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  [RUSSIAN] Love Brings Hope in This Post-Apocalyptic Story

  Choi Jin-Young’s novel To the Warm Horizon, translated by Alina Kolbiagina, presents a storyline in which a group of people is forced to flee their homes by a deadly virus. It is a familiar type of story to Russian readers not only because of Stephen King and other widely translated Western writers who produce such novels, but also thanks to the success of Russian writer Yana Vagner’s To the Lake in 2011. But this Korean post-apocalyptic story is a different cup of tea: while King’s and Vagner’s narratives are more fast-paced, this book requires a much slower reading. This story serves as a reflection, almost a diary, of the characters’ attempts to analyse their pasts at a moment of tragedy; a soul-searching tale of what their lives could have been like, had they made different choices.     The book consists of a series of monologues where Dori, Jina, Ryu, and Gunji invite us into their inner worlds as they escape from their native Korea to Russia  while the pandemic is taking over the world. In the foreword of the book, Choi says that she deliberately wanted to place the characters in “the most enormous country on the planet,” and that she wanted them “to hold a flag, so even from the sky it would signal that ‘a human being is right here, in this place!’” It seems Choi wants us to study and observe the individual at a time of crisis—and the landscape here plays the part of a vast space that helps bring out the feeling of loneliness. She moves characters from a densely populated place into this huge “sandbox” to have a closer look at what they would do, and to reflect on existential identity and the consequences of life choices.      At first glance, the focus in the book is on the pandemic and its aftermath—poverty, famine, crime, and chaos—but these actually serve as the backdrop for the internal transition the characters go through. Each of them analyses their past and realises how loveless their lives have been. Ryu reflects on how she used to neglect her own needs (“I always wore thin jackets into the winter until I got ill, because I never had time to take my warm winter coat to the dry cleaners.”). Having never looked after herself and having never felt loved (“Do we actually know anything about love?”), she regrets marrying a man who doesn’t show any affection or interest towards her.      The voices in Choi’s book are predominantly female, and her heroines are courageous and self-sacrificing, valuing the lives of their loved ones over their own. Men, on the other hand, are often either indecisive or violent: Dan, Ryu’s husband, cries and asks her to return to Korea because he is scared; Dori’s father joins a gang of marauders and bandits to survive, explaining that this is the only way he can save Dori’s life; Jina’s father hits Dori, blaming her for the deaths of several family members, and Jina’s uncle sexually assaults her. The only exception is Gunji, an orphaned boy from Jina’s village who later becomes a compassionate young man. He protects Dori from Jina’s family but ends up being disowned.     The characters that have a chance at being saved are the ones who care about others and who protect their loved ones. Their desire to keep running further away from the disaster—“there, over the horizon, where the sun sets”—is fuelled by their ability to love. Jina, Dori, Ryu, Gunji, and even Miso, Dori’s little sister, dream of making their loved ones happy. Ryu, having told her husband that she doesn’t love him, realises that his survival is more important to her than the words she said, which actually held no meaning. Gunji, having survived losses and hardship at such a young age, simply dreams of catching fish, collecting fruit, and giving them to the person he loves. Wanting to make someone happy is present even at a subconscious level. Without knowing its meaning, Dori keeps humming a song that she heard on the radio—“Ma rendi pur contento” which means “Only make her happy.” Choi Jin-Young offers us the hope that love will prevail and humanity will survive, despite the disasters. Otherwise, why would she end the novel with the words, “I love you”?   Maria WiltshireTranslator and Russian language tutor

  by Maria Wiltshire

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  [TURKISH] When AND How Does a Human Become Human?

  “Will artificial intelligence bring the end of humanity?” This is one of the main questions explored in the novel Veda, a question that everybody, from pop culture creators to contemporary philosophers, have been sharing their opinions about.     But first, let us put this question aside and think about the process that brought us here whenever humans faced technological advances in the past: Will computers replace human beings? Will railroad transportation be the end of horse-and-cart? Will the printing press finish clerical scribes? Following the Industrial Revolution, the conflict between humans and machines has taken center stage. Since the day the first machine appeared, humankind has been asking the same questions, although in slightly different ways. The current version is: Will artificial intelligence bring humanity to an end? We will only be certain to answer this from experience, not by prediction.     In Veda, Young-ha Kim essentially asks the same question and gives his answer in different ways. We are talking about the “existential” adventure of Cheol, a humanoid in the novel who lives on an AI development campus. He decides to cease his isolated life and face the realities of the outside world through his experiences with other humans and robots. While Kim follows this plot, he gives quick nods to earlier science fiction works, utopia/dystopia texts and films, and sometimes he even adds paragraphs to convey the infinite reaches of intertextuality. Many preceding texts include Utopia by Thomas More and, more indirectly, Emile, or On Education by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The endeavour of creating a “human being” reminds one of Frankenstein and, because the AI campus is not what it seems, of Brave New World; readers may also think of post-apocalyptic, sci-fi films such as The Terminator and The Matrix. As in The Truman Show, we explore the consequences of limited contact with the outside world, and the existentialist dilemma of the humanoid character will call to mind Blade Runner.      In addition, Cheol’s fate has similarities to that of Pinocchio, carved from wood by Master Geppetto, both characters who believe themselves to be human before they finally become so. Without forgetting that Karel Čapek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots introduced the word “robot,” Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot forms a reference point for Veda as do many other texts.     In Cheol’s dialogues with his “father” as well as with other robots, humanoids, clones and humans, the writer searches for answers without neglecting the philosophical, ethical and sociological aspects, and proposes his own thesis (since humanity is already over) while “adding on” to the existing body of work.     For instance, Cheol asks many of the same questions that philosophers have pondered throughout the history of humankind: conscience, trust, courage, public awareness, individualism, free will, loving and being loved, remembrance, sorrow, death. Occasionally he thinks about the philosophy of religion. There is only one place where these questions lead: When and how does a human become human? As we dig deeper, we notice that the novel that best represents Veda is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Just like Dorothy, Cheol is forcibly swept away from his familiar settlement. The Tin Man, The Scarecrow and The Cowardly Lion accompany Dorothy just as Min, Seon, and Dharma do with Cheol. And Cheol, just like Dorothy, wishes to return “home” because only then will his story be completed.      Kim indirectly addresses the central question of his book, suggesting that to become human, one needs a story. The various paths Cheol takes, the stops he waits at, and the twists and turns that alter his course all contribute to an ongoing story, crafted along the way. This continuous narrative is the key element that defines humanity.     Whether one is aware or not, the experiences one has lived and collected, shared with others, and partially remembered by others, contribute to the ongoing story that defines humanity. The nature of that story is shaped throughout the journey. Veda leads its readers to believe that, although humanity may have ended by the time Cheol’s story begins, there may still be hope for humankind as long as there are stories to be told.  Çağlayan Çevik Editor and Journalist

