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[Essay] The Possibility of Hypernarrative
The Well-Made Narrative and Beyond
by Yang Yun-eui
[Cover Feature] 212 Versions of the Same Story: Publishing Korean Literature in Japan
Japan is nothing short of a publishing powerhouse. In fact, the country churns out over 70,000 new titles every year. Among these thousands of books, translated works account for six to seven percent, 80 percent of which are translations of English books. The remaining 20 percent are works translated from Korean, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, Thai and other languages which together amount to fewer than 1,000 titles. However, a recent surge in books translated from Korean is drawing the envy of publishers from other language markets. CUON, a Japanese publisher specializing in Korean literature, made its entry into Japan’s publishing market in 2011 with the release of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, and has gone on to publish over a hundred titles since. The books are divided into the “New Korean Literature Series,” which focuses on contemporary works published in the 2000s, the “Classics Series,” which features some of Korea’s most renowned literary works of all time; the “Short Short Series,” which introduces readers to short stories in a bilingual format that includes both the original Korean text along with the Japanese translation; and the “Korean Poetry Selection Series,” which boasts a number of poetry collections. CUON also began publishing the Japanese translation of Pak Kyongni’s widely acclaimed epic novel Land in 2016, hoping to have all twenty volumes fully translated and published by next year.
by Kim Seungbok
[Cover Feature] Let the Snake Wait Under His Weed: The (In)Decision of the Poetry Translator
Is This the End of Translation?
by Chung Eun-Gwi
[Cover Feature] Disintegration of Language: A Translator’s Self-defense in the Era of AI
The task of Hermes—that is what Olga Tokarczuk calls the work of a translator. Hermes is the Greek god who flies through the sky in winged sandals, wearing a winged helmet and carrying a staff entwined by two serpents. He is distinguished by his ability to cross over from heaven to the underworld, between the world of gods and the world of humans, delivering the gods’ will to men. He is one who crosses over, the one who delivers. A translator is like Hermes in that respect, save for the lack of winged sandals, helmet, and staff. What she has instead is a stooped back, stiff shoulders, and flattened buttocks. The body of a translator, who sits hunched in front of a manuscript for extended periods of time, is her tool. When I picture the translators I admire, the image that comes to my mind is people with long-enduring buttocks, not wings; people who carry words with caution, as though they were bricks, instead of moving them all at once. If asked the secret to their crossing over, these translators would doubtless say time. Time expended to translate a manuscript. Time expended—what an uncompetitive weapon in the era of AI.
They say that in the near future, translation will be the first profession to disappear. A translator’s time seems fragile in a world that demands maximum results with minimum cost and time. Many predict that translators working for subsistence will be replaced by AI, and that only a handful will participate as supervisors. The outlook need not be so gloomy, of course, but there will come a moment when translators must prove their competitiveness against AI.
When everyone was talking about ChatGPT, the first question that came to my mind was: why should humans translate books when AI is faster, cheaper, and more accurate? From time to time, I like to compare a sentence I translated with a Google translation. Google Translate is inadequate for translating long sentences and literary expressions, but on occasion, it generates surprisingly accurate results, filling me with an odd sense of shame as a professional translator. I am led to wonder if my translation isn’t swayed by my own personal interpretation, and if machine translation, which interprets a text in an objective, statistical manner, may not expand the possibility of literary translation.
I once imagined: I am at a publisher’s office, sitting side by side with an AI translator. We are translator candidates, competing for the same piece of work (in reality, of course, a translator is not selected in this way). To be chosen, I must make my case as to why I am better suited for the job than the AI translator. In what ways, as a human, am I more capable of successfully performing the task?
To answer the question, one must first study the principle of AI translation. Recent AI translation tools use Neural Machine Translation (NMT) technology to translate languages sentence by sentence. Neural network systems consist of an input layer and an output layer. When a sentence is input into the system, it outputs the coordinate values of words, syntax, word order, and so on by understanding the context through deep learning. The key is to acquire as much data as possible and input high-quality corpora.1 Simply put, AI translation involves statistics, probability, and calculation. The pros of AI translation include quick handling of large amounts of texts. This method involves a spontaneous and direct movement from one language to another, and is a way of expressing a one-to-one relationship that binds two languages into one. In other words, it is a return to simple language.Is simple language, then, appropriate for literary translation? In this regard, a small seed of hope begins to grow in the mind of the human translator who feels small and insignificant in the face of efficiency. Literature is a fluid and complex system of words that commands specific, emotional, and connotative language, is open to various interpretations depending on the reader, and can change with the times. The first thing a human translator must do to translate intricate language is to read. Reading a work of literature is vastly more than obtaining information. The context must be identified, and further, reconstituted, during which process the reader’s imagination and subjective senses are mobilized. Thus, reading is not a passive act in which one accepts written language as it is, but an active response, a creative act, even. A translator—the first reader—seeks to translate in a creative manner through this process of reading. She ponders the meaning between the lines, and studies the context as much as she studies the text itself. This reading is a task in which translators invest as much time as they do in translating.I studied drama in school, not literary translation. I began to translate because translating theatrical texts appealed to me. Before I start on a translation, I review all the TV shows, radio programs, and newspaper articles in which the author has appeared. I do this to find a voice: the author’s voice. I create a narrator necessary for the task of translation, constantly replaying in my mind the voice of the author, like that of an actor playing a certain role, and read the text in the way the author would breathe and see things. The narrator, of course, is not the author, having been created from my imagination and subjective senses. To be precise, the narrator is someone created within myself whose origin lies with the author.
Several years ago, I translated a couple of short texts by Marguerite Duras compiled in “Summer 80,” a collection of ten short pieces she had written for Libération between June and August of 1980. Working on the translation, I looked out every day at the Trouville Beach, where Duras had stayed while writing the book, and imagined her reading her own words to me. I was the stenographer setting down her words and breath on paper. There was a unique rhythm and intonation to her words, and I hoped that her voice had infused itself into the translated text, like a song from a foreign land unfamiliar to one’s ears. A certain hesitance around the border that keeps one from smoothly crossing over, a sense of displacement, suits the language of Duras, I thought. This, of course, is subjective interpretation and feeling—which is how I know what dangers lie in this method of interpretation. Creative translation entails the possibility of mistranslation. With each translated sentence comes continuing conflict. What seems a faithful translation to some could, to me, seem an awkward literal translation—a failure; to another, creativity could seem to be a betrayal of translation. Then there are limits imposed on my time, space, and experience. Translation is an attempt to simultaneously reach beyond a linguistic border and a translator’s limit, and something always goes missing or lost in the process. I once dreamed that the words and sentences I had missed transformed themselves into the author and tormented me. Each time I translate, I feel myself a failure and resolve to do better next time, but I’m flooded by feelings of stagnation—because I don’t know the right answer. What is a good translation? I have yet to find a sure answer to that question. I only know that the narrator I create should not be a reenactor for Duras, or an imitator of a certain language; and that the translation must be done in a language that is whole and intact. Will it be possible if I read and polish the manuscript again and again? As I lose myself in these thoughts, the clock ticks toward the deadline. I wonder if I have ever submitted a translation manuscript that is perfect. All of them are full of holes. Will the day ever come when I’ll be able to say, this time it’s perfect? What is a perfect translation, anyway?
Translator Jung Young-Mok said, “The task of the translator is not to achieve a perfect translation, but to perfect the language.”2 I think the statement is based on a beautiful and fascinating perspective that focuses not only on translation but also on the art of language as a whole. A language is not fixed to a certain text, so something entirely new can emerge as a text is translated from A language to B language; and a perspective that acknowledges this new creation, so that language may be perfected, sets the translator free. The holes and dents that occur as A and B come into conflict may become a sort of literary valley, which does not need to be laboriously filled. The valley itself can be magnificent. And if each translator creates a different valley—as each has her own language—how rich and colorful the view would be. If translation is a creative art, then its wholeness and beauty, I believe, have their source in this rich variety. Ten translators working on one text results in ten different texts, as the language we read is not simply source language, but a personal language with different histories and narratives. This language is handed down from parents to children and develops according to education, environment, encounters, circumstances, and personalities; then it undergoes progress, degeneration, and changes with time, becoming one’s unique trait. Thus, the coming together of an author’s language and a translator’s language is a conversation of sorts that can go in any number of unexpected directions, not one in which the answers can be predicted as in a conversation with AI. It is through this openness that we become aware that this world does not move in a single direction, nor is there only one aspect to it; there are so many different facets to this world, which can proceed in multiple directions.
Sometimes I try to think from an author’s stance instead of a translator’s. If my work is translated into another language, I would certainly welcome the possibility of varied interpretations. I would also be happy if the work transformed so much that it surprised me, as that would evidence the aliveness of my language. There is a life force that comes into existence only when a living entity changes and disintegrates. Yoko Tawada said, “Art must disintegrate in an artistic manner.”3 Translation, perhaps, is a process of disintegrating in an artistic way and gaining new vitality from the debris. If my words crumble away in a beautiful way, giving birth to something new, then that, too, would bring me joy.
