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  Interview with Oh Eun: What We Don’t Know Is Worth Not Knowing Well

  Oh Eun, how are you? As a longtime reader and admirer of your poetry, I’m so glad to get this chance to interview you. But first things first: would you mind briefly introducing yourself to readers overseas who’ve taken an interest in Korean literature? Hello. I’m Oh Eun, and I write poems. I usually introduce myself with the phrase “I write poems,” instead of “I’m a poet” because the act of writing gives me a kind of on-the-cusp feeling. Whenever I’m writing poetry, I feel as though I’m always just about to arrive somewhere. Even after I write the final line of a poem, I always sit there scratching my head for a while. It’s because I’m still writing something in my mind. Maybe I actually have arrived somewhere, but I’m already trying to figure out where to take my next step. I’ll read you the quote on my business card. “Occasionally writing, always thinking of writing. Always living, but only occasionally feeling alive.” I feel most alive when I’m writing a poem. I’d like to ask you about your career path. You majored in sociology at Seoul National University and received a master’s degree from the Graduate School of Culture Technology at KAIST, two majors that are not closely related. You’ve also worked at a big data company, and since then as an author, newspaper and magazine contributor, cultural director, podcast host, lecturer, and so on. Where did this surprisingly colorful experience come from? And has this ‘career of transitions’ influenced your writing in any way? Now that you ask, I wonder if I should have just stayed in my own lane. I’ve always been extremely curious, ever since I was young. I was a headstrong little kid who always wanted to try whatever someone else was doing. Luckily, if I tried it and realized it wasn’t for me, I gave up easily. Of course, that was usually because something else caught my interest.        As an adult, one of my biggest motivations has been the opportunity to try different things. Not because I was good at any of them, but because I believed that stepping into a new field and working to acclimate myself to it would make me a better person. Rather than working hard to get better at something I wasn’t good at, I wanted to understand a variety of things from all different walks of life.        Looking back, I think all those experiences had an influence on my poetry writing. I feel like dedicating myself to various fields helped cultivate my ability to see. It was a process of understanding where my line of sight (蒘鉌) comes to rest, what point of view (蒘懘) I take in looking at a thing, and what might change from a different angle of vision (蒘岆). All of this seeps into my poetry without me even realizing it. There are many traits that might be important for a poet to have, but I think my real talent is my curiosity. After your debut in Modern Poetry, your first book of poetry was The Pigs at Hotel Tassel. One of my favorite poems in that collection is “0.5.” The speaker experiences the abstract world of rational numbers, beyond whole numbers like one and two. This is realized through lines like, “you first called me your eyesight on the chart at the optometrist—in October I became the morning temperature—then I became the thickness of your pencil lead—and went to school with you everyday.” Your first collection is full of this ‘speech of possibility,’ which somehow conveys the lived experience of this kind of abstraction. In turn, your most recent collection, The Pronoun for Nothingness, is filled with ‘undefined speech.’ What has changed between your first and most recent collections, and what hasn’t? Just as the poem “0.5” looks at the world from the perspective of the number 0.5, I’d say this effort at ‘becoming’ is one of the most important elements of my poetry writing. In The Pronoun for Nothingness, I tried to do that entirely in the form of pronouns. I think I wanted to tell the story of things that have to struggle to reveal their existence without being specifically named. The world of a pronoun can firmly fix something in place while also coming across as completely unknowable to someone who can’t follow it. That ambivalence was the impetus for these poems.        Over the past twenty years that I’ve been writing poetry, what I’ve said over and over is, “writing is hard.” Because I’ve put so much of what I want to say into poetry over that time without even realizing it, it feels like writing poetry is getting steadily more difficult. But strangely, this difficulty, this obscurity, also makes me want to write it. Because it’s hard, I want to try harder and get it right. Because it’s so obscure, I want to move closer to see more  clearly. So far, I’ve never felt that writing was anything but difficult. On the other hand, some things have changed. In the past, poetry felt like a finish line on an athletic field or a final goal to be scored, but now it feels like a vast, open ocean. A place with no center and nothing that could fully represent it. I actually can’t swim, but when I’m writing poetry, I feel like I’m happily swimming this way and that across a boundless sea. They say some poems have the prophetic quality of declaring the poet’s identity. In “He,” I pictured your face the moment I read the line, “He was called the pronoun for laughter.” It’s my opinion that, of all Korean poets, you may be the one who writes the funniest poems. Whenever I encounter your sense of humor, I feel totally weightless and free. What meaning and possibility do laughter and humor have for you as a poet? I like to laugh, so I’ve always wanted to be funny. Not that I wanted to be a comedian. I just wanted to be someone who could give people a laugh here and there. I didn’t want that laughter to come from tearing someone else down, but to bloom out of casting off my own pretensions. The way I make use of humor in poetry is definitely different from my everyday life, but I still believe in the power of laughter that grows out of literature. Laughter lightens heavy stories and helps us find warmth in cold, hard situations. Actually, maybe I started using wordplay and puns because I believed that, if I started a serious story like it was no big deal and got people to laugh a little as they read, a moment would come when I could suddenly hit them over the head with something heavy. I have a vivid memory of watching a silent Charlie Chaplin film that made me laugh hysterically until suddenly I was crying instead. That’s when I realized something. Laughter and tears are one and the same. Joy and sorrow are in cahoots. Sometimes, if you take the funniest poem and flip it around, it becomes the most unnerving or the saddest. Whenever I read one of your collections, I always keep a dictionary by my side. I have to prepare for a rush of unfamiliar words: “the stoneflue is a path beneath the bakestone floor” (“We”),  “rubicund” (“Suggestion”), “lambent,” “slatternly” (Wearing Green). Reading your poems feels like exploring the outer reaches of the native language we thought we knew so well. Almost like a linguistic telescope. Why do you take such an interest in vocabulary? To me, words are like toy blocks. Just as you can stack up blocks to build a house or a factory, when I write a poem, I combine words to build sentences and imagine those sentences coming together to form a building I’ve never seen before. Maybe each of us is in a solitary struggle to create our own unique building. In architecture, some people prioritize choosing the best plot of land, and others look for the best materials. My land and materials are all words. Putting words on top of words, words next to words, I’ve naturally formed a close relationship with the dictionary. Even words we think we know well turn out to have new aspects when we find them in the dictionary, and words we’ve never seen before sometimes taste sweet when we first roll them over on our tongues. After all, it’s because we have words that we can express our ideas, create sentences, and ultimately write poetry. I write poems in Korean, and it’s a joy, in my native language, to discover an unfamiliar face to a word I know well or recognize a familiar face on a word I’ve never seen. Many of my poems have started from just one word. Is there any special Korean word you’d like to introduce to foreign readers? If so, feel free to tell us anything you’d like about what it means, why it’s special, and how it sounds and feels. In English, being dead and buried in one’s grave is referred to as being “six feet under.” I imagine digging a hole that deep—the full height of a person—to lay a body to rest. The act of digging down into the ground might be seen as calmly reinscribing the traces left behind on Earth by the deceased. In Korea, being buried after death is sometimes referred to as “ttangbotaem” (literally “ground contribution”). It’s both a wonderful metaphor for death and a reference to the cycle of life. It expresses a sense of hope that death is not an end but a chance to contribute to the earth, from which all things grow, and the conviction that the dead will be born again as new sprouts or saplings. There’s always something mysterious to me about the word “eogam” (nuance, connotation, the texture or feel of a word; literally “word-feel”). It’s not something you can literally feel, like the weather or the changing of the seasons, but words definitely give us some kind of feeling. I’ve yet to meet anyone who knows words as accurately as you, or who uses them as freely. I want to ask about your thoughts on the word “eogam.” Eogam. That’s a great word, isn’t it? It’s always surprising that a word can convey a feeling all on its own. The way that “you” and “thou,” “blue” and “azure” are different. We already talked about the dictionary, but as a child I always wanted to say things precisely. It wasn’t enough for something to be good, I wanted to go deeper and know why and how it was good. If I write the word “soft,” I question whether that’s really the right word, and if it doesn’t measure up, I try to come up with a word to replace it . Sometimes I leave a blank for the right word, and go for a walk. And sometimes I find the word I’m looking for—the moment you realize it’s not sick, but uncomfortable, not excited, but more like carried away. The moment something is expressed in language, it gets defined, but this is also just a matter of wanting to say what I have to say as best I can. The poets I’ve met always compare you as a poet to a small child. They say that Oh Eun is a child at heart or that there is a child at the heart of Oh Eun’s poetry. In fact, your own answer to the question of who you see as your role model can be found in Wearing Green: “if I must choose one, then it must be children.” What can you tell us about your work through the keyword “childhood”? Curiosity is the reason I think of children as my role model. Children are always curious. I’ve been told I was the type of child that always asks, “Why?” I wanted to know it all. What is this place where I was born? Why do the trees change their clothes in the fall? Why does tomorrow come after today? Why are there holidays? Why is that yellow flower called “forsythia”? Why does a year have 365 days? Why do some years have 366 days? So many things to be curious about. Once I realized that asking adults had limits, I started reading diligently. But if you read, you find even more questions than answers. I think that might be why I started writing.        