  by Çağlayan Çevik

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  [FRENCH] The Age of Her Arteries

  The Old Woman with the Knife is a masterpiece of irony. Not an obvious, grating irony, but rather the genuine, existential and formal irony that is characteristic of works that belong to the realm of ‘literature,’ regardless of the genre (in this case, crime).     Here is Hornclaw—referred to as ‘Granny’ for reasons of deference. The geographical and chronological aspects of the novel are clearly set: contemporary Korea in the shadow of an economic recession. But sociologically, it is not so clear: this ‘Granny’ uses a knife rather than knitting needles. Hornclaw’s profession seems incompatible with her age and the fragile respectability that this confers. She is a contract killer—or, to use the jargon that seems to have spread throughout society like an invasive plant, she is an ‘operator.’ The writer Gu Byeong-mo herself is like a seasoned contract killer. From the outset, she aims at—and hits—what is the pulsating heart of any good book, namely irony.     What could be more ironic than a character who specialises in the body, an expert in the vulnerability and mortality of this machine made of muscles, nerves and vital centres, having to face the deterioration of her own body? It is not without irony that time has caught up with someone who is in the business of putting an end to the time allotted to others. Nor is the fact that an expert in the elimination and eradication of others should, in turn, find herself confronted with forgetfulness and the slow erosion of her memory.      Time and age have forced Hornclaw to become more introspective, and like a trap that ensnares the animal that wanders into it, the sins she has committed form the basis of her punishment. We can leave aside moral and metaphysical considerations. As a novelist, Gu is not particularly interested in spelling these out in literal terms: it is up to us, if we have the time and the inclination, to do the work. However, we should keep in mind the idea of just desserts, of poetic justice, of judgment passed with a single word.     With her body feeling the weight of the years, Hornclaw’s past resurfaces and, like a virtuoso clockmaker, Gu sets in motion the complex and perfectly interlocking mechanisms of a story of resurgence and revenge. The first commandment of crime fiction reviews (‘Thou shalt not reveal’) prevents me from saying any more. Suffice it to say that revenge is a sub-species of judgment.     Judgment is not limited to these solemn forms that I have just mentioned. It proliferates in many different forms and is everywhere. It has infected the corporate world, including the agency where Hornclaw works, where there is relentless evaluation of colleagues and their skills. It affects how Korean society sees itself, or more precisely, how it sees one segment of itself: elderly people. It affects how they are classified and perceived—from undesirable to acceptable, from honorable to useless.     There is something Kafkaesque about The Old Woman with the Knife, and indeed, Kafka is mentioned in the book. There are echoes of the writer from Prague both in the inescapable inhumanity of Hornclaw's agency, and in Hornclaw's obsession with wrongdoing. But there is also something of the film, Kill Bill. The action scenes, brilliantly executed, are themselves subject to the law of practical judgment: what should be done, and how should it be done? The language is surgically precise, sometimes literally so, but interspersed here and there with evocative observations which take us into a strange and poetic other world.      And what of the suspended judgment, the indifference towards the lives and suffering of others that characterizes the ‘operator’? We remember Gromov in Chekhov’s Ward No. 6 exclaiming: “If organic tissue is capable of life it must react to every stimulus. And I do!” And in The Old Woman with the Knife, we read: “a stirring, as faint as a foetus’s first heartbeats, began deep into Hornclaw.” Hornclaw is judged because she belongs to the world of humans. Translated by Pascale Sutherland Damien AubelWriter (Marest, 2023)Literary and art critic for Transfuge

  by Damie Aubel

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  [POLISH] To Become One with the Whole—But Not the Way You Like It

