When I was young, I didn’t think soap and toothpaste were items that were purchased with money, because we never had a shortage of them in our home. A cuckoo clock and an audio system were other prizes she took home from bowling tournaments. As a young woman she was an amateur bowler, and to this day her old trophies and plaques cover an entire wall at my parents’ home.

When it came to sports, my mum picked up how to do ten things before she was taught a single one. The problem was, it wasn’t easy for someone like that to understand ordinary people. Mum didn’t understand me.

Mum and I were very different. We shared a body at one time (though it would be more accurate to say I invaded her), but she didn’t think we had much in common. From what she saw, I was slow and uncoordinated. In other words, there was nothing nimble about me, and I, who have always taken people’s words at face value, believed what Mum said about me without bothering to put my body to the test. Anyhow, I preferred to sit in the shade and read, rather than work up a sweat on the field.

But gradually I began to notice something strange. At the Fall Sports Day when I was in the third grade, I achieved a pathetic time in the 100-metre sprint, but in the middle of running a longer race (it was either the 400- or 800-metre event), I found myself in the lead. A similar thing happened during a dodgeball match. Whenever I threw the ball, the players on the other team were eliminated. How was this possible when my mum said I was a sluggish and uncoordinated child? According to her, that’s why I was always reading. Then another strange thing happened when my class went on a field trip to a nearby mountain. The friend I had been chatting with on the way up was no longer by my side. What? She left me behind? But no, that wasn’t the case. I reached the deserted mountain top on my own, the first one up, and was catching my breath when the teacher arrived a short while later, panting, followed by several other students.

As these sorts of experiences accumulated, I began to think my mum was wrong. She must have found me unbearable at times, when I—the child who had damaged her body as it came into the world—couldn’t live up to her expectations, when I used words she hadn’t taught me, when she couldn’t gauge the thoughts that were flourishing in my head.

A child seemed more like a monster, rather than an angel.

Mum had to get four of her upper front teeth replaced after she gave birth to . I suspected her knee surgery also had to do with childbirth as well, but I didn’t mention this to her.

Around that time, I became a kind of tomboy. During the lunch break, I would go out onto the field and hang upside down from the bar, studying the contours of shadows, or sit at the top of a jungle gym and gaze at the magnolia trees. But a ball, at least, belonged to the boys. They laid claim to it, fiercely guarding it from the hands of girls, as if they never intended to part with it. One day, their ball rolled toward me. Hurry! Pass it here! I didn’t want to kick a ball around with them, because it wasn’t possible. Mixing with them, playing ball—none of it was possible.

In the early nineties when I was in elementary school, I’d heard countless times that girls could do whatever they wanted and become whoever they wanted, but those were lies. It wasn’t ‘I’, but the nameless ‘they’, who were the subject of this statement.

So I placed my foot on the soccer ball and thought for a moment. With each passing second, the boys’ patience ran out. When their anger wasn’t enough to rouse any action, they started charging toward me. I calmly kicked the ball in the opposite direction, that is, I kicked it toward the stone wall. I didn’t intend to kick it over the wall, but I underestimated my shooting power, and the ball easily cleared the wall. Because my elementary school was situated on a hill, the boys hurled curses at me and dashed out of the school gate onto the road to retrieve their precious ball. I went back to the classroom, snickering. Since I wasn’t sorry then and I’m not sorry now, I must conclude that perhaps Mum did give birth to a kind of monster.

Even after that I still didn’t take up a sport. I somehow learned how to swim and ride a bike on my own. Then in my mid-twenties on one artificial turf football pitch on the outskirts of Seoul, I began to play football every Sunday morning with a group of high school boys. Around the same time, I was watching every Arsenal match. I had no idea how I came to root for this team, since I didn’t know a single soul in North London, but I believed that if I tried playing football myself, I would discover why. But that experience lasted only four matches. The boys constantly taunted me, barely awake at this early hour: had I had too much to drink the night before? One winter morning after a cold snap had swept across the country I pulled my hamstring from not having stretched properly. Thus, I was forced to retire. I barely managed to learn that my right foot was my dominant foot.

