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[Essay] Magnolia Melancholia
Sometimes, rapturous futures are only reached after passing through the most terrible of nightmares. Having captured the attention of Korean readers with her creative story structure for many years, Choi Eunmi shows time and time again that dark things lurk beneath the beauty and happiness of everyday life. Simply put, beneath the many layers of life is a sea of terrifying and violent emotions. In Magnolia Sutra, for example, one of her most famous works, Choi depicts through fairy tale-like imagination the cycle connecting life and death, a deterministic world view, as well as the heredity of bad karma between a mother and daughter. Choi borrows the forms of fairy tales and fables in her story about a girl named Mulian who inherits the sins of her murderous mother. In this instance, Choi chooses the safest method for depicting violence of a most frightening world. Subverting traditional tropes used by fairy tales, like good triumphing over evil and justice prevailing, this story ends with a picture of a cold, emotionless world. The magical world of fairy tales, which easily resolves conflicts and contradictions, is completely deconstructed by Choi’s icy gaze. Choi is perhaps more aware than anyone about how resentful violence and inescapable hatred are facts of life in a world where people must coexist. Heart-warming endings are not enough to solve the complexity of this world. Literary critic Kim Hyeong-jung’s reading of Choi’s somewhat pessimistic and masochistic gaze as an “allegory for hell” accurately presents the brutality delicately woven into her novels. Life-disrupting death and fiery, bone-engulfing hatred are the reality of our world. The aesthetic of this novel is paradoxical because it paints Mulian’s melancholic life with the sweet fragrance of a magnolia tree. We cannot deny the pain and violence that Mulian faces, but there is immense beauty in how the novel depicts these realities with metaphors that conjure myth and fairy tales. She uses the most beautiful language to paint the most violent world. In The Ninth Wave, her follow-up to Magnolia Sutra, Choi showed real-world, social concerns through a story about a proposed nuclear power plant and the regional social conflicts that surround it. By her second short story collection, A Person Made from Snow, Choi’s fiction began to address different problems from those of earlier works. In particular, she makes careful observations about the way in which the pandemic negatively affected daily life, pouring into her novel the various practical concerns that arose during that time. Choi’s gaze, which was already astutely aware of the violence of the world, shifted focus to confront the various catastrophic situations brought about by the pandemic. The deep valley of emotion that forms when social affects like isolation and transmission, fear and viruses, vaccines and social distancing, come into contact with personal conflicts is an important driving force in bringing out unexpected narratives. Of the many such works, “Here We Are, Face to Face” tells the story of married women who during the COVID-19 pandemic, must cope with an increase in caretaker work. Constantly checking for fevers, proving their vaccination status, using debit cards from the government filled with emergency funds—the women in this novel, who are all in their forties, are denied a comfortable space to exist because of their unique status as mothers and workers in dual-income families. For these women, who work as workshop owners and public transportation assistants, the scope of their work doesn’t allow them to separate their private and public lives. For example, the soap making workshop that the main character owns begins from a “home workshop,” and Sumi, a female driver, has two things demanded of her at the same time: driving and assisting people onto the vehicle. Furthermore, the burden of housework invades their workspace and destroys their efficiency of labor. And even when they take just a short break from work, they cannot help but think about housework, like repairing the air purifier or restocking the refrigerator, and thus do not even know what it means to separate work and home. The women in her novels cry out in frustration, complaining that no one has taught them how to raise children under such conditions; they urinate blood because they overwork themselves attempting to achieve perfection both at home and at work; and they specially prepare vegetable juice for their husbands, whose blood test results can either make or ruin their day. Not only do they have to endure intense labor that blurs the line between private and public, but they also must endure the intense emotional fatigue of being child caretakers. What can save these women who have died many deaths while fighting with their children, their husbands, and themselves? Married women struggling for survival naturally lean on one another, but this relationship can never provide them with utopian solidarity because, as Choi’s stories show us, greed and envy will eventually re-isolate people. These women yearn for a safe place, but the pandemic has converted personal homes into virtual classrooms. Beyond the screen of a laptop, we witness the safest of places—a house—collapsing at the sound of a woman’s pain. Precarious sounds, walls crackling and crumbling, fragile objects breaking—all of these reflect the reality of women who become isolated in the depths of pain they can never share with anyone. And yet, Choi goes one step beyond this terrifying awareness of reality. By simply staring into the face of other women who are in the same pain, women can overcome some of these feelings of isolation. Through a mirror that shows us that inherent in all of us is animosity and rage that threaten those closest to us, we see that Choi’s gaze has come to realize the violence of reality in a different light than before. Hers is not a world that ends with a cold-hearted message about violence, but a story about us as individuals who fully recognize the violence lurking in all subjects. And going beyond making observations about the precarious reality of women, Choi also depicts in a new light the sex of women. In Yours Truly, female friends who raise their children together eventually hold each other back. For example, we have the following scene, in which Jin-ah takes out a pack of frozen breastmilk from the freezer, thus confessing to the first-person protagonist of the story that she is defined by her past and her sex as a mother: “Jin-ah, if you leave it out like that, all of it will melt.” Jin-ah doesn’t budge. “I’m going to thaw all of it today. I’m going to thaw it all and pour it out. Just like you pour water into the kitchen sink.” As Jin-ah says this, she picks up and hands me the stack of papers lying next to us on the chair, her face looking like a good student who used to get perfect marks. Day 9, Day 30, Day 56, Day 98. . . Lactation times for each breast, milk quotas to achieve weight goals, stool and urination counts for the baby. . . All of this diligently recorded over seven months, not a day missing. “This is the milk that was inside my body back then,” Jin-ah says. “It’s the last bit of breastmilk I could have fed the baby. The milk I squeezed out of my body while crying all night watching my sleeping baby. Back then, every day was a roller coaster of emotion. These are six frozen lumps of me from back then, of Yoony from back then. And now I’m going to thaw them.” Jin-ah’s hair is stuck to her cheeks with sweat. “This is me. . . This is everything.” Goodbye. I’m positive that’s what Jin-ah said. Goodbye, Yeong-ji. Jin-ah has stored her breastmilk and all the history surrounding it, in a freezer for more than a decade. She puts this milk and history out on a table during a hot day to melt. Hidden in this scene, is a strange type of affect, furiously going back and forth between the maternity, childcare, friendship, and affection of women. Through this scene in which frozen lumps of breastmilk turn to sticky liquid, Choi makes the reader reimagine the relationship between Jin-ah and the protagonist of the story. In other words, this precarious relationship will disintegrate, collapse, or remain all right. Choi discovers a region that no one else who depicts female relationships has been able to discover. It is neither an amicable nor a hostile relationship, but a complex relationship between married women who are navigating maternity and their sexuality as women. Thus in Person Made from Snow, violence and pain are no longer inherited, as they were in Magnolia Sutra; they melt smoothly. Now, as the critic Kang Ji-hui has noted, the violence in Choi’s novels has transformed into “something like liquid or gas, melting and evaporating with the flow of nature, as opposed to legends with rigid worldviews.” This transformation from a threat that stubbornly persists in the world into something that accumulates and then melts can be understood as a slight relaxation in Choi’s grim perception of reality. Choi’s persistent gaze toward violence is not a cold-hearted resignation that leaves violence as violence, but a desperate struggle to find survival within violence. The novel Face to Face, Choi’s most recent work and a full-length novel that expands upon the aforementioned “Here We Are, Face to Face,” demonstrates a commitment into the future of her study of the sensations after violence. Just as Choi once wrote, we must view life from the bosom of deep time, as if those whom we sensed during the pandemic are both the same people who lived before it and the same people who will live after it. And I trust this commitment of Choi’s. Translated by Sean Lin Halbert Korean Works Mentioned:• Face to Face (Changbi, 2023) 『마주』 (창비, 2023)• A Person Made from Snow (Munhakdongne, 2021) 『눈으로 만든 사람』 (문학동네, 2021)• The Ninth Wave (Munhakdongne, 2017) 『아홉번째 파도』 (문학동네, 2017)• Magnolia Sutra (Moonji, 2015) 『목련정전』 (문학과지성사, 2015)
by Chunglim Jun
Such Small Moments