  Even if sometimes you feel your life is stuck and you don’t know where to go anymore, it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. Maybe it’s just the way your life turned out. For all those who struggle to come to terms with today’s intractable world with its exhausting, everyday struggles, Won-pyung Sohn has a story which just might speak to this generation.     Kim Ji-hye is doing pretty well. She’s young, smart, educated, and she just got her first internship. She may not be paid very well, but it’s still a legitimate start. What could possibly go wrong? Well, for one thing, she is merely one among others. Many, many others. It is as if mediocrity had been assigned to her at birth. Born in 1988, a time of tremendous social and economic changes in South Korea, Ji-hye fails to excel. She graduated from a lower-tier university and gets a job at the age of thirty as an intern at a company-sponsored learning center.  Her job, even though it allows her to work in the area of arts and culture, mostly consists of photocopying lecture materials and arranging classroom chairs. She lives in a shabby basement apartment, the only one she could afford. Even her name Jihye (meaning “wisdom”) turns out to be yet another ironic disappointment. Because it was a popular name at the time, parents ended up giving their daughters the same name, to the point where she simply gets called ‘Ji-hye B’ at school. In short, the future doesn’t look very bright for someone with her background.     Things appear to take an unexpected turn the day a new colleague gets hired at work—a young man named Gyu-ok. Ji-hye has seen him before: a couple day earlier, he was at the same café she was, and had made a scene, embarrassing one of the most prominent lectures who works at the center. Everything gets even stranger when they both join ukulele lessons and meet two other men who also blame the world for not offering them much and instead taking from them.     At their regular meet ups at a local bar, this peculiar group of new friends decides to take revenge on the world, hoping to pave the way for others to resist the suffocating social structures surrounding them. Can such a dream, however, fuelled by resentment and copious amounts of alcohol, lead to a happier, more fulfilling life? One where justice prevails and self-realization wins over conformity?     Sohn’s characters will speak to many readers, as they are clearly meant to represent a wide array of people. In a world of cutthroat competition, where being a good person is just not enough, where only the rarest and most brilliant individuals make it to the top, the frustrations felt by Ji-hye, her companions, and the rest of humanity are more than relatable. The constant battle between individual dreams and mass conformity is represented in the book by the juxtaposition of Ji-hye’s new friends with her other colleagues (and including her brother). The first group cries out for justice and change in the world, reminiscent of the Korean independence movement’s fighting spirit at the end of the twentieth century. The latter group just parrots the mainstream line and argues that it’s better to conform, for it leads to an easier life where everything ends up as good as it’s going to get—so long as one surrenders to the oppressive rules set by society.     The story given to us by Sohn may or may not tell us whether defying the world order can actually succeed. However, it surely represents a generation forced to live under the enormous pressure of performing at the best of their abilities, while preserving the status quo for the sake of a stable, complacent life. This book is a bitter critique of the modern world that seems to have little to offer to younger generations who are desperate to seek their own place and purpose in it.    Łukasz JanikLiterary Translator

  by Łukasz Janik

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  [ENGLISH] Looking to a Brighter Future

  When I picked up Dawn of Labor, I knew nothing of Park Nohae. In that way, I was the same as the collection’s original readers, back when Park’s poetry was first published under a pen name in Korea in 1984. Now forty years later, this seminal work is available to English readers in a new translation from Brother Anthony of Taizé and Cheehyung Harrison Kim. Transcending oceans, languages, cultures, and four decades of distance, Park’s words still echo today as strong as ever.      These words speak of labor, and of the harsh conditions factory workers found in Korea during the 1980s. It’s hard not to be moved by the thought of Park, the quintessential worker-poet known as “the faceless poet,” writing these words in pencil on tissue paper between long hours doing factory work. What urgency must he have felt! I think too of the zeal with which the readers met his work, his fellow workers, his countrymen, who considered these poems so essential to their understanding of their own struggle that they turned them into songs that spread across the country. Others had written of life inside the factory before, but Park’s writing was different—he was one of them.      Growing up in Beolgyo, a small farming village in the southern part of Korea, he went to Seoul to seek a better life, but was met with the brutal conditions of factory labor. He wrote of the grease that coated the machines the workers used, which in turn seeped into their lives, into their beings. He often described the bodies of his fellow workers as bruised, broken, and maimed despite their young ages. He wrote of lives lost to the implements of their labor, severed hands buried at the base of the factory walls after the workers couldn’t bear to give them to the victims’ families, in a way where you feel the sorrow of the workers as much as the physical pain of the victim.     These poems are visceral, but their true strength lies in Park’s grasp of the emotions of the workers as much as in his understanding of the severity of their working conditions. In “No Way to Stop,” he writes:      I run with all my strength,     but the farther I go, the more distant I am      Workers are a “spinning top,” clothes are “wrung ever drier.” In this constant churn, “Gone are my eyes’ shine, my smile, and my thoughts.” Yet the true cruelty is the endlessness of this struggle. He notes that “more frightening than any whip / is the fact that I must live.” I have never seen a factory floor, but I too have felt like my labor had no value, like no matter how hard I worked, I couldn’t get ahead. In my moments of deepest despair, this is what grips me: what else is there to do but live?     There must be more to life than endless labor. I’m sure it was this yearning that led Korean workers to rally around Park’s writing. The depth of Park’s empathy extends beyond just his brothers in labor and towards his sisters as well. In “Record of My Journey with Men,” Park writes from the perspective of a woman tracing back not only her relationships, but her journey from sida (a factory apprentice) to team leader. It is in this poem we start to see Park’s greatest gift: not only portraying the crushing factory conditions or the sacrifices the workers were forced to make but gesturing towards something better, something like hope:      the company grew big,     from a hundred workers to fifteen hundred,     but all I have left are a rented room with a deposit worth half a million won,     a cassette player purchased with monthly installments,     and a worn-out twenty-five-year-old body.      As the demands made upon them increase, the workers rally, convincing the narrator “that if we unite, we can win,” and it’s in this space, linked arm and arm with her brothers and sisters, “eyes moist with tears,” that her “heart becomes a peaceful land for the very first time.” In this peace, she realizes that she can go on, that life holds something more, and she finally feels love begin to bloom.     I don’t share the exact concerns of Park’s narrators, but I too have worried about wages, about where I am going. But even beyond the galvanizing energy in these poems of liberation, there’s a depth and tenderness I didn’t expect. Rather than feel something coldly dogmatic that you might see in a pamphlet advocating for workers’ liberation, Park’s poetry sings. In this new edition, the poems are printed in both English translation and the original Korean so bilingual readers can appreciate them further. Brother Anthony and Kim have to be commended on their translation, portraying the subtlety and nuance of Park’s words so they continue to resonate all these years later. Park’s writing is beautiful, full of images I know I’ll carry with me. In a poem called “Spring,” he writes how “the yearning memory of her hometown quivers / like the waves of rising heat.” This longing, this homesickness is warm, but also fragile; a mirage, as likely to break as it is to come true. Yet the faces of her siblings “are clear as azalea petals.” It’s in holding these images we too know we can keep going, that things will change.      We are invited to consider the lives and working conditions of the laborers of Park’s day, but it’s the beauty of his rendering and this possibility for hope that etches this struggle into my heart, just as much as his depictions of pain, suffering, and loss. But this is only the first step, Park tells us, as the collection’s title poem suggests. The “dawn” Park anticipated shows us there is much work to be done, a new kind of labor, a work towards revolution, progress, and equity in both work and society. Park doesn’t simply describe the issues, but points towards a new day, a new future, one decided and built by us, rather than on others’ demands. Unfortunately, it’s a call that continues to be relevant, but luckily still resonates. But now, all these years later, we can see that what Park fought for has come to pass. It’s happened before, and it will happen again:          Right through the middle of uncertainty,     resolutely, resolutely,     we shall advance.— From “For a Peaceful Evening”   Ian J. BattagliaWriter, Literary Critic 