Back in the shoes of a translator, I consider the act of crumbling in a beautiful way. If we believe that language affects thought, and that the words we write and translate ought to be imbued with the morals, ethics, and values of the day, the first thing that must be eliminated from the language of translation is discriminatory language, and particularly language that lacks gender awareness. The expression I’ve been wrestling with lately is “그녀,” the Korean word for “she.” In a Korean dictionary, “그녀” is a third-person pronoun referring to a woman previously talked about. The gender-equal dictionary compiled by the Seoul Foundation of Women & Family, however, points out that the word is used from the standpoint of a man to indicate a woman. Considering that a corresponding expression—“그남”—does not exist, we note that “그녀” does put an emphasis on a woman’s gender. Replacing every instance of “그녀” in a text with “±×,” however, may lead to confusion when a foreign language with separate male and female pronouns, such as “he/she” or “il/elle” are translated into Korean. Further, in translating sentences written by an author who lays emphasis on the narrator’s identity as a woman (for instance, in author Clarice Lispector’s works, it is important to reveal that the narrator is a woman), the term “그녀” cannot be excluded. And let’s say that there’s a story about someone whose gender is irrelevant, or someone with both masculine and feminine characteristics. In such a case, do we use “그” or “그녀”? Shouldn’t a fresh neuter pronoun be invented? None of these questions can arise in a simple language system in which two languages are placed in a one-to-one relationship. The questions become possible when language is not merely seen as a means of communication uttered through the vocal organs, but perceived as a complex and multilayered system fraught with social and cultural significance. Without such questions, the originality and creativity found in a translation language will seem nothing but mistranslation.
So, this is all there is to my self-defense as a human translator. The AI translator might already have finished and submitted the translation while I’ve been talking away about these hypotheses and theories. In the end, the winner of this competition will be determined by what the reader wants, which is the most reliable criterion. What does someone reading literature want? What does it mean to read literature?
Finally, I’ll borrow once again from Olga Tokarczuk in an effort to persuade readers of literature: “Literature is thus that particular moment when the most individual language meets the language of others.”4
With what kind of language do you want to greet this particular moment? My answer, as a reader, is clear: a language with a voice, a thinking language, a creative language, a contemplating language. And this answer is the hope, as well as the urging whip, that I hand myself—reader to translator.
by Shin Yoo Jin
[Essay] Where to Go from Here: The Ecopoetry of Ra Heeduk
“Even after modernity has made every alley disappear, a poet has the responsibility and right to remember and restore the things that fade away, just as Baudelaire, passing the new Place du Carrousel, recalled the camp of stalls and piles of shafts,” writes Ra Heeduk in her collection of essays, A Half-Bucket of Water. Based on this quote, we may say that to read a poem is to step into an alley and that to open a book of poems is to face the veiled past.
Ever since Ra Heeduk began contributing to the JoongAng Daily in 1989, writing poetry has been an act of looking back. The title of her first published poem, “To the Roots,” became the title of her first book, published in 1991. In this book, she follows her own roots, from the unjust oppression she experienced as a Korean literature and language teacher all the way back to her childhood when she grew up with other children in the orphanage run by her parents. She does not stop at her own past, however, as she also interrogates the history of Korea—farmers who lost their homes in the rush to urbanization; families separated amidst a divided country; and democracy activists who lost their lives fighting the dictatorship. These images are at the center of Ra’s depictions of Korean society.
In To the Roots, the poet looks back on the roots of “I” as well as the roots of the Republic of Korea collectively. For Ra, to write has always been closely related to the nostalgia inherent in people, remembering the alleys that are forgotten. A poet is one who extends a hand to someone being swept away by the harsh currents of society. Over her three-decade career, she has published nine books of poems. In that time, her gaze has been fixed on the contradictions and injustices of human civilization that torment the marginalized.
Ra often writes about the people who have been chased off into the alleys, specifically the poor who have been excluded from the plans to redevelop Seoul. In her poem “Sinjeong, District 6-1,” Ra writes “it is more painful to live somewhere on which things are constantly being built than to live in an abandoned building” (The Words Stained the Leaves). This sentence is born of the fact that the poet’s eyes are not on the development of Seoul but on the people who have been left behind by the times. She is looking not at the beautiful skyscrapers but the low, weathered roofs. The houses of the impoverished, which were once a part of the city, become narrow alleys, and then are excluded from the glittering, new sights of the city or demolished outright.
What legitimizes such a system that makes people drive away other people? This guilt is aimed not only towards others but also towards the poet herself. In “After Losing That Alley,” the poet moves into a new apartment complex and thinks of “the remorse that required someone’s poverty / and the longing that required someone’s misery” (It’s Not That Far from Here). She admits that her own well-being is impossible without the sacrifice forced upon another. The belief that her life is dependent on another develops into the belief that all life is dependent on one another. For example, in the poem “The Last Memory of the Hand,” she describes how touched she was when she petted a bird in the Sariska woods of India: “I heard the most honest confession of the body.” Here, we can catch a glimpse of the poetic revelation that a poem must deliver not a visual image of nature but the weight and warmth of life that one can feel by actually touching nature.
Nature must be the root of all alleys that humans have lost. Although as humans we are a part of nature, with our skin always touching all of life, we also try to look at the world as separate from us. How can we experience life? This question is the clue to understanding Ra’s poetry. In “Permitted Surfeit”, she writes such descriptions as “delicious sunlight” and “twelve superfluous baskets of sunshine” (What Is Darkening). Sunlight, something so familiar that it fails to be notable, becomes food that has weight and can be swallowed. Furthermore, in “The Old Tambour,” when she writes “while stitching me, someone went away”, she casts the “I” as a fabric woven from a skein, endlessly becoming and coming undone.
The skin must be the place where one feels life. The metaphor of touch lends itself to the notion that the time in which life connects with one another is endless. In this way, the poet recalls the clear and simple realization that the contemporary person has become lost in the waves of Korean modernization. A person’s own body is not comprised alone. Even an individual body is made together, and even a single mind is shaped together over a long period of time. Scale & Stairs illustrates life in this sense. The moment she touches a magnolia, she writes, “the smoke’s shadow lay on my hand, above the flower bud. / Ah, whose kiss this is!” (“The Smoke of My Breath”). To Ra, the act of touching is understood as a moment of contact in which she is touched by things that have now disappeared. Thus, what comprises her books are never words but “this stratum of words” (“A Shovelful of Earth”), the experience of beings that have disappeared from the language of the civilized person.
This understanding of life in Ra’s poetry can be thought of as an alternative to the attitude of “civilized” person who views nature as a target for development. One thinks of other lives as inferior or as objects to be regulated because one has forgotten how one’s own life is indebted to those other lives. This idea grows more clearly into a criticism of society in her recent work where she seeks an ecological way of thought. In Wild Apple, she criticizes the overfishing of minke whales in “Between ‘No Sighting’ and ‘Sighting.’” She also offers Native American animism as an alternative way of thought, writing “When I arrived at the American Indian Village / I realized raindrops are the death of clouds” (“Raindrops”), a line that suggests respect even for inanimate objects as life.
The epistemic project of deconstructing human-centrism does not simply mean that we must return to a primitive way of thought. The idea that even raindrops and clouds must be understood as subjects with agency is central to contemporary neo-materialism and ecological activism. The formal experiments in The Time Horses Return carries ecological importance. Ra is not writing about the mind of “I” but about the time spent pondering the mind of “you.” The “you” here is not limited to other people but includes other others such as amoeba, grass, and starfish. Ra attempts to record a document of the world from the point of view of such others. The ethical concern consistent throughout the book is to care and worry about the unimaginable pain of “you” and “your” way of existing, the otherness that cannot truly be felt as “mine.” Following this bioethical thought, the poet comes to the conclusion that what is furthest from humans is humans ourselves. As in the line “but you never ended up recalling / the days of fins and gills” (“You and Fish”), evolutionarily, humans and fish have the same ancestor. What humans have forgotten is the true origin of ourselves.
Our very existence may be an alley we have forgotten. We may have lost sight of how time and the society of others form the mind and body of “I.” Ra writes plainly in Filename: Lyric Poetry: “The marks left by your actions, that’s what I am” (“Rhythm 0”). Again, we have the idea that “I” does not make up one person. Just as countless lives accompany one another to bring one flower to bloom, one person is made by endlessly spending time in the company of others. Such ecological thought crosses all borders, national or racial. “There is no border to crumbling soil,” Ra declares in her poem, “We Ate Soiled Rice.” What is needed for ecological relations is the strength to think beyond the epistemic regimes of capitalism or nationalism.
For all that, how can the cycle of corporations and capital be stopped? How can nations be stopped? How can we stop love, which respects humans more than the countless lives that bring a flower to bloom? This may seem irrational to some and impossible to others. Ra’s misery and sorrow toward the reckless development of civilization is made clearer in her recent work, Possibilist. As illustrated by the lines “Where are the plastics or drifts accumulated? / When does the new ice age end?” (“Birds of the Pleistocene”), to Ra, this is the era of human pollution and “the new ice age.” To make matters worse, the quarantines of the COVID-19 pandemic cut off human relations, the homeless were driven from shelters, and many things that were once a daily part of life became things that should have disappeared (“The Things that Fade Away”). It has become a matter of course for people to distance themselves from other people.
