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  [Cover Feature] The Emotional Science of Real Estate

  The Dating Crisis and a House for Typical Romantic Love One common theme in modern Korean literature might be called “The Song of Impoverished Love.” The inability to get married due to poverty and class differences is an inevitable conflict for young characters who try to become the agent of their lives through modern dating. Following in this tradition, the short stories “Nangmanjeok sarang-gwa sahoe” (Romantic love and society) by Jeong Yi Hyun (Literature and Society, Spring 2002) and “Seongtan teukseon” (Christmas special) by Kim Ae-ran (Literature and Society, Summer 2006) introduce the idea of sexual expression and juxtapose it with the housing problem in the literature of the 2000s.  The student narrator of Jeong’s story (Romantic love and society) views herself as a risktaker, seeking a man worth betting her twenty-two years on. She follows “the ten commandments,” her own personal “game manual” to capture a man’s heart, to control sexual relations and elicit erotic feeling. She demonstrates a paradoxical consciousness in that she recognizes sexual objectification by men as the condition and context for heterosexual relations, but uses this male power for her own ends. The narrator admits that the marriage and family system is supported by the labor of dating, in which the woman trades her gender and sexuality for the social class status provided by the man, but she believes that she must aim to get the best deal to fulfill her own desires. “I had to face this desolate world on my own . . . This meant I had to be a strong woman.” This is the attitude of a young woman who strives to have agency even if she has to allow her body and sexuality to be transacted as commodities in the neoliberal market which coexists with gender hierarchy. For her, a house is an important condition for a romantic transaction. “The first thing a guy wonders is what neighborhood I live in, and if I say, ‘Banpo!’1  I start off at an advantage.” She rejects the doctrine of chastity her parents have foisted on her, but respects them for setting her up with a small apartment in Gangnam. She accepts their teaching that female sexuality is an important resource when it comes to marriage, and that one’s home as a newlywed is tantamount to one’s social class. For young women, a fair dating exchange is a very important gendered habitus for class advancement, and (the hierarchy of) locations of residence is what turns this habitus into class. Stressed and anxious from having to succeed in both the public and private realms, young women imagine dating as a (profane) path to self-realization. But for the male narrator of Kim’s story (Christmas special), dating only confirms his misery and servility to no end. He has been unable to find a job after graduating, and he blames himself for not being able to enjoy a typical relationship with his girlfriend. “The man wanted to spend Christmas with his girlfriend . . . like others did.” But he cannot follow the middle-class heterosexual model, which involves a structured dating itinerary that he calculates to cost twenty thousand won for dinner, fourteen thousand won for movie tickets, twenty thousand won for a present, ten thousand won for tea, and forty thousand won for a love motel room. He feels diminished because he cannot cover these expenses without his girlfriend’s assistance. His biggest complaint is that he is unable to have sex because he doesn’t have a space of his own. “The man looked up at the windows of the yeogwans and love motels and sometimes felt jealous because out of all the rooms, none were his.” He stays at his sister’s place, and “there, even small disturbances could not but startle them [him and his girlfriend]. They had the feeling someone might come, or that they’d have to go . . . The man had felt this even when he first confessed his love.” Coursing through the story is the narrator’s desire to secure a space/capacity to love: “When he fell in love, he wished he had his own room for the first time.” The suffering of young men in an age of low economic growth is embodied in the deprivation of the standard manifestation of heterosexual love because of the lack of one’s own space. The premise of the story is the young man’s self-loathing, as his entitlement to be the head of the family is delayed, and we are to presume a gendered aesthetic that regards this as a symptom of the times. Descriptions of young men who try to purchase a house while dating but fail, and thus fall short of heterosexual gender roles, were a staple of the “gosiwon2 literature” of the 2000s. At this time, there was widespread social grieving for young people suffering economic hardship who could not reproduce the family through home ownership to continue the standard life cycle.  Redevelopment as a Form of Love and Violence On the other hand, people do not purchase houses as a means of family reproduction in the fiction of the 2010s. Rather, a house is a minimum means for maintaining your self-esteem, as you prove you are an economic agent keeping up with the times. Kim Hye-jin, in particular, has written a series of pieces about the emotional science of redevelopment, the Korean way of converting space into capital. In her novel Fire and My Autobiography (Hundae Munhak, 2020),3  part of Namil-dong is being redesignated as Jungang-dong for administrative convenience, and the novel closely examines how this redesignation spurs a redevelopment craze. Namil-dong becomes an object of disgust, and the mindsets of people who define themselves by the neighborhoods in which they live are passed along to the younger generation. The father keeps boasting how leaving Namil-dong at the first opportunity to buy a house in Jungang-dong was the best decision of his life. Finding himself in the right place at the right time to put in a bid for the right price at an auction, he took advantage of this opportunity. He stresses that he was the right fit for Jungang-dong from the beginning as he was an effective economic agent, unlike the pathetic and irresponsible people of Namil-dong. But his “ability” to seize an opportunity was really nothing more than luck. He’d recklessly borrowed money from the bank and as he stood terrified at the auction, not knowing what to do, one of his neighbors unexpectedly arrived and assisted him in making a successful bid. However, the father revises his memories in keeping with the hierarchy of the redevelopment area, repeating this edited memory to his daughter in an attempt to teach her. The father believes that he ended up on “the right side of the tracks” through his own efforts when in fact it was the random chance of the administrative division combined with sheer luck. Still, he declares that the economic outcomes of Namil-dong and Jungang-dong could be intuitively known.  The mother is wracked with anxiety lest they unwittingly become assimilated into the Namil-dong community. She cannot devote herself to raising her daughter because the father does not earn enough to support them. She scolds her child out of frustration because she hates to see herself working for a living and her daughter hanging out with children whose parents just let them play out on the streets all day. “Hong-ah, you’re different from the children in this neighborhood.” From this exchange, the narrator learns that her mother worries that she’ll grow up like the local kids. The mother classifies children according to the neighborhood where they reside and tries to instill this standard in her daughter as well. She tries to escape from Namil-dong by inculcating in her child a sense that she’s different from the working-class children who are neglected and left to their own devices, and in this way pressures the daughter to study. From these actions that circumscribe her world, the daughter can also “feel that her mother worried and cared about [her].” The narrator realizes that her mother’s anger and frustration have been passed down to her in the form of sacrificial love. The mindset of enabling one’s children to “transcend” a boundary is really a way of maintaining and strengthening that boundary. As an adult, the narrator witnesses the perpetuation of this attitude when her friend Ju-hae tries to have her daughter Su-ah assigned to an elementary school in Jungang-dong rather than Namil-dong. “I’ll never be able to throw off this mindset for as long as I live here. These things don’t disappear on their own. They’re always spreading, moving from person to person, and finally they’re passed down to the next generation and the next.” Paradoxically, loathing is passed down through love. Kim Hye-jin coolly identifies the distinctive emotional structure of Korean families, in which parents project their class anxieties onto their children’s academic performance as the basis for maintaining the distinctions of Korean cities, where real estate is divided according to school districts.  Kim Hye-jin’s “District 3, District 1” (Literature and Society, Winter 2019) highlights the moments when redevelopment acts as a point of class intersection, creating a partition between female friends and queer lovers. The first-person narrator, “I,” rents a place in a cheap neighborhood that has been on the downturn since it was slated for redevelopment. Every day “I” feels a rush of horror while passing through the bleak alleyways. She feels neglected in Korean society, where young irregular female workers have neither their safety nor survival guaranteed. So, every time she sees the small stray cat Tabby running around with bloody saliva dripping from its chin, she recognizes it as a fellow survivor. Then “I” finally meets “you,” a young woman trying to care for Tabby. “A person pure and good enough to willingly spend time and money on stray cats, you looked like someone who desperately needed my help.” Thanks to this encounter, “I” no longer feels “the horror and dread [she] was so sick of feeling in the alley.” The sense of suffocating confinement that the dilapidated old neighborhood gave her abates for the first time as well. She often looks directly at the other woman’s face. She keeps making eye contact despite warning herself not to. Both sexual tension and affinity grow between the two as they tend to the stray cat together, but their relationship cannot develop smoothly with the redevelopment zone looming in the background. When they take the cat to the veterinarian’s clinic, the narrator reacts in surprise to hear the treatment will cost millions of won. The other woman, by contrast, calmly pays the fee. The narrator is then surprised by her acquaintance’s demeanor. Whereas the narrator had come to the neighborhood for cheap housing without regard for the redevelopment project, the other woman is financially savvy enough to have turned a profit by speculating in property there. The narrator’s affinity for the other woman, “you,” is also a fascination with neoliberal survival logic and the financial power that each individual woman can appropriate in order to survive. But “I” also says, “On my way home, I thought, you’re such a strange woman. I could see that you felt sorry for suffering animals and helped them however you could, but this was unusual and a bit much.” Looking at her friend, she feels inferior: “‘You’ must see me as useless and incompetent.” Despite the friendship they build up over time, she isn’t able to bridge the gap between herself and this woman, who has set aside one of her properties for the cats she has rescued. The narrator also falls into self-criticism: “Is everything my fault for being so naive?” The gentle face of “you,” unguardedly trying to share tips and information for investing in the redevelopment zone, reminds us of the ambivalent aspects of violence. The narrator thinks of redevelopment from the perspective of residents already living in the zone. She is shocked that the other woman thinks the neighborhood should be destroyed and rebuilt because it’s already dead anyway. She realizes that it is “people like ‘you’ who remain in the end, people who create the expectation that a perfectly good neighborhood will be redeveloped or redesigned, and causing its residents over a decade of suffering.” She is faced with the irony that the financial power women and sexual minorities might exercise to earn a living is predicated on participating in violence against others.  Trading in Shame This is not to say that problems disappear once you own a home. “The Brightest World I Know” by Lim Solah (Hyundae Munhak, October 2020) begins with the narrator’s declaration that she has rejected nunchi (intuitive awareness) her whole life. She thinks it’s strange to force yourself to laugh and hide your true feelings just because you don’t want to be excluded. This declaration exempts her from performing emotional labor on the job, and leads to her proud decision to work as a freelancer in the art and culture field. But from the time she buys a house, she can no longer keep this personal dictate regarding emotion. “Real estate prices have risen precipitously in the past one or two years,” so she is no longer able to afford rent. She plans to move to a relatively inexpensive suburb on the far end of the Seoul metropolitan subway line. But while she is still in the stages of finding a place, a showroom representative recommends she buy a new house in the suburbs as it is only half the price of a rental deposit in Seoul. She is charmed by the view from a sunny window overlooking a vegetable garden, especially when comparing it to the dreary city environs, and after hearing that it will be cheaper than renting in Seoul even after adding on the mortgage, she buys the officetel, a dual-purpose studio that can be used for business or residence. But it’s not long before a high rise goes up in front, blocking the view, and no sooner does the rainy season start than water seeps in from the outer wall, causing distress. She has the leak inspected and learns that it will cost millions of won to fix. The construction company should be liable since the building is not yet a year old, but the contractor has already disappeared, being one of those contractors who avoids liability by declaring bankruptcy as soon as a sale goes through. The narrator tries to contact the other residents to see if they will share in the cost, as the outer wall is a public space, but they just ignore her as it’s not their problem. The tenants’ representative suggests setting the outer wall’s repair costs above the true estimate and then asking the insurance company to reimburse them. If the leftover money is distributed to the tenants, they might agree to have it fixed. The representative knows of an interior design company that will set the rate high, and a contact who can help with insurance claims, so all the problems can be solved with just a little ruse. The narrator says, “I felt like I was stepping on a line, and on the verge of crossing it.” But upon finding that there is a solution, “[t]he muscles in my face started to move. My cheek bones rose, and the tips of my lips spread wide. I was laughing, too. I checked out my grinning face for a while when I was in the bathroom washing my hands, but the smile faded because I was looking.” The narrator’s friends enter their names in an apartment lottery in preparation for marriage, and the narrator accompanies them to a show home. She’d like to submit her name, too, but since she’s not getting married, she’s ineligible under the points system. The show home representative equates marriage and childbirth with wealth, saying, “Owning an apartment beats having a job in Korea. Nowadays the base rate for an apartment is a billion won. If you have two children and then win the apartment lottery, each child is equivalent to five hundred million won.” They openly discuss the “shrewd” housing strategy of having a fetus recognized as a child and then aborting it, or the “cold” strategy of adopting a child only to abandon it. As a writer, the narrator believes that literature is the constant search for humans’ inner truth or individual standpoints, but she is perplexed by the truths and standpoints surrounding real estate. Aware now that she must endure insults as the condition for having a house, she can trade in real estate with a smile. She learns to hide her shame in the same way she wipes away mold to make her home attractive to bidders. She wants to sell it off quickly and move into a proper apartment. “I traded my officetel at a loss, but I was pleased to think I’d found a sucker to take it.” Despite the niggling feeling that she had to give up something, she finds herself smiling.  In Hwang Jungeun’s “A Strange Episode” (Epiic, January–March 2021), the characters buy a house for their security, but find themselves in an embarrassing predicament. A lesbian couple, Seon-in and Gang-hee, cry in frustration over the instability of being renters—having to show their place and go around to view others’ places every two or three years. They feel disturbed and insulted (to no purpose) at seeing the order and disorder, the poverty and hardship, of the lives of strangers, and witnessing the hostility of landlords and the disillusionment of tenants. So the two decide to buy a place located at the far end of a residential street facing a mountain. It is one unit in a villa,4 a seventeen-year-old, multi-family residential building, but there is a hiking trail just out front and they admire the blossoms on the fringe trees. Above all, the price fits their budget. The first person home from work turns the light on as a beacon for the other, and the sight of this light on the way home gives them a feeling of safety and security. The narrator says, “We thought this was what a home was for.”  But the friends who come to congratulate them on buying their first home ask why they didn’t buy a proper apartment. “An apartment building has a management office, and there are many people, which is an advantage if you need to do something collectively.” The two wonder if they will ever need to act collectively, but it turns out they do. Late one rainy night, Gang-hee falls down the stairs at the entrance, suffering a severe head injury. Seon-in is shocked and suggests to the neighbors that they repair the old stairs before someone else gets hurt, but no one is interested. What’s more, water is leaking from the ceiling, but the upstairs neighbor denies responsibility, claiming he’s taken all the measures he can. There is a child living upstairs who runs around at dawn, awaking the couple and disturbing them. When Seon-in complains, the neighbor responds that the only way left to control this child would be to beat him, and did Seon-in want that? Everyone around knows these things are wearing them down, and the couple keeps wondering why no one intervenes. They realize that the light they see on the way home can no longer give them a sense of safety or security. Feeling “a growing sense of suspicion, anger, and disillusionment regarding her neighbors,” Seon-in recalls the ghastly, wide-mouthed grin of the person who sold them the house three years previously. He may have been grinning because he was making his escape from these neighbors. “The landlord rented out the place in that state, and the tenant rented it that way.” Seon-in feels frustrated when she realizes they’ll continue this cycle when they put up their villa to be bought by someone else who’ll expect it to be better than the home they lived in. The young women discover that the home they’ve worked hard to buy does not bring them the safety or emotional fulfillment that they expected. Instead, a house is part of a system in which you endure contempt in exchange for bare subsistence. You endure it for a while before you have no choice but to pass your disillusionment and anger along to someone else. While the discourse on housing in Korean society focuses on the injunction to become skilled financial agents who pounce upon the profits from redevelopment, or on compassion for the younger generation and its failure to reach the goal of reproducing the heterosexual family, “real estate” only perpetuates these endless dynamics. Is it now possible for us to have a “home” where our lives are intertwined with others instead of “real estate” that is only material space bereft of community? Much is left to discuss. 1     A well-to-do neighborhood inthe greater Gangnam area of Seoul. 2     Cubicle-sized accommodationfavored by those studying for public service exams or those unable to affordother housing. 3     Includedin this volume is my commentary: “A Genealogy of the Hate Economy and theEmotional Science of Redevelopment,” which I have revised and expanded here. 4     InKorea, unlike in the West, a villa refers to asmaller, older residence that is usually four stories tall. Translated by Kari Schenk Illustration ©Chulmin Yi

  by Kim Keonhyung

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  [Cover Feature] Real Estate Narratives in Korean Literature