Children also have a transparent quality. When they play together, things like gender, nationality, religion, and family circumstances don’t hold them back. They just want to know each other, to jump and play and enjoy being together. Games resolve in victory or defeat, but play begins just because it’s fun, then occasionally stops for a moment before beginning again. For children, knowing someone’s name is all it takes to be friends, and they cherish the time and space they share together. Who wouldn’t feel admiration for a person like that? It’s so different from the way adults try to prove themselves by drawing endless distinctions with others. We often link the physical process of maturation to becoming an adult, but I think the heart and mind can grow a lot even after reaching adulthood. Someone whose heart has grown up well will be able to look at others clearly, without prejudice, and maintain a curious mind about the world. I’d also like to know about you personally. The Oh Eun I know is warm and cheerful, always laughing and making jokes. As the critic Kim Sang-hyeok has said, you’re also someone who “never simply passes by a person begging in the street or the old folks selling chocolate and gum.” How do you think this personality is revealed through or appears in your writing? I suppose that makes me think of the characters in my poems. Not only the human characters but also the animals, plants, and objects. My heart goes out to things that are always there but which no one pays attention to. The person who has a name but is never called on, the plant that appears to be growing just fine while its roots are rotting away, an object which is used every day but never gets to show its true face—theirs are the stories I want to hear. Simply striking up a conversation could seem impolite, so I cautiously imagine. It’s a process of attaching a mouth to something that’s never had a chance to tell its own story. Of course, a large portion of myself finds its way in too. Weak and squishy, liable to double over at the drop of a hat, going from hope to despair and back multiple times a day—me, myself. For me, the blank page is the place where the being is reborn. Sometimes amazing things happen, sometimes a failure becomes a way to bounce back stronger, and sometimes I search my whole life for something without ever figuring it out. I just want to tell their stories in my own way. Sad stories told humorously, funny stories told devastatingly, devastating stories told indifferently. Perhaps this is how humor functions in my poetry. A world teeming with pronouns unfolds from the pages of your most recent collection, The Pronoun for Nothingness. Pronouns are an interesting subject, when you think about it. Nouns were created to refer to various objects, and then we use pronouns to refer back to those nouns once more. In other words, until a pronoun refers to any specific thing, it is filled only with possibility. It brings to mind the linguistic concept of the dummy subject, like the impersonal pronoun “it” in English. Your recent poetry is filled with this kind of placeholder or blank. Could you tell us more about this ‘poetic negative space’? As I wrote The Pronoun for Nothingness, it gave me the feeling of sand slipping through my fingers. Let’s say there’s a proper noun that attains existence at the moment of its naming. In the very next sentence, it is replaced by a pronoun. “It” meets with another “it.” “That” gets placed next to another “that.” Sure, the meaning isn’t difficult to gather from context, but that’s just the reader’s perspective. I wanted to tell the noun’s story—the noun whose existence fades among the endless pronouns. In order to do that, I had to go back up the chain of the naming process. How did it get that name, who gave it that name, and could it have a different name? Then I realized something. The moment we name it, the referent is trapped within that name—the way the sky unfurls in our minds, the moment we read a poem titled “Sky.” In other words, it occurred to me that naming something immediately blocks its potential to expand any further. Then I wanted to write exactly the opposite kind of poem, one that would use the pronoun to remind us of the noun, and then once more the proper noun. I wanted to go back to before the reference, back to when the possibilities for interpretation were plentiful. At that point, the blanks or ‘poetic negative space’ that you mentioned become a space to be filled in from the experiences and imagination of the writer and reader. A space that exists as emptiness, that arises again as nothingness.   In “That,” you write, “There is something / Its name escapes me […] Here I am / Not knowing its name.” It seems like not knowing something, leaving it blank, is a way to explore possibility. This refusal to inconsiderately seize control of meaning feels like a kind of linguistic democratization. Maybe laying down established meanings and facing each other blankly makes a new encounter possible. What do you think of the reading of your poetry as a ‘sociological imaginary of language’? One thing I considered carefully when writing The Pronoun for Nothingness was distance. The distance between “me” and “you,” the distance between “me” and “them,” the distance that grows within the community of “us,” and the inevitable distance between “me” and “myself.” When people feel they know for certain, they are bound to make the mistake of jumping to conclusions or judging too quickly. Even the context that has shaped our lives can act as a kind of bias, and when it does, it can be helpful to place ourselves in a state of ignorance. You have to, to exercise discernment. Since it’s important to imagine other lives and try to think from other people’s perspectives, I suppose you could call this a ‘sociological imaginary of language,’ as you put it.        Looking back over the time I’ve spent on poetry, I think ‘not knowing’ has been an important impetus for my writing. I used to think I was writing to learn what I didn’t know, but at some point, I altered that idea. Now it feels more like I write so that, whatever I don’t know, I can not know it well. The geography of my poetic practice has changed—maintaining a willing distance from the object, knowing nothing in order to clear the mind of prejudice, approaching from as transparent a state as possible. When something doesn’t reveal its essence no matter how closely you approach it, you can’t help but be humbled. You know, if you touch a soap bubble, it pops. All you can do is watch with a blank stare, cleared of all language, discipline, order, and so on. Knowing nothing. And while you’re at it, know it well. You’ve written, “I don’t write father but dad. I don’t call him father, I call him dad” (Patting). Have you noticed that your poetry collections always include the people you care about? The way a compass always points north, at the end of your poetry there is always a person. I’ve always thought that was so beautiful. “People hold people in a warm embrace” (“Good Person”). So I’ve always wanted to ask you, what are people to you? A riddle to which the answer changes every second? Of course you know the Korean proverb, “We may know the depths of the deepest waters, but not of the shallowest person.” A reasonable person may not always make reasonable choices, and a person who’s good to me may not be a good person to others. That’s why I try to empty myself and become transparent before people, as I do before poetry and before words. As much as possible, I want to be free of bias in my approach to people.        In the past, I really wanted to solve the riddle of people. But at some point, I started wanting to simply let things be and watch that subtle, complex condition. If you get too deeply involved, you can damage the essence. And if you interpret things however you like, you can only ever create a distortion. The riddle is interesting, but at the same time, you can’t know its inner workings. You can’t be too quick to guess the answer because the answer is always changing. You have to watch and wait to see each new aspect, which could appear at any time. I think that’s what makes a person someone we care about, a special someone. Looking back on your poetry, you’re always trying something new and different. I’d like to call this poetic career of self-reinvention a ‘history of courage.’ Is there a world of language you’re hoping to unfold after The Pronoun for Nothingness? Tell us about some of your new interests and themes. And, if I may ask, do you have any books in the works for us? As I take a moment to look over the poetry I’ve been writing since my last collection, it seems I’m writing a lot about ‘traces’ and ‘time differences’. But it’s hard to know while I’m still writing. I usually only realize the direction I’m moving in after a certain amount of time has passed. The process itself almost seems like a metaphor for traces and time differences, but while I can never know what scenes await me on this journey, I try to not know well. I don’t know where I’m going, but I hope there will be laughter and tears, joy and sadness there.  Translated by Seth Chandler   Ko Myeong-jae is the author of the poetry collection Closing Our Eyes When We Kiss and the prose collection When I Miss You Too Much It Snows. He is a professor of creative writing at Keimyung University.    Korean Works Mentioned:•    Oh Eun, “That,” “He,” “We,” The Pronoun for Nothingness (Moonji Publishing, 2023)     오은, 「그것」, 「그」, 「우리」, 『없음의 대명사』 (문학과지성사, 2023)•    Oh Eun, “0.5,” The Pigs at Hotel Tassel (Minumsa, 2009)     오은, 「0.5」, 『호텔 타셀의 돼지들』 (민음사, 2009)•    Oh Eun, Patting (Nanda, 2020)     오은, 『다독임』 (난다, 2020)•    Oh Eun, “Suggestion,” The Left Hand’s Feelings are Hurt (Hyundae Munhak, 2018)     오은, 「암시」, 『왼손은 마음이 아파』 (현대문학, 2018)•    Oh Eun, Wearing Green (Nanda, 2024)     오은, 『초록을 입고』 (난다, 2024)•    Oh Eun, “Good Person,” I Had a Name (Achimdal Books, 2018)      오은, 「좋은 사람」, 『나는 이름이 있었다』 (아침달, 2018)•    Kim Sang-hyeok, “The Never Misunderstood Oh-Eun,” Lyric Poetry, 2016 Winter     김상혁, 「오해받지 않는 오은」, 『서정시학』 (2016 겨울호)   1     Translator’s Note: The word “stoneflue” is a literal translation of the word dolgorae, a less common variety of traditional Korean underfloor heating. This word is a homophone for “dolphin.” The word “bakestone floor” is my coinage for gudeuljang, the flooring used in this heating system, in which “gudeul” is etymologically derived from the phrase “baked stone” or “heated stone.” This is not a rare word in Korean, but I have repurposed the English word “bakestone” to convey it in a way that should strike English readers as both familiar and unknown, which is the effect of the line as a whole.