My father, at least, gladly welcomed my interest in football. Because all my family members were female, including our dog, my father, the sole male representative, has always appeared somewhat lonely. By this time, about ten years after I’d left home, I was seeing my parents only once or twice a year. One day during the Chuseok holiday, my father and I were drinking beer while watching a FIFA U-20 Women’s World Cup match. The midfielder Ji So-yun, nicknamed the ‘Korean Messi’, was charging down the pitch. Lying half-sprawled on the couch, I said to my father, who also lay half-sprawled in the opposite direction, ‘If only I were ten years younger, I’d be on that pitch right now.’ As if he found it a nuisance to respond, my father said, ‘You mean if you were about twenty years younger.’ I burst into laughter. Looking exasperated, Mum asked if we had finished peeling the chestnuts that would go on the ceremonial table. I sat up right away and started peeling. Though I was no longer a child who needed her approval, peeling chestnuts was one of the few things I had mastered on my own.

Han Yujoo is the author of The Impossible Fairytale. She was born in Seoul in 1982, studied German literature at Hongik University, obtained a master’s degree in aesthetics from the prestigious Seoul National University, and is currently working toward another master’s degree in comparative literature from Seoul National University. She is also a noted translator, whose works include translations of Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table, and Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful and The Ongoing Moment, among others, into Korean. In addition, she runs her own micro-press, Oulipo Press, focusing on experimental fiction.

Janet Hong is a writer and translator based in Vancouver, Canada. Her translation of Han Yujoo’s The Impossible Fairy Tale was a finalist for the 2018 PEN Translation Prize and is also currently shortlisted for the National Translation Award. She has translated Ancco’s Bad Friends, Ha Seong-nan’s The Woman Next Door, and Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s Grass.

Photo credit: Won Jaeyeon

The post Mum was an athlete appeared first on English PEN.

I wrote this novel in the summer of 2009.

On the 20^th of January that year, the South Korean administration murdered evictees in Yongsan, central Seoul. In the course of a mass demonstration, a huge conflagration broke out and six people died in the flames. It was an illegal mass operation in which service workers (civilians) were employed. The day before the incident, police called these service workers inside the police line, which they were not legally supposed to cross, and sent them inside the building where the evictees had gathered. In the over eight hours that the service workers spent inside, they forced the evictees up onto the roof where they would be cut off, lit a fire on the stairs and sent the smoke up to the roof. Though several fire engines were sent out during this process, the service workers who had remained outside the building threatened to throw the firefighters out. Later, a firefighter who was present in the courtroom said in testimony, ‘even though we requested the police to collaborate, they did not accept our request, and each time we went back unable to extinguish the fire’. The fire broke out on the 20^th January, as soon as police special forces were deployed onto the roof. The entire process was broadcast live via an internet news channel, and many people witnessed the moment of the fire breaking out. I was one of those people.

After the incident, the incident itself became known as the ‘Yongsan Disaster’, and the site of the conflagration as ‘Namildang’. Families who had lost their loved ones and had the corpses taken from them by state bodies gathered at Namildang. They stood isolated there for over 300 days, demanding an apology from the government and the truth about the incident. Hundreds of police were constantly surrounding the building, cursing and attacking the bereaved families. There was also a court case centred on those who had died in the fire. In the case, the victim was the government authority and the assailants were the evictees. I attended the trial and wrote a five thousand word essay on it, titled ‘A Mouth That Eats A Mouth’ (this is the same as one of the chapter titles in One Hundred Shadows, but the content is different). Through the process of the trial, the circumstances of this disaster were revealed, in which money (capital) egged on evictees, service workers, and policemen to fight. Though the issue of who gave the order to suppress the evictees’ protest is extremely important, ‘no-one is the person who gave the order’ was the police executives’ consistent answer. The Lee Myung-bak government did not make public the 3000-page report investigating the police executives. The phrase ‘Yongsan disaster’ became a sensitive one for the duration of the Lee Myung-bak administration. Wherever you happened to be in the streets, if you were holding a picket with the words ‘Yongsan disaster’ written on it, a dozen police would rush over and encircle you.

And yet, such wretched scenes do not appear in this novel. People who have died through great violence, burning buildings, smoke, people who cannot come away from the place where their father or husband had been at the last, the attacks and isolation that they would experience as everyday occurrences, are not mentioned in this novel.