  by Ian J. Battaglia

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  [DUTCH] Genre-Defying Honesty

  One of the things I appreciate most about translated literature—something that makes reading across borders invaluable, if not indispensable—is the way in which it allows the reader a glimpse of life in unfamiliar parts of the world. As translation is an act of empathy, so too is reading in translation. This holds true for fiction and, perhaps even more so, for non-fiction. I was reminded of this while revisiting Baek Se Hee’s I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, in which the author offers a glimpse of life as she knows it. A refreshing mix of dialogue and micro-essays, Baek’s candid take on mental health is as genre-defying—memoir? self-help? psychology?—as it is thought-provoking.       In her prologue, Baek describes the impetus for writing this book as twofold: first, to  search for others who feel similarly to her—feelings caused in part by dysthymia, or persistent depressive disorder—she decided to stop endlessly looking for them and see if others would recognize themselves in her. Given the tremendous success of her book, both nationally and internationally, I’d like to believe that many people do. And for those who don’t, Baek adds, her work might help them better understand those who do. Second, she sees her book as an artistic practice, referring to art as a channel of hope and a way to “stir someone’s heart.” It is precisely this creative flair that removes any negative suspicions the reader may have about the type of book they are holding. A far cry from mind-numbing strands of “self-help” in the conventional sense of the word (“Do this and get better!”),  I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki stands its ground as a work of literature in its own right. I should also add that According to Chicago style, it should be Pelckmans’s choice to hold onto the original cover illustration, a gorgeous creation by graphic designer DancingSnail, helps to elicit the literary character of the book.      The format that Baek goes on to explore is equally original as it is stimulating. Most chapters start with a short anecdote or reflection that introduces a new topic. The main body of each chapter consists of dialogues between Baek and her psychiatrist followed by a short essay. These conversations, however, are not presented as stand-alone snippets, but as a carefully curated whole, weaving together a narrative that the reader glides through from start to finish. To be sure, for an essayistic work on the complexities of mental health, this book is quite the page-turner.And what makes it such a gripping read is Baek’s level of honesty. Through her session transcripts, Baek literally invites the reader into the room with her therapist. The pitfall that she deftly avoids in her essays is the tendency to present “takeaways” and “lessons learnt.” Yes, things are learnt over the course of her therapy sessions, but I would be hesitant to call these “lessons.” Therapy—if I may speak from personal experience—teaches you something about yourself as a person. It is a welcome fact then that Baek eschews the didactic approach altogether, instead mulling over her findings in a much more subtle vein and leaving it up to the reader to take and pick as they choose. One is free, at all times, to disagree with Baek—or her psychiatrist, for that matter. I for one certainly felt like I saw things differently every now and then. Such is the nature of any conversation on mental health. To use a phrase recurrent in the book, “black-and-white-thinking” has hardly ever served anyone well. Steering clear of any attempt to profess universal truths, Baek’s essays are sharp, perceptive, sometimes humorous, and always engaging.      In short, a book discussing topics such as self-image, anxiety and codependency in a more genuine way than I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki is probably hard to come by. Its format is captivating and label-resistant. Although some readers might feel initially thrown off, Baek’s nuanced style brings us around. Without fail, she invites us to relate and rethink. Going back to her reason for practicing art and writing this book, I’ll confess: my heart was stirred. Mattho ManderslootLiterary Translator

  by Mattho Mandersloot

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  [GERMAN] Think Again in Novel Form