  by Ko Myeong-jae

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  Interview with Kim Ae-ran: Attentive Minds and Literary Forms

  To prepare for this interview, I reread all of your works in chronological order. There was something dramatic in realizing that I’ve grown up alongside your characters. I was reminded of the early 2000s and felt quite emotional. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the progression of your characters accurately reflects not just my past, but also the trajectory of Korean society and families in the twenty-first century. It’s also fascinating that your novels have inherited elements from Korean literature of the 1990s—small stories, lonely selves, preferences, and personality, just to name a few. With your novels, you’ve proven the paradox that even the most private stories are still universal and connected to society. Could you share more about how your writing journey began in relation to these themes? Three keywords come to mind: “noodle shop,” “room,” and “theatre.” I’ll explain each of these briefly.        My mother ran a noodle shop out of our home in the countryside for over twenty years. In her shop, I learned that cooking is a form of labor long before it transforms into virtue or duty. I also got to see firsthand what it meant to be a proud, economically independent woman. The people who came to the restaurant were people from all walks of life and socioeconomic backgrounds. At the time I hated sharing with those customers our small home where we ate and slept, but now I realize that it was a precious experience for my development as an author.        By “room,” I’m talking as much about a physical place as an economic class. My early work inevitably contains many of my personal experiences. As a young author, I used to be embarrassed by the smallness of my stories about “home” and that “room.” But not anymore. Much like pointillism, small stories in numbers can become the brushstrokes for a vast sky.        Lastly, I studied theatre in college. While in school, I saw many performances barely make it to the stage. In the process, my peers and I learned how to accept each other’s imperfections and how to keep our promise to the audience. During that time, I also learned how to look for the meaning of life without relying on a personal god, and how to love without idolizing the other person. Although I can’t say for sure that I was aware of this at the time. It’s interesting that your experience in theatre has seeped into your novels. I can’t help but think that this is also related to your writing and literature. Noodle shops and rooms are especially present in works like Run, Dad! and Mouthwatering. One thing that plays an important role in the world-building of these early works is what you might call a “resentment-free reconstruction of reality and active imagination.” But in your works in the 2010s and beyond, I think this becomes more complicated. For example, in My Brilliant Life and Vapor Trail, you seem more aware of the harshness or negative aspects of reality. I wonder if this indicates a kind of shift. Or as writer Kim Yeonsu once stated, perhaps laughter and tears all come from the same place. In that sense, something that was latent in your early works has now emerged to the surface. I’m curious what the context behind that change was. I’ve always wanted to possess a sense of humor that demonstrates a deep understanding of life. I hope I’ve achieved that, at least to some extent. Still, it’s true that in striving for that, I had started to smile less. But after the sinking of the MV Sewol, my pessimism returned to faint optimism, and then after the COVID-19 pandemic, I started to sympathize with Rebecca Solnit who said that both pessimism and optimism are forms of certainty about the future. I once read that certainty interferes with our decision-making. And yet, so long as we cling to a certain amount of hope, it doesn’t so much give us a good answer, but rather, a difficult one—like a cracked jar that leaks light to reveal the dignity of humanity within. I think Korean literature of late can be split into two periods: literature that was written before the sinking of the MV Sewol, and literature that was written after. When Kim Yeonsu wrote about you, I felt a warmth inside as I sensed the unique and complex connection between you two—awkward and ambivalent, yet somehow friendly. What does the term “contemporary author” mean to you? I know writing is ultimately a solitary act, but I think that relationships between writers must be significant. What first comes to mind is the Korean phrase “a hill to lean on.” I also imagine this network of writers as a forest. I’m happy to know that my work is not the first shovel in a barren landscape but rather a tree or leaf swaying in unison with other trees and leaves in a forest cultivated by other writers. Within that forest, I sometimes feel the winds of history, and at other times, I’m shaken and humbled by those same winds. Eventually, I may decay and be absorbed into the earth, but that, too, is the way of nature. Contemporary writers are the people with whom I share that uncertain destiny. I find it interesting that from the beginning of your career, many of your main characters have been children. Your newest full-length novel, A Lie Among Truths, also features a young boy. I can’t help but think that there must be some special reason for this. Perhaps you have a particular affection for coming-of-age journeys? The young characters in my early works were very interested in themselves. After all, one must resolve their own problems before they can see others and begin to talk about “we.” While writing my latest novel, a certain idea occurred to me: Growing up is all about changing perspectives. I also think that maturation doesn’t have to be about going through the traditional rites of passage; it can happen gradually over a long span of time. So, in this novel, I decided to have my characters initially obsessed with their own wounds, then slowly I let them begin to see the sorrow and wounds of others as intensely as their own. People tend to think growing up is about becoming bigger, but it’s actually about becoming smaller, because the smaller we get, the bigger our world becomes. I’m paraphrasing Jeon Seung-min, of course, from his book of essays, Reading with Intent. Personally, even though I may not have grown up to become a more sophisticated writer, I’ve become someone who can observe the world and people with patience—something for which I am thankful.  Since your last novel, My Brilliant Life, I’d been waiting with great anticipation for A Lie Among Truths. And it was just as moving as your previous work. Of course, this novel is centered around lies. In the line “One secret helps another secret,” the word “secret” can implicitly be seen as a close cousin with “lie.” Now that I think about it, your first novel, My Brilliant Life, also revolves around the hope and disappointment caused by a certain lie. But in your latest work, I think lying becomes much richer. What significance does lying have for you right now? And what is its relationship to storytelling? To me, lies are even bigger than fiction or storytelling. After all, a novel is essentially an author’s carefully crafted lie. As has long been known, lies in literature are used as a method to protect the truth. In other words, some truths cannot be conveyed without the use of storytelling. Conversely, some lies only feel like they are true because they have been carefully structured and narrativized. It’s a subtle but important distinction. I try to resist the urge to resort to an easy narrative while struggling to preserve the driving force of the story. If a story feels too comfortable to me, I shift my perspective to make sure I’m an honest liar. Another interesting aspect of A Lie Among Truths is the introduction of non-human characters, which is something new in your body of work. Rather than simply serving as a plot device, they seem to reflect a fascinating expansion or shift in worldviews. For example, all three of the children who are the main characters suffer their own wounds and live precarious daily lives; yet, they have non-humans that they must look after and protect. I wanted to hear more about this from you. I wanted to give these children, for whom family is a painful burden they must carry, a different type of family with its own meaning. After pondering how to ensure the children weren’t put in forced positions of salvation while also not relegating them to a place of meaninglessness, I came up with the idea of a companion animal. I didn’t want to overly anthropomorphize or idealize these animals, so I went with a lizard. I deliberately placed it in contrast to the dog, which represents devotion. While humans have long cherished dogs, lizards (like snakes) have been despised by humans since the dawn of time. Of course, snakes and lizards are different, but they share a common history of neglect and mistreatment by humans. By juxtaposing the dog, a symbol of love and loyalty, with the snake, a creature that doesn’t even know people hate it (as movie critic Kim Hye-ri puts it), I wanted to strike a balance and step away from an anthropocentric perspective. Your desire to avoid anthropomorphism and idealization resonates with me. The last sentence of your book also left a lasting impression on me: “I could have chosen not to return from the dream, but I did.” This is almost the exact opposite of the last sentence of “Who Sets Off Fireworks on the Beach Without Thinking?” from your first collection, Run, Dad!: “This might all be a dream, but just like the wind that traveled thousands of kilometers across the northern pacific to meet me, I must meet that dream.” In other words, the young character from twenty years ago yearned to “meet a dream,” but now, this more recent young character wishes to return from a dream. Why has the meaning of dreams changed for your young characters? I once said in an acceptance speech that, “What matters more than the height of the leap is the place where you land.” I thought I was showing humility and a young author’s mettle, but now that I think about it, it wasn’t that I was trying to hide my own vanity, but rather some fear I had. After all, to land somewhere, to come back to Earth after a great leap, takes a lot of strength, effort, and courage. And to land somewhere, you first need height. You must experience that height. If we can call that height a dream or a fantasy, then perhaps what my early works captured was the sensation of measuring and savoring the distance between the sky and the earth with my body. In contrast, the arc of landing seems to be contained in my more recent works. In an interview, you mentioned that you write your characters while imagining them ten years in the future. It occurred to me that the characters in your latest novel could be both future versions of characters from previous novels, and past versions of characters from future novels. Are there any characters from past works that you would like to rewrite? I’ve sometimes caught myself continuing or rewriting previous short stories of mine. For example, “Knife Marks” and “Covering Hands” both explore motherhood from different angles. “Beginning of Winter” and “Like Raindrops” both explore the grieving process through the motif of applying wallpaper. The youth from “A Proud Life,” who cries because his book gets wet in the rain, becomes a member of the older generation in “A Good Neighbor,” willingly discarding perfectly good books. I plan to continue observing these character transformations.  I also want to ask you about some of the short stories you’ve published after Summer Outside. The two works that come to mind, “Foreign Body Sensation” and “Home Party,” seem more socially aware than Summer Outside. In particular, I think you highlight the hypocrisy and contradictions behind the desire for a middle-class life, a so-called “standard life.” By pointing out the fact that we’re all complicit in this hypocrisy, I think these works are a form of satire directed at the self. In this sense, your work seems to possess a strong sense of physicality as it is firmly rooted in this world. Do you think this rootedness is related to your attitude toward fiction? When I first started out, the “physicality” of my works was mostly tied to a character’s sense of daily life and their humor. But recently, it has also manifested in this critique of “complicity,” as you put it. I think this is because of my interest in bodies that awaken, that become courageous within their limitations and imperfections. These bodies take many forms—dying bodies, drunk bodies, desiring bodies, bodies that are socially conscious. When these “embodied” people make unexpected choices, I feel great humility. A person’s weight is not measured by their achievement in a single era, but by the sum of their contradictions, flaws, failures, and journeys throughout their lifetime. That is what we call life. At some point in time, various media elements—TV, internet, emails, webtoons—began to be highlighted and used as narrative devices in your novels. Of course, these forms of media shape stories in their own way. In this day and age, when these different forms of media compete against each other, what, in your view, is the significance of the novel? And what do you think the novel has contributed—or is contributing—to humanity’s story? In the past, I used to think that the virtue of novels was in their content. Empathy, understanding, imagining the Other—things like that. But these days, I wonder if the true value of literature and reading lies not in content, but in its form. Of course, I also learn a lot through modern media, just like everyone else. I’m often impressed not only by the narrative techniques they use but also by their themes and content. But I’m still skeptical of YouTube and social media, the two most dominant forms of media right now. I guess I’m a bit old-fashioned, despite being neither young nor old.        I should also mention that, with the rise of YouTube and Instagram, there has been a rise in people talking about themselves. Historically, there have never been so many “first-person perspectives.” But with so many “I”s in the world, why has self-alienation become so prevalent? In this age where self-obsession and self-alienation coexist, how can we engage with second- and third-person worlds in a healthy way? Is there a way to be an agent without being a main character? I often ask myself these questions because I, just like everyone else, am not free from such influences. That’s why I think attention has become the moral issue of this era. In a world of dopamine addiction, the strength and time to focus on one object, one issue, might itself be the key to living ethically. This makes me think anew about the importance of literature and reading. I’m fascinated by your comment about “being an agent without being a main character.” It almost seems loosely connected to your affection for adverbs over nouns. I am reminded of your discussion of adverbs in the book of essays, A Good Name to Forget. Teachers often warn students not to use adverbs too often because they are not essential to sentences and can lead to superfluous writing. And now that I think about it, as I write these questions and consider how they will be translated, I unconsciously try to minimize my use of adverbs. Could you share more about your deep fondness for adverbs? When I was young, I read a lot of writing manuals. While reading those books, I was often scolded by the authors for breaking their writing rules—authors who had never even met me! What I should have taken as mere guidelines became absolute truth, and this left me feeling discouraged. My essay about adverbs was my lighthearted rebellion against those early teachers. It was just a small act of defiance, but I got a real kick out of it. In all seriousness, however, adverbs do lead to a lot of wasted verbiage. Perhaps that’s why it’s more apparent in writing than in spoken communication. I suppose my point was that adverbs are a necessary waste. I wanted to defend vibrancy, playfulness, flexibility—all of which require adverbs. Ironically, the short stories and novels I personally admire are those with restrained poeticism. But even someone who hates vegetables can become a vegetarian. Perhaps what I love so much is not adverbs themselves, but rather what you might call the adverbial. And maybe that’s why I’ve never quite connected with rigid, “noun-centered” writing that asserts absolute certainty and claims a monopoly on the truth. The adverbial definitely seems at odds with today’s demands for cost-effectiveness, speed, and stimulation. The meaning of family in your novels has also undergone significant transformations. In a 2017 interview, you described family as three things: the first Other we encounter in life, the place where we practice emotions, and a pole that helps us jump over bars. If I asked you what family means to you now, would you answer differently? I doubt there are many people who have a smooth narrative of their own childhood. It’s my guess that most of us live with certain gaps and omissions, regardless of age or nationality. I often write about children who must fill in the holes their parents could not. In those stories, the tools of humor, imagination, and lying were very useful to me. Conversely, I have sometimes been too idealistic when depicting parents and children, attempting to erase feelings of guilt over parental devotion and sacrifice. I guess I needed an indirect method through which to engage with reality. That’s probably why I got a good laugh when I heard writer Ko Mi Sook say recently that family is a hotbed of lies. In my early years, I frequently used child narrators, but now, in my forties, I have become responsible for looking after my own parents. Through this, I’ve come to accept that we don’t need to idealize family to understand or care for it. At the same time, we don’t necessarily have to be apathetic about the empty spaces inside us, either. In your short story “They Said Annyeong,” which is featured in this issue of KLN, there is a scene in which the main characters part ways without being able to say goodbye. I guess I’m in the same situation right now. But before we leave, I want to ask you one last question: What are three works of yours that you want international readers to know about and why? Limiting myself to short stories, I guess I would suggest a few of my early works as well as my more recent ones. Two of these, in fact, will be included in my fifth short story collection, set to be published this year. “Home Party” is one.In writing this story, I wanted to tackle the topic of money during the COVID-19 pandemic. Or more specifically, I wanted to write about “social currency” and the parties held during times of isolation by the people who possessed it. No setting requires more social performances than parties, and what better character to play such a role than a struggling actor? That’s the idea behind that story. Then there’s “They Said Annyeong.”In the English language, subjects and objects are relatively clear. If only life were as simple. The main character of this story feels the wonder and angst of navigating between one’s mother tongue and a foreign language. A lonely woman, she uses learning a new language as an excuse to learn about life. Finally, “Who Sets Off Fireworks on the Beach without Thinking?”Throughout my career, I’ve written stories in only three different styles: writing a story I know in a familiar way, writing a story I don’t know in a familiar way, and writing a story I don’t know in an unfamiliar way. This novel was written in the last—and least frequent—style. That’s why, whenever I read it, I feel a strange mix of nostalgia and liberation. It’s a fun and beautiful story about two characters in the middle of the night battling for narrative control over a single story. Translated by Sean Lin Halbert  Kim Mijung is a literary critic and lecturer at Soongsil University. She is the author of Moving Constellations, a collection of literary criticism, and the co-author of How Do Post-War East Asian Women’s Narratives Converge? She has also translated The Power of Affect.  Korean Works Mentioned:•   Kim Ae-ran, Run, Dad! (Changbi, 2005)    김애란, 『달려라 아비』 (창비, 2005) •   Kim Ae-ran, Mouthwatering (Moonji, 2007)    김애란, 『침이 고인다』 (문학과 지성사, 2007) •   Kim Ae-ran, My Brilliant Life (tr. Chi-Young Kim, Forge Books, 2021)    김애란, 『두근두근 내 인생』 (창비, 2011) •   Kim Ae-ran, Vapor Trail (Moonji, 2012)    김애란, 『비행운』 (문학과 지성사, 2012) •   Kim Ae-ran, Summer Outside (Munhakdongne, 2017)    김애란, 『바깥은 여름』 (문학동네, 2017) •   Kim Ae-ran, A Good Name to Forget (Yolimwon, 2019)    김애란, 『잊기 좋은 이름』 (열림원, 2019)  •   Kim Ae-ran, A Lie Among Truths (Munhakdongne, 2024)    김애란, 『이중 하나는 거짓말』 (문학동네, 2024) •   Kim Ae-ran, et al, Collection of Stories on the Theme of Music (Franz, 2024)    김애란 등 『음악소설집』 (프란츠, 2024) •   Kim Yeonsu, “What Kind of Person Is Kim Ae-ran?” Literature and Society (Moonji, 2012)          김연수, 「김애란 씨는 어떤 사람인가요?」, 『문학과사회』 (문학과지성사, 2012)