  Real estate [budongsan (lit. “immovable property”) in Korean] is surely near the top of the list of concepts essential to describing Korean society. Koreans certainly have a finely developed sensibility when it comes to ownership of space, as is evident from the old Korean proverb, “If one cousin buys land, the other cousin gets a stomachache.” Historically speaking, it has always been common for the wealthy to be landed, or for them to convert their various tangible and intangible assets into land or buildings. Indeed, far from being unique to Korea, such is the norm in any capitalist society. What gives real estate in Korea its peculiarity, however, is that it is not just a matter of physical space and price; rather, it encompasses life, not as a means but as a goal in itself.  The Japanese occupation of Korea [1910–1945] exacerbated land issues. Such problems existed prior to the occupation, of course, with the sharecropper-landowner system exemplifying the inequalities arising from the dominance of the owner class in Joseon society. However, land became even more of an absolute precondition to people’s existence with the seizing of land by the occupiers and the advent of twentieth-century capitalist industrialization. Thus, this period is characterized by both a strong urge to recover Korean land from its oppressors as well as rectifying inequalities surrounding land ownership that predated the occupation. A typical expression of the former would be Yi Sang-hwa’s poem “Does Spring Come to Stolen Fields” (1926), while novels such as Yeom Sang-seop’s Three Generations (1931), Chae Man-Sik’s Turbid Rivers (1937), and Pak Taewon’s Scenes from Chonggye Stream (1936) painted diverse portraits of the latter.  After liberation in 1945, land became the arena of the most acute social conflict. Stolen land needed to be restored, so land reform measures were enforced to ensure a fair and equal redistribution, but the ruling class refused to relinquish its hold. The country was soon plunged into chaos again with the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. The ensuing strife over land, from the Korean War up to the industrialization of the country, is nowhere so well documented as in Pak Kyongni’s epic, Land (1969). This sprawling saga provides an overarching look at Korea’s modern history with its significant context of land and homes. As befitting its title, it recounts the travails and hardships on the way to recovering one’s land. The 1960s’ influx of people to the capital city is well captured in Lee Ho-cheol’s Seoul is All Full (1966). This work brings to life the stories of those at the bottom of society fleeing the countryside to make a life for themselves in Seoul at whatever cost. The shanty towns and slums that grew from their illegally erected dwellings represent a complex real estate issue to this day, at odds with the demands for redevelopment and reconstruction, as immortalized in Cho Se-hee’s The Dwarf (1978). Its masterly portrayal of a dwarf and his family being forcefully evicted from their dwelling in the slums, fully exposing the class conflict and injustice, firmly establishes this novella as a classic in contemporary Korean literature.  The 1970s saw the rise of the apartment as a new kind of dwelling in Korean society. With increasing numbers of people opting for such homogenized spaces, living in a standardized, mass-produced apartment rather than a more personalized space came to be considered a mark of urbane sophistication. In Choi In-ho’s “Another Man’s Room” (1971), a man returns from a business trip to find a false message from his wife and undergoes a surreal experience in his apartment, exemplifying the modern man as divested of individuality and free will, and reduced to a merely functional capacity.  The term budongsan increasingly came to refer to land, buildings, and residential property—anything that did not fall under the category of “moveable property.” Massive development projects, mass migration, and construction of new cities gave birth to a new category of inferior housing in the form of gosiwon1 and “one-room” efficiency apartments, which began to be addressed in the works of writers such as Park Min-gyu and Kim Ae-ran in the 2000s. The real estate bubble and history of greed exemplified by Seoul’s Gangnam district is well represented in Hwang Sok-yong’s Gangnam Dream (2010).  The subject of real estate in Korean literature has thus been given ample and diverse treatment over the past century. Given its inseparable ties to economic class and the political context, it is unsurprising that real estate has become a prominent backdrop for many other social issues. With real estate prices going through the roof in recent years coupled with the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, real estate issues continue to feature prominently in Korean literature. From dwellings such as banjiha,2  oktapbang,3  and gosiwon (collectively referred to as jiokgo,4 or “hellish agony”) to one-room, two-room, and three-room efficiencies; to tenement houses known as villas and mansions;5 and apartments with aspirational Western-style names [such as IPARK, Lotte Castle, Signiel, Trimage, Prugio and so on], the nomenclature of living spaces in Korea clearly illustrates their respective class distinctions. With one’s status and class directly linked to the name of one’s neighborhood and apartment, a distinction wide open to contempt and even bitter hatred, real estate has become a serious social issue in Korea and was a decisive factor in the outcome of the recent presidential elections.  Skyrocketing prices ignited rage according to one’s respective position—those without housing along with single and multiple homeowners—as well as exacerbated intergenerational conflict. This only solidified the concept of housing not as a home, but as an investment. Coincidentally, the verb for “living” in a house (jibe “sanda”) in Korean is homonymous with the verb for “buying” a house (jibeul “sanda”). Their conjugated forms differ, but surely the coincidence in the present form is too interesting to be overlooked. More and more, a house has become not a place to live, but a property to buy.  Such contemporary real estate issues make frequent appearances in recent works of Korean literature. Not content to merely describe the shabby living conditions of young people, the subject of acquiring a house or of property changing hands often functions as major plot points. An entire spectrum of humanity is represented in these subjects, from young couples, newly married or planning to get married, to those raising or employed to look after children; older people looking for suitable dwellings after their retirement; and queer couples looking for a place to live together.  Kim Hye-jin’s Fire and My Autobiography (Hyundae Munhak, 2020) represents the cumulation of the author’s interest in redevelopment issues in Korea. The impulse towards upward social mobility, as represented by the narrator’s parents’ generation and their eagerness to cast aside any class solidarity or local feeling in favor of being re-zoned and incorporated into a more desirable neighborhood, finds a razor-sharp depiction in this book. Far from relying on sentimentalism or nostalgia concerning the old and the decrepit, the author skewers how the characters’ neighborhood and homes come to represent not only their identity and class, but also their very ability to survive and better themselves. Arbitrary lines drawn by administrative districts become inextricably linked with the characters’ sense of self and lived experience, leading to more lines being drawn between those living within those boundaries. There are original, long-time residents; speculators sitting on their investments, waiting to flip them for a profit; and those living as tenants in such properties. These inhabitants weave a tangled web of desires in which each goes about their own precarious existence.  If Kim Hye-jin’s novel paints an unflinching portrait of the familiar subject of redevelopment from a contemporary standpoint, Cho Nam-ju’s Seoyeong-dong Stories (Hankyoreh Publishing, 2022) takes an overall approach to ongoing real estate issues, with a focus on apartments in particular. This essay has briefly touched upon the perception of real estate in the Korean context, but it is the apartment that lies at the heart of such issues.  By far the most common and preferred form of housing in Korea, apartments dominate practically all real estate issues. The chief concern of redevelopment or reconstruction projects, for instance, is to build new, up-to-date apartment complexes, with apartments accounting for the majority of presale homes as well as homes for sale or rent. Descriptors ranking the desirability of apartments have coined a startling array of neologisms, with the ubiquitous “yeok-se-gwon” (within walking distance of a subway station) spawning “seu-se-gwon” (within walking distance of a Starbucks) or whatever amenity is considered worthy of advertisement; not to mention such portmanteaus as cho-pum-a (an apartment right next to an elementary school [chodeung hakgyo]), joong-pum-a (next to a middle school [joong hakgyo]), and endless other variations.  The Seoyeong-dong neighborhood, depicted by Cho Nam-ju in a series of linked stories, represents an archetype of nearly all living spaces outside of Seoul’s city center. Recognizable to any Korean living in an urban setting, its trimmings conjure up the image of “neighborhood” common to most minds, where names like Dong-A, Hyundai, Woosung, and Daerim reflect the companies that built such apartments in the 1980s and 1990s, and with all the schools, hagwons,6  parks, subway stations, bus stops, and various amenities surrounding them. The author captures the emotional repercussions when such an ordinary-looking neighborhood is rocked by fluctuating housing prices. The characters of these stories are champions of their neighborhood, willing to tell anyone who will listen that their area is undervalued. Interestingly, said characters conflate real estate value with honest labor, as something attainable by saving and scraping. The value of an apartment complex with thousands of residents can hardly be increased by the efforts or skills of a few people. Real estate values fluctuate in minute quantities, depending on the willingness of policymakers to invest in infrastructure, on the economy in general, and various macroeconomic factors. To equate one’s self-worth with that of an apartment, however, is to surrender to the thrall of real estate values and property rights, to succumb to self-interest and avarice.  The linked stories of Seoyeong-dong Stories provide room for a varied cast of characters. There are those who cannot wait for prices to go up, as well as those who stand by, in equal amounts appalled and apathetic. There is the struggling young couple who makes a bold investment by swapping apartments, a move that pays off handsomely, except that they suffer from inordinate noise from their neighbors in their new apartment; a woman who has purchased an apartment and observes her father, who has found employment as a guard in the building facing hers, suffering abuse at the hands of other owners; and a character that vehemently opposes the construction of an assisted living residence for the elderly before being forced to change her mind after their own mother is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, among others. The author does not defend or outright condemn these Korean attitudes toward real estate. The last story of the book is “Allie's Adventures in Wonderland,” where the protagonist, Ayoung, is about to be kicked out of her home by redevelopers in the only area she can afford to live, having barely scraped together the five million won necessary for the security deposit. There are no opportunities for people like Ayoung, no matter how hard they work; in the end, Ayoung avoids being turned out on the street thanks to the kindness of the head teacher at the hagwon where she works under an irregular contract as an assistant English teacher. After devoting so much space to the desires and habits of apartment dwellers, the decision to end the book with the housing struggles faced by a woman in her thirties may strike the reader as an odd choice. However, it seems this is where the crux of the stories lies. With no place to stay, Ayoung is driven to a gosiwon. On the way there, she reads an article about how young people in their twenties and thirties are taking out crippling mortgages to buy apartments in the greater Seoul area. What could possibly bridge the chasm between thirty-somethings like Ayoung, and others who all but sign their souls away to panic-buy apartments? Cho reveals, in the author’s note, how “deeply ashamed and difficult” she found it to write these stories. Certainly, if shame is the overwhelming reaction to the housing and spaces occupied by members of a society, one would be hard-pressed to claim that society functions as a community in any sense of the word.  The issue of real estate in Korean society is certain to remain a contentious one in the foreseeable future. Korean literature will doubtless find ever more creative ways to examine this issue. Real estate and housing are firmly rooted in space, an unavoidable subject in the construction of any background and characters when it comes to the novel, in particular. Whether real estate and apartments continue to occupy their current position as objects of investment or speculation remains to be seen, as this author looks forward to the creative ways in which Korean literature will address the subject of home ownership in the future.  1     Cubicle-sized accommodation favored bythose studying for public service exams or those unable to afford otherhousing. 2     Semi-basement dwellings as seen in BongJun-ho’s Parasite. 3 Rooftoprooms, usually made by illegally converting rooftop spaces of low-incomehousing. 4     ji-ok-go: ji from jiha(basement) in banjiha, ok from oktapbang, go from goiswonforming a homonym of jiokgo or ″hellish agony.″ 5      In Korea, unlike in theWest, villas and mansionsrefer to smaller, older residences that are usually four stories tall. 6     Cramschools, but also any kind of private school offering classes such as music,art, sports, etc. Translated by Yoonna Cho Illustration ©Chulmin Yi

  by Roh Taehoon

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  [Essay] From the Priestess of the Sun to the Poet of the Earth

