean literature. And there is no better time than now. As few as two decades ago, translated Korean Modern fiction was a dreary procession, tramping slowly but completely over the same dusty terrain: Colonialization, the Korean War;  traumas of the political war that followed, and; the social and economic price of industrialization. A western reader, picking these books up and glancing over them, could easily be forgiven for putting them down with a shudder, and taking up less troublesome affairs like grave-robbing or self-mutilation.

For Western readers without knowledge of Korean culture and history, anything published before 1980 might seem a bit archaic and/or opaque. Having spent the first half of last century under the boot of the Japanese colonialists, and the latter half engaged either in an active or passive civil war, Korean modern literature has tended to grimness; combining the light-hearted joi-de-vivre of black-and-white Holocaust documentaries with a pronounced fratricidal tone that the Khmer Rouge would have immediately embraced. Unless you are a fan of history, or uncontrollable weeping, this is the literature to look past.

But a new wave (Hello Hallyu!) of Korean writers (and a sprinkling of evergreen perennials) has put much of that in the past, either moving on to new topics, or melding old topics to themes and stories that English readers can read and enjoy.

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