“When will you rest?” I’m asked this quite often these days. Well, when will I rest? I’ve been teaching more college courses since last year, and on off-lecture days, I work at a bookshop. I spend three weekdays on campus, two at the shop. On weekends, I write and catch up on chores. The potted plant I’d recently received as a gift withered from neglect. It was a birthday gift . . . During busy spells, I don’t take a single day off. Sudden free time makes me anxious as I wonder if I’ve forgotten to do anything. I believe I’m in control of my time and tasks, but lately, they’ve been nipping at my heels. I enjoy the reading and writing—even the other related tasks can’t be separated from the life I wish to live. But now I know. I’m beat. It took me long enough to see it. Reading is no longer a pastime but an extension of work. Sometimes, I suspect that I’m deceiving myself, conforming to assigned roles instead of working with self-agency. After lecturing at the college located a four-hour round trip away, I muse on the subway ride home. I want to distance myself from this life. I want to go someplace far away. Maybe that’s why. Traveling is my only pause. The only bright spot in my busy routine comes with choosing a city and making plans to visit. Every day, I scour the internet for flights and accommodations. No matter if the trip falls through. Imagining is enough to pull me slightly beyond my quotidian force field. I recently traveled to Tokyo. I looked forward to one thing—staying open to chance. To empty myself of thoughts triggered by controlled situations, embracing chance sensations instead. The beauty of travel lies in those moments that let you shed routine-hardened senses. But they now seem harder to cast off. For one, there’s my smartphone . . . It keeps information at my fingertips, but at times, I long to leave it in a drawer as I voyage away. Wanting to at least leave my laptop behind, I stayed up late working the night before the trip. I finalized my students’ grades and pre-ordered books for the bookshop. I double-checked everything to preempt work-related texts and calls. Later, I walked through customs, imagining the impossible: Could I have traveled without my phone? Tokyo was the fifth Japanese city I visited. I had put it off, making the belated journey after seeing Fukuoka, Nagoya, Okinawa, and Kyoto. (I always used the Korean pronunciation “Donggyeong” for “Tōkyō,” getting teased for an old-fashioned habit supposedly betraying my gukmin-hakgyo-era upbringing.)[1] Outside the window the sun was setting as I took the Narita Express to Shinagawa Station. I overheard several non-Japanese languages—Chinese, English, and French. The eager voices chattered while I dozed off. The late-night work had taken its toll, it seemed. I arrived at my lodgings barely awake. I was struck by the sheer number of people in Tokyo. The Shibuya Crossing and Akihabara Electric Town were inundated with pedestrians, and all the restaurants I stumbled on had long lines as if according to script. Like a scene from The Truman Show. Awed by the crowds, I stared and wondered where they came from. Instead of relaxing, I grew tenser than usual, even wishing to return straight home. I mulled over my previous trips. Does the fleeting getaway from familiar routines and settings lead to any rest? Am I not being my own taskmaster, utterly exhausted as I trudge back to the hotel and collapse into sleep? Outside the window, the Tokyo Tower gleamed in the distance with several metro lines passing by in the background. Thoughts crossed my mind, one after another. Being too intent on rest, I was hardly enjoying my trip. Rest by compulsion. The pressure of time and tasks had been replaced by my coercive self pushing me across the sea. Until age nineteen, I grew up in the countryside. The hillside village had only three buses a day going into town. Looking back, the place had enjoyed clear boundaries of rest. Seasons and weather separated work from repose—as an entirely “natural” consequence. For instance, farmers would leave the fields and head home at sunset, and once the cold winter set in, they would allow their bodies enough rest for the coming year. Nature affected the on-off switch of daily activities, and those rhythms set the pace for managing life. On days without work, Father looked after plants and animals. His time was divided almost equally between work and care. Even on off days, he rose at dawn. He built a chicken coop in a corner of the warehouse, and when two farm dogs had puppies at the same time, he cared for nearly twenty pups. Father was delighted when I was given a jujube sapling for helping at a friend’s orchard. The friend’s father said it would take time for the sapling to bear fruit in our yard. Our family took turns looking after the sapling. Whoever had time watered it and kept the base free of weeds. As the seasons passed, we gathered around on holidays and spoke about the tree. Within three years, it bore fruit. In the summer, villagers sat by the stream to escape the heat, and in winter, they swept the snow at dawn, exchanging greetings. Together, we worked and rested. The city, where I could work anytime, pressured me to work all the time. The sleepless, insomniac city disrupted my sleep. Outside central Tokyo lies a neighborhood called Kichijoji. I chose that quieter place for the last day of my trip and woke up early to catch the train. I watched the tall buildings through the window gradually give way to single-story houses. Having boarded an express train bypassing Kichijoji, I got off at the next stop, Mitaka Station. I decided to walk the extra distance. The paths were quiet, and cyclists passed by now and then. I saw locals walking their dogs and reading newspapers in the park. Aside from my travel companion, no other tourists were in sight. My edginess eased. We spotted a used bookshop on the way and stepped inside. The front counter was empty, and even as we browsed, no one arrived. My friend chose several story books in the children’s section while I reached for pocket-sized paperbacks. We had made our selections by the time the apparent owner emerged, adjusting his glasses. He took his time tallying the prices on a calculator. Once the books were in our backpacks, we left the shop. As we neared the small goods and vintage shops of Nakamichi Shopping Street, I saw several places leisurely opening for the day. No rush, no hurry. At a playground with a stately elm, a child squealed and skipped around. My friend and I bought donuts and ate them on a bench. The child left while we sat in the sunlight. A chilly breeze rustled the tree. Perhaps it was for these moments that I traveled. Small moments, an hour or even ten minutes at most. And for the places where those times gathered. Tokyo had plenty of old cafés that seemed to stand still in time. I walked in the door, finding the streetside bustle fading like a distant memory. Shown to a table, I was served a hot towel and a glass of water. My eyes ran over the posters and faded patches of wallpaper as other customers came and went. Some of them were reading, some were waving at others and joining them, some gestured at each other mid-chatter, and some peered gravely at their phones. I ordered the “morning set,” a Japanese café staple, and sipped on a cup of their “blend coffee.” Ambient jazz melodies and hazy indoor air. Now that I’ve left Tokyo, I remember the place as a cozy nook overlaid with small scenes. “Did you rest well?” My travel companion and I asked each other on our return flight. In my daily life, I make different attempts to rest well or empty myself. At the end of those mostly failed attempts, I look to the next try with quasi-resigned hope. One does their best at work, but can they do their best to rest? In his book The End of Work, the American economist Jeremy Rifkin predicts that more free time and less working time will establish new lifestyle modes in the place of traditional culture.[2] This points to the possibility of surplus time encompassing time for leisure or self-enrichment—in short, the possibility of rest. When asked, “What do you do to rest?” most people say, “Nothing,” but that’s easier said than done. To do so, one must do nothing at all. I recall doing the following to rest: 1. Gaming. I once spent a fortnight shut in at home, gaming. I buried myself in the game without going out to see anyone or stopping to work. With my PlayStation plugged into the TV, I barely budged from the armchair. My daily routine went sideways, but my mind was somehow refreshed. 2. Watching TV dramas. When a minor surgery kept me homebound for a month, I binge-watched drama series. My friends had recommended several shows. I’ve been hooked ever since, and now I have several OTT subscriptions. 3. Sleeping. I used to get my sleep in one stretch. But with intervals of sleeping and eating, sleeping again and eating . . . the slight regret over time spent asleep is now compensated by the sense of being recharged.As one would expect, resting bears on the question of how to spend non-working time. Free time will only increase in the long run. Not working as much as others used to make me an anomaly, but now I seem to go against the norm by not taking proper rest. I recently took up table tennis. In part for the exercise, but I also longed for physical learning. While writing my manuscript, I made a few resolutions. First, to separate work from rest. To work with greater focus and switch off to relax. Next, to ward off emptiness and ennui by seeking out new interests. To find occasions, not necessarily big or grand, that move my soul. Finally, to embrace the surplus nature of unproductive time. Doing nothing may be a challenge, but I can still free myself of guilt. These are my only wishes as I embark on 2024. Translated by Sunnie Chae [1] Translator’s note: the term gukmin hakgyo [elementary school], a remnant of the colonial era, was changed to chodeung hakgyo by the Education Act Amendment Act No. 5069 in December 1995. [2] Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (New York: A Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam Book, 1995), 221.