  The Flame Returning to the Sun There was a woman who worshipped the sun. A poet who worshipped not the moon shaded by the sun’s rays, but the sun itself, radiating the most blistering heat and glow. A poet who gave herself to the temple of that sun. That poet is Kim Seung-hee, who announced that she would “never reconcile with realism” (“Siin-ui yeonghon”; The soul of the poet), who grappled fiercely with the reality women face. This poet who “dared to imagine” her “flame on an eternal orbit / returning to the sun / Always, and evermore” (“Taeyang misa”; Mass for the sun) is now already in her seventies. After fifty years of a celebrated career, in which she published eleven volumes of poetry, including her latest astonishing collection Danmujiwa beikeon-ui jinsilhan saram (Changbi, 2021; The truthful human of pickled radish and bacon), she still leads the audience to look forward to what might come after this book. Here, I ponder Kim Seung-hee’s relentless fifty years as a poet, beginning with her debut in 1973. In an era when there weren’t many women poets writing in distinct voices, Kim emerged with her memorable first publication “Geurim sog-ui mul” (The water in the picture), a poem in which she portrays a subject who wishes to paint a life-giving picture. Kim’s first book, Taeyang misa (Goryeoweon, 1979; Mass for the sun) powerfully signaled the birth of a woman poet who worships the sun. I feel tremendous respect for Kim all over again as I grasp that through the eras of “pure poetry” (sunsu si), “participation poetry” (chamyeo si), “national literature” (minjok munhak), realism, minjung literature, labor literature, postmodernism, miraepa poetry and beyond, she has never been swayed by the trends and ideologies of the time but has built and kept her unique place in poetry. Some say poets are destined to lead lonely lives. I can only imagine how much of a solitary struggle Kim’s literary life as the priestess of the sun must have been. I try to picture all the times Kim, a poet so full of love that she wishes to “only / love more, in order to live” (“Taeyang misa”; Mass for the sun), must have written her poems with great intensity, not letting herself slacken even for one moment. A Spirit Dreaming of Flight Kim Seung-hee has pursued a boundary-crossing life; yet, she has lived within the institutions of marriage and higher education. On one hand, the fact that she majored in English as an undergraduate and then received a doctorate in Korean literature, or that she moved to the US after finishing her doctoral dissertation, illustrates how she sought to live unrestricted by institutional boundaries; she wanted to cross them. On the other hand, one may also see that Kim committed to a life within institutions: she returned to South Korea to teach at Sogang University, where she worked until the end of her tenure, and attentively fulfilled her position as a wife and mother. Though Kim’s life as a wife, mother, and university professor depicts her as a diligent denizen, her life as a wild sun-priestess poet suggests that poetic writing was a fierce and lonely struggle for her. Perhaps this is why the reader can sense both heat and coldness in her poetry. Kim is a poet who has the fiery passion for worshipping the sun—all the while knowing that she can turn into ash upon close contact—as well as the ability to sharpen her language with icy reason. It is nothing short of astounding, then, how Kim has simultaneously delivered her roles as a wife and mother, a university professor focused on education and research, and a poet who has continuously reestablished herself. One can only fathom how much Kim must have bitterly interrogated herself. In her eleventh poetry collection, Danmujiwa beikeon-ui jinsilhan saram (The truthful human of pickled radish and bacon), which she published at age seventy, Kim writes that “what dreams also wriggles,” and that one “wriggles because they have a dream” (“Kkumteulgeorida”; Wriggling). While witnessing Kim as she continues to write poems full of wriggling passion and alive with tension, something also wriggled awake within me. Is a sun-worshipping poet born with an uncommon energy? Reading this collection, I found myself already looking forward to her next one. Kim’s poetry, which forges fiery passion with icy reason, is an incandescent flower that blooms from within pain. The metonymy of the “picked radish” and the “bacon” in this collection must have risen out of her self-evaluation as neither a “kind” nor “truthful” person, as well as experiences as painful as “[her] neck snapping” and as “heavy as [the] truth” of “[p]eople who approach [her] with sincere minds,” all the while also facing those “whose true intentions, or what’s inside them, [she] cannot tell” (Danmuji wa beikeon-ui jinsilhan saram; The truthful human of pickled radish and bacon). Her cry, “What more, what more, what more do I want” in this titular poem paradoxically reflects the poet’s refusal to disavow her hope and dreams for people and the world. The poet is aware that if the “wriggling” stops, so will dreams and poetry. To Live as a Woman Poet In her debut poem “Geurim sog-ui mul” (The water in the picture), Kim Seung-hee effectively uses the motif of A Dog of Flanders to render a poetic subject who wishes to move beyond painting “that [which] only needs to be beautiful,” to painting a picture that restores life. The poem announces the emergence of a new aesthetic subject who will go to a “lost friend” to “become a river / To permeate,” to turn into “water that will blossom that place” as well as “the friend’s flowers,” then finally rise forth as a “wide, warm ocean / that will blossom our dead pictures.” The poet shows an extraordinary desire to move “beyond Belgium / to far, faraway Asia” (“Geurim sog-ui mul”; The water in the picture). The literary world must not have been easy on the poet. It was an age and society that were especially conservative and ungenerous toward women poets, and Kim was able to endure only through her poetry. In the poem “Naega eopneun hanguk munhaksa” (Korean literary history without me) from Dalgyal sog-ui saeng (1989; Life inside an egg), Kim demonstrates sharp insight about her identity as a woman poet. Her identity was formed through numerous exclusions from Korean literary history, starting from the “era of zero-meaning pure poetry” to the “era of participation poetry” to the “era of deconstructive poetry (haeche si)” to the “era of commercial love poetry,” and finally to “era of minjung poetry.” By declaring that she is “today a single rat flea / A yeoryu1 rat flea” in front of “Korean literary history / plastered into a pattern like neat wallpaper,” Kim offers a critical view of Korean literary history and powerfully locates her place within it as a woman poet.  Kim has centered women’s lives throughout her eleven poetry collections. She defines herself as a “daughter of a southern province,” “mixed-blood of poverty and the sun” (“Namdochang”; Southern Province Chang), and identifies with the fierce lives of women poets: Na Hye-seok, who lived the life of a “pioneer” and went out like a “blue flame” (“Na Hye-seok Kompeullekseu”; Na Hye-seok complex), and Sylvia Plath, who left the world by “turning on the gas in the boiler room / in her night clothes” (“Silbia Peulleoseu”; Sylvia Plath). Kim also honors women who were hurt and sacrificed in history, women whose names were taken and existences scrubbed, and women who fled the world consumed by capitalism and neo-liberalism by choosing death. Such women include Joseon-era painter Heo Nanseolheon(1563–1589), who “tried to overcome a hill with a single brush / even during the day, for she would die if she could not overcome herself” (“Nanseolheon-ui bang”; Heo Nanseolheon’s room); the Japanese Imperial Army’s “comfort women”; the woman who survived her son during the 1980 Gwangju Democratic Movement (“Owol Monarija-ui miso”; The smile of Mona Lisa in May); the woman who “howls while tearing open her whole body” in the delivery room (“Yeoin deungsinbul”; Buddhist mummy woman); the woman she witnessed “in the subway station on New York’s Fifth Avenue” who “suddenly started laughing” and threw herself “onto the tracks” (“Sotkuchyeo oreugi 8”; Bursting up 8). Represented as the pioneering woman, the sacrificial woman, the systematically trapped woman, and the system-fleeing woman, Kim Seung-hee’s poetic subject confronts her own contradictions and dreams of liberating her mind from imprisonment. The desire for flight is often met with failure in reality; in poetry, the poet maintains a firm grip on the “wriggling” sensation. That persistence is what frees her. Poet of the Earth In another recent collection, Kim Seung-hee still reveres the sun, but shows a certain change: she presents herself as a heliotropic poet with her feet solidly on the ground. In other words, it seems that Kim has switched from being a priestess of the sun to being a poet of the earth. The poet of the earth consistently reflects the gloom of Seoul, where she resides. The place in Seoul that grabs her attention the most is the Han River. The poet “sets for the banks of the Han River / thinking Maybe I’ll give it a good cry . . .” There, she encounters: “perished lives, who fell through the broken bridge during the Korean War All their unspeakable bundles The junk wristwatch that still rattle-rattles Impoverished women who, grief-stricken by money and mad for love, walked into the water singing like Ophelia People immured in water, meditating in front of a wall with open eyes Lowly silent lives sitting with their faces in their laps Spoons rusted with tears.” The “currents of the Han River” weep on behalf of Kim and, in turn, she mourns “The wordless, who have long been sunken into the water” (“Seoul-ui uul 12”; Gloom of Seoul 12). Stating that “the person of the avant-garde is who until death / sustains a body full of living butterflies” and “dances forward more and more as rainbow bubbles,” Kim intends to live the life of the avant-garde poet (“Jeonwi-ui saram”; Person of the avant-garde). Even though she wants to “run away and give up,” she cannot surrender hope, because she is unable to let the “brilliant sunlight, which gives and gives” go to “waste”; though she knows “hope is lonely,” she continues to live in hope’s “life sentence” (“Huimangi oeropda 1”; Hope is Lonely 1). Kim cannot desert hope because she is still a poet who worships the sun. The sun has left its mark in Kim’s poetry, but there are transformations within her as a poet who now has her feet cemented on the earth. For instance, the remarkable appearance of “the tomato molar” (“Tomato ssiateul simgoseo”; After planting tomato seeds) in Danmuji wa beikeon-ui jinsilhan saram (The truthful human of pickled radish and bacon)—with its red shade and its round, lumpy shape—is suggestive of both passion and pain, as if it embodyies the sun. This “sun on earth” symbolizes Kim’s poetic metamorphosis. The poet is keenly aware that to break free from living the “passive form,” in an “unknown fear of / the chased rabbit becoming the chasing rabbit / The chasing rabbit becoming the chased rabbit,” she must “sever the circuit of desire” (“Yumogeul wihayeo 1”; For the nomadic 1). She continues to criticize the neoliberal lifestyle, in which people are inclined to goad one another on. Reading Kim’s poetry, one comes to wonder if today’s society has advanced much from the devasting world in which “war breaks out in the Persian Gulf” and “multinational armies air raid / the streets of Baghdad” in the middle of the night, only to leave behind “a lustrous show / in which the anchorman becomes the hero” (“Naneun syopinghanda goro naneun jonjaehanda”; I shop, therefore I am). Living where “the world of presumption tames the world of no doubt / and the world of no doubt tames our world,” the poet persists in the “heaviest fight in the world” in which she is not tamed by the notions of “presumption” and “no doubt” (“Sesangeseo gajang mugeoun ssaum 2”; The world’s heaviest fight 2). Readers from across the world, watching Kim Seung-hee’s long, tenacious struggle will join their hands with her to start their own fight: “biting down on the tomato molar, / us, together . . .” (“Tomato ssiateul simgoseo”; After planting tomato seeds). 1Translator’s note: yeoryu means “female,” but in the context of poetry connotes a specific type of femininity that is delicate, gentle, sentimental, etc. The term was criticized and discarded in the late 1990s for its sexist and patriarchal usage.   Translated by Emily Jungmin Yoon Img ©SON HWA JUNG

  by Lee Kyungsoo

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  [Essay] The Backmasking Historian

  My mother never told me about whales. She never told me about camels, giraffes, or elephants either. She didn’t tell me about ships. If I hated my mother, perhaps it was because she never told me any stories about ships. —“The Ulsan Period: Spirit and Fire” The above passage in Kim Soom’s autobiographical essay “The Ulsan Period: Spirit and Fire” (Munye Joongang Spring 2007) feels rather displaced from the rest of the piece. It crops up among her questions about why her father, who used to work at a shipyard, left Ulsan and how the heavy industry company he used to work for was able to grow into the world’s largest shipbuilding powerhouse even without her hardworking father, and her explanation of the process in which over two hundred blocks are assembled in fire to build a ship. To trace the whereabouts of her mother’s stories—the stories of whales, camels, giraffes, and elephants—that disappeared because they were foreign to her father’s shipyard, made up of iron, water, and fire, we need to walk into the shipyard of Kim Soom’s mind.  In Cheol (Iron), which tells the story of shipyard workers, all the men have a wife in the village. Unmarried men who come to work at the shipyard wish to marry a village girl. However, no worker’s wife is ever registered as a shipyard worker. Only the sons can become the next generation of workers in the shipyard, and so all the villagers wish for a son. Fathers are the only ones who can seek and receive work, and it is also only the working fathers that the shipyard deprives of or alienates from work. In Cheol, a worker is someone who has been officially granted work or whose work is acknowledged. They are not workers of an era in which labor itself was regarded as great, nor workers who are considered great because of their labor. Instead, they are workers of an era in which one could “become a great worker” only “when the iron ship is completed.” But it is still the wives who manage the day-to-day lives. It is also the wives’ responsibility to accept the loss of employment of their husbands and react materially—by changing the type of side dishes at meals and such.  Fathers can be registered with the shipyard as workers and are allowed to have work. Therefore, they can also be deprived of the work they have. They can also look forward to the day the “iron ship is completed” and they “become great workers.” However, mothers cannot become workers registered with the shipyard and therefore are denied the hope of becoming great workers from the outset; they have no labor to be deprived of from the beginning. What Kim Soom says about her mother—how she “hated” her mother who “didn’t tell her any stories” in the aforementioned essay—is not placed in the fore the way she talks about her “father’s labor” because she has no choice but to draw out words this way; because nothing about mothers can be officially deprived or alienated from them. Kim Soom has been writing about people who are already deprived. If fiction takes on the task of revealing the insidious desires and the excluded and alienated things that are invisible in reality, Kim’s works, which show the state and circumstance of those desires and things, faithfully perform that task. Empty Spaces in Line Breaks  While the father is granted work and goes to the shipyard of water, fire, and iron, the mother is not granted work and is even alienated from the deprivation of work. Then how should this story of alienation from the outset be written? The father’s story is assembled by putting together two hundred blocks of iron with water and fire, but whales, camels, giraffes, and elephants cannot be assembled. That is why Kim Soom’s stories are not constructed by stacking paragraphs that resemble well-honed blocks but are constantly unraveled into sentences, lines, and phrases.  The repetition of disconnect not only within a single work but also between different works makes Kim Soom’s fiction read like poetry. Just as poems have breaks between stanzas, her novel creates empty spaces through line breaks. Kim’s attempt to “reach a little closer to [her] desire to write poetry,”1 which Kim mentions herself, is also a way to communicate the language and history of women. 1  Kim Soom, “Author’s Note,” Baekchideul (Idiots), Random House Korea, 2006. One Left was an attempt to write women’s history by attaching footnotes to the testimonies of the victims of the Japanese military sex slavery, or “comfort women,” in the novel. In the dominant structure inherent in everyday language, women are unable to make the language their own, as the language is the dominant structure itself. This is the reason that many women’s experiences are shaped in the language of the perpetrators. The records are written in the perpetrators’ language. The Japanese military comfort women who do not know how to read or write in Kim Soom’s Heureuneun pyeonji (Flowing letters) write with their fingers on flowing water by the river to tell their experiences and history. This was the women’s way of writing history that could communicate their experiences without having to learn the language and grammar of the perpetrators and pass them on to the places where the river reaches. And a comfort station was a place where Japanese-speaking soldiers, a Chinese-speaking workman, and Korean-speaking women crossed paths in violence without being able to communicate with each other. Suddenly the door opens and a soldier pokes in his head. “Eiko, I’m here.”  He enters the room while pulling down his pants but suddenly pauses and says, “You’re not Eiko. Who are you?” “Eiko’s dead,” I say, glaring at his face. “Where is Eiko?” “You killed her.” “Did she go somewhere else?” “You guys killed her. Don’t you see the blood on my hands? Can’t you see the bloodied rag I used to wipe her blood?” But even before I finish speaking, he shuts the door in a huff.2 The Japanese soldier speaks, but his words are not communicated to the comfort woman, and neither can the comfort woman communicate her words and intentions to the soldier. Violence is perpetrated in a space where words cannot be understood between people, and the women’s pain cannot be communicated to the outside. Kim Soom’s task of retrieving the words and stories of the Japanese military comfort women from this system of violence is about confronting the fact that the people of a nation, patriarchy, and colonialism are woven together in the grammar and language of our daily lives. When the language of this tightly-knit system, the language of the perpetrators, is removed, the narrative becomes a form of poetry. It is for this reason that Kim Soom’s “testimony novels” do not follow the traditional form of fiction.  The Backmasking Historian Backmasking in music is a recording technique in which sounds or voices are recorded backward onto a track that is meant to be played forward. It involves the reversal and rearrangement of units of phonemes, not syllables.3 The result is a collection of completely new arrangement of phonemes, which is not delivered as an accurate, unified sound. In this sense, the way Kim Soom writes fiction is similar to the backmasking technique—her works pick up the histories of people who did not have a voice, were not recorded, and as a result, even had their existence questioned in the modern history that was written clearly in a familiar grammar. By reversing the direction of modern history and reproducing the same sounds backward, those histories can be rewritten.  Therefore, what Kim Soom has been doing from her initial works—re-recording the history of the Japanese military comfort women using their testimonies, criticizing the oppressive patriarchal system, and restoring fragmented memories and records—is no different from backmasking history. 2. Kim Soom, Heureuneun pyeonji (Flowing letters), p. 271. 3. Park So-jin, “A Study on the Correlation between Music and Subconsciousness: Based on Backmasking of Music,” MA thesis, Sangmyung University, 2012, p. 27. Translated by Stella Kim Jang Soohee Literary Critic Dong-A University 

  by Jang Soohee

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  [Writer's Notes] Will I Be Able to Reach the Tree?