  After leaving her job and husband, Yeong-ju opens a bookshop in the district of Hyunam-dong. Although the location does not at first seem ideal for a bookshop, she sets her heart on it upon noticing that the hyu (ýÌ) in Hyunam-dong is the Chinese character for “rest”. Rest seems to be exactly what the characters in this novel long for. Yeong-ju herself suffers from burnout; Min-jun, the barista in the bookshop, falls into depression after he can’t land a secure job despite having been a straight-A student all his life;  Jung-suh, Yeong-ju’s most loyal customer, is in a constant state of anger due to unfair work conditions; Seung-woo, a blogger and author, quits his exhausting job as a programmer; Ji-mi, the owner of a coffee-roasting company, finds herself lost in a self-destructive marriage; and both high-school student Min-cheol and his mother Hee-ju feel overwhelmed by their roles as son and mother.       Yeong-ju’s bookshop brings these characters together and provides a safe space to reflect on their life decisions. It’s not a place where problems are miraculously solved, but a place that encourages people to rethink. This means the hyu doesn’t imply inactivity but rather the leisure to have time to think. Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop is not a novel that caters to our cognitive laziness by offering simple truths; it challenges us to question old views and open up to new ones. Although Yeong-ju is full of self-doubt, she treasures stories that guide her to places she never expected.       The novel explicitly refers to more than twenty books and films to stimulate thinking on certain problems. For example, at one point the barista Min-jun and Yeong-ju discuss whether it makes sense to follow a dream. Is following an unachievable dream a waste of one’s life?  Or can following a dream itself be so fulfilling that it might be worthwhile to devote your whole life to it, whether you reach it or not? Yeong-ju then cites Hermann Hesse’s Demian and suggests that no dream is permanent. Since each dream is replaced by a new one, we shouldn’t cling to any of them. This is a typical example of a discussion among members of the Hyunam-dong Bookshop community.       These discussions don’t end with a clear answer, but they do encourage both the characters and the reader to keep thinking. Although Yeong-ju is the central figure of the community, she is not a voice of wisdom that tells the others how to lead their lives. Many conversations don’t even involve her. For example, at one point Min-cheol asks Seung-woo whether people should pursue what they like to do or what they are good at. After Seung-woo gives several suggestions, Min-cheol concludes that the point is not to feel relaxed and carefree. Sometimes, it seems we just have to accept a complicated situation and its ensuing confusion, and continue to ponder it.       At other times, it’s books or films that help the protagonists find their answers. Despite his growing reputation as the barista at the bookshop, Min-jun still wonders why his life is so difficult and nothing seems to work according to his original plans. After the film screening of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After the Storm at the bookshop, he identifies with the film’s protagonist Ryota, a former writer turned private detective crippled by a gambling addiction as he struggles to reconcile with his ex-wife and son. Min-jun realizes that life might have been so difficult for Ryota because it had been the first time for him to live life. This realization brings him some comfort. How can something be easy when we do it for the first time?      Adam Grant’s bestselling book Think Again encourages us to break out of our cognitive laziness and stay curious about the world. Although the comfort of conviction may seem more inviting than the discomfort of doubt, questioning ourselves and “thinking again” is the only way to open our minds and to learn. We can read Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop as Think Again in novel form. The remote bookshop feels like an oasis that invites us to rest and to think again. The pillars of this oasis are the love of books and the community of book lovers that is not exclusive but waiting for us. Who knows when the time will come when we need a story in our life to help us think again?    Barbara WallAssociate Professor of Korean Studies,University of Copenhagen

  by Barbara Wall

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  [FRENCH] Man is an Owl to Man

  Nature is not all good. Especially in this remote region where the forest seems to be at one with the darkness. Park In-su, a man hired to stop visitors from entering, has the impression that the forest is watching his every move. At all hours of the day and night, he hears it like a nagging whisper that exhausts and weakens him. When he moved in the village below the mountain with his wife Yu-jin and son Se-oh, he thought he was putting his violent behavior and alcohol issues behind him. One time, after drinking too much, he injured his little boy after throwing him against the wall. Since then, Se-oh has been unable to bear being alone with him. But in this village, home to the many forest lumberjacks, there’s not much to do in the off-season beside getting drunk.       A stranger soon upsets the village’s dull routine. Lee Ha-in is a lawyer whose estranged older brother has disappeared. Convinced that his brother had been working as a forest ranger before In-su replaced him, Ha-in has arrived in an attempt to track him down. After the opening scene—a masterful conversation between Ha-in and In-su—we are introduced to the villagers as Ha-in encounters them one by one to show them a photo of his brother. They all deny recognizing him. Thanks to the omniscient narrator, the reader knows that none of them are telling the truth. Yet they can’t betray the forest. They all know it would never forgive them.       After reading Hye-young Pyun’s The Owl Cries, walking through a dark forest will become an anxious task. The reader will also be aptly reminded of the iconic line from David Lynch’s TV series Twin Peaks: “The owls are not what they seem.” In this novel, when owls hoot, misfortune strikes. When In-su discovers the phrase, “In the forest the owl lives!” written in a notebook left by one of his predecessors, he initially finds it absurd (of course an owl lives in the forest, it’s its natural habitat!). But how can the reader trust In-su? His drinking causes visual and auditory hallucinations, and he feels as if he’s slipping into a parallel world. Is his house as strange as he thinks? Is that old stain on the wooden staircase really blood? Why does the padlock on the gate open onto the forest instead of the courtyard? And what’s lurking in the basement that Yu-jin keeps locked?      In Pyun’s novels, redemption is rare for those who have failed in life. A master at creating stifling atmospheres, the writer seems to have a predilection for losers who struggle with forces beyond their control. While her plots are most often set in cities (haunted by the threat of an epidemic, as in Dans l’antre d’Aoï Garden (tr. Jeongmin Domissy-Lee, 2015), or destroyed by an earthquake, as in City of Ash and Red (tr. Lim Yeong-hee and Françoise Nagel, 2012), the natural elements are a perfect fit with her dark, desperate universe. Marked by unflinching honesty, her writing is not gentle with any of the characters, just like nature.       Pyun imagines a forest that swallows up those who enter it, turning it into a metaphor for human society. During his search, Ha-in learns that his brother is far from being the only one to have disappeared in this strange land. Because of the arduousness of their work, lumberjacks vanish from one day to the next, as if the forest had swallowed them up. The toxicity of human relationships is no match for the harshness of the environment. As a metaphor for the human community, the forest oppresses all those who come near it, and individualism stems naturally from the frustrations and domination of the strongest over the weakest. The Owl Cries is one of those stories that leaves you with no illusions about the human race, and allows you to understand why some people might prefer animals to their own kind.  Laëtitia FavroLiterary Critic for Le Point, Lire, and Livres Hebdo