Yet, as if it is a poet’s responsibility to say that an ecological community is possible, Ra writes, “I’m trying to become a possibilist / I’m trying to believe in the possibility of impossibility” (“Possibilist”). What is the difference between saying that an ecological relation or community is possible and believing it? Perhaps the difference is not significant, but what her poetry opens up here is not attainment but action. Can a parent agree to provide less than the best for their children? Can a person understand the mind of an animal? Ra’s poetry offers the ecological action of saying that something is possible even if it is not and hurling our whole bodies toward the conclusion that it is. The poet says that she doesn’t know what challenges await and what the future might bring. She admits that we may fail. Therefore, though her poetry claims that it knows nothing about nature, it only grows more and more devoted. Her poetry suggests the adventure toward existence in nature. It prepares for the fact that humans are beings thrown into nature. It is the intense propulsion back to the very beginning.
by Park Dongeok
[Cover Feature] We Have to Protect the Future of All Life¹: The Emergence of Climate Crisis Awareness in Korean Literature
Human-induced Devastation
by Heo Hee
[Cover Feature] From Climate Change to Climate Grief
“There it is! The Jang Bogo Station!” someone shouted, looking out the porthole. It was January 2023 when we reached the Jang Bogo Research Station on the continent of Antarctica. Still exhausted with seasickness, I forced myself to climb up to the deck. The wind was gentle that day. The thermometer on the wall showed the mercury steady at two degrees below zero. A balmy day, considering it had been nine below zero on the morning I departed from Seoul. There was a thin cloud cover, but the sun was radiant, and the sea sloshed gently below. This was not what I’d expected to see. On my first visit in 2018, the sea had been covered in ice. But now, it had all melted away, leaving behind deep blue waves. A colleague from the research station came to meet us, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. “We’ve been having unusually warm weather this year, and not a lot of snow. It’s so hot at the base we’re sweating. You’d better take that jacket off now.”
Antarctica is changing rapidly. Ocean temperatures reached a new high since the research station’s inauguration in 2014. Before, researchers traveled to and from the base by airplane. Once the sea had frozen solid, the ice could be used as a runway. But in October 2022, just one month before the start of Antarctica’s summer, researchers had bored through the ice to measure its thickness; because the sea was much warmer now, the ice was only 1.2 meters, which fell well short of the 1.5 meters required for a safe airplane landing. As a result, the research station canceled all in- and outbound flights, restricting researchers to maritime travel. Only a small fraction of the originally-planned personnel could participate in research now, thanks to these restrictions.
by Won Young Lee
[Cover Feature] A Different Way of Life, A Different Kind of Fiction: Writing The Weathermaster
“A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard,” begins Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Rick’s day starts with his mood organ; so does mine, more or less. My cell phone may be less intricate, but it does the job of waking me up with the alarm I set the night before.
Our daily lives already rely extensively on machines. I was commissioned to write this piece via text message and email. Written on my computer, it will probably be read on your phone, our communication entirely dependent on devices. Over the whole process, I have not come into contact with a single human face or voice. All of my actual contact has been with plastic and glass.
Thanks to machines, we go about our lives with no concerns about the weather. By choosing refrigerators and washing machines, electric dish dryers and humidifiers, and cars, we have excluded the sun and wind and rain from our lives. Air too dry? Turn on the humidifier. Forest fires? Let’s develop some firefighting helicopters. Too many mosquitoes? Genetic manipulation can solve that! This is how we have responded to the climate crisis. The living world is impartial; neglect the sun and wind and rain, and they will not look after us. There is no way for us to keep our current lifestyles, refusing to give up any of our privileges—eating meat every day, using cars for short distances, flying for pleasure—and expect the natural world to remain constant.
On the streets, everyone walks around with smartphones in their hands. Toddlers look at phones in their strollers. Once, I watched a child fall over trying to reach out and retrieve a phone that had dropped to the ground. The child cried harder over dropping their phone than the shock of the fall, which made me want to cry, too. Our appetite for mobile phones has turned the Earth’s orbit into a junkyard of dead satellites, with space debris orbiting the planet at seven times the speed of a bullet. Cell phones have driven a quarter of the planet’s bees to extinction, while workers for phone manufacturers toil under inhumane conditions, sometimes at the cost of their lives. Using smartphones, our attention span has dropped lower than a goldfish’s. None of these horrific reasons, however, are enough for us to give our phones up. We keep erring not because we don’t know the solution or the right answer, but because we would rather stay on the wrong side. We know we should give up our phones but cannot, addicted to them as we are.
After learning that dead birds are found with plastic waste in their guts, I became firmly anti-plastic. I stopped buying plastic products and aligned myself to a zero-waste philosophy. I pondered how to write about a message that was already everywhere in a way that would catch the reader’s attention. I settled on science fiction, set in the future, reversing the situations of humans and animals, and that’s when I was finally able to turn the message “Stop using plastic now!” into fiction. And thus I turned the urgency I feel about the climate crisis into a short story collection titled The Weathermaster.
After The Weathermaster came out, I received an interview request from the climate and energy section of the Business Post. I was surprised that the request had not come from the literature section, but also pleased, as I had written the book from a different place than before. I had hoped it might be read as a piece of climate activism. Libraries called me, too, asking if I could give a talk on climate change.
At one such talk, an audience member raised their hand (the person in question had a tumbler on their table, showing that they were trying to cut back on disposable cups). They were trying to consume less for the planet, but found that they had merely gone from buying new things to trawling online for secondhand goods. The librarian that had invited me also admitted that while trying to cut down on shopping, they had become an avid vintage shopper instead. For the sake of the planet, they had switched to buying used goods, but could that really be called a meaningful change?
I went through a similar experience after deciding to stop buying things. Life felt suddenly flat. I no longer had the anticipation of researching products I was thinking of buying, the thrill of going to stores, the satisfaction of coming back with an armful of goodies. It wasn’t that I missed buying new things so much. That was the easy part, actually; I’m not rich, but I have most of the things I need, and don’t really need much else. The hardest part was the boredom.
I was so very bored. Every day, new and upgraded products were being produced, but I couldn’t buy them. There was no fun in sitting around with my existing purchases while the world hurtled ahead without me. Having given up my pastime of searching for and comparing and choosing products I liked best, I was left with a lot of time to kill.
The gift of surplus time didn’t sit well with me at first. How could it? I’d given up a great pleasure in exchange for something I couldn’t stand. All that spare time made me anxious. I tried to set it aside and ignore it. Not knowing what to do, I thought wistfully about the happy hours I’d spent shopping. Thinking of large shopping malls still gave me a flutter. I could still taste the desire of acquisition, the excitement ahead of a purchase and the thrill of finally getting my hands on something I wanted (ad infinitum).
If it weren’t for my cat, my Pachira Aquatica, Monstera, and Schefflera plants; if it weren’t for my best friend, an environmental activist; if I hadn’t worked for an environmental magazine before becoming a writer; if I hadn’t watched Chris Jordan’s documentary Albatross; if I hadn’t written The Weathermaster; if I hadn’t been asked to write about climate change; if I hadn’t been asked to speak about the environment—I would probably still be shopping at the mall every weekend. I would absorb myself with browsing new items, and indulge in splurges I would pay off in installments.
Life had other plans for me, however. I quit shopping and decided to make the most of the downtime that that offered. My reasons were manifold—the climate crisis, dwindling funds, yoga practice—but most of all, I didn’t want to fall into addiction again. I had a pretty tough time in my late twenties when I became addicted to ballroom dancing. What had begun as a hobby quickly turned into a compulsion. I only felt happy when I was dancing. Just thinking about it gave me a rush, while everything else in life paled in comparison. My dance shoes stayed in my bag all the time. I could be chatting with a friend at a lovely café, and all the time I would be looking forward to when I could get up and go to the dance hall.
Being addicted to shopping might give the illusion of making one’s life richer, but it actually has the opposite effect. It’s a vicious cycle of wanting things we don’t need, and then having to work even harder to pay for them, only to realize that we want something else. Going down that path, no one can ever be satisfied in the present moment.
I realized that the surplus time I was struggling to put up with might very well be what certain philosophers had in mind when exalting the virtues of living in the present. I tried and failed to think of anything else I could do with that time other than shopping, watching movies, or exercise. Really, it was like casting pearls before swine. What was I supposed to do with all that time?
The answer to what I had come to consider boring, frustrating downtime was unexpected peace of mind. I used to think that breathing space was a bonus that came after one achieved all their ambitions. It turned out that it came with giving up things I didn’t want or need.
Many of the stories in The Weathermaster were written in a rush. I wrote “Great Pacific Dead Body Patch” as a campaign against single-use plastics, while “Those without Bunkers” is a warning about the climate crisis. When I was writing the latter, I suspended the narration for over one page to describe how our lifestyles are destroying the planet. “Visitors” is a satire of how humans treat non-humans. I was not always like this, putting message over form, when writing my previous works. Yet with The Weathermaster, I gave up on moving stories forward smoothly in favor of headlines that could be seen a mile away. I didn’t care if that meant I broke the rules of writing fiction, if my stories had less literary merit, if they turned out a little gauche. I wrote the stories in The Weathermaster with the hope that they might inspire someone to cut back on single-use plastics, to take an interest in the climate crisis, to remember that the lives of animals are as precious as our own.