  1 A   What are you thinking about? O   Trees. I’m going to go find a tree. I’ll go find it on my own. A   I just saw it. O   What? A   The shadow of a bird flying above. O   Shadows of flying birds are islands. Islands that can never be reached. A   Then what about the shadows of trees? O   A bird flying into oblivion. A   Can I go with you? O    . . . A   Your fingers smell like fish. O   I thought about fish. The sad fish in the tank in front of a hoe restaurant with their naïve expressions. And Spinoza . . . When my eyes opened at six o’clock this morning I thought of Spinoza. And the lenses of glasses, white waves, a grey house, candles, buttons. A   Buttons? O   Do you remember my green coat? The fourth button fell off and I need to reattach it. But to do that I need to buy a needle and thread, and buying a needle is difficult for me. Same with buying a knife. A   Where’s the tree? O   The tree is above the ground. A   So where is it? O   It’s about hundred and fourteen kilometers away from where you’re standing. They say that the tree is around eight hundred years old. No one knows its precise age. A   Can I go with you? O   How has it lived for eight hundred years? A   Because it’s a tree . . . O   For me, just living a single day is desolate and frightening. Some days, a single day feels longer than eternity, which means I’m often stricken with horror as to how to live for today. A   For all we know, a day may be longer than eight hundred years. 2 O   I wanted to go find the tree on my own. A   When’s the bus coming? The bus that will take us close to the tree. We have been waiting for two hours at this bus stop and all I can see are disused stables, empty pastures, and a church cross. O   The bus may not come. A   This is the first time in my life I’ve waited for a bus that may not even be coming.  O  Anyhow, I’m going to walk to the tree. A   Let’s go together! O   I wanted to go find the tree on my own. 3 A   If you look at us from up above, I bet we look like one person. O    . . . A   No need to go as far as the moon. O    . . . A   Why haven’t you said anything since before? O   We, that is to say you and me, why are we going together to find the tree? We aren’t even lovers. A   Oh, so we aren’t lovers . . . O   I don’t love you. I only love one person. A   What do you think about when you’re walking? O   Death . . . I think about death. A   Since when? O   I’ve thought about death long before you came along. 4 A   What’s that up there on top of the hill? O   The tree . . . It must be a coincidence that the tree is over there. The same way it’s a coincidence where a stone lies in a river. A   So that tree has been coincidentally standing there for eight hundred years. A   How much longer do we have to walk before we reach the tree? O   A day, two days, four days . . . A   The sun has gone and disappeared; even without the sun it’s so bright. A   How many days have we been walking? O   Three days . . . A   What are you thinking? O   I’m thinking I want to plant a tree and live while watching it grow . . . If I can’t disappear. A   If you can’t disappear? O   Every time I think about death, I’m paralyzed by the desire to disappear—silently, leaving no trace. The desire is so powerful it feels like my heart is aflame.  A   Where do you want to plant the tree? O   Just on empty land. I open my eyes in the morning, wash my face, drink some water, and pray. I eat my breakfast, then go to the tree. I sit in front of the tree all day long, then come home.  A   When do you write? O   Finding the tree is writing. Looking at the tree is writing. Touching the tree is writing. And even after my life has run its course, the tree remains. 5 O   The tree is thirty paces ahead. A    The leaves have fallen off, not a single one left. O   The wind blows . . . The branches are swaying. The tree is swaying. So even eight-hundred-year-old trees still sway. To remain standing like that it must always have been swaying—not a single day of rest, for eight hundred years. For there are no days when the wind does not blow. O   It seems like the tree is coming down to the ground. As far as I know, that tree could always be in the process of coming down to the ground. A   Two birds have flown to the tree. Birds smaller than sparrows. The birds sat on a branch. One bird flew away. O   In a tree as big as that there are only two nests. A   A rather large bird flew off as if grazing the tree. A grey bird a little larger than a magpie. O   Another little bird has landed in the tree. A   Three rather large birds flew in from the west and behind the tree. O   Three little birds flew up into the tree. A   How strange . . . Earlier, there were two birds in the tree and since one flew away there should only be two birds, so how are there three? O   There must have been a small bird hiding in the nest, don’t you think? A   Let’s take a closer look. O   The larger bird is trapped in the tree branches. 6 O   It seems like we’re not walking toward the tree, the tree is walking towards us . . . 7 O   The tree is twenty paces ahead. A   I can see the roots poking out of the ground. O   The roots are like rivers. Rivers that snarl, surge, and swirl. Rivers unable to flow into the ocean, trapped without start or end, that can’t flow to the ocean. A   Do you want to touch the tree? O   I don’t know. A   Let’s go closer to the tree. A   The tree is eighteen paces ahead . . . The tree is sixteen paces ahead . . . The tree is twelve paces ahead. O   It’s as if we’re walking into the tree . . . A   The tree is ten paces ahead . . . The tree is seven paces ahead . . . O   I can’t take a single step more. It’s like I’m going to be swallowed up by that tree if I take one more step. To tell you the truth, I’m frightened of that tree. A   Well then, let’s turn at the tree. Let’s count how many steps it takes to walk all the way around it.  O   I wanted to go find the tree on my own. A   One, two, three, four . . . O   I found the tree on my own. A   One hundred, one hundred and one, one hundred and two . . . We’ve only gone half way around. O   If seen from above, would we and the tree look like one mass? A   Well, then there’s no need to go to as far as the moon.  (END) Translated by Victoria Caudle

  by Kim Soom

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  [Musings] The Ghost of the Author

  I have only translated living authors, a circumstance owing to my being drawn to contemporary literature—as vain as it might sound, I want to participate in the dissemination of the stories and voices of my lifetime, to partake in the artistic production of the Thailand I was born into. For each book I have translated, I have always had the author to consult, even to befriend. I have double-checked with them my understanding of certain phrases, asked them about minutiae like the exact color (blue can become tricky moving between Thai and English) or collar style of a shirt mentioned in passing, traded a multitude of emails, texts and phone calls with them, shared meals (and, lately, my vaccination status) with them. In other words, their existence as living human beings who begot the original works is something I experience as part of my reality as a person and as a translator. Yet, somehow, I remain preoccupied with “The Death of the Author,” that Roland Barthes essay I read over two decades ago as a college coed. I found myself formulating thoughts through it and discussing it in my last pitch, as I did in my first. It’s true, my initial encounter with the essay precipitated something like an epiphany: Barthes’s words opened up the possibility of reading, and, for me, they gave literary criticism its raison d’être. Post-college, though, many years passed where that piece of literary theory lay dormant in my brain, only to return with renewed vigor when I took up translation. Prabda Yoon’s story collection The Sad Part Was was the first book I ever pitched. In presenting the collection, I discussed at length how the stories in it insist on exposing themselves as texts (“[I]t is language which speaks, not the author,” writes Barthes) and are eager to discredit the Author, via metafiction and other devices, thereby giving the reader the pride of place as the maker of meaning. Given Yoon’s influences during the years when he wrote the book, reading his early work through a post-structuralist lens is definitely not farfetched, and I did not expect the essay’s death grip on me to continue. Except it did. A few months ago, I wrote a synopsis for Saneh Sangsuk’s novel Jao Garagade (English title to be determined), and before I knew it, I had resorted to Barthes again, to explain the significance of the book’s anticolonial narrative structure, which aims to re-elevate the oral tradition of storytelling in the face of the novel’s dominance, the novel being a form imported into Thailand from the West.1 Garagade, in being made up of oral tales within a tale (some of them doubly contained), all either passed down or being passed down in the narrative present, inherently questions the idea of unitary authorship, harking back to a time before the myth of the Author took hold of our imagination. In many ways, Garagade and The Sad Part Was couldn’t be more different: the former is a tale set in a western Thai village in the 1960s and in the jungle that it used to be at the turn of the twentieth century, a tale that (in one of its many strata) mourns the loss of natural resources and hence mourns the lifestyle of the past, while the latter is an unapologetically urban set of stories that speaks to the Bangkok of the turn of the millennium, each using narrative forms reflecting their own substance. Why, then, did I feel so compelled to seek a “Death of the Author” reading in each of them? Even Barthes himself later questioned his own wisdom, as Kate Briggs, the translator of his Preparation of the Novel, tried to warn me when I was her student. For a long time, I put off reading the tiny sections in Preparation called “Return of the Author” and “Return to Biography” that she had pointed me to, fearing they would cause the foundation of my literary worldview to crumble. Although in the dreaded snippets Barthes goes so far as to describe his change of heart as an “about-face,” I hung onto the phrases where he humbly refrains from being prescriptive (“For me (once again, I’m not sure if I have the right to generalize) . . .”), and anyway, before taking the plunge into reading those two extracts, I had pre-consoled myself by reasoning: regardless of what he asserts therein, “The Death of the Author,” the text, has long been out there, severed from its Author, and need not be discounted merely because the same man who wrote it might later in his life wish to disavow it—He is dead. It is easy to understand why a translator who has spent years buying completely into the idea of the Author’s death being a precondition for reading would find that death likewise is a precondition for translating. As translators, we are readers first, even if we have the privilege of making our interpretation of the text less fleeting by documenting it in print. For a time, we get to be the “place where [the text’s] multiplicity is focused,” as Barthes says about the reader in his seminal essay. For a time, we get to play the writer reincarnated—a writer even more literally “imitat[ing] a gesture that is always anterior”—and doesn’t reincarnation always presuppose death? Later on, if we are lucky, we will die in many other people else’s hands or on their screens. Yet it’s not so simple: I’m haunted by the Author’s ghost. One basic task translators often do is write biographies in the target language for their authors. This exercise, at minimum, will require the translator to do some fact-checking, more likely also a bit of research, meaning engaging with the author’s life story is inevitable. This level of engagement—still conceiving of the author in the third person (the “external author . . . just the He,” as Barthes puts it in Preparation)—holds true regardless of whether the possibility to meet the writer in the flesh exists or not. But especially when we translate living authors, we potentially have some degree ofaccess to their I, to the “writer’s interiority,” “the recourse to [which],” Barthes had once suggested, was “pure superstition.” In such a scenario, the temptation, accompanied, even, by a sense of duty, to tap into that interiority is overwhelming. That is, the specter of the Author feels all the more present when the unabstracted version of the author is a living person only a phone call or an email away. These musings are in no way meant to negate the wisdom of consulting the author. But as translators, we spend many, many hours alone, with our computer in front of us and the original text off to one side (too often always the same side of the desk, however orthopedically ill-advised). Translation decisions are made constantly, consciously, unconsciously, and I can’t help but yearn for a blessing from the Author’s ghost to read the text, remake the text. The psychological balancing act of the need to assert my own construction of the text while respecting the ghost of the Author has left me fixated with scouring the text itself for clues that it—and maybe its Maker, too—also subscribes to the principles put forth in “The Death of the Author,” that it—and maybe its Maker, too—is telling me, Go on, translate the text. Go on, give it another life.   Mui Poopoksakul   1 Thai literature professor Saowanit Chunlawong discusses this aspect of the novel in her article “The Implication of Tale-Telling in the Archaic Love Story of Karaked,” available at: http://daen-aran-saengthong.blogspot.com/2012/01/implication-of-tale-telling-in-archaic.html (in Thai), concluding that Sangsuk suggests the novel is a continuation of oral storytelling. Mui Poopoksakul is a lawyer-turned-translator with a special interest in contemporary Thai literature. Her translations include three story collections: The Sad Part Was and Moving Parts, both by Prabda Yoon, and Arid Dreams by Duanwad Pimwana. She is also the translator of Pimwana’s novel Bright. Currently, she is translating a novel by Saneh Sangsuk. A native of Bangkok who spent two decades in the US, she now lives in Berlin, Germany.  