  by Kim Mijung

• 

  Interview with Jin Eun-young: Buttons from the Gift Giver

  As a long-time fan, it’s an honor to interview a poet whose work I’ve followed so closely. I’m aware you’ve had some big changes in your life recently. Going from Seoul to Gwangju is a big move. The scenery outside your office window must have changed a great deal as well. I’m curious how the new office looks, where you’ve placed your new desk. Could you set the scene for us? I always put my desk next to the window. The view from my previous office was a concrete jungle, a bunch of new apartments, but now I have some old trees and a forest outside the window. I like old things, things that are getting old. I’ve been pretty happy with everything, but there were some difficulties at first. The sunlight is so strong. When you’re in the middle of the city, the shadows of the tall buildings act like a curtain for most of the day. But here, maybe because we’re a bit higher up on the mountainside, it’s so bright and hot during the day that I couldn’t sit at my desk. One wall is entirely taken up by a window, but since this office was vacant for two years, there weren’t any blinds for the first week. Whenever I sat down to write, I’d start muttering to myself about the brightness. I couldn’t wait for the blinds to be installed.      Then I got these charcoal rolling shades that were so dark they completely blocked out the sunlight. When the shades were down, you could develop a photograph inside the office, like a darkroom. It was so dark it was suffocating, and I was still muttering under my breath about the lighting. Then I tore some pictures out of an old art magazine and stuck them up on that wall of light, like patches of stained glass. I just stuck them up anywhere, so they took the edge off the sunlight, and the view outside was still visible through the thin pages. I’ve had a lot of repair workers and technicians and other people coming and going because it’s an old office and needs some work done. Sometimes I wonder if they think it’s weird when they come in and see those loose scraps of paper stuck up all over that big, beautiful window.      I think that’s how literature and art have always been for me. Figuring out my own way to resolve some kind of lighting issue. I need light to live, but if the light gets too intense, I feel like I might kill somebody. But when I take some sentences and start loosely sticking them together, the light peeking out between the lines protects me. It helps me grow and bloom. You majored in philosophy before going on to lecture at Korea Counseling Graduate University (KCGU), exploring literature’s power to heal. Alongside this, you’ve done work in translation as well. From a distance, philosophy, counseling, and translation are three distinct fields, but it seems like they all revolve around the central axis of poetry, which draws them in together. Does poetry play different roles in each of these fields? What is similar or different about poetry as a part of philosophy, of counseling, or of translation? I suppose I have been doing a bit of all three for the past ten years now. Objectively, it’s been just as you described—poetry as a part of philosophy, as a part of psychological counseling, as a part of translation. Yet in my heart I think it feels the other way around—philosophy as a part of poetry, counseling as a part of poetry, translation as a part of poetry.      I’ve told this story elsewhere, but I was a math and science student in high school. I majored in philosophy because of an older student’s advice that a good poet must be well-versed in philosophy. These days, I often tell my students about Baudelaire’s dream of creating new clichés. It’s every poet’s dream to create a single word, a single expression that’s never been said before, but which then becomes so well-used that it turns into a cliché. But this isn’t simply a desire to create a novel phrase that everyone loves. The poet aspires to present the world with a gift: the gift of a new, different world. It may be a world for those who delight in the small and trivial, or it may be something more massive, but we all have this ambition. It is philosophy that allows us to imagine the world we will call forth, to think through and reflect upon the precise way to approach that world. Therefore, all poets study philosophy. Of course, our methods of study differ. Since I majored in philosophy, I take a more exegetical or argumentative approach within the philosophy discourse, but others seem to think philosophically by examining and reflecting upon their own writing.      Counseling as a part of poetry has been with me ever since I started writing poems. The high school I went to was trying to make a name for itself as the new, elite college test-prep school in the neighborhood, so they had no arts and literature track. The atmosphere was like, if you got caught reading one of the classics during study hall, you could expect corporal punishment. I wasn’t even allowed to enjoy literature as much as I’d have liked, but I learned through experience that when I was depressed and exhausted, just reading a poem to myself, mouthing it under my breath, made me feel so much better. In other words, reading and writing poetry was a kind of self-therapy for me. Weak, tender things will always find a way to make a little hole to hide in, right? This world is so full of weak, tender things that it feels like a sponge, so full of little holes. In twelve years at KCGU, reading and writing poetry with all sorts of students, I’ve really come to think so. Some drill their hole with sound, some with color, some with love. Each of us can hide in a hole drilled by art and humanity. When it’s not reading or listening but writing and performing, perhaps it’s less like drilling and more like nibbling a hole with the incisors of letters and music. You have to gnaw the hole open and shape it yourself, so it’s not easy at first, but we all have incisors.      I think of translation as a kind of training in earnestly and carefully approaching something unfamiliar to you. I began translating because I wanted to know more about the poet Sylvia Plath, who lived in a world I knew so little about. “Please just get divorced and start a new life!” That’s what I used to say to my mom when I was a child, starting when I was in the upper grades of elementary school. So it was a struggle for me to understand women who cry out in anguish while staying in an unhappy marriage. Whenever we hear a scream, no matter whose it is, we have an immediate reaction, “Oh my god. Someone’s in pain. Shouldn’t we get them out of that situation?” But understanding someone means to know the specifics of their pain, and to know the deep-seated reason they’ve confined themself there. It means that even if you wouldn’t defend such a life, you accept that for this other person, who’s different from you, it is their way of being, and they are in pain. And you don’t draw facile conclusions or judgments. When I translated Sylvia Plath’s poetry, I sat and thought over what this life I hadn’t lived might have been like. When I read her diaries and letters, I felt a little closer to that pain I hadn’t known. In this sense, writing a poem is like translating a piece of the world. In the case of your own poetry, what do you think is most important when it’s translated and introduced in another language? It may be impossible to prevent things from being lost in the translation process, but is there anything you believe absolutely must be conveyed intact and without distortion? The order of the words that make up the images. Even if the target language sentences don’t come out as smoothly, I’d like the order of the words to be kept as close to their positions in the source text as possible. It’s usually quite difficult to translate that way because word order is different, but I feel it’s the only way to convey the image that the poet is trying to show the reader. The images in your poetry are so distinct that it feels like you must always have on your desk a scale for weighing words, a temperature gauge, and gem-cutting tools. The “new clichés” Baudelaire spoke of make their presence felt throughout your collections. I can feel the senses within my body become vividly awake when I imagine lines like “Like a snail’s eye, the gentle day” (“Birthday”) or “Like a little silver drum being played, your palm is tapped upon by the rain” (“Proposal”). It seems that images—the images you hope will be carried over as closely as possible and never be lost in translation—truly play an important role in your poetic world. The title of your recent prose collection is Although I’m Not Right for the World. As soon as I heard the title, I had the urge to complete the sentence and felt a very strong pull. What would it mean to be “just right for this world”? Is it even possible? What were the “someone’s sentences that saved [you]”? The book brought out so many questions. How do you understand the word “world”? What does it mean for us to be reading and writing there? In a sense, I think the idea of being just right for this world is incredibly frightening. That makes it sound as if the world is a jigsaw puzzle where everyone will fit perfectly if they just find their place. I get a sense of compulsivity from that worldview. Even just one person not fitting in puts an end to such imaginings of the world as a jigsaw puzzle. After all, in a basic sense, the world is a concept meant to encompass everyone, so if even one piece doesn’t fit, the complete, single picture becomes impossible. And the number of people who don’t fit into this world is certainly more than one. In fact, almost everyone doesn’t fit. Each one of us is a differently-shaped piece, and one of my sides might match up to another of your sides—in the plural sense of you. There are always many gaps between the pieces. For instance, I like Hannah Arendt’s books, but I don’t really like the stories about her love affairs. When she was a student, she had a relationship with Heidegger, who was her philosophy professor, and she met him again sometime much later. When he got sulky that her work was more popular than his in America, do you know what she said? She remarked that he’d been under the impression she couldn’t even count to three. When I read that in one of the biographies, I was shocked. How could these be the words of such a brave and critical female philosopher? How could she have fallen in love with a man who treated her like she was so stupid she couldn’t count to three? She’s not a match for me. But no, then again, she is a match for me. When I sense her idealizing Greek culture, she’s not a match for me. When she’s unrestrained in her criticism of Zionism, she is a match.      