  by Laëtitia Favro

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  [CHINESE] A Different Kind of Possibility in a Postapocalyptic World

  Kim Choyeop’s The Greenhouse at the End of the World carries forward the signature style of her short stories, depicting alternative possibilities with a gentle yet firm touch. Like many science fiction works of this era, the book starts with a global catastrophe. However, unlike those stories where a white male hero comes to the rescue, this book focuses on a group of women surviving the apocalypse and one woman who discovers their story after the world is rebuilt.      In many literary works and in the real world, we often encounter gender stereotypes—women are expected to be associated with certain identities while being distanced from others. However, the women in this book are scientists, soldiers, and mechanics, as well as mothers, daughters, and sisters. They live in a futuristic world where they can be brave and tough, but also gentle and attentive at the same time. And in this setting, there’s no sense of contradiction or constraint imposed by gender.      Binary thinking is generally challenged in Kim’s narrative: the official and the civilian, selfishness and altruism, plants and machines, the natural and artificial, the beneficial and harmful—despite appearing mutually exclusive, they’re actually deeply intertwined. Consider the strange plant Mossvana, which appears throughout the book: it’s a blend of nature and technology, serving as an effective agent against dust while at the same time representing a malevolent force of unchecked growth. However, these assessments of effectiveness and malevolence are derived from a human perspective. The plant itself doesn’t have a specific purpose; it merely evolves to adapt and survive. Humans are the ones who consider the plant’s ability to reduce dust to be beneficial, but its toxic stems and leaves harmful, and its blue luminescence irrelevant. This plant species became a trailblazer in a particular era, then retreated into history. Whether it is rediscovered or researched doesn’t affect the plant itself.      Rachel, the creator of Mossvana, exhibits a similar pattern. Her limbs and organs have been replaced by machine components, and her blood with nano-fluids, making her a cyborg. She studies plants because she is interested in them, and she modifies them because she can. She doesn’t intend to save the world, nor does she aim to destroy it. Rachel is a character full of mysteries that defy straight answers. When the last organic part of her brain is removed, does she still retain some humanity, or has she become a machine? When the chip in her brain is manipulated by Ji Su, does she still have free will? Is the relationship between Rachel and Ji Su, which transitions from curiosity to dependence, a form of love? Kim doesn’t impose judgments on her characters but leaves room for readers to come up with their own interpretations.       Readers are then free to imagine future possibilities. As challenges like climate change and artificial intelligence shape our future, science fiction tropes are becoming reality. Kim’s stories help us to prepare for the changes ahead, devising guidelines we can follow in times of despair. As Susan Watkins observed in Contemporary Women’s Post-Apocalyptic Fiction, rather than nostalgic restoration of what has been lost, women writers reimagine post-apocalyptic scenarios and propose alternative possible futures. In The Greenhouse at the End of the World, Kim depicts a post-apocalyptic utopia led by women. She reminds us that no utopia can last forever, and that any grand communal structure designed to withstand the future will eventually collapse in extreme conditions. However, these women focus on living well in the here and now, even if their past experiences are not believed and their contributions to save humanity beyond the utopia are not recognized. Their survival against the most difficult times and adversaries  becomes a testament to the possibility of whatever utopia—no matter how transient—they can find. Translated by Shaoyan Hu   Regina Kanyu WangWriter, Editor, ResearcherHugo Award Finalist for “Zhurong on Mars” and Locus Award finalist for The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories.

  by Regina Kanyu Wang

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  [ENGLISH] Across Oceans of Time and Incalculable Change