by Min Byeonghun
Letting Go and Living with Mold
Living through COVID-19, a global pandemic, we all came to have a unique story of our own, one that could be shared with others. In 2020, the year marking the sweeping spread of the pandemic that upended the conventional human way of life, my own daily life didn’t change much. I read and write for a living, which I can do well enough without leaving the house or meeting people face to face. I continued to work from home as before, corresponding with my editors through email. The swimming pool I used to frequent daily closed down, though, so I spent more time walking instead, going out to the neighborhood park when it wasn’t crowded. The class I taught was switched to online at the start of the spring semester, but since the class was small, I invited the students to my place from time to time to have class and lunch together. The most notable change in my life during that time was that I won access to a community garden patch overseen by the district office, and became a city farmer for the first time in my life. Around the end of March I plowed the soil; in April I planted seedlings of lettuce, tomato, eggplant, crown daisy, cilantro, and peppermint; I also sowed seeds of rucola, canola, carrot, dill, and radish, and waited for them to sprout. With the coming of May, the crops grew taller by the day, drinking in the sunlight and the warm air. In June, flowers blossomed, dazzling my eyes. I dug out the flowers by the roots and shared them with some fellow gardeners, then brought the rest home and put them in water. I placed a row of transparent bottles along the white wall and filled them with dill, tall with an abundance of yellow blossoms. I learned through the garden patch that flowers of edible plants are just as beautiful as decorative flowers. I had brought nature—the work of my own hands—not only into the kitchen but into the entire house as well, which quite pleased me. So passed spring, and summer arrived. The rainy season that year was uncommonly long. In the central region of the Korean Peninsula, where Seoul is located, it lasted for fifty-four days, from 24 June to 16 August—the longest on record since 1973. Day after day, I would alternately close the windows when it rained, and open them when it cleared to let fresh air in.Mid-August, toward the end of the rainy season, I noticed a suspicious stain on the wall next to the study window. I went up for a closer look and saw three round spots of mold. Appalled, I immediately searched for how to remove mold, then wiped them away using a rag and diluted bleach solution. I was to leave on a three-day trip the next day, so it would be disastrous for the mold to spread with all the windows of the house closed and no one home. When I came home I found that the spots of mold, to my horror, had returned in exactly the same color and size as before. I was utterly dismayed, but I mustered my strength and once again got rid of them. Then I went into the kitchen to cook and have my first meal back home. Feeling refreshed after getting rid of the mold, I wanted to set a nice table; I opened a cabinet drawer and took out a wooden spoon, which I don’t use very often. But something felt off; I took a good look at the spoon and found green mold along the edge of the oval head. A disheartening thought froze my mind: was it possible that everything in the house made of organic matter was covered in mold? I never used an electric fan or air conditioner, as the cold, artificial air didn’t agree with me; during the unprecedentedly long rainy season, the stagnant humidity in the house might have given rise to mold in unchecked corners. I promptly threw open the kitchen cabinet doors and inspected the inside of each cabinet. My gut feeling had been right—a thin layer of mold had formed not only on the wooden spoons, but also in the grooves of all the wooden articles such as a bamboo wicker tray and a plate carved from a log. Even so, up to that point, I was ready to tackle the mold. At once, I pulled out all the household articles in the cabinets and sterilized the cabinets with alcohol. I washed the dishes, let them sit in diluted bleach solution for a time, then rinsed them again with water. Tiresome as it was, three days should be plenty to complete the task, I thought. I felt lucky that only the wooden items had been affected, and was relieved that the books remained untainted. Talking to a friend on the phone, I joked around and laughed, saying the books must be unscathed because I didn’t read much. After cleaning the kitchen, I started on the study. As I dusted off the bookshelves, my eyes fell on the hardcover volumes in the original languages. To my astonishment, molds of different colors—white, green, yellow—lined the angular edges of the fabric covers. The molds were markedly different in color and shape from the ordinary kind that arise in the bathroom or kitchen when it’s not regularly cleaned, and the sight of them sickened me. I had never seen a life form of their kind before. Rubbing my arms to ease the goose bumps, I tried to cool my head, and making an effort not to shut my eyes, I went through each and every book on the shelves. Mold had taken over a good number of them, not only the fabric-covered ones but the paperbacks as well. A volume of Walter Benjamin’s work in English revealed, when I lifted its dust cover, white mold inside the hard covers and on the spine. Without hesitation, I shoved it into a paper bag. Avital Ronell’s Stupidity in its original English was ruined as well. Quarantining Benjamin and Ronell in the paper bag and throwing them out the door, I wept for the first time because of the mold. Not because the beautiful thoughts and words had been corroded by something so trivial as mold; my feelings of loss and grief were for the words underlined in inks of various colors and the notes in the margins. The traces of those days in which I had so struggled to make sense of the abstruse texts had been stolen by the mold. What had been taken from and become lost to me were not certain volumes by certain scholars, but those days of stupidity. Calming myself, I walked past the shelves of books in English and looked through the books in German and French. My heart raced, as I didn’t know how badly the paperback books had been damaged; then I realized that funnily enough, the damage differed in degree depending on the publisher. The pages of the dark blue Suhrkamp editions of philosophical works being fungi-resistant, were clean though faded yellow. Thus the entire collection of Benjamin’s works in German, as well as Kant’s Critique of Judgment and Hegel’s Aesthetics, survived. So did the peach-colored Gallimard paperbacks and Folio editions. As for the French PUF editions, however, pretty green mold had developed along the spines; so the works by Foucault, Laplanche, and Kant were expelled. Scrutinizing the shelves, I grew increasingly cold and desensitized, feeling no regret at tying the books up in bundles and dumping them. Distancing myself from mold was the most critical issue at hand, and I no longer had any qualms about mechanically eliminating, expelling, and isolating what had been tainted with mold. Now came the time to examine the shelf of Korean books. I noted that a shimmering green-gray mold had accumulated on all of the Workroom Press “Proposals” series. I’d never seen mold of such beautiful color before. It resembled rust on ancient bronze artifacts. In admiration, I yearned to contemplate it in silence. These books, I never wanted to dispose of. With each publication of the series, the editor had arranged a gathering with the translator, which I’d attended every time and took notes, in the book, of the translator’s words. Discarding the books was like discarding the vividness of those moments and the words, which I wouldn’t be able to hear anywhere ever again. I searched online to see how to restore books contaminated by mold and learned that librarians in Japan use gauze fabric dampened with 75 percent ethanol solution to wipe books with. I tried the same method to bring the “Proposals” series back to life. But the mold on the covers, made of imported paper, and on the inside of the spines was so persistent that I couldn’t let the books stay in the room with the other articles. In the end, I gave up on restoring them, and shed a flood of tears as I relinquished them. Hearing the news, the editor shared my pain. I sent her the dozens of peach-colored Gallimard editions of Maurice Blanchot as a sign of our days of friendship. So I sent away without hesitation even the ones that had survived—hoping that they’d live long in a safer environment. In the end, though, I couldn’t be wholly indifferent or cold-hearted. As I tied up the severely damaged books, I felt as if my heart were slashed with a knife.It kept raining, even when the rainy season had supposedly ended. September came and the fall semester began, but I wasn’t done cleaning mold. Typhoons raged one after another. Rain fell without ceasing, and the disinfection took forever, with the mold ever multiplying. It was no longer a matter of picking out contaminated books to discard. I had to give the shelves some breathing space. I began to throw away unmarred books at random as well. Otherwise, the infested books would spread mold onto the books that were yet untainted. I scrapped all of Lacan’s Seminar series. A whole shelf was emptied, along with a period of my life. I got rid