Just as we lean towards the well-worn “I love you” instead of countless other, more sophisticated declarations of love; just as we long to hear that phrase spoken out loud no matter how much the other person might shower us with praise, gifts, and affection, I too wanted my words to be clear. Knowing how our world is hurtling towards disaster, my priority was to get my message across.
“Save the planet,” we say, “for the environment.” The truth is that climate change threatens the survival of humankind. It is not for other species or the planet that we must give up the privileges of our current lifestyles. It is for the sake of our own futures that we must renounce the way we live now, because we only have six years left.
I’m still in the same frame of mind as when I wrote The Weathermaster. I have just one thing to ask of you after reading this: let’s not go shopping this weekend. If you’re left with time on your hands that you don’t know how to fill, leave it be. You might be surprised, as I was. It might be horrible, an experience that you’d never volunteer for normally. You might feel like giving up such a pointless waste of time to go shopping or see a movie or pick up your phone instead.
After a while, though, if you resist that urge to check your phone and settle yourself down in front of that unknown expanse of time, you’ll soon be able to recognize the true value of time. That the boredom that you railed against is actually the peace of mind that you’ve been longing for so desperately; that you’ve just come face to face with a different way of life.
by Choi Jeonghwa
[Essay] If You Can See the Magnolia in the Valley
Kim Yeonsu, who this year celebrates thirty years of writing, debuted in 1993 with a poem published in the journal Writer’s World. The following year he won the Writer’s World Award with his novel, Walking While Pointing to the Mask. With more than twenty published works of fiction and essays to his name and having won many of Korea’s most prestigious literary prizes—including the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Daesan Literary Award, and the Hwang Sun-won Literary Award—he is rightfully considered one of Korea’s most representative authors. His newest short story collection, A Future as Ordinary as This, comes nine years after his last short story collection, Mi in April, Sol in July, and was voted “Novel of the Year” in a survey of fifty Korean authors immediately after its release. Kim Yeonsu for a long time has been, in the eyes of his peers and readers alike, one of Korea’s most beloved writers.
Kim’s works are often praised for their ability to satisfy the many demands that readers of fiction have. Although he writes his novels from the cold and calculating perspective of an author with a shrewd outlook on life, the relationships he depicts don’t lack warmth, but exude it. And despite the many insights that appear throughout his books about our inability to never fully understand one another, there are just as many heart-warming depictions (via good-natured relationships between characters) of the will to overcome the impossibility of mutual understanding. Perhaps this is why we read Kim’s novels: we are reminded that life only becomes bearable because of the efforts of humans to understand one another. And perhaps it is also why we reaffirm the continued need for storytelling, as it is only through stories that we can faithfully restore the lives of individuals whose histories have been forgotten.
In A Future as Ordinary as This, Kim attempts to “restore the past” and “remember the future.” But ultimately, his intentions are related to the question of how we can live through the present. Indeed, the present, which is at once the future of the past and the past of the future, seems to have become even more important to the author. The story that most clearly delivers this message is the title work, in which appears the line “What we must remember isn’t the past, but the future.”
The short story begins with “Every time I hear someone say that the world has ended, I think of 1999, of the things that happened that year and the things that didn’t,” and goes on to recount the past of a married couple (Joon and Jimin) who twenty years ago were contemplating suicide together.
While remembering the past, Joon and Jimin track down a once-banned novel written by Jimin’s deceased mother titled Ash and Dust. Thanks to Joon’s uncle, who has read the book, Joon and Jimin learn about the plot of the novel. In Ash and Dust, there are two lovers who, realizing their love is coming to an end, decide to commit suicide. But as soon as do this, they begin living a second and then a third life. Their second life flows backward in time, from present to past, and in their third life, they get to relive their first life, but with the new knowledge they have gained. After telling them about the novel, Joon’s uncle says that people’s unhappiness comes about because “humans only put significance on time that has passed; they only look for the causes of the present in the past.” According to him, “What we must remember isn’t the past, but the future.”
But what does Joon’s uncle mean by “remembering the future”? As the two lovers in Ash and Dust live out their second life, they “remember the future,” which for them refers to the moment in the past when they fell in love. As they continue moving toward that moment, they realize “how imagining the best coming at the end changes the present.” Once they remember just “how excited and thrilled they were” in the future (in other words, the first time they met), the flow of time reverses again and they start living their third life, which is inevitably different from their first life. In this way, the message that “A Future as Ordinary as This” attempts to convey through the story within a story is not as convoluted as it may seem. In other words, when Kim Yeonsu writes “remember the future,” perhaps he’s trying to say that the present, as the future of the past, can be and is connected to the “excitement and thrill” that we experienced in the past. And thus, not only do we need to cherish the “ordinary present” more, but there is also no reason to be so anxious and afraid of the impending future.
Of course, there may be people who are constantly unhappy because they don’t know what “excitement and thrill” actually are. And there may be some people for whom remembering such emotions might cause great pain. A parent whose thirteen-year-old child has died after five years of battling a disease might be such a person. Indeed, what kind of future is there to remember for someone who has lost something as precious as their own child? In the short story “In Front of Nanju’s Sea,” there is a character whose life becomes irrevocably grey because of a certain moment in the past. In this short story, the main character Jeong-hyeon, a writer, goes to an island off the coast of Namhae to give a lecture. There she meets her old friend Eun-jeong who was a member of the same club in college thirty years ago, but who has since changed her name and now lives on the island writing fiction. Eun-jeong says she has thought for a long time about the “second wind” Jeong-hyeon told her about thirty years ago. Jeong-hyeon had said there are moments when someone “falls after enduring until they can’t endure anymore”; in other words, a moment in which someone feels like the winds of life have completely changed direction. Eun-jeong says that this confession of Jeong-hyeon’s comforted her somewhat.
There are frequent references to stories within Kim’s work that give solace to people by letting them know that “second winds” are possible. That this solace is always contained within stories, and that new life becomes possible when we refer to the lives of others, might be the messages that Kim Yeonsu has always been trying to convey to us. For example, there is an inter-textual reference in “In Front of Nanju’s Sea” to Kenji Miyazawa’s story “The Magnolia Tree,” in which Miyazawa writes, “Now that I look back, despite the long arduous journey, I realized the path was full of white magnolias.” Connecting this quote to the story is meant to give hope to people who are “blocked by a blue wall that they think they can never overcome.”
By interweaving and creating various stories and lives, Kim wants to say that we are all connected in the end. His novels also tell us that the coincidental relationships that pass us by in a flash are sometimes the things that allow us to live. For example, “Just Remember One Person” is a short story about how ten years in the past (from the perspective of the narrator), a song requested by a character named Hee-jin at a café in Japan rescued a man in his mid-forties who at the time was in the “darkest place in hell.” Determined to commit suicide, Jun Fukuda visits his hometown where at a café he hears “White Grave,” a song that he always used to listen to back in middle school. The song brings him solace and the strength to escape from that “moment of death.” Hee-jin, who hears this story from Fukuda, ponders how there “can be someone who remembers me even when I am completely unaware that such a person was living in this world.” Hee-jin then poses the question: “Does the universe shift when we try to remember someone?”
In fact, this short story is told from the perspective of the first-person narrator. After receiving an e-mail from Hee-jin, the narrator comes to remember what the narrator and Hee-jin were like ten years ago. The narrator also remembers writing a few words in the café guest book and the future date of April 16, 2014.1 Hee-jin’s email, which was received shortly after a tragedy in which “a ferry carrying students on a field trip to Jeju Island sank off the coast of Jindo,” makes both the narrator and the reader think about the importance of memory. If remembering the future can save our present selves and the past, and if the connections created by remembering or being remembered without others knowing it has the power to change someone’s life (if not the entire universe, however small that change might be), then readers of Kim’s novels will be determined never to stop remembering the future.
Reading fiction can enrich the lives of people in many ways, but the ultimate goal of fiction should be to remind us that we are all connected. We are not only connected to others through time and space, but we are also connected to an infinite number of selves as we pass from the past, through the present, to the future. Kim’s novels tell us that if we can carry out the difficult task of remembering the future amongst all these connections, we will realize that our present lives shine as bright as magnolias. In this way, his novels ultimately give us hope.