  Among the most exciting changes in the South Korean literary scene is the fact that the nation’s science fiction works are gaining notable access to a global audience. A decade ago, most of the leading lights of Korean speculative fiction remained untranslated and inaccessible abroad, but all that has changed. It’s now unsurprising that powerhouse author Kim Bo-young has had multiple books appear almost simultaneously in English translation, including I’m Waiting for You.        This book is unusual in several ways, not the least of which is its pairing of two very disparate literary diptychs. The first, comprising the title story and its sequel, “On My Way To You,” is an epistolary narrative translated by Sophie Bowman that explores how well love stands up to the “cold equations” of the universe. An engaged couple is challenged by the inexorable forces of physics as they travel at light speed, finding themselves separated from one another by the relativistic effects of time dilation, even as time rushes past back on Earth. Is love enough to sustain them in their struggle to be reunited? Love challenged by time dilation is, of course, a concept that has been explored before in SF—nothing is new under this or any other sun—but the execution is what matters, and this pair of stories share a wonderful interplay, contrasting the hell of being alone with the hell of being with others. It is a surprisingly pessimistic story in the big picture, and yet this serves as a fitting test of the love expressed in the couple’s letters to one another. The overall effect is moving, even more so when one realizes that the title story was commissioned as a proposal gift from one of Kim’s fans to another. (The story quite literally “worked”: the two are now very happily married!)       The other pair of stories, translated by Sung Ryu and including “The Prophet of Corruption” and “That One Life,” explore different narratives. These tales focus on the philosophical and ethical struggles of consciousnesses in a universe that, at least to this reader, feels like an intriguing amalgamation of Buddhist cosmology and the simulation hypothesis—the idea that our universe is an immersive simulation of some sort, and we are individual programs existing only within it. Although the simulation hypothesis is not explicitly mentioned, it’s impossible to miss the parallels between it and the alternative Buddhist cosmology Kim explores here. What if samsara—the unending cycle of birth, death, and reincarnation—were a massive self-learning project for a living, conscious universe, and that along the way, the architects of this project learned enough to begin disputing the assumptions of the project itself? The story is a worldbuilding extravaganza of speculative creativity, playing the same kind of games invention with Buddhist cosmology that hard SF authors typically play with physics, astronomy, and biology. Here science-fictional tropes like spaceships take on special relevance, tied to the questioning of the underpinnings of the story’s universe itself. In this diptych, the novella “The Prophet of Corruption” is definitely the standout, as both a memorable and a deeply challenging read.       Given the scope and breadth of Kim’s oeuvre and the marked differences between these sets of stories, one might wonder regarding the rationale behind this specific pairing. However, I found a surprising affinity between the two diptychs. An epigram prefacing the book offers a suggestion as to why. It reads, “The way I see it, loving one person means loving the universe.” Another link between these stories, of course, is that both present the reader with characters that cross staggering vistas of time and navigate radical change and loss driven on by unwavering passion and commitment. These stories somehow manage to be grand epics despite focusing on only a small handful of characters.       The translation here is deceptively lucid and smooth: like the best musicians and acrobats, Bowman and Ryu make difficult, daunting work appear surprisingly easy and natural. Kim’s writing can sometimes be profoundly challenging to render in English, and I felt nothing short of admiration while reading the text, noting often where the translators deftly preserved ambiguities that, while natural in Korean, are much more difficult to maintain in English. (One example is the indeterminacy of gender for many of Kim’s characters, which Bowman mentions in her notes.) Especially impressive was Ryu’s convincing and fluid rendering of the intermingling of Buddhist and scientistic language in “The Prophet of Corruption.”      Worthy of mention are the translator’s notes, which are presented in unusual epistolary form, mirroring the letters of the title story and “On My Way To You.” Although initially dubious about this approach, ultimately I appreciated the decision to convey their notes in this way. The letters are as polyphonic as are the stories in this book, a polyphony amplified by the inclusion not only the author’s notes on the tales but also the reader responses of the original audience for “I’m Waiting for You,” the couple whose marriage proposal was intimately tied up with the story. The overall effect is a reminder that all experience and storytelling is multivocal and multi-perspectival.       So it is with the genre as a whole—for SF authors are in constant dialogue with one another through their works—and I am genuinely happy that English-speakers are now being afforded greater access. I’m Waiting for You is a great starting point for exploring that dialogue in the sure hands of one of Korea’s most celebrated and thoughtful SF authors.    Gord SellarAuthor/Translator and Professor Institute for General EducationKorea University (Sejong Campus)

  by Gord Sellar

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  [CHINESE] Father's Liberation Diary: Weaving the Web of Time

  Father’s Liberation Diary is a biographical novel written by Jeong Ji A who dedicated over ten years to its refinement. The author, recipient of prestigious awards including the Lee Hyo-seok Literary Award and the Hahn Moo-Sook Literary Prize, became known through her novel, The Partisan’s Daughter in 1990, which recounted the experiences of her parents in guerrilla warfare. Father’s Liberation Diary, seen as a sequel to this work, goes beyond the “partisan” label to reveal her father’s multifaceted nature as both a loving parent and an ordinary individual. Upon its release, the novel became an instant best seller with a circulation exceeding 300,000 copies and received widespread praise, including from former South Korean President Moon Jae-in, and author Jiang Yani.    The author structured the novel using the aggregation method of a “funeral,” allowing the multiple characters to appear one by one naturally. These characters, with their varying ages, identities, and ideologies, include former comrades, a teenager, a shopkeeper, Vietnamese immigrants, a younger uncle, a rice cake shop owner, etc. Each gather at this ceremony and tell their stories. Through this masterful storytelling technique that transcends time and space, the father’s different stages in life are pieced together.    Death is the starting point. Untangling the knot in “my heart,” “I” sheds away preconceived notions of “my” father solely as a socialist or guerrilla fighter. For the first time ever, “I” grasps her father’s profound love for humanity—a love that extends beyond ideological boundaries—and also comprehends his desires and affections as an ordinary man. Her father, a staunch socialist, is not rigid in his thinking. His great love for non-socialist individuals and his understanding of non-materialistic religious beliefs are touching and admirable—no matter what, he places human values above all else.    This structural approach allows for a nostalgic exploration of the father’s life that surpasses mere personal emotional reminiscence, offering an objective perspective of his experiences. The work not only captures the father’s enthusiasm and righteousness, but also “inappropriately” collects his affairs—his flirtation with the shopkeeper and unsatisfied sexual desire during his marriage are honestly written out, revealing the author’s evolving attitude towards her father, from fleeing struggle to sincere understanding.    This intricate tapestry of stories spans over fifty years of time. The experience of the younger uncle brings sadness and warmth to the story. As a child, the uncle idolized his brother, the protagonist’s father. However, the relationship between the two took a turn for the worse when the uncle’s son’s promising future was shattered due to the protagonist’s father’s political activity. Whether or not the uncle will come to mourn his brother becomes an ongoing tension that runs through the narrative. The uncle’s belated appearance at the funeral pushes the novel to its climactic moment of “liberation”: all hatred and prejudice find release, not only the uncle’s, but also of the people connected to “my” father. The author understands that her guerrilla father always had within him an unwavering principle of humanity which transcended ideology, race, and class.    In terms of language, the beginning sets the tone for the whole novel with a few short sentences: “Father is dead. He hit his head on a utility pole. My father, who’s been living with a straight face all his life ended his sincere life in this way.” The language is clear and simple, humorous and witty, evoking profound melancholy. While recounting the hardships endured by the protagonist’s father, the language recalls a cold mountain village. This coolness is balanced by heartwarming scenes: from taking in a woman peddler and ends up being deceived, to the long-awaited return of the rice cake shop owner, and playful moments spent with her father in the mountains.    The death of the father brings liberation. Through this multi-perspective narrative, the father is no longer seen as a guerrilla or a communist, but simply as “my” father. This book is a profound recollection of this father’s life, an exploration of the intense emotions caused by that special era, and ultimately, a final reconciliation with herself.  Zhao JingEditor, Shanghai Translation Publishing House