  by Mui Poopoksakul

• 

  [Writer's Notes] [Draft I] Writer-Translators on Their Craft — Bae Suah

  This section features five respected writer-translators who reminisce, reflect, and ruminate on their experiences of writing and translating. Their opinions correspond, but also refract from each other to varying degrees given their unique, personal backgrounds. The section features their abridged answers.—Ed. How did you first get into translation and was there a specific opportunity that motivated you to get into it?   I remember very clearly what led me to translation: my study of German. I was in Berlin at the time. I went to Germany with no ostensible purpose, as I hadn’t gone there to study, work, or learn the language; instead I yearned to spend a year doing absolutely nothing, to be in a place where no one knew me, to not work, and to not speak. I’d gone in search of a world without language, and in Berlin I found it. I had brought a big box full of Korean books to read, which took all of two months to go through. Then a vast emptiness set in. Only two languages existed for me in the world then, as they do now: everyday language that’s as vital to us as water or air, and literary language, which can only be accessed if one desires it. As time passed, I increasingly thirsted for the latter. I tired of walking past bookshops and only ever catching glimpses of German titles in their windows. That’s when something I hadn’t anticipated or expected even after arriving in the country first occurred to me: the thought that I might learn German simply in order to read. To learn it as a high school student might learn Esperanto—that was precisely the idea. This notion took me by surprise. I had never, in all my life, done anything with the focused intensity that people call diligence or dedication, nor held a fervent life goal in my heart. Everything that occurred to me, from my birth to my becoming a writer, had been happenstance, and I reveled in such chance encounters. Of course, when this thought came to me that early November afternoon, as I stood outside a bookshop in a Berlin street already grown dim with the encroaching German winter, it was as a spontaneous impulse and not some avid goal or persistent desire; even so, having nothing else to do in that moment, I decided to act on the impulse. From the start, my idea was that I would enter this language solely through books—through literature. So despite my rudimentary understanding of the most basic grammar, I ran into the bookshop, giddy with excitement, and picked out a book I believed—erroneously—I would immediately set to reading. The book was Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig. I chose it as the title and author were familiar to me in spite of my general ignorance of German literature, and because I had read it before in Korean; and though this had been years ago, I hoped my rereading of the book in German would be made more manageable by that fact. This hope was soon dashed. As I read I had to look up nearly every word except perhaps the articles in a dictionary, and still there wasn’t a single sentence in the book that failed to shock and astound me. I read every sentence and understood nothing, and in this way I was able to understand what wasn’t being said by the sentences without having read a single sentence. That book was a door. The very first door I encountered in a world of vernacular silence, which I’d entered through the erasure of my natural language; a door that led me back inside language, albeit language not as a means of conversation and communication but as a door in and of itself. I believed I had come upon my own method of reading certain types of books. Casting reading with the dictionary aside, I was attempting to read as translation. That was my first act of translation. And translation itself has since become another way of reading for me, in the way recitation has. These days I continue to translate writing I prefer or have an affinity for just so I can read it (differently), and I also translate the occasional poem. This is translation for myself, effectively.   When we speak of “style,” we often think of it as the representative element of a text that displays the writer’s signature personality, but in the case of translation, the text may inevitably have to be adjusted at times to fit linguistic norms and conventions in the target language. This is sometimes referred to as “the betrayal of translation.” Have you ever agonized over this issue?   It’s not exactly a problem of style, but there is something I’ve had to think through. The majority of my translations are of fiction, and in novels how the characters address one another, especially when honorifics are involved, can sway the overall impression of a work. Watching a French film on a flight recently, I found myself gagging at the Korean subtitles and had to stop watching. In the scene a woman is smoking and talking to a man roughly the same age as her, but the subtitles have the woman addressing the man as doryeonnim, a term of address that is used specifically by women when speaking to or of their husband’s younger, unmarried brother, and in which the woman is explicitly “lowering” herself out of deference to a male family member. In the actual conversation, the characters of course address each other by name. 　　Korean speech levels and honorifics are so complicated it’s difficult to set clear rules about their use, and unless you are an expert in the matter, being a linguist or an editor, for instance, they can be quite unfathomable. While in Switzerland, I met a Swiss linguist who remarked that Korean has one of the trickiest system of polite speech in the world, and said this was why (though he spoke no Korean) he had chosen to specialize in it. Then there’s the fact that this system very often reflects values that are regressive, so that actual use of and opinions about continued usage of honorifics vary from person to person. Not to mention how this habitual deferring and being deferred to by various means of polite speech tends to decide hierarchies between people, if only on the level of language. (An example would be how, previously, Korean translations of conversations between spouses would have the wife naturally speaking up to the husband and the husband speaking down to the wife.) But of course in the German source text there is no such language hierarchy, meaning the translator has to write this into the translation. Korean translators have to determine for themselves whether and when to employ polite forms of speech and honorifics in dialogues and sentences, which would fall under the category of translating the unspoken. 　　I had to find solutions to this myself while translating Hermann Hesse’s Narziß und Goldmund (Narcissus and Goldmund). Certain elements of the novel make it tricky to apply Korean forms of address, and the amount of dialogue between the two central characters was significant. The novel is set in what seems medieval times, though the exact period is unspecified. Narziß and Goldmund meet as (assistant) teacher and student at a Catholic cloister school, and become intimate friends. So I wasn’t sure what degree of politeness I should use in rendering their dialogue. Another issue was how to translate the dialogue between Goldmund and the various women (of different statuses and circumstances) he meets. For instance, when the student Goldmund leaves the school and has a chance physical encounter with the wandering Lise, should these two converse in polite form or informal form? If at first meeting they were to use the polite form, should they continue to do so even after having slept together? When Goldmund falls in love with the daughter of a knight, which polite form should these two people of different social rank use when speaking to each other? Should that form be historically accurate or should it reflect modern usage? Or should the emphasis perhaps be on what readers today would find most natural and easy to read? These were some of the questions I had to answer. But of course the choices I made regarding forms of speech only reflect one of many possible ways to translate this novel. 　　The use of honorifics in translation tends to reflect the general values or conventions of the target culture, in this case Korean culture, but I would like to address a somewhat different aspect. In translation there are several areas where the translator’s individual ethics and beliefs can play a significant role, and the use of polite forms of speech and how one chooses to translate a certain word are, I would say, determined by the individuality of the translator. It goes without saying that translation is an act that can be open to active intervention by the translator. I want to highlight this because translated language, and in particular the translated language of literary works (which encompasses not just diction, but voice, tone, manner of speech, and attitude), is necessarily influenced by the language of Korean literature, and will itself in time suffuse the language of Korean literature.   How do you select the authors or works you translate?   As I see it, choosing what to translate is the moment a translation begins. So for me, asking how is the translation? is fundamentally the same as asking what is it a translation of? 　　Having said that, when I first started, I had no specific criteria for selecting what to translate. I knew nothing about German writers and literature then, and lacked the knowledge to even select a work. Not only that, I was not at all—and am still not—someone who translates because they are proficient in a language. I dived into translation headfirst, and so in the beginning I failed to choose the right translation projects. As with writing, translation was a slow, roundabout process for me. It took a long time for me to reach a point where I could decide what to translate, and be satisfied with that decision. 　　Though I still have a strong desire to translate work I’ve discovered myself, I’ve also been fortunate in having editors who have recommended wonderful and captivating authors to me, authors whose work I then went on to translate. These include Fernando Pessoa’s Livro do Desassossego (The Book of Disquiet), W. G. Sebald’s Schwindel. Gefühle (Vertigo), Robert Walser’s Der Spaziergang (The Walk), and Peter Handke’s Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire (The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire). Pessoa, Sebald, and Walser are all writers I came to know in Germany and then subsequently, almost as if by fate, was asked to translate by Korean publishers. The work I encounter through editors’ recommendations tend to be of world-famous writers, and here I have an advantage in that I can ride on the coattails of these by all accounts excellent and famous authors; still, the translations I’m fondest of and prefer are of relatively unknown writers and works (at least in Korea) that I somehow came across, and went on to introduce to editors and eventually to translate and publish. The Iranian writer Sadegh Hedayat’s Boof-e koor (The Blind Owl), the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s A paixão segundo G.H. (The Passion According to G.H.), for instance, and most recently the Swiss writer of Romanian origin I’m set to translate, Aglaja Veteranyi. 　　The most important element for me in selecting what to translate is whether or not the language of the original chimes with my translated language. Because I seek out literature that is unfamiliar, new, minor, I try to avoid work that has strong popular appeal or is fashionable or has a universal style. I prioritize my own pleasure in the writing as its potential translator. Writing that makes the translator’s heart beat faster to the extent she has to pause in her translation, unable to progress any further from fevered excitement, having become entirely, unseeingly enthralled (quite literally)—this is the kind of work I like to translate. I am the antithesis of the translator as researcher, who analyses the text with measured composure, and of whom there seem to be a fair number among the truly excellent translators). 　　The sentences I prefer in the original tend to be uncomplicated yet difficult to render distinctly in Korean, simultaneously simple and ambiguous, avant-garde and beautiful. These are sentences that will always be translated differently from one person to the next according to their idiosyncratic language, and this for me is a joy, a challenge, and a pleasure. That there is pleasure in translation is, after all, why I translate. Another criterion is that the work must be something I would want to read in Korean. This is another important reason I translate. If I read a work in German first and it makes me shiver, that frisson arises from an intense desire to read the work in Korean.   Do you think your creative writing impacts your translation or vice versa? If so, in what ways does one influence the other? (In terms of word choice, expressions, sentence structure, narrative structure, way of thinking, and so on.)   As someone who writes and translates, I think they are both one and separate in that one influences the other. I find with time that I experience the divide between the two a lot less acutely. So it’s difficult to say what precedes the other in exerting influence. When I started translating, the Korean publishing world viewed translation a little differently than it does now. I remember an editor telling me that a good translator shouldn’t have style, i.e., their own, and must act as a clear panel of glass that allows the original work to pass through. I didn’t have a single published translation yet, but I did have hopes of doing so, and found the editor’s words disconcerting and disappointing. As I understood it, the editor, realizing my wish to translate, seemed to be hinting that a writer like myself wasn’t suited to translation. What I think now is this: No translator can be without style. It’s only that their style is lesser known (than that of a writer). Style is one’s preferred language, and translation after all is the act of preferring (favoring, choosing) within the bounds permitted by the source text. 　　Since I started translating I have come to understand writing as a process of translation, of transporting what is nonverbal into the verbal, into words. This understanding has freed up my writing. And through mistranslations which are bound to occur now and then, creativity can forge a new, unexpected path, in the way mutations can present radical change. 　　Anyone who writes yearns to experience freedom through and from language, while yearning to be free of it. Which is why they destroy, expand, transplant, embrace, and experiment. They take their writing far into the distance, they bring it back, they observe how the language shifts and changes as though it had substance, then they plant this in their own soil. This is one of the ways in which they translate.   To translate literature from another language, it must be necessary to fully understand not just the literary language but also the vernacular language and cultural context. Could you share your own efforts in this regard?   There’s actually not a lot I can do in that regard. I began translating not long after I first started learning German, and I had almost no points of contact with Germany or its culture in my personal life. When I returned to Korea, there was zero opportunity to speak or to hear German. So I did the only thing I could do by myself, which was to read as much literature as possible in German. I wanted to know the German of writers rather than nonwriters, and written rather than spoken German. 　　Because I learned German not through speech but through writing, this language remains a primarily textual language for me. When I was in Germany, I enjoyed listening to radio dramas at bedtime more than I did conversing with other people. I didn’t understand everything, but what I enjoyed, I think, was listening to the cadences of dialogue, enunciation, voice, and the different ways the actors controlled their emotion as they spoke. I still prefer audio plays to the easily accessible audiobooks. Even when I can’t follow the plot or what is being said, I find the recitation and enunciation of the actors combined with auditory presentation itself stimulating. 　　It’s become something of a routine for me to travel to Germany when I write. I intend to escape speech and seclude myself in writing, but an unintended consequence is that it’s prompted me to gain some perspective on the local culture. When I am in Germany, I stay at a cottage near Berlin, hardly venturing out and spending most of my time writing or, occasionally, gardening; even so, swapping locations does alter the language environment. The rare times I visit a cafe, I listen to people place their orders. Even the simplest order of half a loaf of rye bread, a cheese sandwich, or a cup of coffee can be so particular to the speaker, I find it thrilling. 　　More recently, I had the opportunity to recite a German literary text and realized that there was a way to familiarize oneself with a language through recitation. The recitation was for a German art film, and came about because the role required someone who spoke German with a foreign accent. (I don’t think the German audience would have understood every word of what I recited in the film). This experience prompted my more recent forays into recitations and reading performances in Korea. 　　An Italian friend I know in Germany, who happens to be a theater actor, told me that memorizing dialogue and reciting lines on stage helped her in becoming better acquainted with the language.   Translated by Emily Yae Won

  by Bae Suah

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  [Writer's Notes] [Draft I] Writer-Translators on Their Craft — Lee Juhye

  This section features five respected writer-translators who reminisce, reflect, and ruminate on their experiences of writing and translating. Their opinions correspond, but also refract from each other to varying degrees given their unique, personal backgrounds. The section features their abridged answers.—Ed.   How did you first get into translation/creative writing and was there a specific opportunity that motivated you to get into it?  Unexpectedly, this question took me back to a time in my early childhood before I began school. My father and I were walking one day, just the two of us, down a country road. A field so green as to dazzle the eye stretched all around, and in the middle stood a white sign covered in large Chinese characters. I hadn’t yet mastered the Korean alphabet, which we learn first, but a familiar Chinese character on the sign caught my eye for some reason. I gestured to the sign and announced, “That’s the character for jade!” My father raised his voice an octave and sang my praises. His eyes glowed with love and admiration. At that moment, the rice leaves all around glittered with dewdrops. The air seemed to vibrate with laughter. Perhaps I was experiencing the thrill of decoding for the first time, like the child who has learned to read street signs for whom familiar streets are no longer the same. Things that rest outside conscious perception because we’re ignorant of them flood into our awareness when we gain knowledge, and this is how humans grow. Language is the starting point for this process. So, confronted with this single character in an unexpected time and space, I experienced the thrill of decoding and became fascinated by the world of decoding and meaning.  　　To go back and answer your question, I first became interested in English to Korean translation while teaching English at a high school in my mid-twenties. One of my students said he wanted to go weekend sightseeing in Seoul and asked for tips on places to see and how to ride the subway. Isn’t that cute? I encouraged him, going so far as to draw diagrams in his notebook. When I met him a week later, he’d visited a large bookstore in Gwanghwamun and picked up a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five as a present for me. He must have thought I’d like an English book since I was an English teacher, but he was wrong. I did read it, though, and was transfixed by it. I was drawn to the famous sentence “So it goes,” which appears as many as 169 times in the story. Without being conscious of it, I wondered how best to translate this sentence and stay true to its meaning. I even looked into how other translators had rendered it. Before long, I was translating the whole book into Korean in my spare time. Even though no one had solicited this work and I was its only reader, I found the work of refining the text and fine-tuning the sentences, changing them this way and that, quite fascinating. This amounted to my first full-fledged translation.   When we speak of “style,” we often think of it as the representative element of a text that displays the writer’s signature personality, but in the case of translation, at times the text may inevitably have to be adjusted to fit linguistic norms and conventions in the target language. This sometimes referred to as “the betrayal of translation.” Have you ever agonized over this issue?  To give my own spin on the famous phrase “translation is treason,” I think translation is the act of jumping into an existing relationship and turning it into a three-way, risking censure. Limits inherent to the author-reader-translator relationship inevitably lead to difficulty. The translator is commonly compared to a bridge or a scale, but considering that a fair and just translation can never exist, then the translator is but a shaky scale or suspension bridge. A perfectly horizontal scale does not exist, and a scale that tips sharply in the direction of the author or reader is of no use. Since I’m human and not an impartial scale, I tip towards the reader if I come across an unforthcoming sentence. I want to provide a helpful interpretation. The translated version then becomes long and strained, or worse, unnecessary annotations are furnished, and the bell starts tolling for me, warning of failure. Then days of work must be deleted before it’s too late. 　　The more creative the writer, the more glaring the failure of the translator. If the writer exercises his or her intellect by using neologisms or wordplay, the translator cries tears of despair. If you ask me to translate in a neat ordered way something that has meaning simply by its destruction of order, then despite myself, I cry, “You must be kidding!” How many times has an aesthetics of destruction in the source language ended up a sorry mess in the target language? Not long ago, I translated a part of Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Comedian as the Letter C.” The word “nincompated” was not in the dictionary. This seemingly plausible word is actually a neologism combining the words “nincompoop” and “pate.” When put together, these childish-sounding words seem quite camouflaged within the longer, elegant term. In these cases, is it possible to translate the original meaning and the writer’s intent? I confess that I failed and was only clumsily able to patch something together.     Could you, as a translator, compare the works of authors you enjoy translating and the tendencies of your own creative work?  Somehow I ended up translating a few books in succession by P. D. James, the so-called queen of British crime fiction—two of her Cordelia Gray books along with her only work of science fiction. Born Phyllis Dorothy James, she took her pen name to avoid being looked down on as a female author in the society of the time, and although she was late starting her career, she wrote steadily into her nineties. For these reasons, I both identified with her and admired her immensely. About An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, she said, “I wanted to have a young heroine of courage and intelligence who faces the problems of life with a determination to be successful in a job which everyone else thinks she won’t be able to do.” It touched my heart to discover that a middle-aged writer successful in her career not only intended to write a book as a gift to young women, but she actually did it. Also, her sole work of science fiction, The Children of Men, takes place in a dystopian world where people have lost the ability to reproduce, but the writer does not lose hope for humanity even in this atmosphere of gloom and despair. She draws the world dark as if sunken in a deep pit, but does not deny the possibility of light shining in at some point, and her hope is grounded in her belief in the power of human goodness. The struggle for positivity is apparent in her writing, and I want to write with this orientation, too. I don’t want to depict a “this is why” world but an “even so, but nevertheless” world. In addition, that James wrote An Unsuitable Job for a Woman at the age of fifty-two and The Children of Men at seventy-two gives me great comfort and encouragement because I started writing novels at a later age as well. Whenever I panic that the time has passed for me to be writing, I think of her and regain control over my thoughts. I tell myself to do the things that I can do in the here and now—read, write, translate, do the things I like steadily each day, every day. Nothing is stronger than the simple force of doing something every day.   Do you think your creative writing impacts your translation or vice versa? If so, in what ways does one influence the other? (In terms of word choice, expressions, sentence structure, narrative structure, way of thinking, and so on.)  Perhaps at an unconscious level my writing and translation influence each other, but consciously, I try to keep them apart. Ultimately, both kinds of work involve command of Korean, don’t they? This means that I’m more careful not to leave my personal mark on a work when translating than when writing. Once I was laboring to translate a favorite author’s favorite work. I fell in love with it at a glance. But an acquaintance of mine who has read much of my writing saw the translation and said it read like one of my novels. Hearing this, I felt as if I’d been struck. I’d been too greedy. I thought I’d put all my love into the work, but I ended up sullying it with my fingerprints. Since then, I’ve been careful to maintain distance from a work I’m translating. But of course, even so, I always strive to use pure Korean rather than Sino-Korean language, and find equivalents for adjectives and adverbs rather than omit them. These are habits based on my personal preference. I also think it’s important to adjust the flow so that a Korean speaker will have a sense of the original rhythm when reading the translated sentences. One gauge of readability is that the sentences join together naturally when read aloud. 　　As for the influence of translation on writing fiction, at times I doubt whether I can really write sentences of my own after living a life of translating other writers. I write fiction today, and I can’t afford to miss out on the spirit of the times, or lose my sense of belonging to this generation or my grasp of contemporary writing style, but when translating the text of other writers, especially those deceased, I’m sometimes anxious as to whether I’m letting go of these things. Of course, the universality of literature transcends time, but my identity as a person writing Korean fiction in Korean society is something that I must not forgo when I write. For this reason, I fear that my identity as a novelist will be compromised if I’m immersed in a translation for a long time.   Writers are translators and translators are writers. They write about the world and translate the world for readers. It takes agility to cross over many worlds; doing so likely fosters a unique identity all its own. In your opinion, are there are any differences between the “Me before writing,” the “writing Me,” the “Me before translating,” the “translating Me,” and the “Me writing and translating”?  As mentioned above, I consciously try to keep my identities as a translator and a writer distinct. I even think of my identities as a homemaker and a parent as separate. I hope this doesn’t come across sounding like pseudoscience, but I also feel that extended periods of translating and of fiction writing activate different areas of the brain. This means that I find the moment of switching from one to the other very difficult. At these times, I make quite a fuss rearranging my desk, changing my brand of tea, and trying out different workspaces. This is somewhat peripheral to the question, however. The processes of the two kinds of work and the attitudes that accompany them are quite different. Should I compare the different kinds of writer’s block as an example? In translation, I get writer’s block when I absolutely cannot understand a sentence. It’s the feeling of coming up against a cliff or a rocky crag amidst the overall consistency of the work. At times like this, I take a deep breath, pause the ticking clock, and take time to grapple with the sentence, one on one. This fight may fade to nothing in a few hours, or it may take days. The important thing is that the fight be resolved at some point. And then, after a moment, when I’m breathing evenly, I can pass on to the next sentence that awaits. The sublime proverb “As you sow, so shall you reap” applies to translation, even if a fear of translating something incorrectly always lurks somewhere in the background. I’m deeply reassured to know that a path will reopen once I have overcome my writer’s block, and that I’ll come to a definite end point. In this sense, translation is not solitary work. I have text to guide me more accurately than any map, and I’m always aware of the readers, my companions. Also, translation can be classified as traditional labor in that it requires steady effort and physical exertion as well as a fixed amount of time. Indeed, it is for these simple and honest qualities that I like it. 　　On the other hand, creative writing is a very lonely endeavor. It’s like walking along a trail without a map, or rather, making the trail as I walk. I must push through on my own power if I’m blocked, and after I’ve come through a difficult passage, the next sentence is not automatically there waiting. A trail forms wherever I go. It is lonely and dreary. In fact, I need not push through a blocked section at all. I can leave the trail and take a detour, or abandon the journey altogether. Who knows? That’s how easy it is to deceive oneself in this job. Just as it is easy to go back and give up, it is also easy to soldier on to one’s ruin. It is a very cruel land, and there’s no solid rear guard to back one up like there is in translation. Simple and honest hard work is not always the solution to problems in this field. In conclusion, I like myself as a translator, but pity myself as a writer.   Translated by Kari Schenk

  by Lee Juhye

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  [Writer's Notes] [Draft I] Writer-Translators on Their Craft — Bora Chung