of all the German books on philosophy, too; I wouldn’t read them anyway. Hegel’s Aesthetics, I sent to an artist friend of mine. I asked my acquaintances if they wanted any of my Penguin paperbacks, and sent the books out in the mail. I threw out the signed copies of books that authors had sent me. I had no choice. The authors knew what I was going through and said they would give me another copy when things returned to normal. I threw away so many things. I had to let them go, without condition. I had to create empty, quarantined space in order to salvage what still had life in them. I had to, to let myself live.Neighbors I hadn’t interacted with before learned about my situation, as I was constantly going in and out of the house to chuck loads of stuff, clutching an umbrella to protect myself from the typhoon. One of them, who lived a floor below, invited me over when I was all scruffy and offered me a meal. When I was absorbed in sterilizing the books, she would knock on my door and hand me something to eat. She sympathized with me, saying it must be heartbreaking for someone who studied books to have to throw them away. Where had the mold come from? From the natural produce of the organic garden patch which I had so greedily brought home? Probably not; no trace of mold was detected at the front door, where I would leave the bag, straw hat, and rubber boots I used in gardening. On the other hand, the study, which had suffered the most serious damage, faced a mountain through the window. The mountain was thick with trees, but just outside the window there was no tree, only weeds in an empty lot. According to the neighbor who lived downstairs, there had been several acacia trees there up until a year ago, but the green space management at the district office had them felled. After the trees had been cut down, rainwater seeped through an embankment into her house during the rainy season one year. My guess is that with the trees gone from the forest, whose thriving trunks and weeds had made for a healthy, self-regulating ecosystem in which growth, development, and decomposition occurred in a cycle, the fungi in the humid air carried by the wind infiltrated my window; the mold spores that would have been kept at bay by the trees settled in my room and extended their power with the long rain. Three years have passed since, but the mold hasn’t been completely eliminated. The mold has done no wrong. All it did was fly when the wind blew and grow when it was humid, according to the order of nature inherent in itself. No matter how much I wiped at it with ethanol, the spores, invisible to the naked eye, stayed hidden in unseen corners, ready to run rampant when the air began to stagnate and grow moist. When I spot such corners, I once again feel the need to empty my space and allow the air to flow. When the air begins to circulate again, of course, so do the spores. In 2020, I experienced something irreversible that manifested itself in a powerful way through human factors—such as a climate catastrophe that included a long rainy season, frequent typhoons, and forest logging—that tangled with nature in the form of mold on the books in my room. Since that summer, as is the case with all inflection points in life, my idea and substance of life have never been the same. Translated by Yewon Jung
by Kyung Hee Youn
Breathe, Live, Rest
When I saw the painting Breathing Space, I remembered feeling like I was taking a deep breath. The piece was part of a solo exhibition, Wandering Mind. The painting depicted a person leaning against a small window of a large building, gazing at the sky—the artist’s way of saying that sometimes a small window can become an unexpectedly vast breathing space. The sky stretched beautifully above the building, its hue a poetic blue. I, too, have moments where I do nothing but space out. On such days, I make a conscious effort not to plan anything or assign tasks to myself. I silence my alarms and sleep in; when I wake up, I give the house a thorough cleaning. I take in the tidy surroundings and gaze out the window—sometimes sunrays pour in, while at other times snow falls in large flakes. During those times, I don’t turn on the TV or play music. I savor the freedom to spend time in my own space. I observe the people passing beneath my window, simply letting myself feel the quiet flow of time. The days I purposely spend in idleness fill my heart with a strength that eludes me on my most productive days. Until a few years ago, I didn’t know how to properly rest. I constantly thought about what needed to be done the next day, or the manuscript I’d be working on at the time. One day, I woke up, and my neck felt stiff—I couldn’t turn to the side. At first, I brushed it off as a result of a bad sleeping position, but as days passed, the symptoms worsened. Stretching only seemed to amplify the pain, expanding from my neck down to my shoulders, and I couldn’t get a good night’s sleep. I went to see an oriental medicine doctor who pressed and prodded my neck, shoulders, and back. His diagnosis was as follows: “You frequently experience tension-related pain in your neck and shoulders, don’t you? It’s because when you do something, you pour yourself into it, which results in a tension build-up.” I almost fell to my knees at how accurate his observations were. It was like he had read my mind. He emphasized the importance of concentrating during the day and fully relaxing at night. He told me that I unfortunately wasn’t able to unload the burden from my shoulders, which caused me pain. “It’ll get better over time. But you shouldn’t try too hard. When you’re resting, you need to let the burden go. Otherwise, your back will keep hurting.” I hadn’t even realized how hard I was pushing myself, and that my body was already overloaded. I was used to my frequent back and shoulder pain, and when I started hearing a popping sound in my jaw whenever I opened my mouth, I just thought it was a symptom commonly experienced by people in modern society and neglected it. From then on, I began carving out dedicated time away from work and writing. For a while I threw myself into swimming; these days I opt for an occasional run. I head out at night and just run for about twenty minutes, without a set route. Running at night has its charm—you can hide your face in its shadows. What’s surprising is that I’m not the only one; many others walk or run in the darkness. Running is good for the heart, lungs, and legs, but it’s especially beneficial for your mental well-being. Focusing on each step gives me a temporary escape from my worries. Afterward, I feel light and refreshed in both body and mind. I’ve also started learning the violin as a hobby, and I’m being consistent about it. I take lessons once a week and practice the pieces I’ve learned whenever I find the time. I don’t mind if I’m not good at it—it’s something I do for fun, and I enjoy it as such. When playing a piece, there are rests in the sheet music. These rests are periods of absolute silence, and when the next note comes along, it’s that much clearer. In the passages where the music needs to be delicate and soft, you have to play more quietly so that the emphasized notes stand out. Well-played music has good moments of rest. Rather than trying to excel at everything, I’m practicing letting go of a few things. I was lying in bed, listening to a podcast, when one of the speaker said something I empathized with a lot: “In South Korea, from the moment you open your eyes until you close them, everything is all about competition: catching a bus, taking the subway, making a restaurant reservation.” Though this may not apply to all countries or cities, I believe it holds true for many places that have developed as fast as Seoul. Long commuting hours, repetitive labor, constant crowds wherever you go, a life of never-ending competition. Even when you’re resting, you crave more rest, and just taking a breath feels draining. At morning rush hour, the commuters’ faces on the subway carry a particular weariness. Sometimes they argue, hoping to get a seat. They’re all on edge due to how exhausted they are. I, too, have spent a few years among them. I’ve worked as an editor for a decade now and made my debut as a poet seven years ago. Last year, I edited the highest number of books in my entire life. In the summer, I also published my second poetry collection. It wasn’t a new way of life for me—I was used to scrutinizing other people’s manuscripts and coming home to look at my own, but for the first time I was sick and tired of it. It became hard to make simple decisions; I didn’t have the will to do anything; I woke up in the morning crying for no reason. I wondered if that was what burnout felt like. For a while, I did little else besides pour my heart into the violin. I hardly wrote or read, but I found myself drawn to reading several books related to music. Music revealed new territories for me. Reading Show Me Your Hands, I slowly delved into the inner world of a pianist, and with Lev’s Violin: An Italian Adventure, I envisioned countless violins, each made of different wood, each with their own unique timbre. Reading Schubert, I discovered all the failures the world-renowned composer had faced. Knowing that others have failed brings a smile to my face: it means that they were serious about their dreams and struggled to make them come true. I feel that, rather than success, moments of failure are needed; instead of constantly