Over the course of the summer of 2009, I wrote One Hundred Shadows by day and at night I held a one-woman protest at Namildang. Because that place and the things that had happened there were so grim and miserable, I wanted to make something warm. It seemed at the time to be all that I could do. And so I wrote this story, and it became my first novel. There will be many readers who read it as a warm love story. Even in Korea, there were many readers who read it this way. But I was not constructing a love story while I was writing this novel. I thought of it as a novel about shadows. A story to do with despair and death and powerlessness, which, like shadows, exist universally throughout the human world. I thought that I had to write something in a place where people were crying every day, I wrote with the earnest wish for even a scant handful of warmth, and then, as I completed the final sentence and looked back at what I had written, I saw that it was love, that it was a song. I surprised even myself. Each time I am asked to talk about this novel, I find it difficult. And it is still more difficult to talk about it briefly. In general, I give two short answers: ‘One Hundred Shadows and ‘A Mouth That Eats A Mouth’ are twins with their backs to each other’, and ‘This book could also be titled The Night Before’. Before things at the electronics market come to a head, the way they did that night in Yongsan, seven years ago.

One Hundred Shadows by Hwang Jungeun, translated by Jung Yewon, is published by Tilted Axis Press. Find out more and order the book here.PEN Presents helps literary translators to champion exciting books from around the world to be published in the UK. Submissions are now open for PEN Presents… East and South-east Asia. The deadline is Monday 5 December 2016.

The post The night before appeared first on English PEN.

ALR: Korea is described by the media as the hippest country in Asia, but ‘hell’ by many of its young people. Why does this contradiction exist?

Cheon: In the term Hallyu, the ‘Korean wave’, there are undertones of imperialistic aspirations and an aggressive kind of nationalism. It’s like propaganda. Maybe it comes from a sense of inferiority. But it is mainly a media label. The entertainment industry, with well-trained stars and musicians, and engineers and composers from countries like the USA, has a lot of influence on the population. The production values are dazzling. However, consumers of the product are hardly dazzling at all. The lives of K-pop stars are dream-like, while their fans’ lives are tragic. This contrast is grotesque.

Han: I sometimes question whether the wave even exists. Yes, many tourists visit Korea because of it. And Koreans know how far ‘Kangnam Style’ has reached around the world. But I mainly see people who work hard for no output. So I don’t feel any contradiction – it’s more like an illusion. Koreans are good at creating these cool and chic images at a fast pace. The government encourages this because it sells, but real people ignore it because they’re disconnected from it.

ALR: Is the success of K-pop and K-drama aspirational or troubling to you?  

Cheon: [laughs] You know, Psy studied music overseas. Perhaps novelists may now be expected to live abroad to get a similar broad experience and perspective. When I travelled in France and mentioned that I was from South Korea, many people responded, ‘Oh, Kim Ki-duk!’ [a Korean film director]. At least the wave is good in that way. When I visited Thailand, people frequently asked if my novel The Whale would be made into a TV series – because Jewel in the Palace, the massively popular TV series, had a spin-off novel that became a bestseller.

ALR: How do the extreme competitive pressures and expectations faced by ordinary citizens, especially young people, feed into your writing?

Han: I see competition and stress every day. The country has developed unevenly, and the younger generation have been forced to think about how to step over each other in order to win. And Koreans don’t know not to be ashamed when they trample each other in this ruthless way. Every Korean writer is definitely affected by this social phenomenon to different degrees. For me, such topics are embedded in the tone of my sentences.

Cheon: In my opinion real competition happened during the thirty years of the 1970s to 1990s. Before then, most people were poor and undereducated, so competition wasn’t necessary. With industrialization came ‘dragons born out of a stream’ – people who made a name for themselves out of nothing. Now, competition doesn’t even exist because your destiny is decided when you are born. For instance, kids from the Kangnam district in Seoul have a higher likelihood of entering a good university than anyone else. Most stories written by authors tend to focus on people who win, but I find myself more drawn to those excluded and left behind.

ALR: Is the international recognition of Han Kang and Shin Kyung-sook giving other Korean novelists a larger platform?