  This section features five respected writer-translators who reminisce, reflect, and ruminate on their experiences of writing and translating. Their opinions correspond, but also refract from each other to varying degrees given their unique, personal backgrounds. The section features their abridged answers.—Ed.   Do you believe that the order in which you took up writing and translation has influenced you? If so, why might that be? If having my name published officially as the author or translator of record is the basis by which I can determine which came first, I would say that writing came first. I first began writing in 1998, when I was still in college. I received the affirmation I needed to turn to creative writing as a career when I received an award from a writing contest that was hosted by my school. Translation came about two years later, in 2000. At the time, I co-translated together with a friend of mine from school. Our first translation was of a work originally published in English (Tolerance by Hendrik Willem Van Loon), but now I work more on Russian and Polish fiction, which I majored in. 　　But come to think of it, I’ve been translating since I was in junior high and high school. When I was in junior high, I used to practice translating to study English, and in high school, I turned to translating because I wanted to learn French better, which I was taking as a second foreign language. I practiced by translating my favorite foreign works into Korean. I still remember vividly how much fun I had translating the plays of Oscar Wilde. On the other hand, I don’t believe I had much fun translating French literature although I adored the language. I think this was a huge reason I decided to change majors in college. 　　I didn’t learn writing from anyone. Writing can bring me so much joy, but sometimes I still feel like I’m walking through a haze. Although, I suspect I would still feel like I’m walking in a haze even if I had studied writing in earnest. In any case, that was how I felt when I first started writing and that’s how I feel now. However, with translations, I feel much more comfortable with the fact that I’m working on existing works by authors of much renown and expertise—works that have been time-tested and guaranteed for their quality. Furthermore, the fact that I can look up the dictionary for the meanings of the words and expressions found in these works also gives me a sense of security. When you’re writing and you get stuck in a rut, you have to wait, sometimes for an improbably long time, for inspiration to strike again. With translation, if I run into a problem, I need only identify the source of the problem, do my research, and pick up where I left off. Translation seems to provide more certainty in that sense, compared to creative writing. 　　This is why I make a conscious effort to observe and accept the worldview, the expressive ways, and the thinking of the authors whom I translate. The worlds they lived in and the world that I live in are very different; this is why there’s a limit to simply copying or mimicking the elements or plots the authors have used. This means I won’t risk falling into the danger of plagiarism anytime soon which also brings me a measure of comfort. As I’m translating the ways the authors have introduced various characters into their stories, their linguistic characteristics, and their unique descriptions, I absorb all of these things, both consciously and unconsciously. When a work is especially difficult to translate, that means I have to think harder and dig deeper. In that sense, I’m influenced by the literature during the translating process. When deciding whom I want to translate, I tend to choose authors whom I admire, both in the sense of who they are as a person and in how they describe the world.   When we speak of “style,” we often think of it as the representative element of a text that displays the writer’s signature personality, but in the case of translation, the text may inevitably have to be adjusted at times to fit linguistic norms and conventions in the target language. This is sometimes referred to as “the betrayal of translation.” Have you ever agonized over this?  This is something that has always been an issue for me. I believe I will wrestle with this dilemma for as long as I’m working as a translator. After translating the Hendrik Willem Van Loon work that I mentioned before, the second work that I translated was Sklepy cynamonowe (The Street of Crocodiles), 1934, and Sanatorium pod klepsydrą (Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass), 1937, by the Polish author Bruno Schulz (1892–1942). Schulz lived a life of poverty and misfortune, and as he was Jewish, he was shot and killed by the Gestapo during the Second World War. Schulz was an amazingly gifted painter and novelist. In translating his work, I realized that he was not someone who constituted a narrative along traditional plotlines but that he was first and foremost a painter who used language as yet another medium to express his art. This made things rather challenging for me. I’m a person who understands the world through words and text; my way of seeing the world is completely different from someone like Schulz, who saw the world in colors, lines, sides, images, and even moving images. I attempted to translate Schulz’s sentences into Korean, but this resulted in sentences that were completely incomprehensible according to the norms and customs of the Korean language. 　　Schulz had the tendency of describing images and scenes using an endless stream of relative pronouns (with a typical sentence running on for five to eight lines; translating Schulz was such a painful exercise that I actually stopped to count how long the sentences were). Because of this, I couldn’t translate the sentences in their original order; rather, I had to translate the sentences in reverse order, from the back to the front, in order for all the connections to make sense. In some cases, I had to chop up the sentences and later reconstitute them. I loved reading Schulz and regularly became awestruck by his genius with each page of his that I translated, but at the same time, I wondered whether I had been too arrogant to think I could translate his works or worse, whether I could do his works justice. The Schulz anthology was first published in a set of two volumes in 2003; ten years later, in 2013, Eulyoo Publishing published the complete works again as a single volume. During that time, I had to edit the translations extensively to the point that it felt as if I were retranslating them all over again. Even now, though, I’m still haunted by the fear that I butchered his works. I’m truly, deeply sorry to Bruno Schulz. 　　Translating The Foundation Pit (1930) written by the Russian author Andrei Platonov (1899–1951), was also a demanding exercise. Platonov is another very eccentric author in a way that is different from Schulz. He uses more traditional sentences (both in terms of length and in their grammatical sense), but his sentences are difficult to understand. 　　For instance, take the sentence “they were all born without any skin.” I interpreted this sentence to describe the babies that were born to malnourished mothers during the famines of the Communist Revolution and the resulting civil war. These emaciated babies came out red and tiny, looking as if they had no epidermis but just a hypodermis or a deeper layer of skin underneath their wrinkly exterior. However, it was impossible to convey this meaning to the readers in an intuitive way without adding some sort of footnotes or additional explanations from my end. 　　Platonov would often employ these turns of phrase. He had a unique point of view that he reflected in his writings. The influence of the writers and philosophers who impacted him was very evident in his writings as well. However, the world Platonov experienced, from the Communist Revolution, civil war, the early social transformations during the Soviet era, all the way to the oppression under Stalin, was far removed from the lives experienced by the general readership in Korea. If the translator were to provide further explanations on the ideas of the different Russian philosophers who influenced Platonov, that would only serve to exhaust the reader. That’s why with Platonov, rather than worrying about the norms and customs of the language, I was more concerned with whether or not I had the ability to fully translate the ideas that the author wanted to get across. 　　I have many more of these episodes that have accumulated over the last twenty years of my translating career. As a translator, I believe these concerns are valid and a way to honor the translator. There is no such thing as a perfect translation and in the process of translation, some meanings and nuances are bound to get lost. This means that I will forever be tormented in my work. But I can’t stop doing what I do. The world is full of amazing works of literature that are too beautiful to ignore.   What do you consider to be the attraction or appeal of the source language that you translate from, and/or of the fiction written in that language?  The Russian language has a very difficult, complex grammar structure. And Polish happens to be seven times more complicated than Russian. They’re both Slavic languages, with the unique grammatical characteristics that Slavic languages have, along with the particular thinking and worldview that are embedded in their context. After I entered graduate school, I found myself having to study Russian, Polish, and Old Church Slavic at the same time. This was incredibly difficult, but the exercise also taught me to better understand the perspectives and systems through which the Slavs see the world. This understanding came as an awakening of sorts. In fact, it changed my life. Although I may not have been as fluent in Russian or Polish as a native speaker and ended up making mistakes, I had a good understanding of the fundamental systems behind the language. This meant that I could at least share in the Slavic perspectives and ways of comprehending the world. The syntax of the Slavic languages is admittedly complicated, but so is the world we live in. In some sense, the Slavic syntax can actually bring some sort of order to the world, a way of categorizing and explaining the complexities around us. This is precisely why I love Slavic languages. Since the Slavic peoples share fundamentally similar syntax and semantics, once you are well enough versed in Russian and Polish, then you can also have a basic understanding of an adjacent language such as Ukrainian, which is grammatically similar and spoken in a country that is geographically close to the other countries. It almost feels as if the Slavic-speaking regions are one community; if you know one Slavic language, it could be your gateway to their world. 　　With literature, it’s a little different. Russian literature can be categorized into pre- and post- revolution era literature (the 1905 Revolution and the Communist Revolution), in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I particularly enjoy twentieth-century Revolution-era works and the literature of early Soviet Russia. The writings are bold and confident, with an audacity that only people who are certain in their belief that they have changed the world with their bare hands can have. The Communist Revolution was the first and only massive social experiment of its kind done in human history. Only twentieth-century Soviet literature can provide such a reading experience. However, there was also the shock that came with the realization that the Revolution, which was believed to usher in a completely new era, ended in a bloodbath, as well as the fear and despair that became widespread with the start of Stalin’s violent oppressions and crackdowns. This experience is also something that can only be found in early Soviet-era literature. No other country or era has this literary tradition, one where soaring hopes for a new utopia and the despair of a coming dystopia are juxtaposed in the same timeframe. 　　Poland was also impacted by the Communist Revolution, because the 1918 Revolution brought down the Russian Empire, bringing an end to Russian colonialism and as a result, newfound independence to the state of Poland. In fact, after the First World War ended in 1919, Poland enjoyed the most liberated, dynamic period in its history. The twenty years leading up to the Second World War in 1939, is referred to as the “inter-war period” in Polish history. Bruno Schulz, Witold Gombrowicz, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, and other such giants of Polish literature all hailed from this era. Inter-war Polish literature is very experimental, unique, and captivating. Since their language is more linguistically complicated than say, Russian, Polish writers seemed to write from a more heightened, interesting artistic frenzy; they unleashed their creative fury in their works. I love that distinctive sense of madness found in inter-war era Polish literature.   How do you select the authors or works you translate?  I tend to choose authors or works that are loved and appreciated in their home countries but have yet to be discovered by Korean readers. In terms of genre, I’m drawn to utopian/dystopian literature. Sometimes, I make suggestions to my publisher about certain works that I believe will have some commercial appeal. The Foundation Pit by Platonov was one such case, as well as Wyjście z cienia (Coming Out of the Shadow) by the Polish SF writer Janusz Zajdel (1938–1985). 　　Because Russia and Poland both experienced Communism in the twentieth century, Korea effectively had no exchange with these countries for a long time due to ideological differences. There are still many great authors who haven’t been discovered by Korean readers. Russia and Poland both produced many compelling writers and works in the early twentieth century, during a time when Korea was under Japanese colonial rule and therefore stripped of all diplomatic rights. Later, due to the Korean War, Korea cut off all ties with the Communist bloc. This blocked any and all cultural exchange between Korea and Eastern Europe including Poland. This year, Russia and Korea are celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the establishment of bilateral diplomatic ties, which has led to many online commemorative events. However, it’s unfortunate that Korea doesn’t seem to have the same level of interest for Polish literature. Polish culture and the arts are very different from the Asian cultural tradition and also quite removed from the Western European or even the US and UK cultures which Koreans are relatively more familiar with. Therefore, Polish culture can come as a refreshing shock to many Koreans. I’m glad that more Polish literature has been introduced to Korean readers following the 2018 Nobel Prize win of Olga Tokarczuk. The SF writer Stanisław Lem (1921–2006) is also an amazing author who has penned many fabulous works, and yet he isn’t well known in Korea. The few works of his that have been translated have all gone out of print. 　　Meanwhile in Russia, when Stalin’s suppressions began in earnest, the regime confiscated the publications of dissident authors or banned them from publishing anything. Many of these works were buried somewhere deep in the KGB archives and forgotten long after Stalin and the authors died. Some of Platonov’s works were seized by the KGB as well and left buried for nearly fifty years until they were re-discovered in the 2000s. The SF writer Ivan Yefremov (1908–1972), was highly recognized by academia, the Soviet regime, and his readers for being a superb geologist and adherent of Communism, but after his death, the KGB broke into his home and confiscated all his writings. Since then, he was all but erased from the annals of Russian literature. No one knows why. Some other authors, such as the brothers Arkady (1925–1991) and Boris (1933–2012) Strugatsky, were both popular not just in Russia but globally, with many quality works under their belt. And yet, they haven’t been properly introduced to Korean readers. I suspect this could be because they only wrote genre fiction as science fiction writers, and therefore were relegated to a niche category. There are so many interesting Russian and Polish works that are fun and commercial with high artistic merit. If these are not published in Korea simply because they are works in genre fiction or popular fiction, that would be a huge loss for the Korean publishing industry and for our cultural community as well.   Writers are translators and translators are writers. They write about the world and translate the world for readers. It takes agility to cross over many worlds; doing so likely fosters a unique identity all its own. In your opinion, are there any differences between the “Me before writing,” the “writing Me,” the “Me before translating,” the “translating Me,” and the “Me writing and translating”?  I don’t remember much about myself in the days before I began writing or translating, as that was such a long time ago. There are times when I’m not engaged in creative writing, but I consider myself to be constantly in translating mode. 　　When I’m writing, I would say that the stories come to me, almost like they are little gifts, rather than that I write the stories myself. All I’m doing is simply transferring these gifts that I’ve received into text form. This is why I believe creative writing requires a very agile sensibility, physical strength, and, above all, time. When I’m feeling tired or pressed for time, I can’t find the energy to listen calmly to the story that is beckoning me, much less put it down in writing. The busier I am the harder writing becomes. Sometimes, when this busy period goes on for too long, I become fearful that I may never be able to write again. And yet, stories still find a way to reach me. I’m very grateful for that. 　　Sometimes, when I show my Korean editors my writing, they respond by saying, “This Korean doesn’t feel natural,” or “I don’t understand this sentence.” Because I’ve seen similar sentences in Russian or Polish, I sometimes find myself employing a similar construct in the Korean language. This doesn’t mean to say that I memorize certain sentences or expressions and repurpose them; rather, I reflect the Russian syntax or Polish syntax in the Korean sentences. When my editors see that, they find it interesting and sometimes bizarre. They suggest I change those expressions since they will seem foreign to Korean readers. But I ask them to leave the sentences as they are, because it was my intention to jolt the reader. As Viktor Shklovsky once said, art exists to stop or slow our automated processes of thinking and make it seem foreign once more. To reach that end, the language used in culture and the arts must be sufficiently “bent,” unlike the language used in our everyday lives. (I love Shklovsky by the way. Three cheers for Russian formalism.) 　　My identity as a translator and my identity as a writer are connected organically. I’m always translating. Even now, I should really be going through the edits of my translation, but I’m taking a break to answer this list of questions as it looked more interesting. My editor would no doubt be sorry to hear this. 　　Because I have been teaching Russian language, literature, and culture for over ten years, I tend to read a lot of papers and dissertations on Russian literature. In many cases, I find myself translating these papers into Korean to use as teaching material. When I was in graduate school in the US, I was trained to do my own translations of the original works, rather than use the translations of others when coming up with class materials or writing my own dissertation (for copyright issues). To attract the attention of my students of Russian language or culture, I read Russian newspapers to them or translate/summarize certain articles to be shared in class. 　　I also like to summarize and translate key current events stories coming out of Russia, such as news on Russia’s development of the world’s first COVID-19 vaccine, news of other drugs in the pipeline, the pandemic situation in Russia, and the armed conflict or disputes in neighboring countries, and share the links of those news articles on my social media for the benefit of my friends. When the recent poisoning of the Russian democracy activist Alexei Navalny was reported in the Korean media, I shared links of those stories on my social media. On seeing those pictures of Navalny, my Russian friend inquired what the posts were about, so I translated those Korean news stories into Russian for her. I follow the pages of feminist groups in Poland to stay on top of Polish social events and the reactions from the feminist community in that country. When I see interesting Polish news articles, I share their links on my social media together with a brief translation of the news article. In Korea, the most recent feminist issues were the unconstitutionality ruling by the Constitutional Court on the abortion ban and the revisions to the Mother and Child Health Act. It was Polish women who organized the “Black Protest” to demand that the legalization of abortion and women’s rights be placed on the political agenda. I myself have participated in the Black Protests held in Korea as well as the protests calling for the lifting of the abortion ban. Whenever I see relevant news on the pages of the Polish feminist groups that I follow, I translate those findings to share with my friends, so that we can all see the conversations that progressive Polish citizens are having. 　　To me, translation is my foremost avenue of learning what people are going through and what they’re thinking in the countries and cultures that I love, and sharing those findings with the people around me. When authors who are smarter and more knowledgeable about the world than I am put down their thoughts in rich, thought-provoking language, then I can share that knowledge with others through the art of translation. Translating is a way of expanding my own world. That is why these perspectives are often clearly reflected in my own writing.   Translated by Amber Hyun Jung Kim  

  by Bora Chung

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  [Writer's Notes] [Draft I] Writer-Translators on Their Craft — Choe Yun