pushing forward, we need periods of rest. For me, rest is a time to regain a pure perspective on the world. After a deep rest, I find that the words trapped in me start bubbling to the surface. I become eager to reveal what I’ve seen, what I’ve thought, and what I’ve experienced in my subconscious. Through the COVID-19 pandemic, I came to realize the increased importance of a good rest. Koreans habitually go to work even during a typhoon or push through tasks when feeling unwell. But we are not machines—we’re humans, and as such, it is impossible to keep producing and creating without taking breaks. We know this, and yet we live as if it were possible. Rest is a fearful concept for me, even though ironically, I always long for it. I always think, “What if quitting my job and stopping to write means I won’t be able to start again?” I know that pausing doesn’t cause the world to collapse, but I’ve always had this irrational fear. Now my neck and shoulders hurt, my back is damaged, and on some days, my mind is so exhausted that I fall apart completely. I have asked my poet friends what they do when they take a break. One of them mentioned isolating at home and immersing themselves in a movie or book they’ve been longing to watch or read. Another said they go camping or take a short trip somewhere. All their ideas were nice. How wonderful would it be to light a fire in the woods, grill and eat a delicious meal; or bury yourself in a beloved book—splendid! I, too, used to relax while doing the things I enjoyed. Do what I want, read what I like, eat something tasty, go to my favorite places. However, when true burnout hit, none of these activities seemed possible. I needed a time devoid of plans, a moment to pause everything and do nothing. At the end of the year, I took my remaining vacation days and enjoyed an extended break until the new year rolled in. I stood in front of the window—as I stared at the large snowflakes, it almost seemed like they weren’t falling down, but instead, rising towards the sky. Like music played in reverse. I thought it resembled the rhythm of life. My puppy was asleep on my lap; gazing at that serene view brought peace to my heart. I’ve always enjoyed going to the library, the swimming pool, the museum, or just wandering around aimlessly, yet I liked this freedom of being alone, doing nothing, meeting no one, with no music or media. Now, I’ve finally come to understand the beauty of this solitude, one that I do not need to rush to fill. I don’t need to go to cool places—a stroll around my neighborhood brings me a new joy. Instead of constantly reading books, I’m happy to take a break from all kinds of texts for a while. While being surrounded by friends is great, savoring the solitude of being alone is also perfectly fine. Once I embraced this mindset and spent my time resting at home, doing nothing, I began looking at my routine and the familiar places I frequented under a new light. I’m not talking about resting in preparation to move forward, to take a leap; rather, it’s about indulging in unadulterated rest for the sake of resting itself, a complete acceptance of the nothingness that is the self. It is the freedom of existence, of reverting to an amoebic state, a form with boundless potential. This kind of rest brings me back to my innate self. Back to my childhood; to my early twenties when I was passionate about so many of the things in the world; to the days when love was the sole occupant of my heart; when I looked at the world with more simplicity; when writing brought me pure joy. Writing is sometimes like a motionless swamp that offers no answer or reaction. Embrace that lack of an answer, let the emptiness sit there. Do not fear loneliness—step willingly into it and spend time with it. When I ceased fearing loneliness and heeded the doctor’s advice to lay down the burdens from my shoulders, I finally could slip into a deep, dreamless sleep. Good rest isn’t merely a gesture in preparation for optimal movement, much like emptying your mind isn’t just a preparatory process for filling it up again. In Korean, 잘 쉰다 means both “to rest” and “to inhale and exhale.” So, 쉬다 (“to rest well”) means “to take deep breaths, exhale, and empty the body.” This implies that resting your body leads to resting your mind, which then leads back to resting your body in a seamless cycle. I wonder if leaving the empty spaces created by rest untouched isn’t just another way of saying “to be alive.” To rest essentially means to live—not to excel at something or to have a busy life, but rather to feel the happiness and fullness of simply being alive; to focus on the present state of both the body and mind. In September, for my birthday, I went on a trip. I wrapped up all the work at the company, finished the manuscript that had held me captive until dawn every day, and escaped to Yeosu; the sea I saw there was the most wonderful I’d ever seen in my life. It took me four hours by train and then a little taxi ride to get to my accommodation, and once I got there and opened the curtains of my hotel room, the sea glittered beautifully in front of my eyes. I looked down to see the locals walking along the colorful street that followed the stone wall. At last, outside of Seoul, I could enjoy the different scenery and lifestyle of another city. It felt like a breath of fresh air after being stuck in the daily grind of commuting between home and work. With no particular plans, I strolled around with a little jump in my steps; I ate a patbingsu, looked at the cats, and relished the joy that complete relaxation brings. During these empty times, I feel new stories and new desires emerging. The beauty of emptiness. Poetry knows this very well—its charm lies in the space between the lines, after all. Rather than the act of adding, I find the gaps left by subtraction more fascinating. Poetry is a game, a confession of your inner self, a reflection of all things of the world. It’s ironic, but after I spend periods without writing anything, my poetry becomes better, and I feel that the act of writing becomes more precious, and more fun. During my experience with burnout, I learned that any weary heart finds restoration through proper rest. You don’t even have to work hard for it. Whether it is love for someone, an open heart towards the world, generosity towards others, a desire to write again, or a yearning to stand tall—all these feelings will eventually resurface. All you need to do to rekindle them is to bask in these moments of pure rest. I didn’t want to escape from work or writing; rather, I always wanted to break free from the monotonous landscape that was “me.” I didn’t realize that this person I knew as myself, who looked the same every day, was undergoing a constant process of internal change. Someone once asked me, “Why do you write poetry? It seems lonely.” Back then, I couldn’t provide a proper answer, but now I think I can. Poetry allows one to peer into the solitude of one’s inner self, to appreciate life’s empty spaces. It’s the joy of filling the spaces between the lines by leaving some deliberately empty. Only after a good rest do you come to realize the multitude of answers that are out there. Translated by Giulia Macrì
by Ju Minhyeon
[Cover Feature] The Bookstore as a Book
The topic of bookstores always brings me back to a personal story that begins the year before I was born. It was 1980, and my mother’s youngest brother, freshly discharged from military duty, decided to leave his boring old hometown and strike out for Seoul. He had no plans, only some money in his pockets to get him through the next few months. He scoured the big city for areas with cheap rent, and finally settled on a sleepy neighborhood in the Seodaemun District. His new home was a tiny shop with a floor space of about 10 pyeong, to which was attached a tinier room. The shop, he filled with books. The Munye Bookstore. That was the name of my other school—the place where my young self spent countless afternoons, and where—if I may be so bold—I learned even more than at my classroom desk. The Munye Bookstore was a home where my young uncle ate and slept, where my young self would read until I nodded off into short naps. It was also a place of community, where young locals hung out in little groups and sang along to a strumming guitar, and a sort of pub where, late in the evening (a nationwide curfew was in place in South Korea until January of 1982), the bookstore doors would be shut and those young people would engage in debate and discussion over beer with peanuts and dried cuttlefish.
How did they end up gathering at Uncle’s bookstore? I’m afraid I don’t know. What I do know is that those young people were, to me, just as part of the bookstore as the volumes on the shelves. Not knowing what title to use for these friends? regulars? neighbors?—of my uncle’s, I would call them “uncles” as well (a few women were among these patrons, but I don’t recall calling them “aunties.” I wonder why?) and grow to recognize them. Employment, marriage, and other facts of life would call them away to other neighborhoods, but they were quickly replaced by new faces. The ones who left, too, would drop in when they were in the area, spot me reading on a stool in the corner, and exclaim, “Hey, it’s been a while! You’ve gotten taller, eh?” Some of those people still get together for meals—although they almost never drink—and to travel together. Even now, more than ten years since Uncle retired.