Han: The authors’ popularity shows that there is interest overseas in more than just music and drama. The very fact that we are here in London is evidence! I’m curious to know how my books are being received internationally. The level of interest fluctuates in France and the USA, but it’s definitely rising.

Cheon: Yes, I believe so. I was able to visit the USA because Modern Family was published there. Writers now have more opportunities than the older generation. Maybe the rising number of successful writers can build a new wave.

Cheon Myeong-kwan worked as a screenwriter prior to becoming a fiction writer. His literary debut, the short story ‘Frank and I’, won the Munhakdongnae New Writer Award (2003). His first novel The Whale received the Munhakdongnae Award for Best Novel in 2004. His novel Modern Family was published in English by White Pine Press in 2015.

Han Yujoo has written three short story collections and the novel The Impossible Fairy Tale, which will be published by Graywolf Press in 2017. She has been a translator of several notable foreign works into Korean, and teaches at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.

Short fiction pieces by Han Yojoo and Cheon Myeong-kwan can be read in the Spring 2016 issue of the Asia Literary Review. www.asialiteraryreview.com

Find out more about Han Kang and her latest PEN-supported book, Human Acts, on English PEN’s World Bookshelf.

Read pieces by Han Kang and Deborah Smith about The Vegetarian on the PEN Atlas.

The post PEN Atlas Q&A: Korean writers in the limelight appeared first on English PEN.

This is especially the case for a novel like The Vegetarian, Han Kang’s brutally poetic triptych of taboo and transgression. It’s not so much the main character Yeong-hye’s refusal to eat meat (though in South Korea this is still rare enough to be subversive in itself) as her refusal to explain herself which provokes such varied, and often violent, responses in those around her – a salaryman husband, a video artist brother-in-law, a dutiful older sister. By filtering her central character through these multiple lenses, Han allows Yeong-hye a radical passivity which challenges Eurocentric notions of what a ‘protagonist’ ought to be – precisely the notions which have long seen Korean literature criticised as ‘lacking agency’. Just as Yeong-hye acts as a vessel for her family’s own fears, preconceptions, and repressed desires, so too the book itself invites widely divergent interpretations as to its overall attitude and ‘meaning’ – between individuals, but also between cultures. But if this is part of the reason that The Vegetarian has already proved such a successful crosser of borders – having already been translated as far afield as Poland and Vietnam, Argentina and Portugal – it also poses certain challenges for the translator.

How, then, at the same time as leaving room for this diversity of interpretation, to ensure that the translation gives English readers an experience as close as possible to that of the book’s original audience? Luckily, The Vegetarian gives the translator plenty of non-culture-specific features to be ‘faithful’ to. First was the considerable poetry of the writing – one of the distinctive features of Han’s prose, unsurprisingly so given that she’s also a published poet (and previously wrote on ‘My Literary Forms’ for PEN Atlas). It’s probably due to this double life that the mood of a given piece by her is always distilled for me into a specific image, which is a particularly useful thing for a translator to latch onto. In the case of The Vegetarian, originally published in South Korea as three separate novellas, each section of the triptych has its own distinct mood: clipped and matter-of-fact, a starched white shirt buttoned all the way to the top; fevered desire undercut with pathos, and experienced at one crucial remove; finally, bleached exhaustion, the blurred outlines of stark trees glimpsed through a grey wash of rain.

But if this combination of style and tone forms a core that can hopefully ensure a unity of experience for readers otherwise separated by language, what about the diversity of interpretation? During the editing process, in which Han was a meticulous and humble participant, I learned about some of the ways the book had already been interpreted by translators into other languages. Some of these were fairly obvious – that Vietnamese publishers had felt the patriarchal family dynamic would form an easy point of identification for their market; or that the sexual content, unusually explicit for a South Korean novel, had been received as fairly sensational by that original audience (something which the director of the Korean film adaptation later played up in his promotional materials, much to Han’s chagrin – she felt that this focus on the sexual element was misleadingly reductive). Other readings were surprising and hadn’t occurred to me, though I could instantly see the logic behind them. When I was stuck on how to translate the epithet ‘May Priest’, in which ‘May’ refers to the May 1980 massacre in Han’s home city of Gwangju, Han wondered if the Polish translator’s choice of ‘Santa Maria’ might work for a UK audience. This led into a discussion of how a historically Catholic country like Poland would likely see Yeong-hye’s renunciation as a self-sacrificial mortification of the flesh, starving herself into some kind of near-religious and saintly ecstasy. Buddhism, on the other hand, which has deep roots in Korea and still flourishes there today, would see it as a quieter attempt at sloughing off the violence inherent in the human animal (without privileging her own interpretive framework over any other, Han mentioned to me during our discussion that she herself is a Buddhist).