  by Zhao Jing

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  [ENGLISH] Mater 2-10: A Train Ride Through a Century of Korean History

  In recent years, perhaps triggered by the commercial and critical success of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, and the American publishing industry’s shift towards selling more diverse literary voices in all genres, there has been a surge of Korean American novels inspired by the lives of the authors’ parents and grandparents—i.e., the experience of living in twentieth-century Korea through the peninsula’s colonial and war-torn decades. Many of these books are finely wrought, deeply researched, and rightly criticize the United States’s interventionist and destructive role during the Korean War. In reading work about the same period of North and South Korean history by Korean authors translated into English, however, one can’t help but notice a greater level of nuance and complexity that a less American-centric authorial lens allows.    Few Korean writers are more accomplished and acclaimed worldwide than Hwang Sok-yong. In the author’s  original afterword from Mater 2-10, Hwang writes that the novel was born from a conversation with an old man in Pyongyang in 1989. The old man’s father was a railroad worker who had fled from Seoul during a South Korean crackdown on labor unions, which were associated with Communist activity during the Cold War.    Now 81, Hwang has authored dozens of books, spent seven years in a South Korean prison for an unauthorized trip to North Korea for which he was later pardoned, fought on the side of the Americans in the Korean Marine Corps during the Vietnam War, and has been a vocal activist for Korean reunification. Mater 2-10 might be his final book, and at nearly 500 pages, it is Hwang’s capstone, a book that brings together the author’s interests in Korean history, reunification, and leftist politics into a single definitive work.     The book begins with Yi Jino, a third-generation railroad worker who has been laid off, high in the air. For over a year, he holds a one-person strike on the precarious catwalk, atop a factory chimney, subsisting on meals and medical aid brought up by his union. While he braves the elements as seasons change, his ancestors visit him in apparitions or hallucinations. His mother calls and says, “Picketing has always been in the Yi family blood . . . Don’t even think of coming down any time soon. So many have died for the cause already.” Those who have read The Guest and The Old Garden will be familiar with Hwang’s blurring of the boundaries between the living and the dead. The book toggles between the stories of Jino, his great-grandfather Baekman, who started as a railroad trainee in the 1920s, his grandfather Ilcheol, and his father Jisan.    Hwang’s novel portrays a colonized nation—first under Japanese rule, then American—that hated and criminalized unions for a century. Workers who demanded fair wages and safe working conditions were routinely kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned, and murdered. While the American labor movement has had infamous eruptions of violence throughout its history, the persecution of unionized workers in South Korea was brutal and ruthless on another level.     One of the most complex and compelling characters is Choi Daryeong, recruited and given the name “Yamashita” by a Japanese policeman who struggles to pronounce his Korean name. Daryeong’s job is to infiltrate and spy on labor unions, starting with book clubs formed by factory workers. With the fervor and ruthlessness of Inspector Javert in Les Miserables, Daryeong spends decades encircling his old classmate Yi Ilcheol and his family, first for his Japanese bosses and then for his American ones. He does his job so well that he climbs the ranks from spy to police chief.     The exploration of moral gray areas is a characteristic of much of Hwang’s fiction. Daryeong is a nuanced character empowered to choose his own circumstances rather than to simply endure injustice. Though he’s clearly the Yi family’s archenemy, Daryeong describes himself as neither victim nor villain. In a meeting with Ilcheol, Daryeong says, “Just as you drove a train for a living, I did police work—for a living.”    Mater 2-10 refers to the locomotive that was originally manufactured during the Japanese colonial period, “Mater” being a Japanese abbreviation for “mountain.” The railroad these locomotives ran upon were eventually seized by the South Korean Army only to be destroyed by the Allies as they retreated. Today, the ruins lie in the Demilitarized Zone as a symbol of the severed connection between two nations that were once one.    My hope is that, with the surge of interest in literary work from Korean Americans about twentieth-century Korea, readers will be encouraged to seek out work from writers like Hwang Sok-yong, whose vital, complicated stories come from both research and lived experience.  Leland CheukAuthor, No Good Very Bad Asian (C&R Press, 2019)

  by Leland Cheuk