  This section features five respected writer-translators who reminisce, reflect, and ruminate on their experiences of writing and translating. Their opinions correspond, but also refract from each other to varying degrees given their unique, personal backgrounds. The section features their abridged answers.—Ed. What came first for you: writing or translation?  Though I read a lot of foreign literature translated into Korean during my middle and high school years, writing my own works was first. When I was fifteen, I published my first story in the school journal. Though my memory is a bit hazy, during winter break in my third year of middle school, I observed a group of aspiring painters at an atelier I was attending to learn drawing and wrote a piece titled “Ruptures” on their growing pains. Although this was when I was still young, before I officially debuted, I was overwhelmed with the happiness of completing a work as I finished the manuscript and sent it to the editors. That’s how I discovered the allure of writing. A few friends and I voluntarily created a literature club called “Pine and Bamboo” (a metaphor symbolizing our unchanging friendship), asking a visiting philosophy lecturer to be our faculty advisor, and I remember we held a kind of showcase for selected works. During high school, when things were financially difficult, I gave my friends short stories or plays that I’d written instead of presents for their birthdays. 　　It was only later that I was awakened to translation. At the time, it seemed like the trend was to read foreign literature in their original languages. We learned English as our primary foreign language and French or German as the secondary one in high school. Somehow, I discovered some foreign-language books in the library and after reading them in their original language, I started to translate into Korean parts I was uncertain about in order to more fully understand them, or paragraphs that moved me. That’s likely how I discovered the joys of translation. In high school, I attempted to translate parts of James Joyce’s Dubliners and Albert Camus’ Betwixt and Between, and struggled a great deal. Looking back on it now, they were difficult-to-translate works and I’d tackled them without knowing their particular beauty. I remember being filled with pride that I’d partially translated a foreign work into Korean. Back then, I was slightly crazed about literature, so I’d charge full-force at anything related to language. After I entered college, I began reading the foreign texts listed on various course syllabi, and I think reading foreign literature and literary theory frequently demanded a kind of fundamental training in translation.   What do you consider to be the attraction or appeal of the source language that you translate from, and/or of the fiction written in that language?  French became my primary foreign language when I decided to study abroad in France, but my thoughts on French language and literature are also connected to why I chose France to study abroad in the first place. When I was in college, it was an extremely dark political time in Korean history. Throughout my four years there, the college would shut down for at least one semester without exception because of the student protests. After I graduated from the Korean Language and Literature Department and entered graduate school, I started thinking about studying abroad, and rather than the United States, which I was already more or less familiar with, I was interested in the ancient European civilizations. And so, there are two reasons as to why I chose France, and thus started translating Korean literature into French. 　　First, to those that were college students in the 1970s in the midst of Korea’s bleak political circumstances, it felt like the disposition of literary research was somehow lacking, that it needed a scientific methodology. And then we found structuralism, something that wasn’t well-known to us in those days. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Anthropologie structurale and Tristes tropiques opened my eyes. Even though I didn’t entirely agree with structuralism’s views on literature, I felt as though it confronted the primitive fundamentals in a scientific manner. I also encountered Roland Barthes’s writings. I ended up writing my thesis on these topics, and these intellectual interests originated from the representative texts of structuralism which were of course written in French. 　　Second, I remember how reading works by French writers resolved many of the deficiencies in Korean literature at the time, which felt stifling for the students who had an endless affection for Korean literature. For a young female literature student in those days, French literature, simultaneously sensuous yet rational, seemed to possess many things lacking in Korean literature, which had been deemed “hard-shelled literature” due to its Confucian and patriarchal nature, and it felt like being able to breathe again. Moreover, it seemed liberated in that it represented reality in experimental and diverse ways, and I naturally became deeply involved in French literature. 　　While I didn’t know very many languages, the general assumption that French was superior in representing human interiority and the depths of the world also decisively influenced my choice in French as my second language. When I left to study abroad, I only packed two books: an unabridged Korean dictionary and a copy of an indirect translation of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.   How do you select the authors or works you translate?  My primary criteria in choosing what to translate are the work’s literary merits and whether it demonstrates modern Korean reality in a sensitive and complex way. I tried to introduce a diverse array of authors and works that proved Korean literature was thriving to French readers who basically knew nothing about Korean literature back then. But before giving these reasons, I need to explain the context. 　　In the 1980s, when I was living in France, the extent to which the average French person knew about Korea was the war and the ensuing division. Korean literature was virtually unknown to the general French reader. As I was repeatedly asked where Korea was, I made a promise to myself: If I became fluent in French, I would devote ten years of my life to introducing Korean literature to French readers. I kept that promise. I started the Korean Literature Series with Actes Sud, and over a period of ten years, I translated and published around twenty works of Korean literature. The support provided first by the Korea Arts & Culture Education Service, and then the Literature Translation Institute of Korea after its establishment, in translating and publishing was a crucial element in continuing the Korean Literature Series. Until then, Korean literature had only been published by university presses in France and even this was rare, so it failed to garner a readership. Having decided to devote ten years of my life, time that could not be easily overlooked, I believed that Korean literature had to go beyond university presses and encounter general readers to become properly known. In this manner, I found a publisher that was open to foreign literature. Professor Raymond Jean, who was my advisor at the time, connected me with Actes Sud, a publisher that had built their reputation through their publications of translations. 　　Though I don’t know if things have greatly changed since then or if there is a diverse readership now, in the 1990s when the Korean Literature Series was first published, Asian literature was carefully selected and read by readers looking for something other than the Western literature they already knew. Within this context, I selected works according to author, theme, and literary tendencies after discussions with the publisher.   To translate literature from another language, it must be necessary to fully understand not just the literary language but also the vernacular language and cultural context. Could you share your own efforts in this regard?  Several years ago, when I was invited to speak at the American Literary Translators Association’s conference, I spoke about translation as “cultural representation”—about translation that revealed the borders between cultures, and translation as an activity that simultaneously erased borders as they revealed them. Literary translation and the problems it poses are all problems of language and culture. Thus, translation becomes a language problem, but because the solution to this problem ultimately becomes an issue of how to represent and make readers of the target language understand another culture, I believe that cultural understanding is absolutely necessary. 　　Whichever way you look at it, the translator must fulfill the role of explaining their own culture to a foreign one, as in literary activities of all genres. With regard to the question, I would like to talk about the issues surrounding two kinds of translation that appear in literary translation. 　　One is a translation that treats the source language’s culture as possibly strange and unsettling to the target language’s readers, and thus erases the unique cultural and linguistic characteristics of the source language—that is, the diverse boundaries between cultures—in order to make it as close as possible to the target language. As it undergoes the dramatic processes of conflicts, fusion, selective exclusion, and connections within the indigenous literary traditions of each country, translation has further developed by planting a foreign culture within a different one. Translation is inherently an activity that is based on cultural exchange and intimacy. And yet exchange and intimacy with a different culture must be distinguished from the problem of “annexion” (annexation) in which one language (culture) absorbs the particularities of another language (culture) through translation. The most representative example of translation that erases borders is what Antoine Berman deemed “annexion” (annexation). That is, a translation that strives to erase cultural boundaries created by the innate characteristics of a certain literature by aiming at “considerate accommodation,” and driven mainly by communication—with the purpose of helping new readers smoothly comprehend an unfamiliar and uneasy foreign culture. Within a translation process that is motivated primarily by facilitating understanding, a work can even be deliberately adapted or edited. 　　The second stance believes the linguistic and cultural particularities of one culture should not be reflected literally but rather that translation should illuminate the complex identity of the source language’s literature by mobilizing all the techniques and insights of translation to reveal these unique characteristics in the target language. This kind of translation preserves the deep and profound relations between two cultures, and I believe it is necessary in forming true readers. While there are numerous schools of translation thought according to the translator, I’m personally on the side of preferring translations that honestly and sensitively convey cultural differences. After all, we have to know the differences between one another in order to someday be rid of them. In particular, Paul Ricoeur’s question on the universal and homogeneous environment of globalization continues to animate those interested in translation. Asking how to preserve ancient civilizations while simultaneously participating in a universal one, how to return to our fundamental origins while remaining modern, Ricoeur once interrogated the problem of differentiation between cultures in the era of globalization. In my opinion, this question provides an important perspective that presses us to remember that translation is a cultural activity, surpassing sheer linguistics.   Have you ever run up against a wall or felt a huge gap when trying to familiarize yourself with the target culture or its vernacular language? Or on the contrary, have you experienced an unexpected closeness or familiarity?  Truthfully, as someone who has only concentrated on translating Korean literature into French, any “walls” or “distance” that I experienced were related to French culture and as a result, didn’t seem like serious issues. This is because my experience studying abroad, my duties teaching French literature as a professor, are rooted in the position of observing France’s changing reality with a steadfast interest—just as I do with Korea’s own cultural changes. While it’s not an example entirely relevant to the question, this doesn’t mean that I never experienced any interesting “walls.” In fact, it was through translation that I fully realized that Korea’s literary customs are unique. For instance, even though France has quarterly literary magazines, they rarely serialize entire novels. Because South Korean authors collect their serializations in literary magazines and later publish them as novels, there are occasionally portions of the work that are repetitive explanations in order to remind the readers of the entire work’s contents during serialization, which the translator has to later rearrange after discussions with the author. Yet this rhetorical repetition is not considered a “stylistic weakness” or “flaw to be avoided” in Korean literature, as it would be in French literature. When translating Korean literature into French, a French editor could see such examples and underline them all in red. Here, one cannot accept all the revisions indicated in red. If repetition, or enumeration, can be considered one of Korean literature’s distinct characteristics, there are an infinite number of translation techniques and methods that will preserve the traces of these characteristics while still ensuring that it doesn’t become a stylistic or literary flaw. 　　Interestingly enough, all the talented translators that I’ve met tend to believe that there is no translation problem that is impossible to solve. They believe (albeit with slight differences) that as long as one has time and love for the languages and cultures of the source and target languages, all translation problems can be resolved, and I’m inclined to agree with their opinion.   Translated by Rachel Min Park

  by Choe Yun

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  [Writer's Notes] [Draft I] Writer-Translators on Their Craft — Park Hyunju