Our thoughts turned to how the book’s reception might differ in the UK, where, for example, readers would be unlikely to have an automatic appreciation of the rigid, Confucian hierarchy of social relations. As much as possible, I chose to retain the Korean practice of using relational titles (e.g. ‘my sister-in-law’s husband’, ‘Ji-woo’s mum’) rather than referring to people by their names. Given the surge of interest in feminism here in the UK, it seemed both inevitable and problematic that The Vegetarian would be seen as ‘representative’ of Korean women’s writing in particular – something Han experienced first-hand at last year’s London Book Fair, where she was lumped on an all-women panel discussing ‘Families and Relationships’ (the men got to talk about Politics and Art). A feminist reading will see Yeong-hye as a young woman asserting absolute control over her own body, a radical renunciation of the role South Korea’s conformist, patriarchal society has carved out for her. Which, of course, is no less right or wrong than any of the other possible interpretations, but which does run the risk of simplification, of reading the book as more of a socio-anthropological report than as literature. In the second section, where she allows her video-artist brother-in-law to paint flowers onto her body, Yeong-hye nevertheless seems to exert an uncanny power over this disturbed, fevered man. The question this invites – how far Yeong-hye is using those around her to effect her own transformation – is as troubling in its context of mental illness as it is in that of sexual politics; were more of Han’s work available in English, Anglophone readers would be more likely to read her explorations of desire and passivity as an exploration of the elision between artist and artwork. This elision could stem equally from her long-standing preoccupation with the figure of the artist and the nature of the artistic process as from her ‘Koreanness’ or gender.

Of course, my translation choices have to respect the author’s intentions, and the gulf between how English and Korean work, which meant a lot of time spent finding syntactical/semantic options that would have the same effect, using a completely different feature of the original language. In the first section, for example, I chose to insert a number of adverbs (‘completely’, ‘naturally’, etc) that would hopefully make Yeong-hye’s husband sound both pedantic and self-exonerating, while the main challenge for the middle act was getting the sexual language right – not too purple, but not too clinical either. But my longest exchange with Han was prompted by the final page, where Yeong-hye’s older sister says to her ‘surely the dream isn’t all there is?’ Han was anxious that the speaker’s uncertainty comes through here, and I had to explain why, unlike in Korean, in English ‘surely’ gives the impression more of the speaker trying to convince herself than of any actual assurance.

Above all, Han Kang wanted her book to provoke, to disturb, to ask questions that each reader will have to answer for themselves. I can only hope my translation does the same.

The subject of the piece,  Han Kang, was born in Gwangju, South Korea, and moved to Seoul at the age of ten. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University. Her writing has won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today’s Young Artist Award, and the Korean Literature Novel Award. She currently teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. She has published collections of short stories including Love in Yeosu, A Yellow Patterned Eternity, and The Fruits of My Woman as well as novels including Your Cold Hand, Black Deer, Greek Lessons, and The Vegetarian.

• The Vegetarian, just published by Portobello Books is her first book translated into English.
• You can read a Q&A with Han Kang at the British Council website.
• You can buy The Vegetarian through our bookseller partner Foyles.

The post How Korean it is appeared first on English PEN.

Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith

In Spring 1997, I published a short story called “The Fruit of my Woman”. It was about a woman who starts to notice green blotches on her body, signalling that she is gradually becoming a plant, and about the man who lives with her, who ends up planting her in a pot on their balcony and watering her. She withers as winter sets in, disgorging a handful of tiny fruit. The story ends with the man clutching the fruit as he stares vacantly out from their balcony.