Translated by Sean Lin Halbert
Korean Books Mentioned:
• A Future as Ordinary as This (Munhak Dongne, 2022)
『이토록 평범한 미래』 (문학동네, 2022)
• Walking While Pointing to the Mask (Segyesa, 1994)
『가면을 가리키며 걷기』 (세계사, 1994)
• Mi in April, Sol in July (Munhak Dongne, 2013)
『사월의 미, 칠월의 솔』 (문학동네, 2013)
[1] The date of the sinking of the MV Sewol, in which 304 people died or went missing, most of them Korean high school students on their way to Jeju Island for a class field trip.
by Cho Yeonjung
[Cover Feature] Humans, Born from the Face of the Persecuted
Remembering to Forget Many things are forgotten over time. The act of forgetting can feel either blessed or cruel. For most of us, time seems to stand still, leaving us with no choice but to live in the moment with the past constantly giving way; therefore, we tend to consider the merciless power of time to forget everything in its wake as a blessing. And yet, there are certain things that must be remembered and protected against this uncontrollable material power of time, even if the period of time in question far exceeds one’s lifetime. I’m referring to remembering moments of violence that occurred in the past but have not been properly settled. Why do people insist that they will “never forget” the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster or the 2022 Itaewon disaster? They do so to demand reinforcements to existing sociocultural, structural weaknesses and to highlight the failures of the state so as to prevent similar tragedies from occurring in the future. They do so to ensure that, through publicly mourning and by clearly demonstrating how the incidents were not “accidents” but rather “incidents” that occurred within a social context, the trauma suffered by the victims and their families can be rightfully restored. It’s ironic that such resistance must take on a verbal expression for closure to be had. Since the late 2010s, Korean literature has seen a prevalence of highly autobiographical works of autofiction typically narrated in the first person. Recent works dive deep into the characters’ identities and densely recreate their surrounding contexts to construct the minority identities of women, LGBTQ, and persons with disabilities with a high degree of verisimilitude. Narrated in the first person, Kim Nam-sook’s “Paju” also manages to create an inverse vector that nihilates the strong emphasis on the first-person singular displayed by prior novels by placing the narrative’s centripetal force not on the narrator, but on another person. The narrator’s voice becomes shaped by the relational forces between the characters Jeong-ho and Hyeon-cheol, ultimately taking the place of the object instead of the subject. In interpreting Emmanuel Levinas, Judith Butler posited that responsibility to the Other is manifested not through the subjectivity of the subject “I” but through the object “me.”1 Levinas stated that “precisely the Other who persecutes me has a face.” As such, the narrator’s ethical responsibility essentially comes from the Other—“you”—who is speaking to “me.” The problem occurs when the “you” who has come knocking on “my” door wants to do me harm. Levinas says that if “I” am not exposed to such violence, then we will be unable to receive any demands to take responsibility for the Other. In other words, “I” have a responsibility to “you” not because “I” have done something to “you,” but by virtue of the relationship that exists between “you” and “me”; that is, this responsibility is first felt from the perspective of the persecuted person. According to Levinas, if “you” were to stab me, I must inform you that “I will not engage in violence against you.” Is this acceptable? As categorical imperatives go, no, it is not. Victims are entitled to the perpetrator’s heartfelt apology, and the guilty must suffer just punishment. But what if no legitimate power exists to serve justice and to ease the woes of the victims? This is the very problem “Paju” zeroes in on. Nonviolent Self-Mourning In the story, the narrator “I” lives with her boyfriend Jeong-ho in a studio apartment in Paju. She is a writing instructor at a private academy; Jeong-ho inspects flaws in touchscreen panels at a semiconductor assembly plant. Despite bemoaning her fate about having to “live as a loser who has to edit shit essays filled with shit punctuation and shit spelling,” “I” appears uninterested in changing her career. One day, however, they meet a “lame” looking Hyeon-cheol. Formerly a member of Jeong-ho’s army unit, Hyeon-cheol announces that he’ll get his revenge for the terrible abuse he suffered at the hands of Jeong-ho when they served together. But this will not take the form of assault or other physical violence, as he had to endure. Instead, Hyeon-cheol insists that his former bully Jeong-ho wire him one million won a month for a year. Acts of revenge are carried out without any legitimate authority to adjudicate what actually transpired between the victim and the accused. Therefore, most forms of revenge are private, outside the sphere of the government. Revenge must resolve more than just the layers of personal feelings such as resentment and injustice. For the victim, revenge is a necessary ritual that allows him to leave the incident behind with a sense of closure. The monthly reparations are a practical means of self-mourning by isolating himself from his trauma. Jeong-ho’s apology is nothing more than a few words of self-defense, uttered in the hopes of easing his guilty conscience. It only serves to further reinforce his narcissistic subjectivity as the perpetrator. Ethical responsibility for others does not arise from self-punishment or immersion in such narcissism. Responsibility is manifested through the “sensitivity” that lies outside causality or the facts of the incident at hand, and is made tragic by the fact that the object who suffers the violence, rather than the subject who committed the act in the first place, invariably comes to this realization sooner. Hyeon-cheol’s subjectivity is simply a materialized sensitivity that is subordinated to present-day Jeong-ho and the memories of his military service. Unfortunately, the only times we see “me” in the object position or “me” in a syntactic relationship related to the subject are in the sentences of the persecuted person (Hyeon-cheol). Persecution refers to acts committed upon a person against their will and outside their control, carried out without any legitimate grounds. Therefore, persecution serves as a way for another person to construct the identity of “me,” according to Levinas, to which Butler also agreed. While undergoing this persecution, the ego of “I” is replaced several times over. The identity of “I” becomes constructed not by any action that I have committed but by the actions of others committed against me. These relationships are most revealed in scenes involving persecution and violence. Hyeon-cheol’s time has become frozen due to the persecution he suffered at the hands of Jeong-ho. His memories are forever fossilized in his conscious and unconscious. Unlike Jeong-ho, who cannot even remember what occurred three years ago, Hyeon-cheol is tightly bound to his vivid memories. The trauma is triggered and re-experienced again and again. Even afterwards, a victim is still bound by the trauma, and the nonexistence of violence does not equate to safety. Hyeon-cheol is forced to seek damages because he is unable to live the present as the present. The “lameness” of his life, funded by part-time work at a convenience store and punctuated by moments of playing Pokémon GO (his biggest joy in life), also stems from the fact that his time is essentially frozen in the past. Hyeon-cheol’s libido, still transfixed in the trauma of the past, must seek a new object to invest itself in. Justice must be served. However, his trauma must be solved outside the realm of state authority because no material power can resolve the violence that permeates every facet of his everyday life. Readers might misread Hyeon-cheol’s subjectivity as being strong and steadfast, but what we’ve witnessed is nothing more than a reactive response of an “I” still shackled by the Other’s persecution. “I” is also affected by Hyeon-cheol, after he appears before the narrator. As she learns of Jeong-ho's past violence, she recalls the eyes of the students at the private academy who she believes are persecuting her. As Jeong-ho’s lover, the reader is inclined to expect that “I” would be supportive of her boyfriend, but as she becomes indirectly involved with the Other—Hyeon-cheol—“I” grows distant from Jeong-ho and closer to Hyeon-cheol. The adjective “lame,” which appears frequently throughout the story, is expressive of the emotional transference that takes place between “I” and Hyeon-cheol. Lameness is both the common existential descriptor they share in their lives as well as a metaphor for the nonviolent method of self-mourning that Hyeon-cheol has elected to take. The rather lame form of revenge he carries out stems from “a state of mind that is so natural and so chronic as to be lame”; yet Hyeon-cheol never harms either Jeong-ho or the narrator. Hyeon-cheol is simply attempting to rescue himself, employing a method of non-violence, in order to rid himself of his past trauma and take one step closer to true healing. He is, in effect, attempting to obliviate his past, al-beit belatedly. If he had chosen an alternate, more harmful attack, his story wouldn’t feel so piteous. Hyeon-cheol doesn’t display any joy or relief at the sight of the monthly cash transfers; instead, the money in his bank account remains a painful reminder of the fact that the violence truly occurred. Once a month, one million won at a time, Hyeon-cheol is slowly and painfully removing himself from his inner grief, trudging along the path of mourning. In the story, “I” experiences Hyeon-cheol’s spartan journey and the transference of his emotions. This transference takes the form of sound and is passed on to the ears of “I” so that each time “I” is reminded of Hyeon-cheol, she hears “a mysterious, sloshing sound near [her] ear” which she dubs “the sound of Paju.” Hyeon-cheol informs the narrator that her feelings toward the students at the academy are closer to fear than hate. In fact, victims of violence go through several stages of emotions over a considerable amount of time. Fear suppresses even the ability to recognize and identify one’s emotions; only after fear has been lifted can the emotion slowly dissolve to hate. That’s why Hyeon-cheol was able to visit Jeong-ho only after several years had passed. The narrator’s world is entirely reconstructed when she is visited by the stranger Hyeon-cheol. Hyeon-cheol becomes most intrusive into the narrator’s world when he asks, “By the way, are you going to marry him?” He is asking if she’ll stay with Jeong-ho even after learning what kind of person he is, and asking whether she is content with her current, lame life. Predictably, the characters do not fundamentally uproot their lame lives. “I” concludes the story while still cohabiting with Jeong-ho and muttering expletives under her breath. Even after the year’s worth of compensation has been paid, their lame lives go on. The reason Hyeon-cheol and the narrator’s lives remain fundamentally the same is that Jeong-ho, the Other, has not changed in the slightest. In insisting that he doesn’t remember what happened, he claims a sense of injustice for himself, though he was the aggressor. Even the standard of repentance he refers to is derived from