Writing is the work of creating contact so that these temporary and partial matches arise. Literature seems to have the ability to take parts and pieces that have always been so far apart they’d never bump into each other and magnetize them together. Right now, we’re connected. But we could fall apart. But that’s okay. We can be reconnected again. Of course, this process isn’t always as easy or pleasant as it sounds, but good works of literature always bring me some relief through the knowledge that these moments of contact and rupture aren’t only happening to me. Your books often introduce readers to quotes from foreign authors. Your first collection Seven Word Dictionary includes quotes from Nicanor Parra, Louis Aragon, and Rainer Maria Rilke; We, Day by Day from Pasternak, Nietzsche, and Spinoza; Stolen Song from Maurice Blanchot, César Vallejo, and Antonio Muñoz Molina. I Love You Like an Old Street opens with a line from a Zbigniew Herbert poem, “Those touched by misfortune are always alone,” and then lines from John Berger, Dylan Thomas, and Emily Dickinson open each section. All four of your poetry collections have three parts, each beginning with a quote from a foreign writer, so it seems this format has become a distinctive characteristic of your work as a poet. Do you plan on keeping this format for your next collection? Is there a reason you like to draw on quotes? What are your thoughts on these lines from other writers? It isn’t intentional. It might just be that I write too little, so it’s hard to pull together a collection with more than three parts. The lines I use as epigraphs are all lines that I love, of course. An epigraph usually appears at the beginning of a piece of writing to indicate the topic or theme, so it’s meant to suggest to readers the mood or thematic concerns I had when the poems were written or collected. I’m saying, “Here’s what I’ll be talking about.” But the reason I’m so attached to that style is really more of an intense and fundamental desire to read the quoted books together with those who would befriend me. It’s as if I want to say, “There is a more beautiful and dazzling world out there than the one I’ve captured in this book. I know there is!” Just as a road connects to other roads in endless procession, I hope the words of other writers quoted in my books will serve as a key to open the door to those writers’ books, in continuous connection to yet other worlds. I confess that, in my own reading, I’ve followed many of those quoted lines to the joy of discovering and falling in love with new authors I’d never heard of. Thanks to that experience, I’ve become a member of a reading community that transcends time and space. Since we’re on the topic, would you introduce us to any new works you’ve found recently, or any new meanings you’ve discovered in re-reading something? If not a specific work, I’m curious what sorts of things you’ve been reading. Any trends or keywords? I want to keep up with your thought. Recently, I’ve been thinking about the spirit of gift-giving. I wrote about this in my recent essay collection as well, but reading Margaret Atwood’s Burning Questions led me to Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. I picked it up because Atwood strongly recommends it as required reading to young aspiring artists regardless of genre. It made me rethink what it means to engage in relationships openly rather than dually. In my twenties I thought of myself as someone who would repay a kindness no matter what it took. Whatever love I received from someone, I thought I would give back even more. It made me feel proud to think like that. I think it was a kind of psychological strategy to accept that I was indebted to someone else’s love to sustain my existence. But as time went by, I could never sufficiently pay back all the people who’d given me love, and those people never expected a reward either. With love and kindness, giving back only when you’ve received and taking only when you’ve given is fundamentally a kind of exchange relation. As Hyde points out in his book, not only will that not change the world, the world couldn’t even function properly that way. Without the bountiful gifts which the sun gives to plants, and which plants give to us, we couldn’t even exist. But I don’t compensate the sun that’s shining down warmly on me right now, nor the delicious plants that I’m chewing on.      On days when I feel alone, I get great strength and consolation from the words of Szymborska, Herbert, Bachmann, and Berger, but it’s not as if I can write works as great as theirs to move and console them in return. There is no way to compensate them. All that you and I can do, as poets, is write and do our best to offer a single line as a gift to give someone else courage on a day when they are struggling. When I think of how gifts keep passing onward to other places in that way, flowing endlessly among many people rather than back and forth between just two, I feel much more generous. In my twenties, I was very fearful of inconveniencing or becoming indebted to someone. To myself, I insisted this was because I was a strong, independent person, but really it was because I couldn’t accept our fundamental vulnerability, our ultimate dependence on others. But reading Hyde’s argument of the gift economy as a kind of universal flow—one that may appear to have been cut off by capitalism since the modern era, but which in fact can’t be severed so long as the cycle of life continues on Earth—I felt my own dark anxiety about the future lift and brighten. I want to live like a plant. Vegetarians eat plants but not animals, despite the fact that both are living things. I’ve heard it explained that the ability of plants to give gifts is greater than that of animals. Lettuce and herbs grow back quickly even if we pick a leaf for breakfast. Plants can preserve themselves even as they share with other beings. It’s said the Buddha returned in one life as a rabbit and offered up his body to feed a hungry tiger, but since even thinking about such dedication and sacrifice could be too much for us, let’s try to live like the plants, which preserve the self even as they give freely of the self as a gift. I’ve been trying to view whatever comes my way in the new, generous perspective of a plant. I wish I could be more like a plant as well, with that gift-giving ability. But in the world of capital, where almost everything is quantitatively assessed and exchanged, it occurs to me that self-preservation isn’t as easy as one might think. In other words, whatever that thing is—the thing you’re most afraid to lose, the self you want to preserve no matter what—if you want to hold onto it, you have to be so reactive and cling to it with all your might. I wonder what that thing—the self—is for you, whether in poetry or in life. When I spoke of self-preservation, I wasn’t thinking of a self that exists as some fixed characteristic. On the contrary, when I speak of preserving the self, what I mean is sustaining a passion for reinventing the self through ceaseless contact with the world. If we think of a stem sprouting from a seed or leaves budding on a branch, we can feel a kind of passion rising ever outward from the self and toward something else. Of course, this passion isn’t truly everlasting. We can’t preserve the self infinitely. Everything comes to an end. But until then, I hope I will always retain within me the ability to transform the self by taking small steps towards other beings. I remember a line from The Gift: “We stand before a […] burning house and feel the odd release it brings, as if the trees could give the sun return for what enters them through the leaf.” The author is watching a wooden house burn down, and it feels to him as if the trees are returning all the light they’ve taken in back to the world—it’s quite an epiphany. Of course, when we then see forests burning for months on end, the first worry that comes to mind is the climate crisis. It’s as if the trees are engaging in a great self-immolation, a stern rebuke of humanity for taking everything from nature and never offering any gift in return. I Love You Like An Old Street often brought to mind the faces and expressions of death. There are many different keywords by which to read your poetry, but I’d venture that one important foundation of your poetic world is loss and mourning. In your essay “Amid Emptiness, a Sad Person,” you write that after a loved one dies, our “way of loving” them changes, and you say that we need another “experiment in love,” quoting Megan Devine. That left an impression on me. In our times, what is the shape of love required by a community of sadness? Tell us more about your thoughts on loss, mourning, and love’s extension. Actually, in your poem “Incomplete”, you write that “to cross the valley, what’s needed is not two legs,” but “a buttonhole-sized belief is enough.” I like those lines. What is the buttonhole-sized belief we need in order to cross the valley of death? Could it be the belief that we are still connected? A sense of connection, that we are still in touch with the dead. Megan Devine’s observation that when a loved one dies, love isn’t over, but the way we love them changes, means that we are still connected to them, but the way we are connected is different. When I teach Heidegger’s Being and Time, I tell my students about his concept of death’s singularity, but actually, when I think of my own personal experience and the people around me who’ve lost loved ones, it seems that death can’t truly separate us. Loss is always the loss of one part of a person. Not the whole. We’ve lost their body. Of course, this loss is fatally, violently painful. We can no longer see or touch them. But we haven’t lost everything. We continue to feel and remember their being as we love them. This is why John Berger says absence is not nothingness. Their being is with us. In contrast, a person who is still alive and breathing, but with whom we have no connection, is so much further away from us than the dead, so much closer to nothingness. If we hold on to this small belief—that we are connected, that we must be connected, this buttonhole-sized belief—we can continue to remember and record our loved ones who’ve crossed into death. And we can also avoid excluding, neglecting, and turning away from our living and breathing neighbors.      One of the reasons I like your phrase “buttonhole-sized belief” is that it’s connected in my mind to the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert’s poem “Buttons.” The poem is set in a dense forest, where the truth of a tragic massacre of young military officers forty years earlier has finally come to light. Because so much time has passed, their bodies have grown soft, and even their uniforms are worn and frayed, but the buttons alone rise from the earth where they’re buried, now threaded into the forest, and bear witness to their existence. I felt a jolt of surprise to think of buttons so hard and resolute, fastening together the twin lapels of existence, life and death. A button can never be independent. Its being bears witness to connection in and of itself. A buttonhole is even smaller than a button, yet it is the necessary condition that allows the button to fasten to some other being, or for something to connect to a button, like the empty hole of our existence. We must believe that there are always a few more holes to connect you and me, in order to work toward that connection. I suppose that’s the button that connects the two of us as well. I wish I could hold it tight in my hand as I drift off to sleep. It’s one of a kind, a button of warmth. And now we’ve arrived at our last question. How do feel about the word “future”? What steps are you taking, and in what direction, for the work ahead? I don’t think I can say I’m an optimist. But since you’re the one asking, I’d like to give a warmhearted answer. Let’s imagine an enormous coat to heat up this ice-cold world. On that coat would be an infinity of buttons. How could I make such an enormous coat myself? When you feel that sense of desperation, focus on just a single button. That button is fastened to the coat, so as long as you have that one thing, you’re connected to the world. Recently, I was reading a book by Rebecca Solnit in which she explains that the slogan “the personal is political” originally meant that the social structure defining individuals is so much more powerful than each person’s individual life that individualistic understandings are impossible. I agree deeply, but it occurs to me that the most vivid way to approach that structure is to focus on the pain of someone you know. In other words, when we can properly connect with their pain, we are releasing or fastening one of the buttons that can save the world. I hope to do so through poetry. Translated by Seth Chandler KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:•   Jin Eun-young, Although I’m Not Right for the World (Maum Sanchaek, 2024)    진은영, 『나는 세계와 맞지 않지만』 (마음산책, 2024)•   Jin Eun-young, Seven Word Dictionary (Moonji, 2003)    진은영, 『일곱 개의 단어로 된 사전』 (문학과지성사, 2003)•   Jin Eun-young, We, Day by Day (tr. Daniel Parker and YoungShil Ji, White Pine Press, 2018)    진은영, 『우리는 매일매일』 (문학과지성사, 2008)•   Jin Eun-young, Stolen Song (Changbi 2012)    진은영, 『훔쳐가는 노래』 (창비, 2012)•   Jin Eun-young, I Love You Like an Old Street (Moonji, 2022)    진은영, 『나는 오래된 거리처럼 너를 사랑하고』 (문학과지성사, 2022)•   Jin Eun-young, “Amid Emptiness, a Sad Person” (Monthly Munhakdongne No. 114)    진은영, 『허공 속의 슬픈 사람』 (문학동네 계간지 114호)•   An Heeyeon, “Incomplete,” Walking in the Carrot Patch (Munhakdongne, 2024)    안희연, 「미결」, 『당근밭 걷기』 (문학동네, 2024) An Heeyeon began her poetic career in 2012 when she was awarded the Changbi New Poets Award. Her poetry collections include When Your Sorrow Cuts in, Within What is Called Night, What I Learned on the Summer Hill, and Walking in the Carrot Patch. She has also published prose collections, including House of Words and When You’re Loved, When Night Grows Deep. She was awarded the 2016 Shin Dong-yup Prize for Literature.