Immediately after writing the story, I thought that I might like to return to this idea in the future. Rather than fleshing out a backstory, I wanted to write a longer work which would allow for variations on the theme, as in a piece of music. It wasn’t until I’d published two full-length novels, which I’d already been planning, that I was able to get started on what eventually became my third novel, The Vegetarian, published in 2007.

The Vegetarian is made up of three parts, originally published in Korea as separate novellas; the first part is the one which shares a similar form to “The Fruit of My Woman”, in that it’s narrated from the husband’s point of view, with the voice of the protagonist, Yeong-hye, haunting the narrative in a series of monologues. But the tone and atmosphere are completely different. Unlike in “The Fruit of my Woman”, there are no paranormal events. The husband’s narration is chillingly matter-of-fact, and the nightmares which Yeong-hye’s monologues recount are particularly gruesome. Her hazardous attempt to ‘become vegetable – a pure being’ in order to vomit out ‘the violence of flesh/the human’ is constantly misunderstood as it progresses towards destruction. By the third part, “Flaming Trees”, Yeong-hye is refusing all food other than meat, believing that she is turning into a plant. The trees appear to blaze up like fireworks as the ambulance rushes her to the general hospital, in an agonising variation of the conclusion to “The Fruit of my Woman” – the withering of the tree-woman as winter approaches.

The novel took me three slow years to write. In the final year, when I wrote “Flaming Trees”, I also wrote a lot of poetry. In-hye, who watches over her younger sister Yeong-hye in “Flaming Trees”, is having trouble sleeping, disturbed by a recurring dream. In this dream she is standing in front of the mirror. Blood runs from the reflection of her eye. She raises her hand to wipe the blood away, but her reflected self remains stock-still, and the eye carries on bleeding. That year, thinking of those suffering sisters, I wrote a seven-poem cycle called “Bleeding Eye”. I also wrote several poems featuring plant imagery.

In this way, for me, poetry, short stories and novels are all closely intertwined.  So far, I’ve published three short story collections and five novels. Last year, my first poetry collection came out. Out of the hundred-plus poems I’d written, I chose sixty, and arranged them into five sections; I was able discern a similar feeling uniting those poems written while I was also writing a particular novel. Of course, these poems are independent from prose fiction, but they had undoubtedly been influenced by the questions and emotions that I’d lived with, the images that had absorbed me, while I was writing my novels.

I’m sometimes asked about the difference between writing poetry, short stories, and novels. I’ll usually also be asked what makes me choose a given form. This process is extremely personal and intuitive, and so it isn’t easy to clarify – the only thing I can say with any certainty is that the most obvious difference is that of time. You need at least a week when writing a short story, twenty days at most, whereas if you want to write a novel you’ll need over a year (my fourth novel took me four and a half years to complete). Poetry, by contrast, can be written in a very short amount of time. Of course, some poems end up nagging away at you for quite some time, but this can’t be compared with the labour-intensive work of producing a novel, which involves a strict routine of writing a fixed amount every day.

Selecting which form to use is a slightly more complex issue. When I write a novel I focus on internal questions. Questions are what motivates me to write; if I want take those questions as far as they can go, to see them through to the end, I need the novel’s tenacity. On the other hand, the idea for a short story will come to me as a single scene. I start to write and when I arrive at that scene, the one that gave me the idea in the first place, I know the story has come to its natural conclusion. A poem’s deepest connection is to language. It will come to me as a single line, which usually forms the beginning of the poem, but sometimes ends up in the middle or at the end. These intuitive flashes find their way to me whenever I’m unwell, or have to move house, when the flow of my life is interrupted by the trivial or significant. The year when I wrote the most poetry was the year when I felt most insecure. I wasn’t sleeping properly, didn’t have the concentration necessary for prose, and lines of poetry kept running around in my head. These eventually morphed into a play, so one afternoon I picked up my pen and turned it into a verse drama. The play would take an hour to read or perform, but took five hours to set down because I was limited by the speed of physical writing. Once I’d managed to drag that slow parade of images out of my head and onto paper I was utterly exhausted, but I also felt that I’d finally turned a corner.