himself; rather than truly repenting, he merely feels the hint of a guilty conscience. Jeong-ho is only able to sense those feelings that are confined within the boundaries of his narcissism, where he cares about nothing else but his own discomfort and inconveniences. (The Korean government, which has tried to cover up tragedies under the pretense of maintaining the national image, closely resembles Jeong-ho.) In a narcissist’s world, there is no place for altruistic relationships. In the end, Jeong-ho forgets about all the events that transpired, with only the narrator “I” remaining to tell us the story of Hyeon-cheol. To her, Hyeon-cheol is both a memory and an influential Other who has reconstructed her reality. However, “I” cannot (or does not) act independently with any sense of subjectivity, such as leaving Jeong-ho or quitting her job. This conclusion resonates with Levinas’s saying that the self “I” is no different from the object “I” (me) constructed by Others on a pre-ontological level, and further overlaps with Butler’s argument that becoming part of a relationship and thereby becoming subject to the influence of Others means that the self is also involved in the sense of responsibility. We are all like “I,” in that we are laid bare before the Other in a position of absolute passivity. How cruel to be stuck in such lame, mundane lives while all three individuals are clearly in pain. Paju is a frontline border region located close to North Korea and fortified with multiple military bases. In a place where the threat of war is very real, it’s dangerous to be living lame lives. Together, the characters demonstrate how frighteningly powerful and persistent violence can be in our lives, like the “sound of Paju” that the narrator hears. Through Hyeon-cheol, the story describes the process of self-mourning wherein the victim is forced to rescue himself through nonviolent means. He is attempting to regain the right to forget. Paradoxically, for him to properly forget, he must first remember what happened. The aggressor, on the other hand, will always find these situations unfair, as he has long ago forgotten what happened in the first place. This is why violence should always be remembered and kept alive in the public domain, why a grieving period is necessary for the victims not to remain trapped in a swamp of self-loathing and remorse, and why alternate mechanisms must exist for individuals to separate themselves for the sake of oblivion. The reason we insist that we will “never forget” a tragedy is to prevent something similar from taking place again. When an act of violence leads to yet another act of retaliatory violence committed in the name of self-defense, is this justified? Ultimately, the human face that puts an end to the violence is born from the face of the persecuted. As “Paju” makes bitterly clear, the power of being human comes from the “emptiness in the clear eyes” of grieving victims frozen in their own self-mourning, no matter how much it “truly fucking sucks.” Translated by Amber Kim Jeon Seung-min is a literary critic. She began her career after receiving the Daesan Literary Award for College Students in 2020 and winning the Seoul Shinmun New Writer’s Contest in 2021, in the literary criticism category. Having majored in English literature at Sogang University, Jeon is currently pursuing a master’s degree in the graduate school of her alma mater. Her areas of interest are twentieth-century British modernist fiction and queer feminist discourse. Korean Works Mentioned: • “Paju” (Epiic Vol.10, 2023) 「파주」 (에픽 10호, 2023) [1] Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. Fordham University Press, 2005.
by Jeon Seung-min
[Cover Feature] Community of Memory
Community of Disaster
The German philosopher Theodor Adorno said, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” But isn’t a bad time for poetry1 exactly when poetry is needed most? The here and now, when literature’s existence as well as its role and possibilities are being called into question, needs literature more than any other era.
In recent years, Korea has had to contend with an unforgettable number of lost lives: 304 in the Sewol Ferry tragedy of 2014 and 158 in the Itaewon Halloween tragedy of 2022. All these deaths have become shared memories for the living. Memories of hearing false reports that all the passengers on the ferry had been rescued, memories of being unable to do anything but watch as people were dying, memories of feeling enraged and powerless in the face of the orders for passengers to remain still, and memories of feeling consumed by an untold, unbearable guilt have bonded us as a community. Both those who are gone and those who remain are the victims of these social disasters.
Speaking about sorrow is like endlessly performing a requiem for the dead. The dead have no words, and thus the burden of language falls to the living. Language fills the place of helpless silence and can also pierce through that quiet like a scream. When pondering over the sort of language needed to speak on behalf of those who cannot, the first language that comes to mind is silence. We wanted to write about our sorrow accurately but lost hope when we realized that it was impossible. Despite failure after failure, writers never stopped searching for that language. We wanted to speak, in a global language, to the pain and truths of those no longer in this world.
Following the Sewol ferry disaster, writers recreated the language of silence that had inevitably been lost, publishing literature of a testimonial nature and taking action through the 304 Recital. The 304 Recital is a reading series created by citizens and writers in memory of the 304 people who never returned from the Sewol ferry.2 The recital, which starts at 4:16 p.m. on the last Saturday of each month, was held in Gwanghwamun Square for the first time on September 20, 2014, and for the hundredth time on December 31, 2022. Much literature has been written commemorating that day, and the day itself has remained with us all this while. All those people gathered together went back in time to that day, to those earlier versions of themselves. Facing such large-scale loss, literature began to view these lost and missing subjects from a political and ethical perspective.
Mom, It’s Me, a collection of birthday poems written through the eyes and in the voices of Danwon High School students who perished in the Sewol ferry disaster, was published in 2015. Where the voices of the young victims and the poets coincide, the poets never stop trying to give testimony to their indescribable sorrow as witnesses and observers. Naming the victims, taking care to read aloud their names correctly, is a vow to face each of those particular, distinct names head on and to never forget them. A name is both a gift someone else has bestowed on us as well as the title of the history we write for ourselves. By calling their names, the living initiate a conversation with the dead.
Mom and Dad, thank you for loving me even more after that day
Mom and Dad, thank you for loving me as your own hearts ached
Mom and Dad, marching for me, starving for me, shouting and fighting for me
I am Ye-eun, the child of the two most earnest and honest parents in the world
I am Ye-eun, the child who will be loved by all forever, even after that day
Today is my birthday
— Jin Eun-young, “After That Day”
In “After That Day,” the poet Jin Eun-young becomes Ye-eun. Through the unusual form of a birthday poem, the poet speaks from inside the tragedy. The living carry on their backs the shame of having survived, and write while remembering and speaking of the dead. The living try to restore the morality of others. Only by taking up the voices of the deceased can the living become literary subjects. Because the only ones who can speak the truth are the dead. To willingly speak in the voice of someone now gone from this world—that is the start of mourning.
Community of Sorrow
With a kiss
We can be made human
Life, it seems,
Must be breathed into life.
We learn and so we do not know.
[· · ·]
We understand people through those means
Thus attaining life’s first shortcut.
— Kim Hyun, “Life Is”
In the above poem, the act of kissing is what makes us human. Lips are for breathing with the aim of sustaining life, for calling others by their names, and for making contact. Through that contact with the outside world, we can affirm a new hope. The poet Kim Hyun said, “While the language of literature is the last to be written, the people who create literature, the people who speak about these events, do so until the very end. They are the ones who never stop calling people’s names.”3 Believing that lies cannot prevail over the truth and that darkness cannot win out over light4, literature is endlessly calling out names, albeit rather slowly.
Opening one’s mouth to call someone by name not only creates an interpersonal relationship between the two—this act recognizes the named person as a social subject. The unique individual who bears that name can never be replaced by someone else. Naming our dead, verifying their faces, and drawing them into a shared memory. We call on the deceased when we are prepared to fully receive them. Saying their names aloud and reaffirming our own voices is a vow to never stop remembering them.
You ponder, What if from tomorrow the days without sunrise continue?
Then we’d be inside this black mirror twenty-four hours a day, and who’d dip a pen into the mirror-water to write about us?
Why is there is so much ink for writing?
[· · ·]
An emptiness walks into the mirror-water. She’s weeping, caressing, and calling your name.
[· · ·]
For the thousandth time you don’t reach the island.
You won’t be able to reach the island yet.
— Kim Hyesoon, “I Want to Go to the Island,” tr. Don Mee Choi
In Autobiography of Death, the poet Kim Hyesoon examines death’s social and ethical meanings. Using the Buddhist ritual of forty-nine days of mourning, the poet draws a connection between the dead and the living. While the forty-nine days of mourning are underway, the dead and the living bear a shared responsibility. You “get on the ferry, dragging along a small bag,” but cannot reach the island, and while the poem states the word “yet,” you may never be able to reach it. The “emptiness” approaching you where you wait inside the mirror, the one “calling your name” consoles those who have not been mourned. Writing as if calling out a name. Even if the person being called does not turn around, literature continues to call out to them. Literature exists in the places where we feel not sympathy or pity but shame.5
The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi, a Holocaust survivor formerly imprisoned at the Auschwitz concentration camp, is a kind of last will and testament for the author, written before he died by suspected suicide at his home in Turin. The book, a work of testimonial literature, is filled with the shame and despair—as well as the guilt—that comes from having survived. After Sewol, the shared sense of guilt among the survivors has been vividly felt. With this sentiment as a base, people formed a community of sorrow. Survivors took to the town squares to assert that such a disaster should never happen again. They thought of themselves as the saved, and even as they became more aware of their powerlessness, they managed to dredge up words from the pools of painful silence. Even if they were no longer near the site where disaster had struck, all of those who lived became survivors, the saved.