  by An Heeyeon

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  Mediating Lyricism and Historicity: Han Kang’s Translators

  As Han Kang’s translators, what do you think is the significance of this Nobel Prize win?  Kyungran Choi Compared to the Nobel Prizes in Literature awarded in previous years, the reaction from French readers to Han Kang’s win has been quite enthusiastic. Even before the Nobel announcement, Impossibles Adieux (We Do Not Part) had already sold more than 13,000 copies and had garnered a lot of attention here, but I heard that immediately following Han’s win, the 8,000 copies available in print were sold out. French media reported on the news, and there were several consecutive days of coverage in the daily newspaper Le Monde from October 10 through 12. The national radio station France Culture invited me and Pierre Bisiou as the translators of Impossibles Adieux on the air for an hourlong conversation about Korean literature and translation. Looking back at the international attention that Korean literature began to receive after Han Kang won the Booker Prize in 2016, it seemed inevitable that a Nobel Prize in Literature would someday follow. The fact that Han Kang was named the winner—as a translator, a literary citizen, and a reader, it was hard to hide my joy.  Paige Aniyah Morris This seems like a moment of long-awaited recognition for Korean literature. It’s a shame that for so long, despite such a rich literary history, literature from Korea hadn’t received much international attention. I hope that this win will revitalize the Korean literary translation and publishing industries and encourage overseas publishers to break away from the popular trends and acquire more diverse Korean literary works.  Mariko Saito In 2024, a year of never-ending war and genocide, shouldn’t the fact that there is a writer who hasn’t forgotten those who’ve suffered and died unjust deaths be a source of hope in itself? Through movements such as the Gwangju and Jeju uprisings, Han Kang shows us how human dignity endures even in times of crisis. I think it’s especially meaningful that this message has expanded beyond the national bounds of Korea and entered into the realm of the human experience.  Was there a particular means by which you came to translate Han Kang’s work? Sunme Yoon In 2011, as I was searching for new works to translate, I came across an article about famous young Korean authors, which prompted me to start reading the first book I ever read by Han Kang, La vegetariana. Before I’d even read the whole first chapter, I decided to translate the book, and the following year my translation La vegetariana was published in Buenos Aires, Argentina, becoming the first translation of that novel into a Western language. This was how I came to translate Actos humanos (Human Acts), Blanco (The White Book), La clase de griego (Greek Lessons), and Imposible decir adiós (We Do Not Part) as well. Ok-kyoung Park I met Han Kang on a literary tour organized by LTI Korea in 2013.1 I loved the books that we all read and discussed while traveling around Gwangju and Damyang so much that I knew I had to translate them. When I was asked by the Swedish publisher Natur & Kultur to translate Han’s work, I naturally agreed to take on the task.  Could you share what the international reaction has been like to Han Kang’s works in translation? SY It’s no exaggeration to say that international readers were the first to discover Han Kang’s true worth. Argentine readers responded very enthusiastically to La vegetariana. In 2013, with the support of LTI Korea, Han participated in the Buenos Aires International Book Fair, and I heard there wasn’t an empty seat in that lecture hall—tons of people who’d read the novel came prepared with lots of questions. And, of course, three years later, The Vegetarian won the International Booker Prize. OP Both Den vita boken (The White Book) and Jag tar inte farväl (We Do Not Part) have received lots of attention and acclaim since being published, with positive reviews appearing in more than ten renowned newspapers and magazines, including Sweden’s largest daily newspapers, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet. More than a thousand readers attended the book talks Han Kang held in Stockholm and Umeå in 2024, and the events were so successful that there was a more than hour-long wait to receive the author’s autograph afterwards.  If you had to briefly explain why international readers should read Han Kang, what would you say? OP Not only does Han’s work deal with universal issues that anyone, regardless of nationality, can relate to; it delves into violence, conflict, societal oppression, trauma, and more while still offering readers a sense of warmth and an emotional resonance rooted in its distinctly lyrical and beautiful style.  SY These days, many overseas interviewers have been asking me to recommend the books that make for a good introduction to Han’s work, and I always suggest starting with La vegetariana or Actos humanos. No matter how prominent Korean society and Korean history are as the backdrops, I think that all of Han’s works evoke universal empathy because they are all ultimately reflections on being human. PAM If you are a reader who wants to be completely transformed by a book, I recommend reading the works of Han Kang. We Do Not Part especially is an excellent novel for increasing readers’ awareness about Korean society, history, and intergenerational trauma.  What do you usually pay the most attention to when translating Korean literature into your target language? Furthermore, what did you concentrate the most on when translating Han Kang? PAM I try to bring out the emotions of the source text in my translations, and I value not only the accuracy of the translation but the writing style, the rhythm, the lyricism. When translating this Han Kang work in particular, I remember creating a glossary for translating “snow,” “crystals,” “spirits”—words that formed the distinctive universe and language of We Do Not Part. I was happiest when I read passages from e. yaewon’s and my English translation and felt as moved as I did when I’d read them in the source.  OP I’m the type to try not to leave out a single word of the source in the translation. At the same time, because it’s important to me that it doesn’t read like a translation to Swedish readers, I think I have to strike a good balance. When I was deciding on the title for Jag tar inte farväl (We Do Not Part), I thought hard about choosing a Swedish word that could convey the feeling of the Korean word jakbyeol, or “farewell.” And because Swedish sentences must have a subject unlike Korean ones, I decided after a discussion with the author to add Jag, meaning I, to the title of the Swedish translation.  SM When it comes to Han Kang, there is always “poetry” at the center of her prose. It is important to translate in such a way that you don’t crush the margins that harbor that poetry. The historicity is also key. In the case of Wakare wo tsugenai (We Do Not Part), I referenced Okinawan, a language with a similar history to the Jeju language. At the same time, instead of completely translating the Jeju language into Okinawan, I felt that I needed to create a new language just for this novel.  Please describe the process of publishing Han Kang’s work in translation. What kinds of support did you receive, and did you face any difficulties in signing the publishing contracts? Could you share any tips for successfully publishing a translated work of Korean literature? SY For La vegetariana, Actos humanos, and Blanco, I received support from LTI Korea, and for La clase de griego and Imposible decir adiós, I received support from the Daesan Cultural Foundation. Of these works, La vegetariana was one that I chose myself and translated. If this is your first time trying to publish a translation, I advise you to write a publication proposal introducing the author and the work and to send that proposal to publishers who might be interested. Rather than analyzing the book in your proposal, it’s helpful to summarize its content, highlight its strengths, anticipate its prospects and the response from readers in the target market, and include a sample translation. In other words, the translator also has to play the part of an agent.  OP In my case, I was approached by the publisher to translate Han’s work, so I didn’t encounter any particular difficulties. For more than ten years now, renowned Swedish publishers have been interested not only in midcareer Korean authors but in emerging writers as well. In the late 1990s, when Korean literary translation was in its infancy, there was a sense of reluctance from publishers regarding translated literature even when translators submitted full manuscripts, but now, publishers often ask for summaries of works by Korean writers or, as is true in the case of Han Kang, they buy the rights first and then commission the translations. From a translator’s perspective, this is an encouraging development. PAM Thanks to support from LTI Korea and the fact that Han’s previous translators into English had already developed good working relationships with the publishers in the US and the UK, I think the publication process for We Do Not Part went much more smoothly than I’d expected. It was definitely quite a difference from the dead ends and high barriers to entry that I’ve faced in some of my other translation and publishing experiences. For emerging translators who want to translate the works of Korean writers who are not yet well known in the target region, I highly recommend seeking support from organizations such as LTI Korea and the Publication Industry Promotion Agency of Korea.  LTI Korea is engaged in many projects, such as our translation and publication grant programs, meant to promote Korean literature overseas. What are your hopes going forward? OP I have a long history with LTI Korea—from Yi Munyol’s Ett Ungdomsporträtt (A Portrait of Youthful Days) in 1999 all the way through to 2017, I’ve translated a total of six books with LTI’s support. I’ve also participated in the residency program twice and had great experiences meeting several writers over the years. I hope that there will be steady support for publishing translations in Sweden going forward. I would also love to see mid-career translators have the opportunity to participate in the residency. The experience of discussing literature with the authors and meeting various writers through the literary tour is such a huge asset for a translator.  SY My relationship with LTI Korea is a very special one. Not only have I received several translation grants from LTI, but I’ve been teaching literary translation at the Translation Academy for the past fourteen years. Through teaching, I think I’ve come to reflect more deeply on my own translations and have become a better, more refined translator as a result. The Sample Translation Grant Program was done away with a year ago, but I hope that this program, which reflects the discernment and literary knowledge of translators, can be revived even if it is reduced in scale. I think that if translators are able to take the lead in selecting works to translate and liaising with publishers, more diverse writers and literary works can be introduced around the world.  [1]  Editor’s note: This literary tour was conducted as part of LTI Korea’s Residency Program for Translation Research in Korean Literature, which invited translators to join a writer in exploring the region where the writer’s works are set in order to broaden translators’ understandings of these works. In 2013, Han Kang took part in the tour with translators from seven languages: German, Spanish, Arabic, Swedish, Vietnamese, Italian, and Chinese.  Translated by Paige Aniyah Morris  Kyungran Choi lives and works in Paris as a translator and employee at the Korean Cultural Center in France. With Pierre Bisiou, she is the co-translator of Impossibles Adieux (We Do Not Part). Paige Aniyah Morris is a writer, translator, and educator from New Jersey, USA, who now lives in Seoul. With e. yaewon, she is the co- translator of Han Kang’s We Do Not Part into English. Ok-kyoung Park graduated from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, received her master’s degree in Sweden, and now works as a translator. Since the late 1990s, She and Anders Karlsson, a professor at the University of London, have co-translated many works of Korean literature into Swedish. Of Han Kang’s works, they have translated Den vita boken (The White Book) and Jag tar inte farväl (We Do Not Part). Saito Mariko is a translator from Niigata, Japan, who now lives in Tokyo. She has translated Han Kang’s Girishago no jikan (Greek Lessons), Subete no, shiroi mono-tachi no (The White Book), Kaifuku suru ningen (Fire Salamander), Wakare wo tsugenai (We Do Not Part), and with Kim Hun-a, Hikidashi ni yuugata o shimatte oita (I Put the Evening in the Drawer) into Japanese. Sunme Yoon is an instructor in the Spanish language track at LTI Korea’s Translation Academy and a translator into Spanish. She has translated many of Han Kang’s works as well as Chung Serang’s La única en la tierra (The Only Hana on Earth), Won-Pyung Sohn’s Almendra (Almond), Cheon Un-young’s El hombre del Desván (The Catcher in the Loft), and Yun Ko-eun’s La turista (The Disaster Tourist). 