I first published poetry and short stories when I was twenty three. Now that twenty years have flown by, I’m moving forwards slowly but surely, trying to maintain a precarious balance between everyday life and writing. Now, while putting the final touches to my sixth novel, to be published in June, I’m also taking notes of ideas for short stories so I can get started on them in the summer, and of the next novel, which I’ll begin in autumn. Sometimes poetry demands to be written, and brings other work to a halt to create a breathing space for itself.

Now and then I feel that I have nothing to fear, since, whatever the circumstances, I still somehow manage to write. Even when I find myself struggling, the agony of being unable to write will cleave open a fissure in life which I can then infiltrate. A new form, a new language, will be waiting there for me to grasp. And I do know now that this is neither optimism, or pride.

About the translator

Deborah Smith (@londonkoreanist) is an early-career translator of Korean literature, with The Vegetarian by Han Kang forthcoming from Portobello Books. She has received translation grants from the International Communication Foundation, and LTI Korea (forTheEssayist’s Desk by Bae Suah). English PEN funded her sample translation of Hwang Sok-Yong’s Princess Bari. She is currently studying for a PhD in contemporary Korean literature at SOAS.

• As part of the British Council Cultural Programme’, Han Kang will be appearing at London Book Fair 2014
• Read a Q&A with Han Kang at the British Council website.

The post My Literary Form(s) appeared first on English PEN.

For many hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years, the structure and content of a shaman ritual, which helps the passage of the souls of the dead from this world to the next, has been passed down from generation to generation, retaining a remarkably similar form given the time span involved. This exorcism tradition, generically known as Hwangch’ŏn Muga (‘Shaman Songs of the Underworld’), includes 47 oral sub-stories relating specifically to ‘Princess Bari’, a shaman narrative that has been recited across the Korean peninsula with very little local variation. Much like the Greek Myth of Odysseus and the Scandinavian tales of Odin, the plot is structured around a journey to the world of the dead, undertaken in order to rescue one of the souls there. Shamans, who are female in Korean culture, consider ‘Bari’ as their foundation myth, referring to ‘Grandma Bari’ as the original ancestor of all Korean shamans. They themselves are uncertain as to why the ‘Bari’ narrative came to be included in all exorcism rituals, but it seems that through recounting the sufferings and ordeals experienced by Bari, their progenitor, shamans have been able to claim for themselves her position as a ‘suffering healer of sufferings’, one who solves various ordeals while undergoing them herself.

Together with my previous novels The Guest and Shim Chong, Princess Bari presents a reality which is recognisably that of our present world using a distinctively Korean form and narrative. If the period from the fall of the Berlin wall to the beginning of the Bush administration saw the beginnings of globalisation, 9/11 was the turning point after which a more openly enforced American unilateralism led to an increase in globalisation’s reach and intensity. Now, its effects can be clearly felt not only in Korea, but in every country, resulting in polarisation between nations.

After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, North Korea suffered a famine which lasted for more than ten years, peaking as the period in the late 1990s known as the ‘Arduous March’. According to a UN survey, as many as three and a half million people may have died from starvation and the side effects of malnutrition between 1994 and 1998. Meanwhile in South Korea, only a very short distance away, we had everything in abundance. While recognising the responsibility of the North Korean government and seeking to call them to account, I also repeatedly criticised the hypocritical human rights logic of the Big Powers who instituted and subsequently managed the division of Korea into North and South, with other Communist countries previously supplying the former, and US troops still stationed in the latter. The reality of life in  North Korea has been obscured by ideological arguments and strategic preparations for the (highly unlikely) possibility of a ‘North Korean collapse’. Many aspects of the situation have been widely forgotten, or else used solely in propaganda intended to vilify the North Korean regime’s anti-humanitarianism. Every victim, every refugee in today’s world, must pass through the new ‘hell’ that has been brought about by the dark side of globalisation.

For me, constructing a story overlaying the ‘movement through hell’ of present-day refugees with that of the Korean shaman myth ‘Princess Bari’ is a very symbolic act. Bari goes to the ends of the earth searching for the ‘water of life’, posing questions like: how, in this 21^st century global village of dissolution, hatred and death, can we discover the road which leads to life? what is the real meaning of this ‘water of life’? How could a modern-day Bari go about finding such a thing? These questions were the seeds for Princess Bari.

