nanoomi

Apologies for the long silence. I think we’ve all been swamped by our respective projects. But…! Exciting news! One of my own recent projects has just gone online: an English translation of Hye-young Pyun’s short story 토끼의 묘.

This has been in the works for some time, starting with my initial translation of the story for the Seoul Young Writers’ Festival in 2010, all the way up to the final version for Words Without Borders. If you click on both links, you’ll see that the versions are different, right down to the titles. This is because the SYWF version was an early draft done to KLTI specifications (accuracy, accuracy, accuracy), while the WWB version was done to online publishing specifications (5000 words maximum).

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The other day I caught the 401 bus, just to see where it ran. After a bit, it went by 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.

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This is post four of a multi-post series on Korean GLBT Literature, featuring a Q&A with Gabriel Sylvian, the founder of The Korea Gay Literature Project.

An interesting transcript of an interview with Haun Saussy (Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago) which took places at the Asia Institute Seminar at the conclusion of  December 2011. This is from Emanuel Pastreich‘s blog Korea: Circles and Squares, which became immediately lovable to me when I read Pastreich’s About page which says about the author, “He runs a bog known as “Korea: Circles and Squares.” Now THAT is either a bit of completely knowing yourself or an amusing typo.

In any case, the piece begins with a rather philosophical bit of discussion about awareness of the ‘other,’ world-history, philosophy and world-literature. But about two-thirds of the way through they get to issues of Korean literature in translation. Read the full story

2011 was an active year in Korean literature.

• 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.

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This is post two of a multi-post series.
You can find post one, discussing the history of gays and lesbians in pre-modern literature here.

Yesterday we talked a little about the role of gays and lesbians in pre-modern Korean fiction. Today’s question turns towards the “modern” period of Korean literature, which essentially began at the turn of the 20th century.

Q) Can you briefly outline the history of modern gay/lesbian literature and mention any notable authors or works?

A) Well, use of the word gay/lesbian for any work prior to 1995 is problematic. The Korean LGBT leadership (understandably, because they had no native same-sex history or tradition to refer to) stated in numerous interviews during the 90s that homosexuality did not exist in Korea before their movement. That is inaccurate. Homosexuality (dongseongae), the biomedical term, entered Korea in the early-1920s, and cross-dressers and same-sex desiring men and women were occasionally mentioned in journals and newspaper crime reports from that time, the new term sometimes used to describe them. There were also reports about dongseongae suicides and crimes from Japan. The same-sex cultures that emerged in the cities from the 20s were influenced by Japanese culture, while the same-sex culture in the countryside was carried over from the Joseon period. LGBT politics dates from the 1990s. So if you mean literature written against the background of LGBT politics, the earliest major LGBT authors were Jeon Myeong-an (gay), whom I mentioned, Han Jung-nyeol (gay), and Gim Bi (transgender). Their works have been available on the Internet as e-books and several made available in print. There was a “gender literature” anthology called Rainbow Eyes published in the mid-2000s. We cannot use identitarian terms like gay and lesbian before 1995 without some qualification, although the body of earlier data belongs to Korean LGBT history insofar as they are articulations of same-sex desire. Read the full story

Chasing down a question from long-time commenter Charles (not me^^) and some interesting information about Yi Kwang-su, I came across some interesting work a The Three Wise Monkeys, by Gabriel Sylvian.

I emailed him some questions and the answers were interesting (and lengthy!) enough so I decided to run them individually, with some comments they evoked from me.

Gabriel, a grad student in Korean Literature at Seoul National University, founded The Korea Gay Literature Project  in 2004, and you can read more about him here. In any case, my first question was for background:

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Yun Dong-ju is often known as a poet and patriot. He was arrested by the Japanese more than once, and was a firm believer in conserving important elements of Korean culture during Japanese colonialism. There is some suspicion that his death might have been the result of Japanese medical experimentation (191).

The Heavens, the Wind, The Stars and Poetry is an omnibus type book. It contains 120 poems, a short biography, and excellent frontispiece photo, a 19 page analysis of his poetry, and an interesting bit of “research” into the religious basis of his work.
But also included in the book are four short stories, of which three are very short. Not surprising for a poet, the works are full of allusion and symbols, with nature taking a very high rank in the list of allusions and symbols. This can be pretty easily noted just by looking at the titles of his short stories. Yun is a complicated read as well, hopping from thing to thing with little notice and employing a writing style that is in some ways reminiscent of the surrealism of Yi Sang and the absurdity of Pak Min-gyu. That’s good territory to be in, if you don’t know the authors. Read the full story

Human Decency by Gong Ji Young is one of the smaller works in the Jimoondang series, partly because it is so parochially Korean, pitting a facilely “international” character, who has had the nerve to look outside of Korea, against a “true Korean hero” who has relentlessly stayed inside the grinder of Korean politics. It has that peculiar kind of Korean romanticism about Korean history that does not translate into English.

The narrator is tortured by her abandonment of political purity and she brings that angst to her assignments. In this Manichean construction she meets Gwon Ogyu a “noble” rebel and also Yi Minja, who has spent an international life. The narrator both loathes and loves (but mainly loathes) Yi, and in this struggle seems to argue that anything modern is, in fact a way, to spurn Korean history and society.

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