Uncle, why a bookstore, of all things?
The question came to my mind after I’d finished my own military service and prepared to return to school, wondering what I should do with my life. At the time I had vague dreams of authorhood, so perhaps part of me hoped to hear that he’d wanted to be an author too. But Uncle’s answer blew away my expectations.
Because I was broke. The thing about a bookstore, it doesn’t cost much money to start one. All you need are shelves, and the wholesalers were happy to supply you and get paid once the books sold. And if they didn’t sell, I’d just return them. It was the best kind of business for a poor kid like me.
It was coincidence borne of chance, then. But wasn’t that just another word for inevitability? Necessity had driven Uncle to that business, but in the blink of an eye, the bookstore ended up being a perfect fit for him. Uncle’s life revolved around reading books, selling books, and talking about books with patrons. So I can imagine the helplessness he must have felt in early 1998, when the landlord—who’d lost his job in the Asian Financial Crisis at the end of the previous year—decided to run the bookstore himself and refused to extend Uncle’s lease, kicking him out without even paying back the deposit. But I was only a high school student back then, too young and feisty to understand. I didn’t realize back then that Uncle’s youth, my adolescence, and maybe a period in Korean history, too, had ended forever.
Uncle opened up a new business near a local university. The new shop was packed with books on every wall save the door, but did not have a little side room where people discussed their books, or display shelves where interesting reads were proudly exhibited for all. Instead, the center of the floor was taken up by two rows of low shelves. Uncle’s new business was not a bookstore, but a chaekbang (book rental store) where patrons could rent comic books and novels. Unlike the ever-bright Munye Bookstore, the Kkaebi Bookshop (the most popular book rental franchise at the time) was dark, and the books stained by all the hands that had flipped through their pages. Uncle’s chaekbang started off on a downward spiral, which went on and on until the other franchise stores closed and the head office, too, finally closed the curtains in 2010. Munye Bookstore, stolen from Uncle by the landlord, had long since shuttered its doors by then.
If the financial crisis had been the death knell for Uncle’s bookstore, online bookstores would be the nail in the coffin for all the other physical bookstores, big and small. And I was there to see it all. While in the military, I became a Platinum-rank customer with an online bookstore, the credit card payments for which led me to take a logging job for an online store’s book database straight out of the army. In the summer of 2006, only one term away from my undergraduate degree, I became a full-time employee at an online bookstore. I was the merchandiser who oversaw books in the humanities, social sciences, sciences, and history sections.
Looking back, I must have learned everything I needed to know about books from Uncle’s shop. In On the Commerce of Thought by Jean-Luc Nancy, subtitled Of Books and Bookstores, Nancy explains, for the bookseller, the act of reading a book is both a lectio (reading) and an electio (choosing): “The bookseller. . . brings [books] and exposes them, giving them the vantage from which to play their role as subjects.”
Over the three years and six months I spent at that workplace, I tried to think of myself as a “book deliverer.” An individual who procures books, displays them, and creates the right environment for them to play leading roles of their own. But reality didn’t quite work that way. Unlike flesh-and-blood customers I could see at a physical bookstore, online readers were faceless statistics. And it was no easy task to deliver anything to faceless statistics. Worse, even the books were formless statistics! Although almost every book in existence was recorded in these online databases, they were utterly devoid of scent and difficult to estimate their thickness. They were completely flat. Although I could look up any book I could think of with the touch of a finger, I could neither turn them over in my hands nor look at the books around them, nor simply stroll through their presence. I was sick of work, I wanted to read only for the pleasure of it, I wanted to write for myself, I said, making up one excuse after another as I quit my job. But looking back, I think I know the real reason: the faceless readers and the formless books.
Long story short, after quitting my job, I became a writer—a book reviewer, to be precise—and continued to maintain my Platinum membership with all my book purchases. All the while, small bookstores around the country continued to shutter their doors. But I was so busy reading and writing that without any awareness of the issues at hand, I considered this phenomenon part of a natural progression, as unavoidable as the disappearance of record stores and video rental shops.
Then, in 2015, I saw the tides of change. I saw the rise of independent publications, and the continued growth of Unlimited Edition, a book fair specializing in independent books. So-called independent bookstores underwent a Renaissance (to exaggerate mildly), with more and more articles covering the “revival of neighborhood bookstores” and the “small bookstore boom.” But—strangely, thinking back—I wasn’t particularly interested. Not interested at all, in fact. Was I just that sick of bookstores? Was I just that steeped in the traditional publishing system? Or maybe I no longer felt the need to be a reader of the book deliverers. My shelves had long since been packed with more volumes than those that had filled the walls of the Munye Bookstore.
Then, in 2016, I received an email from Iro, the owner of first-generation independent bookstore Your Mind and organizer of Unlimited Edition. At the time, the rapid growth of local, or small, or independent bookstores had led to reader concerns that the quality of such establishments might decline. Iro’s proposal was that I join a bookstore exploration project that would examine the differences between these bookstores, learn about the bookstore owners’ outlooks, and the challenges they faced in their work. I accepted and spent one month with novelist Kim Junghyuk meeting the owners of eight wildly different independent bookstores for open interviews. (The transcripts have been published in a book titled Bookstore Exploration and include lectures from two Japanese bookstore owners as well as the transcript of a group conversation between four Korean bookstore owners.)
To confess, even as I started the first interview, I was skeptical. The napkin math just didn’t add up: these businesses didn’t look like they could afford the rent, let alone make a profit. I saw my uncle lose his bookstore. I saw the thieving landlord bungle the business in just a few years. I saw my uncle’s book rental store wither away with the times. To me, independent bookstore owners were naïve romantics, no different from Don Quixote.
Let me begin with the conclusion: I was being conceited and judgmental. These bookstore owners, naturally, were all aware of the potential problems. But they worked away at what they could, where they could. They led the charge of bookstores specializing in independently-published books, LGBT works, theme-rotating publications, artbooks, and travelogues, charging ahead alongside local bookstores big and small, and making all sorts of impacts on their communities. Just like Uncle’s Munye Bookstore all those years ago. Although the variety and quality of perspectives have since skyrocketed, the essence of these spaces remains unchanged: a sanctuary for people with non-mainstream interests.
As an author whose works appeal largely to people with non-mainstream interests—that is to say, as an author with a fandom of minuscule proportions—I empathize wholeheartedly. My bookstore events are attended by anywhere from four or five to no more than thirty to forty people, but those events are comforting. At those events, I see the faces of my readers, breathe the same air as my readers, and share certain emotions with my readers. But in a big meet-and-greet at a cinema, for example, I sometimes break into cold sweat, and not just because of the sheer number of people. And not just because of the small differences between book readers and movie audiences. I attribute it to the setting. A cinema is not a place for communication. When I’m at the front, I see the audiences watch me as though watching a film (one in which they recognize neither the actors nor the director), with arms crossed. A bookstore, on the other hand, is a place of exchange. In a bookstore, the readers and I—because I prefer discussions to lectures wherever possible—speak and respond as though having a conversation.
One experience that opened my eyes to the power of bookstores took place last spring at Goyo Bookshop, an independent establishment in Haebangchon specializing in literature. I led a seven-session workshop titled “A Writing Style Workshop for Those Lost Amidst Sentences.” A serial event like this was a first for the venue, which generally hosted one-off book discussions. Because space was limited, we capped the number of participants, which meant that registrations closed almost instantly.