As part of the British Council Cultural Programme’, Hwang Sok-Yong will be appearing at London Book Fair 2014. English PEN will be holding an event with Hwang Sok-Yong called Tales from Korea at the Free Word Centre London, on 7 April 2014.

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As a translator from the Korean, I am constantly on guard against that reaction and therefore take very seriously the task of landing on the right tone. It can be challenging to capture, particularly when the author or narrator’s voice is so different from my own. To put myself in the right frame of mind, I read widely in English when I take on a new project. To translate a satirical, postmodern novel, I read several such English novels; when working on a novel about a poet and his poetry, I read various volumes of poetry. This ritual isn’t so much to gain direct inspiration, but rather to energize me, the way one might listen to upbeat music while jogging.

I’ve translated many novels with alienated, lonely male characters, who often express their disillusion with life through destructive behavior I don’t relate to or talk in ways that feel foreign to me. In these cases, I pay particular attention to the way men of a certain age and epoch speak in movies, novels, and in life. Dialogue is revised and edited again, as I poll acquaintances, friends, and colleagues to craft an authentic voice. For example, in one project, a character is a middle-aged former baseball player, and to properly render the way he thinks about his past career and talks shop with a buddy, I read articles and blog posts about baseball to get a feel for the way people discuss the game, and asked baseball fanatics around me for their opinions on how they would talk about certain aspects of the sport. Little touches like these go unnoticed when done well, but are glaring when done poorly; they contribute greatly to the overall tone of the book.

Using these methods, I have embodied the voice of a middle-aged North Korean spy, a guilt-ridden writer despairing at the loss of her mother, a 1940s Japanese prison guard, a coddled but neglected ten-year-old girl who feels like an outsider, a murderous sociopath, and an autistic math whiz.

The most challenging, however, wasn’t any of these characters, but a hen named Sprout. In The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly by Sun-mi Hwang, recently published in both the US and the UK, the feisty, spunky, independent-minded hen, yearning to leave the battery cage to lay and hatch an egg, charts her own course, refusing to settle for anything less than the life she has in mind for herself. The author’s writing is spare and charged with emotion, and I wanted to convey that while keeping the prose elegant.

As I read classic and modern-day fables, I went through several versions of the manuscript, editing, discarding, and reworking to get to the right tone. In one of my early drafts, I had rendered a passage this way:

Sprout slowed down to match the baby’s gait. The female ducks fell back unwillingly. ‘The weasel, that terrifying hunter! I’m scared. And I hate him. He took everything precious to me. I wish I were stronger than the weasel so I could get revenge!’ It was a foolish thought. Revenge? Just thinking about living in the wide-open fields was enough to make her cry. But she didn’t, closing her beak firmly.

Although more literally translated, the hen’s thoughts in single quotes were jarring in English. Eventually, I decided to do away with the single quotes throughout the text while retaining Sprout’s feelings and thoughts. In the end, I ended up with the passage below:

Sprout slowed down to match Baby’s gait. The female ducks fell back unwillingly. Sprout felt surging hatred toward the weasel. He’d taken every precious being. She wanted to be stronger than the weasel to get revenge. But she knew it was foolish. Revenge? Just thinking about living in the wide-open fields again was enough to make her cry. But she held her tears at bay and set her beak.

In the second version, Sprout’s fear and gumption are still on display, but the text reads more fluidly, encapsulating the mood of the novel more effectively. As this novel is a fable, I wanted to convey the deeper meaning while keeping to the lean style of writing. It was surprising how difficult this proved to be, but it is because works with more complex sentence and narrative structures that seem more difficult at first glance allow for a wider choice of words. My goal for every translation I do is to recreate the mood of the original novel—in this one, to transport the English language reader into Sun-mi Hwang’s universe of brave, singular animals.

• Sun-mi Hwang  is speaking at the Cambridge Literature Festival at 10am on Sunday April 6th, in the Lightfoot Room at the Divinity School,  St John’s College, St John’s Street, Cambridge, as well as at the English PEN Literary Salon, at the London Book Fair, Earls Court, at 11.30 on Weds April 9th, all as part of the British Council Cultural Programme.

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