  by KLN Editorial Team

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  Parallel Worlds, Not Knowing, and the Art of Gaping

  Bo-mi, I’ve long admired your work, both as a reader and translator. Your ability to create such singular stories has always astonished me, and I’m grateful for this opportunity to talk more in-depth with you. Your work often features parallel worlds and alternate realities. In your debut collection Bringing Them the Lindy Hop, a son dies in the opening story, “Blanket,” but survives and reappears in the last story. The young couple in “Blanket” become the protagonists in a story from a different collection. You’ve said that you “never forget that even characters who appear briefly have their own lives” and you’d like readers to approach your fiction as if they’re reading about real people. What draws you to parallel worlds and alternate realities? When I look back, I realize I was a child deeply fascinated by events. Not just what happens in the visible world, but the hidden one I couldn’t see with my eyes. In elementary school, I read a lot of books about the supernatural. I pestered my mom to buy them for me. One book—I don’t remember the title now—was about the mysteries of the world. It was probably a translation, and it covered subjects like the whereabouts of the last Russian princess Anastasia, the Hollow Earth theory, and the secrets behind Agatha Christie’s disappearance. The last chapter was about witches. It claimed that witches still existed today and included photos of their rituals. I was ten years old at the time. I knew those photos were probably staged, but part of me thought, or maybe hoped, they were real, taken by someone who had infiltrated their secret world. To me, everything in that book was both real and fake, and this created a sense of confusion, which was probably intentional. Within that confusion, the world of the book seemed more plausible.      Later on, when I became a writer, I often thought about the emotions that book stirred in me, and I wished my readers would experience my stories in the same way. I wanted them to believe my characters existed somewhere out there or, at the very least, to hope my characters were real. To achieve this, every character had to have their own life. Everyone lives their own story. The person who passed by me today, even if I don’t know them, is the main character of their life. Maintaining that sense—that even characters who appear briefly have their own lives—has always been crucial to me. It helped me discover the joy in writing. In the afterword to Bringing Them the Lindy Hop, you say that you like to insert recurring characters in parallel worlds because you “enjoy imagining [yourself] living in an alternate universe, working hard and trying [your] best.” This, in turn, makes you “relieved, because [you’re] allowed to be a little lazy here.” I find this concept fascinating because it’s not just about creating alternate lives for your characters, but about seeing another version of yourself in a different reality. How does this idea influence your writing process? Does it help you connect more deeply with your characters? And how do you decide which characters to insert in these parallel worlds?  For a long time, I didn’t realize this way of thinking influenced my work. It was more a way of comforting myself rather than something that affected my writing. However, this has changed recently as I began incorporating my life into my work. Of course, my personal life makes up less than ten percent of my writing, but even that’s quite significant for me. I used to think it would be difficult to include my experiences. I felt they were too ordinary and not worth using as material. And the more special experiences seemed too difficult to adapt because they were things I’d actually gone through.      Recently, I began to see my experiences as part of what another version of me in a different universe might go through. The me living here might share small seeds of the same experiences with the me in another universe, but that me in the other universe would make different choices and treat people differently. This idea really intrigued me. For example, in my short story collection Dreams of Love, which was published last year, a place called Jungwoo Mansions comes up a lot. That was the name of the apartment I lived in as a child. The characters in the collection are different people, but they all share a common link—they’re versions of me from various universes, representing my different childhood selves. These days, the character I connect with the most is myself.  You’re gifted at building intricate worlds in a small amount of space. I’m thinking of your enigmatic piece, “The Cat Thief,” which was published in Freeman’s in 2022 and later in Lit Hub. It’s stunning how you’re able to suggest entire histories of characters in just a thousand words. How do you achieve this? I’m so glad you liked my story, “The Cat Thief”! I wrote that piece before I made my debut. Back then, I felt like I could never become a writer and was often engulfed in a sense of despair. I couldn’t write anything. The thought of writing a book was overwhelming. My confidant, who became my husband, was aware of my struggles and suggested that I try writing a story in the style of Project Runway. It’s an American reality competition show where designers create outfits within a set time and theme, and then their work is judged. I remember my husband saying, “If you don’t write anything, you’re out.” We decided on the subject (cats) and the length (two thousand characters). And we said we had two hours to finish it. We sat in a cafe and began writing. I took my actual experience—the time a man stole a tea timer for me—and added different details to it. I remember feeling a bit desperate, knowing I had only two hours to write. But this taught me that anything is possible in fiction. Before, I used to worry a lot, wondering, “Could this really happen? Isn’t this too farfetched?” But I decided to toss aside those doubts and gained the courage to set stories in foreign places and to write about ridiculous events, like stealing a cat.       My struggles with writing didn’t vanish after completing this piece, but I learned something crucial about the mindset needed to write a book. The next work I wrote became the title story of my first collection, Bringing Them the Lindy Hop. And Emerson from “The Cat Thief” appeared again in my first novel, Dear Ralph Lauren. In the afterword to Bringing Them the Lindy Hop, you also mention that a seasoned writer criticized the second piece you ever wrote, saying it lacked authenticity. Though you were upset, you had an inkling of what he meant—that you were perhaps too free in writing about things you didn’t know. Similarly, when your story “Blanket” won the Dong-A Ilbo New Writer’s Contest, one of the judges questioned whether you’d done your research. You then noted that writing without meticulous attention or prior research could be fatal. How do you balance research with giving yourself the freedom to write about anything and everything? When do you decide that you’ve done enough research and it’s time to write? And how has this approach evolved throughout your career?  Writing freely about things I don’t know and the sense of freedom I felt while writing “The Cat Thief” are slightly different. I used to write about subjects I wasn’t familiar with. In “Blanket,” the issue was with the protagonist’s rank in the police department. I was unaware of how police promotions worked and was told that a promotion like his would never happen. I realized that such misinformation could ruin the plausibility of the entire piece, undermining its sense of reality. After that, I made sure to thoroughly research the subjects I wrote about. Once, I wrote a novel set in France and spent a lot of time on Google Maps and hotel websites to accurately depict the streets, the city, and the hotels. Later, readers asked if I’d ever been to Lyon, and I was thrilled when they were surprised to hear I hadn’t.      However, the freedom I felt while writing “The Cat Thief” is a bit different. It has less to do with objective facts and more to do with my mindset while writing. Objective facts need to be accurate and shouldn’t be compromised. But beyond that, I believe you should be able to write anything. Characters can go anywhere, meet anyone, and do anything, no matter how extreme. This is different from knowing something well. My story “Dreams of Love” is about a woman who tries to abandon her child. If I had a child or truly understood a mother’s feelings, I think it would have been harder to write that story. It’s important to hold on to that sense of not knowing. In his essay “On Writing,” Raymond Carver said that “writers don’t need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block.” Although my interpretation might differ from his original intent, I feel that preserving a sense of “not knowing” is also a crucial quality for writing fiction. You count Raymond Chandler, Ernest Hemingway, and John Cheever among your influences, which makes sense, given your realistic, minimalist style and your use of the “show, don’t tell” technique. However, I notice a Chekhovian quality in your work as well, especially in your exploration of psychological realism and subtext, combined with a kind of ironic humor that highlights the contradictions of the human experience. At times, your stories even verge on Kafkaesque. You’ve also shared that you’re influenced by various genres like mystery novels, American dramas, and science fiction. Do you consciously think of these techniques and influences as you write? How would you describe your own style or voice?  Chekhov and Kafka! My goodness! As a writer, how could one not love Chekhov and Kafka? Their influence is almost impossible to avoid. For a long time, whenever I was asked to name my favorite short stories, I’d cite Kafka’s “The Judgment,” Hemingway’s “The Battler,” and Choi In-ho’s “The Drunkard.” These three works are very different from one another, but they have one thing in common: they don’t tell you everything that happens to the characters. They include gaps or things we don’t understand. I was drawn to this style because it felt like a true representation of life. Life is full of things we can’t understand, and we’re bound to fail when we try to explain them. For instance, when a tragic event occurs, and some people die while others survive, how are we to make sense of it? This is one of the themes in my debut work, “Blanket.” If fiction is to reflect life, I believe it must capture this sense of not knowing. I wanted to capture the gaps themselves. Early on, I did this by intentionally leaving things unsaid, but now I find myself trying to reveal the unknowability—the gaps—while saying more. Is this why you’re drawn to the mystery genre, where gaps and unknowns often thrive?  I think so. Fundamentally, I believe every fictional work is a detective story. This might be a bit of an exaggeration, but when readers dive into a story, they’re always curious about the choices the protagonist will make. It’s important to keep that sense of curiosity alive. Aside from this idea, I have an immense love for the mystery genre. As a child, I watched a lot of detective shows and read countless detective novels. I grew up on Agatha Christie and the Sherlock Holmes series. Later on, I became obsessed with writers like Raymond Chandler, William Irish, Dashiell Hammett, and Ross Macdonald. I always wanted to write a mystery novel featuring a detective, so I was thrilled when I got the chance to write Children of the Lost Forest a few years ago. Another similarity to Chekhov I see in your writing is how you create deep pathos while keeping a certain distance from your characters, as if viewing them through a telescope, revealing more from afar. Yet, you manage to evoke strong emotions in readers. How do you maintain emotional distance while ensuring your characters still resonate deeply with your audience? I don’t know everything about my characters. When I think of a story or character, I try to write as if they’re real people in another world. As you mentioned, I imagine that I have a sort of telescope, observing their actions and simply recording what I see. Often, I don’t fully understand why they say or do certain things, which only deepens my interest. I find myself becoming more curious and I think about them even more. I really enjoy this feeling when I write. These feelings inspire me. “You can love without understanding.” I love this phrase. It captures how I feel when I write and how readers might feel when they enjoy my work. John L’Heureux said, “To avoid melodrama, aim for a restrained tone rather than an exaggerated one … keep the language deflated and rooted in action and sensory detail. Don’t reach for dramatic language but for what’s implied.” You do this particularly well. How do you exercise such restraint and control in your writing, especially in emotionally charged scenes? What advice would you give to writers struggling with this issue? Some readers criticize me for not expressing enough emotion in my writing. Or they think I portray it in strange ways. They might even be bewildered after finishing a story, wondering what