Survivors face an ethical dilemma as members of society. The same way that literature after Auschwitz is already being written about Auschwitz even as the place itself is not mentioned by name, these tragedies are already being written into Korean literature without the mention of any names at all. Not being able to write all the details is a way of remembering the pain of them. When the saved read literature that features the words ocean, boat, children, candles, and April, they immediately think of the Sewol ferry, the faces of the drowned rising to the surface. Literature ultimately starts a conversation via those who cannot speak. And because literature guarantees anonymity, even the voiceless can be themselves within it for a short while.
But then came October 29, 2022. Despite our earnest insistence that things had to be different than they had been prior to Sewol, another social disaster occurred. Cameras captured the unfiltered scenes in Itaewon. The sight of countless hands that could not be held, numerous shoes missing their owners, were imprinted on people’s minds as yet another instance of trauma. The scenes of the crowds swarming and surging, people trapped and unable to escape from the crowded alleyway, were shown on TV. We could not help but to think back to 2014, when that capsizing boat had been broadcast live. Thinking about what was happening in actual reality that went far beyond any shockingly horrific film scene was a process of thinking about others—of pulling up the truth that had been submerged, coming face to face with other people, and affirming their names. Mourning is both personal and shared work. For incidents that leave us with collective trauma, collective mourning is a necessity.
Community of Mourning
They say the living always gather around the dead
We are gathered without so much as sorrow
True mourning cannot begin without a body
All secrets are submerged below water
Undead hands rise up from the sea
We must grab hold of them and pull them out
— Lee Young ju, “We Cannot Start Our Sorrow”
Hannah Arendt, citing Isak Dinesen, wrote, “All the sorrows of life are bearable if only we can convert them into a story.”6 Literature actively restores a space for mourning so that our personal sorrow is not cast aside as merely personal. As in the title of Lee Young ju’s poem, dredging up the drowned, calling their names, and studying their faces is the process of carrying out an impossible mourning. After a social disaster, literature moves forward, continuing to hold and share our sorrows.
We still cannot view the Sewol ferry disaster, and now the Itaewon disaster, as events of the past. At the same time, we can never return to a time before them. We are still in Gwangju in May, in a burning building in Yongsan, on the Sewol ferry, in Itaewon, and in countless other places. We cannot stop the vortex of sadness that starts up inside of us at the mere mention of these places. Our mourning has no end.
Literature is an extremely human endeavor. Peering into the human heart and attempting to approach it is a long struggle. When we recover the heart using language, we can see the shape of our sadness from the outside. Language cannot liberate us from pain. When faced with the horrible sights that we cannot bear to reimagine, the process of creating distance from the topics expressed through the medium of language forms something of a safe zone. Literature becomes a space where it is acceptable to mourn fully and freely. In this way, literature itself is the space where we can be together with those who are no longer in this world.
In the face of social disasters, literature can continue to create stories and continue to not forget. In these stories we have created, in this space called literature, we gladly work together. Literature will always be with us. Through stories, we can endure. So long as we believe in the power of community, we will not forget. We will remember always.
Translated by Paige Aniyah Morris
Jang Mi-do began her career as a poet by winning the New Writer’s Award from Literature and Society in 2020. In 2022, her first book was awarded a publication grant from the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture.
Korean Works Mentioned:
• “After That Day” I Love You Like an Old Road (Moonji, 2022)
「그날 이후」, 『나는 오래된 거리처럼 너를 사랑하고』 (문학과지성사, 2022)
• “Life Is,” When Lips Are Open (Changbi, 2018)
「생명은」, 『입술을 열면』 (창비, 2018)
• “I Want to Go to the Island,” Autobiography of Death (New Directions, 2018)
「그 섬에 가고 싶다」, 『죽음의 자서전』 (문학실험실, 2016)
• “We Cannot Start Our Sorrow” Let Us Leave No Record of Love (Moonji, 2019)
「슬픔을 시작할 수가 없다」, 『어떤 사랑도 기록하지 말기를』 (문학과지성사, 2019)
[1] Bertolt Brecht, “Bad Time for Poetry” (1938)
by Jang Mi-do
[Cover Feature] A Mourning against Mourning
Only in January of this year was it confirmed that a sergeant named Oh Mungyo, whose remains had finally been identified, had died in battle during the Korean War (1950-1953).1 Korean history is unusually rife with individuals whose deaths are held in suspension. Death occurred repeatedly through the eras of conflict that saw the Japanese occupation and the Korean fight for independence, the division of the peninsula and the struggle to establish a unified government, the oppression of a dictatorship and the democratic movement against its tyrannical government, and so on. The only divided nation in the world today, Korea faces the challenging tasks of ascertaining the truth of historical tragedies and preventing similar tragedies from taking place, because the division itself serves as a pretext for violence.
After liberation from Japanese rule, the South Korean government made anticommunism its national agenda. Communists were the proclaimed enemy, and through the course of history became nothing more than “commies” who deserved to be killed off. And that wasn’t all. People were punished not because they were communists per se; rather, they were punished because the term could be used to justify state terror.2 So the thoughts and ideologies that appear to be criteria for distinguishing enemies from allies had, in fact, nothing to do with all this violence. Countless massacres were committed to maximize fear and antagonism and to stifle criticism. Those who commemorated the dead, too, were deemed reactionaries, as the dead were deemed communists. What can Korean literature say—or what should it say—when certain deaths are regarded as not worth grieving, when even the opportunity to remember them is denied?
In the past, Korean literature served as a counter-memory while the state forbade the memory of mass murder. Covered-up deaths were written down to tell people the appalling truth; the facts were embodied in stories so that they would be remembered longer, made more specific so that they could be experienced more closely. In addition, Korean literature had to defy mourning in certain forms. The victims of the April 3 Jeju Uprising and Massacre and the Yeosu-Suncheon Rebellion, for instance, were forced to remain silent for a long period of time, but during that same period the Syngman Rhee regime made political use of the incidents through zealous mourning. How contradictory was it that those who allowed the massacre of civilians then grieved the deaths? Through a memorial service grieving the deaths of the military and police whose lives were sacrificed, this regime coerced people together and exercised control over them.3 By distorting the facts even while extending condolences, the regime came up with a false narrative on how the lives of innocent citizens were destroyed by communists, and stressed their political legitimacy by mourning for only a select group of people.
Through it all, literature was used as a means to encourage such dramatized mourning. Most of the writers called to cooperate with the munin josaban (investigation party consisting of writers and literary figures), ostensibly to ascertain the truth of what had happened during the Yeosu incident, depicted rebel forces as evil and savage creatures, labeling them cannibals and beasts.4 The mass killing of civilians by riot soldiers was hardly even mentioned. So literature played a role in reinforcing the reductionist thought that the evil forces threatening the good citizens had to be eradicated. This goes to show how many obstacles there must have been in Korean society to grieving tragic deaths.
Korean literature must practice mourning by resisting three different types of mourning in general. First, a distorted form thereof. In other words, it must fight attempts to misuse a person’s death by forging records and making false reports. To do so requires an effort to examine historical facts from multiple angles and to shed light on hidden aspects in order to secure an exhaustive record. To that end, authors in Korean society had to risk their lives. Hyun Ki-young, who divulged the truth regarding the April 3 Jeju Uprising and Massacre through his book, Sun-i Samch’on, was in fact taken to the Defense Security Command and subjected to severe torture.
Second, a mourning that refuses selective mourning. Literature must make note of the names considered less important than others and relegated to the back burner, and hence deprived of a chance to be remembered; it must also question the assessment, “worth remembering.” For instance, a number of literary works emphasize that citizens who participated in the May 18 Democratic Movement possessed a noble determination for democracy, thereby restoring their honor and making the horrors known. This restoration of honor was an urgent and important task, as the victims had been condemned as rioters. But because the priority was on proving the purity of their beliefs, the fact that women working in adult entertainment businesses were actively engaged in the democratization movement was completely overlooked. “Like the Amazones,” a poem by Ko Yeongseo, and “If I Follow You,” a short story by Yi Hyunseok, deal with this fact and seek to bring to light the other main participants who were kept away from the spotlight.
Third, a nationalistic mourning. In the case of “comfort women”—sex slaves for Japanese soldiers—there was a tendency to discuss the harms the women suffered within a nationalistic frame. This method of mourning must have been chosen to remind people of the nation’s painful past and strengthen their solidarity. This has positive implications in that it enables people to remember the pain inflicted upon the victims by Japanese soldiers and to respond to their painful experiences. But there’s a risk of reducing the comfort women to the symbolic role of national victims, thereby turning the individual women into abstract figures, and even giving rise to the presumption that only people of the same nationality may partake in mourning. Wary of such consequences, the author Kim Soom wrote One Left, a novel that focuses on the life of just one woman, and Sublime is Looking Inside of Yourself, based on one person’s testimony, devoid of a traditional narrative structure. Another author, Seong Haena, broke away from the typical method of creating a character based on an actual historical figure when writing about comfort women, and came up with a singular character named Oz, depicting her as someone with her own unique tastes.