To confess, I was once again skeptical. I’d only elected to lead a workshop rather than a lecture series because I thought it would be easier for me, but then I realized that lectures might have been easier after all: once I’d prepared a lecture, most of the sessions would have been under my full control. In a workshop, I would never know just how much to prepare or what direction the participants might decide to go. What if no one spoke up? Or what if we went off on tangents? For me, reading had always been a solitary activity, which was the very reason I loved it.
Once more, I was proven a fool. In a book talk, most participants are fans of the author. In this workshop, half the participants didn’t know me, and didn’t particularly care even after I introduced myself (they were diehard fans of Goyo Bookshop). In spite of that, reading and discussing the same book together was supremely fun, occasionally thrilling, and ultimately moving. I finally understood (and not just with my head) that books were not unchanging monoliths. Different readers, places, and contexts gave them entirely new meaning, and at times, different perspectives on the same book would entangle and generate a completely new chemical reaction. How should I put it? Jonas Mekas must have read my mind when he wrote Requiem for a Manual Typewriter, in which he said: “Ah, if you have never experienced it, been with it, no use telling it to you, you’ll never understand it.”
by Keum Jungyun
[Cover Feature] Where Literary Experience Meets the Personal
"If books take us to new worlds such as we have never seen before, it is bookstores that provide the passage to those chance meetings,” wrote the author Kim Choyeop. Tucked away in the city’s alleys, small bookstores provide an intimate space for those wishing to embrace the literary experience of reading and writing. At small bookstores, we stumble upon new discoveries and the experiences that go with them. And when we pursue those chance meetings, intentionally or spontaneously, we find ourselves part of a community of readers sharing a range of interests.Why Small Bookstores Are on the Rise
by Gu Sun-A
[Cover Feature] From Bookshop Enthusiast to Bookshop Owner
I want to start with a confession: I didn’t always like reading. Even into my twenties, I only ever read books for school. But in navigating life and society as an adult, I became overwhelmed with pointless doubt and anxiety—although, as a young adult, it didn’t seem so pointless. I developed insomnia. And then one day, I started going to bookstores to read books. I became a regular at my local bookshop. I even sought out bookstores to visit while on vacation. There was something therapeutic about opening a book and feeling the paper beneath my fingers. It brought me comfort. Sometimes I even imagined that books were letters sent to me from a faraway friend. Before I knew it, I had become a bookshop enthusiast.
It’s common for one hobby to lead to another. I attended every event held at my local bookstore, no matter what the occasion. I met authors and fellow bookworms. And through those experiences, I learned to read with greater depth and purpose. Then, a few years ago, I quit my job, escaped to Jeju Island, and started working at a bookshop in Hamdeok-ri. Through interacting every day with other people who loved books, the world of reading became even richer and more tangible. Just a few months back, I left my job and opened my own bookshop in a neighborhood filled with tangerine groves. I named the shop Goyo Letter. All this I did simply because I liked books, because I wanted to be closer to them. Connecting Literature and Music
by Han Min-jeong
[Essay] Let the Face Be (Re)Born
Since Yi Won’s debut in 1992, an intense set of descriptors have clung to her poetry—terms like “cyborg sensibility,” “electronic desert,” “monitor kinder.” These descriptions were an attempt to explain the shock that her unfamiliar imagination sent through the Korean poetic establishment with the scenes in her first collection, When They Ruled the Earth, of people strolling down the street with wires and plugs hanging from their bodies like umbilical cords (“In the Street”). Yet even as they define her poetry in such terms, critics have also taken interest in those aspects of her poetry which break free of this definition. Such critics worry that this imaginative intensity obscures the fact that Yi’s poetry is “a kind of ontological question on a more fundamental level.”1)
These concerns ring true because Yi has always been immersed in the question of being human. As the electronic desert is no longer the central subject of her poetry, we can see that what interests her is not digital civilization, but ways of life in the here and now that we inhabit. The issue that has interested her for so long, it seems, is how people live in a changing world and how we as humans respond to these changes.
Here the motif that draws attention is the face. Perhaps because of the intensity of her other imagery, the face is rarely discussed by critics, but it appears prominently and consistently across her work. Notably, we often find faces in the process of disappearing or having already disappeared. Take, for example, the faces in “Self-Portrait” from her second collection, A Thousand Moons Rising Over the River of Yahoo! Even now, more than twenty years later, they form a remarkable and frequently discussed self-portrait.
by Song Hyun-ji
[Essay] The Possibility of Hypernarrative
The Well-Made Narrative and Beyond
by Yang Yun-eui
[Cover Feature] 212 Versions of the Same Story: Publishing Korean Literature in Japan
Japan is nothing short of a publishing powerhouse. In fact, the country churns out over 70,000 new titles every year. Among these thousands of books, translated works account for six to seven percent, 80 percent of which are translations of English books. The remaining 20 percent are works translated from Korean, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, Thai and other languages which together amount to fewer than 1,000 titles. However, a recent surge in books translated from Korean is drawing the envy of publishers from other language markets. CUON, a Japanese publisher specializing in Korean literature, made its entry into Japan’s publishing market in 2011 with the release of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, and has gone on to publish over a hundred titles since. The books are divided into the “New Korean Literature Series,” which focuses on contemporary works published in the 2000s, the “Classics Series,” which features some of Korea’s most renowned literary works of all time; the “Short Short Series,” which introduces readers to short stories in a bilingual format that includes both the original Korean text along with the Japanese translation; and the “Korean Poetry Selection Series,” which boasts a number of poetry collections. CUON also began publishing the Japanese translation of Pak Kyongni’s widely acclaimed epic novel Land in 2016, hoping to have all twenty volumes fully translated and published by next year.
by Kim Seungbok
[Cover Feature] Let the Snake Wait Under His Weed: The (In)Decision of the Poetry Translator
Is This the End of Translation?
by Chung Eun-Gwi
[Cover Feature] Disintegration of Language: A Translator’s Self-defense in the Era of AI
The task of Hermes—that is what Olga Tokarczuk calls the work of a translator. Hermes is the Greek god who flies through the sky in winged sandals, wearing a winged helmet and carrying a staff entwined by two serpents. He is distinguished by his ability to cross over from heaven to the underworld, between the world of gods and the world of humans, delivering the gods’ will to men. He is one who crosses over, the one who delivers. A translator is like Hermes in that respect, save for the lack of winged sandals, helmet, and staff. What she has instead is a stooped back, stiff shoulders, and flattened buttocks. The body of a translator, who sits hunched in front of a manuscript for extended periods of time, is her tool. When I picture the translators I admire, the image that comes to my mind is people with long-enduring buttocks, not wings; people who carry words with caution, as though they were bricks, instead of moving them all at once. If asked the secret to their crossing over, these translators would doubtless say time. Time expended to translate a manuscript. Time expended—what an uncompetitive weapon in the era of AI.
They say that in the near future, translation will be the first profession to disappear. A translator’s time seems fragile in a world that demands maximum results with minimum cost and time. Many predict that translators working for subsistence will be replaced by AI, and that only a handful will participate as supervisors. The outlook need not be so gloomy, of course, but there will come a moment when translators must prove their competitiveness against AI.
When everyone was talking about ChatGPT, the first question that came to my mind was: why should humans translate books when AI is faster, cheaper, and more accurate? From time to time, I like to compare a sentence I translated with a Google translation. Google Translate is inadequate for translating long sentences and literary expressions, but on occasion, it generates surprisingly accurate results, filling me with an odd sense of shame as a professional translator. I am led to wonder if my translation isn’t swayed by my own personal interpretation, and if machine translation, which interprets a text in an objective, statistical manner, may not expand the possibility of literary translation.
I once imagined: I am at a publisher’s office, sitting side by side with an AI translator. We are translator candidates, competing for the same piece of work (in reality, of course, a translator is not selected in this way). To be chosen, I must make my case as to why I am better suited for the job than the AI translator. In what ways, as a human, am I more capable of successfully performing the task?