  This section features five respected writer-translators who reminisce, reflect, and ruminate on their experiences of writing and translating. Their opinions correspond, but also refract from each other to varying degrees given their unique, personal backgrounds. The section features their abridged answers.—Ed.   What came first for you: writing or translation?  If the order in which one takes up writing and translation has at all to be considered, I would say that nobody starts with translation, strictly speaking. If you narrowly define translation as converting one language into another, it is something that occurs after the act of writing, and if you define it more broadly as converting one mode of expression to a different mode of expression, then translation is an action that is inherent in the process of writing. There are many people who are born into multilingual environments, and from a young age when they start learning to write, they may write in two languages at once, but I believe this also falls under writing. 　　The question of which comes first, writing or translation, is most often not a question of cognition but rather a perspective on career path. That is to say, it is a question of representation, such as if you first published your own book before translating. I recently participated in a panel discussion at the 2020 Seoul International Book Fair. And because the subject of the talk was “The Present and Future of (Korean) Mystery Novels,” I couldn’t help but make my remarks from the perspective of a writer. However, when communicating with the people in charge of programming, they usually called me “beonyeokga-nim” or “Ms./Madam Translator,” and even in the final copy of the script I received, my co-presenter was listed as “author” and I was listed as “translator.” I found this fascinating. It’s possible that I have made more of a name for myself with the public as a translator, and from that perspective the organizers might have believed it was more appropriate to call me a translator rather than an author. But I have an identity as an author who has released two novels and two essay collections. It is an identity that is not easily separated. That is to say, this question I’m answering right now gives the impression that it is possible for my translator-self and my writer-self to be separately drawn out at different points in time. But for one person, can translation and writing really exist as chronologically linear events? I don’t think so. As soon as humans picked up written language, the act of writing began, and when that written language gains another mode of expression translation naturally follows and from that point on, narrators of all languages come to handle translation and writing simultaneously.   When we speak of “style,” we often think of it as the representative element of a text that displays the writer’s signature personality, but in the case of translation, at times the text may inevitably have to be adjusted to fit linguistic norms and conventions in the target language. This sometimes referred to as “the betrayal of translation.” Have you ever agonized over this issue?  When we talk about “style,” it can, of course, be referring to the literary choices and linguistic patterns unique to a particular writer, but it is also a reflection of the culture and society in which the writer lives. A translator must not only consider this, but also has the difficult job of considering the culture and society the reader is part of as well. 　　From this point, a translator must then be capable of separating out and considering all of the elements used to craft a style. Generally, when we speak of stylistics, we must take into account that there are elements of an individual’s idiosyncratic expressions, and sociolinguistic issues which reflect the structure of society at large. All of these disparate elements are joined together to create a sentence, but it means that there are many aspects which must be considered at the same time. I’m of the opinion that we must work to save any particular aspect of a text that can be thought of as a personal quirk or characteristic. There are authors who may be writing an essay, but have attempted a haiku-like writing style, or authors who try out lists of incomplete sentences. In those cases, I believe that a translator should attempt to keep these formal elements when expressed in the target language. There are also instances where an internal linguistics dictate a sociolinguistic issue, and when those occur, I consider the source text’s structure as much as possible. I also try to stick closest to the level of the source text when approaching issues with complex or expert terminology. In cases of formal discourse, I try my best to find the corresponding form for each language. When confronted with the issue of the frequency of a term, I turn to the corpus and search for a term that has a comparable frequency. 　　However, there are times, when faced with changes in the historical climate or ideological issues, when changes to the text are demanded. This is mostly relating to issues of political correctness. Even if the term was considered innocuous at the time the text was written, I will discuss the term or phrase in question with the editor and make appropriate changes. If what is written, for example, misogynistic language, language that is cruel to children, disparaging terms for other societies and cultures, etc., is not strictly necessary for the establishment of a character within the context of a text, I will debate whether or not to remove it.   Could you, as a translator, compare the works of authors you enjoy translating and the tendencies of your own creative work?  As a translator, I do not have a particular author that I care for more than the others. Because a translator is also, first, a reader, I could perhaps divide the works I’ve translated by how they have been literarily esteemed, but I generally like all the books I’ve worked on and rate them highly. This is because if I feel like a work isn’t literary enough, isn’t worth introducing to the readers, or doesn’t interest me in any way, I wouldn’t be translating it in the first place. And I don’t see any point in comparing those authors’ work with my own. I have translated a wide spectrum of works, and it would be hard to place them in a single category. There are authors, like Raymond Chandler, Truman Capote, or Michael Ondaatje, to whom style is a crucial part of the work, but even they cannot be lumped together. As a translator and a reader, I like to read different types of work and I believe that even if it may not match my individual preferences, I may still enjoy it.  　　Even if there are authors that I like, it is no mean feat to copy them or chase after that style. This is not simply just a matter of taste, but a matter of ability as well. 　　But if we talk about my own writing, there is a consistent flow that can be said to be my authorial inclination because of the kind of stories I strive to tell. Up until now, the stories that I have written have mostly been grounded in human goodness that hides behind evil and a belief that people can change. Even so, I do not believe that my authorial-self is complete, and therefore I don’t know what I may write or what inclinations I may develop in the future. In creative work and in translation work, no one is at a standstill.   Do you think your creative writing impacts your translation or vice versa? If so, in what ways does one influence the other? (In terms of word choice, expressions, sentence structure, narrative structure, way of thinking, and so on.)  It is certain that any experiences a person has in their life will influence those other experiences. And in the case of language, each level (diction, syntax, discourse) cannot be clearly separated from the other, and language and thought are inextricably related. If I had to pick a difference between being a translator and any other job, it is that as a translator you must maintain an awareness of a multilingual consciousness. That is to say, metalinguistic sensitivity is an essential quality for a translator to have, and it is those thought processes which will be reflected in writing as well. 　　I’m not sure if this is related to my experiences as a translator, but even when I’m writing novels, I have it in the back of my mind that my readers might not solely be Korean speakers. Of course, because I write in Korean, readers who can speak Korean will read them, but I write with the thought that my work may one day be translated and introduced to people belonging to another culture. Therefore, although something may be effective in one culture, I would like to avoid the possibility that it may be unsettling or wrong in another cultural context. I’m of the mindset that it is necessary to consider what you might call “global standards”—even at the risk of this term containing Eurocentric undertones. 　　Even though that is may be the case, I’m not saying that we should give up on having a culturally specific perspective or structures particular to the Korean language. Although I believe that when ambiguous language or cultural metaphors are used as a basis for literary works it may be difficult for a non-Korean speaker to understand, I don’t believe that this should place any limits or restrictions on creative work. Translation can widen our literary prospects, and if some day my work may be read by a member of a different language group or culture, I hope that they too will be able to engage in new experiences.   Writers are translators and translators are writers. They write about the world and translate the world for readers. It takes agility to cross over many worlds; doing so likely fosters a unique identity all its own. In your opinion, are there are any differences between the “Me before writing,” the “writing Me,” the “Me before translating,” the “translating Me,” and the “Me writing and translating”?   To repeat what I said before, I do not believe that there are any clear distinctions within the self. I started writing from a very young age. I awoke to writing around the age of three or four, and I have, of course, very little memories from before that. After that point, I would make my own stories by copying the plots of fairy tales, and I even wrote romance stories in my diary. The only difference is that I never let a single other person read them, and never published them. Once my eyes were opened to another language, translation became one part studying, and one part linguistic life at the same time. I would write down the lyrics of pop songs that left deep impressions on me on the front pages of my math reference book and try translating them. Of course, this only means that it didn’t follow a strictly commercial definition of translation. The only “Me before writing” or “Me before translating” would be a prelinguistic “Me.” Could I possibly remember the “me” of such a young age? I must have memories from before I acquired language, but they amount to nothing more than indistinct fragments spread out against the plain of my consciousness. A human of language can carry out a multitude of functions through that language. Writing and translating may be my professions, but the work I do also includes writing criticism, non-literary texts, and public speaking. All of these professions are carried out through language. That being said I have never felt the need to divide myself into a “translating Me,” a “writing Me,” a “critiquing Me,” or a “lecturing Me.” Many people may think that writing and translating are two separate processes. And looking at it from a professional perspective that may appear to be the case. However, when looked at as linguistic actions, they cannot be so easily separated. All humans acutely sense the world from within language. The only differences are the means and methods of expressions used by each person.   Translated by Victoria Caudle

  by Park Hyunju

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  [Writer's Notes] [Draft II] The Law of Translated Lines — by Sora Kim-Russell

  What goes into writing a book and translating it? A writer and translator reveal their behind-the-scenes experiences from both sides of their computer screens.—Ed.     The Law of Lines (Arcade, 2020)     How to Translate Pyun Hye-young First, you have to hear voices. Within the opening pages of the book, the story should start to narrate itself to you, the characters should start walking around inside your head. You have no idea what’s going to happen, but something has begun, with you in it. Next, panic. Because she almost always slips in some maddeningly difficult wordplay that almost entirely doesn’t work in English no matter how feverishly you tilt and shake the page. Then, reassure yourself that, no matter how challenging her wordplay gets, you usually manage to find a solution, even if it basically amounts to saying, Dear Reader, here comes some wordplay. Ideally, you should be moving from the big picture (plot, character, voice) down to the smaller items (word choices, tricky sentences), but with Pyun you find yourself swimming in words for a while. Remind yourself that you will find a solution for them now only to have to change all of it again in the future (read: five minutes before the book is about to go to press) when you will have a sudden epiphany. Fun! That problem shelved, you move on to panicking about her use of narrative distance. Pyun is notoriously tricky to translate because her narrators maintain a distance from the characters that is third-person omniscient—if said omniscient being low-key hated everyone and everything with a kind of cool, sociopathic reserve. She writes about contagion, rot, corruption. Things that lose their form and ooze. But her prose is controlled and reserved, as if the narrator is watching everything fall apart from above, from some sort of sterile observation deck. This gives her prose a flat affect, and it is very, very tempting to stuff it full of more words and to string her knife-chopped sentences together to make it all warm and smooth. But that’s not her, nor is it you. Do you translate stories, or do you translate stories by very particular authors? When you get lost here, go back to the voices in your head. Let them guide you.   Women in Translation The Law of Lines was an interesting change from City of Ash and Red and The Hole, which focused on the plights of two rather toxic men. It was tempting to sympathize with those men simply because they were the protagonists, but they were so shady! In Lines, the main characters are all women. Almost all. Can’t forget Su-ho. This book felt warmer to me, and I wondered if that was why. Or maybe it was because all of the main characters were victims and thus more sympathetic? In The Hole, Oghi was a victim who turned out to be something of a villain. In Lines, Se-oh wants to be a vigilante but may have misidentified her villain. If I were to assign an essay based on this book, the topic question would be: Who are the true villains in this novel?   Wrestling with Titles One of the biggest challenges of translating Pyun Hye-young is the pressure of coming up with a title before I’ve finished translating the book. If I had it my way, the title would always be the very last thing I come up with. Realistically though, you need at least a good working title to get the publicity machine rolling. Pyun’s titles very often contain hidden meanings. With Seon-ui beopchik, I immediately read it as the law of lines, like the law of gravity, or the law of entropy. It had a clean, mathematical sound to it. What do lines do? But then I thought better of it and asked the author. I’d fallen into this trap before with “Tokki-ui myo,” which looks like you’ll be reading about a leporine burial site, only to learn she meant ÙÖ, i.e., “myo as in rabbit.” Which isn’t to say that it can’t also mean a grave or a tomb. But that meaning is meant to be buried (har har). In my own translation of the title, I went with “O. Cuniculus,” the Latin name for one common species of rabbit. I lucked out, as “cuniculus” comes from a Latin word meaning “a small conduit or burrow, as an underground drain or rabbit hole; or a low tunnel, as to a burial chamber” (emphasis mine). When this kind of serendipity occurs, one must run many, many victory laps around one’s neighborhood. The Hole also contained a double meaning. Literal, physical holes appear throughout the book, but hol- is also a Korean prefix meaning alone or widowed, like Oghi and his mother-in-law. Likewise, in City of Ash and Red, the mystery character’s name Mol means “to not exist.” The name of the character that the protagonist is so desperate to find is a cipher, a clue to the reader that he can never be found. I considered translating the name using a Latin equivalent, like Nil, but the editor voted for keeping the Korean. Pyun, too, wanted the character’s name to sonically echo the word “mall,” as in shopping mall. When I asked Pyun about the seon in Seon-ui beopchik, she explained that it had multiple meanings: lines, good/opposite of evil, interconnectedness. The editor, agent and I racked our brains for something that might convey all three dimensions of significance. “The Golden Rule” was a promising suggestion made by the editor, but the sales team said no. I suggested anything starting with “The Geometry of —” but the sales team said it sounded too much like nonfiction. Variations on Good or Goodness were deemed too abstract. Ultimately, the sales team turned down so many of our suggestions that we just kept returning to “The Law of Lines.” And in the end, it did seem the most fitting. Lines abound throughout the novel. Points, lines, planes. Triangles, pyramids. Gas lines. Hierarchies. Crossed paths. And other dangerous lines, like those that shouldn’t be crossed. The law of lines was abstract, but it also felt like the title of a hypothesis whose proof was laid out in the novel.   Playing Possum “She’s not a very Korean writer, is she? Who lives in a townhouse? That’s not a Korean-style house.” “On page 86, you used the idiom, ‘to play possum,’ but possums aren’t native to Korea. What did the original say?” These are interesting questions I’ve fielded from readers in the past year. What makes a novel Korean? Are some Korean writers more Korean than others? Should translations of Korean books only contain that which can be found in Korea? Is “piece of cake” acceptable, thanks to Paris Baguette, while “playing possum” is verboten? Pyun is Korean and writes in Korean, but does that necessarily mean her work must represent Korea? Arguably, the most “Korean” thing about her work is the wordplay, because it is so inseparable from the language. (Though with hole/hol, she used a bilingual pun, so even there it can’t be called specifically Korean.) Foreign elements appear in her work because those things are familiar to her domestic readers—even townhouses, which do exist here but perhaps only for a certain class or lifestyle. Meanwhile, her foreign readers sometimes remark that her books could have been set in their country instead. When I shared the question about Pyun’s “Koreanness” with Jenny Wang Medina, a friend and scholar of Korean literature, she asked, “Why is it Pyun’s responsibility to ‘represent Korea’ at all?” It’s a good point. Her job is to be a writer, not a national brand ambassador. If her work is not bound by cultural purity, should translations of her work be? At the same time, maybe it is weird for a Korean character to talk about possums. When I looked up the line from the original again, I remembered why I had translated it that way. The original sentence read like a Korean explanation of the American idiom. I thought it might be too tedious for readers if I spelled it all out in English. Also, I thought “playing possum” suited the scene better. But I know this question will stay with me for a while, and the next time around maybe I won’t include a non-indigenous animal. (Unless you count that possum who lives in a café in Seoul . . .)   And Speaking of “Purity” As far as I can tell from my critics, I am always either too literal or too liberal, usually within the same book. Why did I translate this word this way and not that way? Why didn’t I make this writer sound more like that other writer? Why didn’t I include the characters’ titles, and why did I spell the author’s name like that? (Hint: I didn’t. The author did. It’s their name.) If it’s not already obvious, I gave up on trying to please everyone a long time ago. In fact, I’m not sure I ever tried. My fidelity is to the text-in-translation and what it’s telling me to do. In that respect, it’s not so different from writing. I don’t know of many writers who write in order to please readers. Editors, maybe. But even then, not without a fight. I think we’re all just trying to satisfy the voice of the book, of the characters, of the prose that demands to be brought to life in some such a way, and you simply do the best you can to not ruin it.   ₩₩₩ Is it true that Pyun Hye-young’s stories could take place anywhere? Yes and no. There is still a “Korean-ness”—if by that we mean the specific textures of daily life taking place at a particular location and moment in history—that must be contended with. In The Law of Lines, I fretted over small details, like how Ki-jeong wears slippers at work, or how to explain the different types of banks where one might apply for loans, or what that exposed gas line next to the kitchen stove looks like. Not to mention the pyramid scheme itself. There’s nothing inherently Korean about multilevel marketing schemes. They’re found everywhere; only the particulars vary. The one in the book happened to be based on an actual and very predatory multilevel marketing scheme from about ten years back in which college students were lured in by desperate friends or misleading job ads, coerced into taking out loans to fund their entry into the scheme, and physically trapped inside “dorms” with dozens of other victims where they were all but starved and prevented from escaping. Is this, then, a problem of tradition? Or is it a permutation of capitalism? Some readers might interpret The Law of Lines as a takedown of Confucianism, but if anything, it’s a portrayal of how traditional relationships that were once informed by Confucianism are being overturned by the pressure to make money. If this were truly a Confucian book, then presumably Ki-jeong would be a wise, caring teacher whose students respect her—or conversely a domineering taskmaster whose students fear her (depending on your take on Confucianism). But instead, she views teaching as a job she’s stuck in, compares her students to vermin, and ends up framed by a wealthy student for a petty crime. Su-ho longs for any job that isn’t manual labor while wishing his mother were dead and his burden of filial piety gone. College students sell out their friends for a vague promise of wealth. The pyramid is a metaphor for what capitalism, not Confucianism, demands of us: make a profit no matter what, even if it means selling off your dearest relationships.   Houses and Homes The first line of The Law of Lines was the last line that I changed. Specifically, I changed “the house” to “their house,” because I remembered at the last second how jip conveys both a physical house and an emotional home, whereas Cartesian English separates them. I hoped that little change would warm the story up, if only by a degree. The most touching scene for me in Lines was when Se-oh tries to sleep in her and her father’s burned-out house. The description of the ruined house was reminiscent of other things Pyun has written, in which “home” is a treacherous thing. The characters in Lines struggle to feel at home anywhere. Se-oh thinks she has been successfully hiding in the wreck without anyone’s knowledge, but the night she decides to leave, she realizes that her neighbors have known all along and have been doing little things (collecting her mail for her, not letting their kids run wild through the ruins, etc.) to help her stay. She ends up in a low-rent gosiwon, having realized all too late that home was not just a point in space but the daily life she’d shared with her father. Su-ho, too, is facing the loss of his house/home to urban redevelopment, a scheme which overwhelmingly favors the rich and injures the poor. He didn’t think he could sink any lower than the current rundown apartment he shares with his mother, but now he is faced with the same fate as his debt-ridden clients. For him, the lesson of home comes too late.   What Happens After We Die? “I know the ones who love us will miss us.”– Keanu Reeves The biggest mystery to me in The Law of Lines was the story of Ha-jeong, Ki-jeong’s half-sister by her father’s mistress. I felt a whole-body ache when I learned her back story and imagined what it would be like for a child to lose her mother (for reasons never explained) and have to grow up in a house where she is unwanted and unloved. Ki-jeong’s mother went through the motions of raising Ha-jeong, but without love Ha-jeong was not much better off than a weed growing in a garden. By the end, Ki-jeong realizes that investigating her sister’s final days was the wrong response to her death. Too late, she understands that to love someone is to miss them when they’re gone, and that she owed her sister love. People like to ask me: of all the books you’ve translated, which was your favorite? I answer them honestly when I say that I cannot pick a favorite. What might elicit an answer, though, is if they were to ask instead which books continue to haunt me long after the work is done.  Writer Pyun Hye-young (left) & Translator Sora Kim-Russell (right)  

  by Sora Kim-Russell