Let’s take a look at Han Kang’s We Do Not Part, a novel that expands on the meaning of mourning by resisting a set way of grieving. The storyline is relatively simple. Gyeongha, a novelist, goes to her friend Inseon’s house in Jeju to save Ama, Inseon’s pet parrot, left all alone in the house because Inseon is in the hospital with a severed finger; Gyeongha, however, fails to save the bird. In the meantime, other factors come into the picture: the May 18 Democratic Movement, which Gyeongha’s last novel dealt with; stories of Vietnamese survivors who were sexually violated by Korean soldiers during the Vietnam War, turned into a documentary film by Inseon; the April 3 Jeju Uprising and Massacre, experienced firsthand by Inseon’s parents; the Bodo League Massacre, exposed in the process of tracing the remains of Inseon’s uncle.
The incidents mentioned in We Do Not Part are described without much clarity—none can be confirmed as factual. The April 3 Jeju Uprising and Massacre, first of all, is told through bits and pieces of various testimonies, revealing only the shadows of fragmentary episodes; no clear record or objective proof exists. The dead cannot speak, and what records there once were, have been manipulated or have ceased to exist. Survivors are witnesses but, at the same time, victims who suffered violence surpassing the limit of what one can endure. Those suffering from PTSD show signs of hallucination, dementia, or loss of memory after being forced to remain silent for years. So their testimonies are nothing but sketchy bits of memory without any context. Besides, Gyeongha, the focalizer of the novel, hears these stories only through Inseon, reconstructed through Inseon’s own language. On top of that, Inseon, who tells Gyeongha the stories, is a hallucination or a spirit if Gyeongha herself isn’t dead, and if Gyeongha is dead, Inseon is someone Gyeongha encounters in a sort of vision after death. All the memories are nothing but faint silhouettes, vaguely revealing themselves in a blizzard that blurs the view.
The most intense and real pain, and therefore the most conspicuous, is the one experienced by Inseon, whose stitched-up finger is pricked by a needle every three minutes in the affected area. As a result, tragic incidents get shoved to the background, and comments by critics on the novel being off-balance seem appropriate enough. But the novel’s focus on Inseon’s pain rather than on historical tragedy sheds light on the attitude of the generation living after the tragedy. Even if one reflects on historical tragedy and sympathizes with others’ pain, the pain inflicted on one’s own body is so much closer to oneself, and so much more intense. Not only that, the tragedies mentioned in this novel are nothing but glimpses of blurred memories that can’t be turned into one unified story, and can only be experienced secondhand through one’s imagination as Gyeongha had. A tragedy that doesn’t feel quite real because parts of the story are missing is consigned to the back seat in reality. The detailed description and emphasis of the pain experienced by Inseon seems to be a strategy to accentuate the difficulty of mourning and make it as distinct as possible.
The process of bleeding a sutured area to prevent a scab from forming, exacting pain on the person, is a procedure undertaken to keep the flesh above the severed nerves from dying. Inseon feels hopeless, knowing that she must live with the pain for three weeks, stabbed with a needle every three minutes; she honestly wants to give up. But the doctor tells her, “The pain that comes from saving the finger is stronger at the moment, of course, but if you decide to give up the finger, the pain will last the rest of your life and you won’t be able to do anything about it.” If she stops the procedure to keep the pain at bay, she will have to deal with phantom pain for the rest of her life, which serves as an allegory for mourning—facing tragedy head-on will result in severe internal injury. Investigating and writing a novel about the horrific violence committed by the military during the May 18 Democratic Movement has left a pain so deep in Gyeongha that she has trouble going about her daily life. The horrors of Jeju subsequently encountered by Inseon and Gyeongha bring them great sorrow as well. But if they don’t face them now, they must suffer for all the days to come, knowing that the roots are rotten. It is as if to warn us that the guilt of silence and denial will only be prolonged should we forsake mourning.
In addition, Han Kang has conceived a way to connect people through pain, a direct and common sensation everyone experiences, rather than the concept of a race, an abstract body of people. Inseon plays a variation on the word soksomheora, a verb that means to stay quiet so as not to be caught, by saying that she feels blanketed in cotton (somsok), transforming the word into something that describes the soft texture of snow. This brings to mind the words repeated throughout the novel, that snow stays frozen on the faces of the dead but melts on the warm face of one who’s alive. Snow melts, “turning into cold drops of water that then turn into tears,” and we become someone who can cry for others’ pain. The warmth of a living person can melt what’s frozen, making it soft, and melted snow can turn into tears.
Further, the melting of snow indicates the loosening of countless bonds forming the crystals. As the bonds are loosened, Han Kang moves on to the notion that the death of a friend’s pet parrot is just as grave a loss as the historical tragedy of the April 3 Jeju Uprising and Massacre, that the gravity of one can’t be weighed against that of the other. Gyeongha feels an inexplicable degree of pain at the death of Ama, the bird. “I don’t understand. Ama doesn’t belong to me. I’ve never even loved the bird enough to feel such pain,” she ponders. Her words are in keeping with the testimony of a survivor in the novel who says that the image of a young mother having her dead infant taken away by the police remains more vivid in her memory than her own experience with brutal torture:
“People were getting on several patrol wagons when a young woman in the back of the line howled, No! No! She had a baby who’d died on the ship, either from starvation or disease, and the police had ordered her to leave the dead baby on the wet dock. The woman struggled, screaming that she couldn’t; the police just snatched away the baby, quilt-wrapped baby, and put it on the ground, then dragged the woman forward and put her on the wagon.
How strange, that I recall her voice from time to time, more often than . . . the unspeakable torture I went through, and the unjust imprisonment. And I remember how the people, more than a thousand of them standing in line, all turned their heads to look at the quilt wrapping the baby.”
More than a thousand people taken away and put through unimaginable hardships are pained to see a dead child being taken away from a woman—a stranger. They grieve together, feeling her pain as though it were their own, when they don’t even know her, and when they each are enduring different pains.
Mourning for complete strangers is considered more difficult than mourning for someone close. So when people speak of the April 3 Jeju Uprising and Massacre or the May 18 Democratic Movement, they use terms such as “one blood” and “one people,” emphasizing that they can be connected to one another as “we.” But as much as this may be a way to bring people together to mourn, it can also be a way of continuing on with the principle of exclusion, as it can create the constraint that mourning is possible only when people are united as “we.” It can be assumed that such an abstruse and unclear narrative was required in order to break free from the kind of mourning that has its start in drawing boundaries. Through the medium of pain, Han Kang suggests the possibility that we can mourn the pain of a stranger we’ve never met, a stranger who is not of our own nationality, a stranger who has nothing to do with us. This is also a process through which we can learn to go beyond people, including those who have experienced historical tragedy, and mourn for animals, who have been considered a different class altogether from humans.
In “Oz,” the short story by Seong Haena, tattoos are used as a means of mourning and healing. To have one’s skin tattooed, a needle is used to forge a wound on the skin, after which ink is inserted into the wound to produce a picture or words. To carve something onto something else, something has to be scratched out first. Just like the scratch art book Oz gives to Hara as a gift. When you scratch a page covered with dark ink with your fingernail, a beautiful drawing full of colors reveals itself. Concealment and distortion, selection and symbolization must be discussed more often and examined properly so that forgotten names may take on their colors again. It is certain that new works of literature are coming into existence even today, to cast off a narrow sense of mourning and come up with a deeper, more comprehensive way to mourn.
Translated by Yewon Jung
Sung Hyunah is a literary critic. She began her literary career in 2021 by winning the New Writer’s Contest held by the Kyunghyang Shinmun and the Chosun Ilbo. She received the Daesan Creative Writing Fund in 2022.
Korean Works Mentioned:
• Sun’i Sam’chon (ASIA, 2012)
『순이 삼촌』 (창비, 2015)
• “Like the Amazones,” The Season of the Salmon’s Return (Cheon-nyeon-eui-sijak Publishing, 2021)
「아마조네스 여인들처럼」, 『연어가 돌아오는 계절』 (천년의시작, 2021)
• “If I Follow You,” In a Different World, Too (Jaeum & Moeum Publishing, 2021)
｢너를 따라가면｣, 『다른 세계에서도』 (자음과모음, 2021)
• One Left (University of Washington Press, 2020)
『한 명』 (현대문학, 2016)
• “Oz,” Light Underneath Light (Munhakdongne, 2022)
｢오즈｣, 『빛을 걷으면 빛』 (문학동네, 2022)
• We Do Not Part (Hamish Hamilton, 2024)
『작별하지 않는다』 (문학동네, 2021)
[1] Pak Eungyeong, “Identity of Oh Mungyo, a Sergeant, Who Died on Arrowhead Hill Without Seeing His Baby Boy, is Confirmed at Last,” Kyunghyang Shinmun, 18 January, 2023.[2] Kim Deukjung, The Birth of Commies: The Yeosun Incident and the Formation of an Anticommunist Nation, Sunin, 2009, 46-47.[3] Kim Bong-guk, et al. “Politics of Mourning and Veteran Support During the Early Period of Syngman Rhee’s Government: Monopoly, Crevice, and Ambivalence of Mourning” The Politics of Mourning: The Death and Memory of Modern East Asia, Gil Publishing, 2017, 132-135.[4] Kim Deukjung, 402-403.
by Sung Hyunah
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