To answer the question, one must first study the principle of AI translation. Recent AI translation tools use Neural Machine Translation (NMT) technology to translate languages sentence by sentence. Neural network systems consist of an input layer and an output layer. When a sentence is input into the system, it outputs the coordinate values of words, syntax, word order, and so on by understanding the context through deep learning. The key is to acquire as much data as possible and input high-quality corpora.1 Simply put, AI translation involves statistics, probability, and calculation. The pros of AI translation include quick handling of large amounts of texts. This method involves a spontaneous and direct movement from one language to another, and is a way of expressing a one-to-one relationship that binds two languages into one. In other words, it is a return to simple language.Is simple language, then, appropriate for literary translation? In this regard, a small seed of hope begins to grow in the mind of the human translator who feels small and insignificant in the face of efficiency. Literature is a fluid and complex system of words that commands specific, emotional, and connotative language, is open to various interpretations depending on the reader, and can change with the times. The first thing a human translator must do to translate intricate language is to read. Reading a work of literature is vastly more than obtaining information. The context must be identified, and further, reconstituted, during which process the reader’s imagination and subjective senses are mobilized. Thus, reading is not a passive act in which one accepts written language as it is, but an active response, a creative act, even. A translator—the first reader—seeks to translate in a creative manner through this process of reading. She ponders the meaning between the lines, and studies the context as much as she studies the text itself. This reading is a task in which translators invest as much time as they do in translating.I studied drama in school, not literary translation. I began to translate because translating theatrical texts appealed to me. Before I start on a translation, I review all the TV shows, radio programs, and newspaper articles in which the author has appeared. I do this to find a voice: the author’s voice. I create a narrator necessary for the task of translation, constantly replaying in my mind the voice of the author, like that of an actor playing a certain role, and read the text in the way the author would breathe and see things. The narrator, of course, is not the author, having been created from my imagination and subjective senses. To be precise, the narrator is someone created within myself whose origin lies with the author.
Several years ago, I translated a couple of short texts by Marguerite Duras compiled in “Summer 80,” a collection of ten short pieces she had written for Libération between June and August of 1980. Working on the translation, I looked out every day at the Trouville Beach, where Duras had stayed while writing the book, and imagined her reading her own words to me. I was the stenographer setting down her words and breath on paper. There was a unique rhythm and intonation to her words, and I hoped that her voice had infused itself into the translated text, like a song from a foreign land unfamiliar to one’s ears. A certain hesitance around the border that keeps one from smoothly crossing over, a sense of displacement, suits the language of Duras, I thought. This, of course, is subjective interpretation and feeling—which is how I know what dangers lie in this method of interpretation. Creative translation entails the possibility of mistranslation. With each translated sentence comes continuing conflict. What seems a faithful translation to some could, to me, seem an awkward literal translation—a failure; to another, creativity could seem to be a betrayal of translation. Then there are limits imposed on my time, space, and experience. Translation is an attempt to simultaneously reach beyond a linguistic border and a translator’s limit, and something always goes missing or lost in the process. I once dreamed that the words and sentences I had missed transformed themselves into the author and tormented me. Each time I translate, I feel myself a failure and resolve to do better next time, but I’m flooded by feelings of stagnation—because I don’t know the right answer. What is a good translation? I have yet to find a sure answer to that question. I only know that the narrator I create should not be a reenactor for Duras, or an imitator of a certain language; and that the translation must be done in a language that is whole and intact. Will it be possible if I read and polish the manuscript again and again? As I lose myself in these thoughts, the clock ticks toward the deadline. I wonder if I have ever submitted a translation manuscript that is perfect. All of them are full of holes. Will the day ever come when I’ll be able to say, this time it’s perfect? What is a perfect translation, anyway?
Translator Jung Young-Mok said, “The task of the translator is not to achieve a perfect translation, but to perfect the language.”2 I think the statement is based on a beautiful and fascinating perspective that focuses not only on translation but also on the art of language as a whole. A language is not fixed to a certain text, so something entirely new can emerge as a text is translated from A language to B language; and a perspective that acknowledges this new creation, so that language may be perfected, sets the translator free. The holes and dents that occur as A and B come into conflict may become a sort of literary valley, which does not need to be laboriously filled. The valley itself can be magnificent. And if each translator creates a different valley—as each has her own language—how rich and colorful the view would be. If translation is a creative art, then its wholeness and beauty, I believe, have their source in this rich variety. Ten translators working on one text results in ten different texts, as the language we read is not simply source language, but a personal language with different histories and narratives. This language is handed down from parents to children and develops according to education, environment, encounters, circumstances, and personalities; then it undergoes progress, degeneration, and changes with time, becoming one’s unique trait. Thus, the coming together of an author’s language and a translator’s language is a conversation of sorts that can go in any number of unexpected directions, not one in which the answers can be predicted as in a conversation with AI. It is through this openness that we become aware that this world does not move in a single direction, nor is there only one aspect to it; there are so many different facets to this world, which can proceed in multiple directions.
Sometimes I try to think from an author’s stance instead of a translator’s. If my work is translated into another language, I would certainly welcome the possibility of varied interpretations. I would also be happy if the work transformed so much that it surprised me, as that would evidence the aliveness of my language. There is a life force that comes into existence only when a living entity changes and disintegrates. Yoko Tawada said, “Art must disintegrate in an artistic manner.”3 Translation, perhaps, is a process of disintegrating in an artistic way and gaining new vitality from the debris. If my words crumble away in a beautiful way, giving birth to something new, then that, too, would bring me joy.
Back in the shoes of a translator, I consider the act of crumbling in a beautiful way. If we believe that language affects thought, and that the words we write and translate ought to be imbued with the morals, ethics, and values of the day, the first thing that must be eliminated from the language of translation is discriminatory language, and particularly language that lacks gender awareness. The expression I’ve been wrestling with lately is “그녀,” the Korean word for “she.” In a Korean dictionary, “그녀” is a third-person pronoun referring to a woman previously talked about. The gender-equal dictionary compiled by the Seoul Foundation of Women & Family, however, points out that the word is used from the standpoint of a man to indicate a woman. Considering that a corresponding expression—“그남”—does not exist, we note that “그녀” does put an emphasis on a woman’s gender. Replacing every instance of “그녀” in a text with “±×,” however, may lead to confusion when a foreign language with separate male and female pronouns, such as “he/she” or “il/elle” are translated into Korean. Further, in translating sentences written by an author who lays emphasis on the narrator’s identity as a woman (for instance, in author Clarice Lispector’s works, it is important to reveal that the narrator is a woman), the term “그녀” cannot be excluded. And let’s say that there’s a story about someone whose gender is irrelevant, or someone with both masculine and feminine characteristics. In such a case, do we use “그” or “그녀”? Shouldn’t a fresh neuter pronoun be invented? None of these questions can arise in a simple language system in which two languages are placed in a one-to-one relationship. The questions become possible when language is not merely seen as a means of communication uttered through the vocal organs, but perceived as a complex and multilayered system fraught with social and cultural significance. Without such questions, the originality and creativity found in a translation language will seem nothing but mistranslation.
So, this is all there is to my self-defense as a human translator. The AI translator might already have finished and submitted the translation while I’ve been talking away about these hypotheses and theories. In the end, the winner of this competition will be determined by what the reader wants, which is the most reliable criterion. What does someone reading literature want? What does it mean to read literature?
Finally, I’ll borrow once again from Olga Tokarczuk in an effort to persuade readers of literature: “Literature is thus that particular moment when the most individual language meets the language of others.”4
With what kind of language do you want to greet this particular moment? My answer, as a reader, is clear: a language with a voice, a thinking language, a creative language, a contemplating language. And this answer is the hope, as well as the urging whip, that I hand myself—reader to translator.
by Shin Yoo Jin