exactly happened to the characters. When I use restraint in my stories, it’s not intentional. It’s just that there are many parts I feel I can’t fully explain. For instance, if I’m writing a scene where a wife loses her husband and bursts into tears, I can clearly describe the situation of losing her husband, but I can’t fully explain why she’s crying. I can say it’s because she’s sad, but that might not be entirely true. It’s a very complex emotion. She could be feeling guilt, emptiness, self-pity, and so on. Instead of explaining everything, I choose to show the scene. I stay silent about the parts I can’t fully understand and focus on what I can describe well. I believe this approach can reveal much more. Of course, some may choose to explain the complexity with words, but that’s not my method. Themes of class disparity and the gap between the rich and poor, the privileged and disadvantaged, frequently appear in your work. I’m thinking about the young couple in “Blanket” who say that they’re “nothing,” calling themselves “human trash,” the blind man and his wife in “Downpour” who cite their “stupidity” as the reason why they can’t ever move up in the world and become happy, and also the nanny in “The Substitute Teacher.” What motivates you to explore these social issues and what message do you hope to convey? My novel Dear Ralph Lauren is where I seriously tackled this theme. The protagonist, Jongsu, is studying in the U.S., but he recalls a girl he knew in high school. At that time, the brand Ralph Lauren was extremely popular in Seoul, and almost everyone had at least one Ralph Lauren item. But this girl came from a less affluent family and had to work part-time to afford it. This novel is based on my own experience. Some of my high school friends could easily buy shirts that cost over 200,000 won, while others wore their school uniforms all the time. I was somewhere in the middle. If I’d begged my parents, they might have bought it for me, but never willingly. Those school days left a strong impression on me.       Back then, we didn’t openly distinguish between friends based on financial disparities. Everyone got along well on the surface. But there were subtle emotions at play, like the sense of alienation between wealthy friends and those who struggled financially. Since I was neither rich nor poor, I might have been more sensitive to these nuances. As an adult, I realized that this sense of alienation could manifest in various forms—anger, lament, resignation, self-deception, malicious intent, hypocrisy, hatred, contempt, and so on. I’ve always wanted to write about the impact of money and wealth on people’s hearts. Maybe not in a direct way, but these concerns are a constant presence in my work. Can you walk us through your creative process? How do you develop your story ideas, and what does a typical writing day look like for you? What inspires you and what do you do when you’re stuck? In the past three or four years, my writing pattern has changed. I used to start my workday late, but these days I try to start by 9:00 a.m. at the latest. It would be better if I could start even earlier, but that hasn’t happened yet. I find it difficult to work at home, so I have a list of cafes where I can be productive. Cafes are usually empty and quiet early in the morning. I enjoy writing in that kind of atmosphere. My goal is to write two to three thousand characters every day. Then I come home by 1:00 or 2:00 p.m. and completely forget about my work, spending my time on personal errands or hobbies. When I’m not writing, I prefer to separate myself completely from my work.      Honestly, I still don’t fully understand how the seeds of my books come to me. Sometimes certain scenes pop into my mind without any context. Recently, I had an image of a girl getting slapped on a snowy day. To make sure I don’t forget these ideas, I jot them down in the Notes app on my iPhone. Whenever I read an interesting article, see a compelling scene in a documentary, or come across a memorable passage in a book, I make note of it. When I start writing, I review these notes and use them to build my story.      This process doesn’t always go smoothly. While my goal is to write more than two thousand characters a day, there are many days when I can’t meet that target. Sometimes writing feels too overwhelming. Still, I go out early every morning and try to reach my word count, even if it means writing sentences that I might delete the next day. By repeatedly writing and deleting, there comes a day when I don’t delete them anymore. So, when I face a daunting pro-ject, I tell myself: if I keep pushing through this overwhelming feeling, I’ll be able to write something one day. As a professor at Kyung Hee University, how do you balance your teaching responsibilities with your writing career? What do you emphasize most to your students? The class I teach at Kyung Hee University isn’t specif-ically about fiction writing. It’s called “Reflection and Expression,” and it’s a required liberal arts course. Students write about themselves, and they must take it to graduate. Most aren’t interested in writing, and after the semester, they probably won’t write again. But what I emphasize is that even if they don’t write, they should continue the activities essential to writing. Like paying attention to themselves and the things around them, observing what happens. By doing so, they can discover things they’d previously overlooked and develop feelings about them. This idea actually comes from the Raymond Carver essay I quoted earlier. He wrote, “At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing—a sunset or an old shoe—in absolute and simple amazement.” I believe this applies not just to writers. Anyone who views the world this way will have a richer life, and the more people who do, the better our world will be. I love that line. Raymond Carver talks about “gaping” or “paying attention” as being perhaps the most important quality of writing. It reminds me of the story “You Must Know Everything” by Isaac Babel and what the Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa said: “To be an artist means never to avert your eyes.” Do you have any specific exercises or techniques you use to cultivate this attentive way of seeing in your students? How do you personally ensure that you stay observant and engaged with the world around you? I encourage my students to make a list of things they like and don’t like. But I also tell them that discovering those things is difficult. To have genuine interests, you need to invest time. Simply saying, “Oh, I like this” or “I really hate this” isn’t genuine. We should focus on things that evoke “strange” feelings in us—emotions we can’t easily explain. When certain scenes or sentences stay with you, it’s worth questioning why that is. Why does this linger in my mind? I believe these kinds of questions help you discover who you are. They help you realize what kind of lens you use to see the world. Once you understand your “lens” better, you can either deepen that perspective or change it.      The important thing is not to wait for texts that move you to come along but to actively seek them out yourself. Read, watch, and listen, and if something stays with you, question it. This is what I call “reading.” The text can be anything. Ultimately, I believe your own life should become the subject of your reading. Everything you encounter can be something to read. You’ve received numerous literary awards throughout your career, including winning the Young Writer Award four years in a row from 2012 to 2015, as well as the prestigious Daesan Literary Award and most recently the Yi Sang Literary Award. While it’s not all about the awards, how has this recognition impacted you and your approach to storytelling? Winning awards is always a thrill. Of course, I’m grateful, and I often think I’ve just been lucky. Debuting as a writer, publishing several books, and receiving various awards. . . I try to see it all as luck. I try not to put too much stock in them. Maybe it’s because I’m easily swayed by such things. If I’m not careful, they might influence me too much! So, I put extra effort into thinking that they mean nothing. I always aim for balance. You know that famous saying by Isak Dinesen? “Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.” That’s what I strive to do. What books are on your nightstand right now? Are there any films or works of art that are currently inspiring you? I haven’t been able to read as much lately, but I’ve started a book called The Divided Self by Scottish psychiatrist Ronald David Laing. Published in 1960, it’s a study on schizophrenia where Laing argues that instead of merely categorizing schizophrenic patients by their symptoms, we need to understand how they perceive the world. Only by approaching them in this way can we effectively treat them. This reminds me of what the famous neurologist Oliver Sacks advocated in Awakenings. He insisted that we need to listen to the stories of Parkinson’s patients. He said, “We must come down from our position as ‘objective observers,’ and meet our patients face-to-face; we must meet them in a sympathetic and imaginative encounter. . . they can tell us, but nobody else can.”      Of course, we can never fully understand how patients with schizophrenia or Parkinson’s disease perceive the world. Some aspects will forever remain beyond our grasp. Even so, we must never stop trying to look into their reality and listen to their stories. I believe this is a mindset a writer should have. There are gaps in this world that we cannot understand. We may never be able to explain them fully. Even so, we shouldn’t stop trying. As discussed earlier, we shouldn’t avert our eyes. That’s how I feel. I want to keep writing fiction that includes these gaps. Translated by Janet Hong      KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:• Son Bo-mi, “Bringing Them the Lindy Hop,” “Blanket,” and “Downpour” from Bringing Them the Lindy Hop (Munhakdongne, 2013)     손보미, 「그들에게 린디합을」, 「담요」, 「폭우」, 『그들에게 린디합을』 (문학동네, 2013)• Son Bo-mi, “Dreams of Love” from Dreams of Love (Munhakdongne, 2023)     손보미, 「사랑의 꿈」, 『사랑의 꿈』 (문학동네, 2023)• Son Bo-mi, “The Cat Thief” from The Fireflies of Manhattan (Maeum Sanchaek, 2019)     손보미, 「고양이 도둑」, 『맨해튼의 반딧불이』 (마음산책, 2019)• Son Bo-mi, Dear Ralph Lauren (Munhakdongne, 2017)     손보미, 『디어 랄프 로렌』 (문학동네, 2017)• Son Bo-mi, Children of the Lost Forest (Anon Books, 2022)     손보미, 『사라진 숲의 아이들』 (안온북스, 2022)• Son Bo-mi, “The Substitute Teacher” from Cats and the Elegant Night (Moonji Publishing, 2018)     손보미, 「임시교사」, 『우아한 밤과 고양이들』 (문학과지성사, 2018) Son Bo-mi began her literary career by winning the 21st Century Literature New Writer’s Prize in 2009 and the Dong-A Ilbo Literary Contest in 2011. Her works include the short story collections Bringing Them the Lindy Hop, Cats and the Elegant Night, Dreams of Love, and The Fireflies of Manhattan; the novella The God of Coincidence; the novels Dear Ralph Lauren, Little Village, and Children of the Lost Forest; and the essay collection Anyway, American TV Shows. She has received numerous awards, including the Munhakdongne Young Writer Award, the Hankook Ilbo Literary Award, the Kim Jun-seong Literary Award, the Daesan Literary Award, the Yi Sang Literary Award, and the Lee Hyo-seok Literary Award. Janet Hong is a writer and translator based in Vancouver, Canada. She received the TA First Translation Prize and the LTI Korea Translation Award for her translation of Han Yujoo’s The Impossible Fairy Tale. She’s a two-time winner of the Harvey Award for Best International Book for her translations of Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s Grass and Yeong-shin Ma’s Moms. She is currently a mentor for ALTA’s Emerging Translator Mentorship Program.  

  by Janet Hong

• 

  Interview with Kim So Yeon: Continuing until We Become Our Outsides

  I still remember when I read your first collection, Reach the Extreme. I could feel the true, earnest love in those raw lines rife with determination, which made me check to see how old you were as they had filled me with awe. When I read the last line of that collection, “I hope I never get invited anywhere in this world, that my name does not remain after my death, that I may never be too close to the goings-on of the world, its everything, life, not-life, or suffering or desire or love, or what pierces me, that I should brush past them, my life and yours,” I knew I was going to read every poem and piece of prose of yours. A long time after that, when I became a poet myself and invited you to give a talk, I remembered that first collection again, and while poets become who we are through writing poetry, you made me realize you were already a poet before you ever wrote poetry. I’m now wondering what experience or thought first brought you to write poetry. I remember when we met for the first time in my studio in Ilsan and you talked about my first collection. Whenever I hear about Reach the Extreme, I don’t think of it as mine anymore, I think of it as the work of the person I used to be. That much time has passed, and that’s also the way creative works age, I think. I’m very thankful for your response.      In the beginning, I just liked to read poetry. During high school—between 1983 and 1987—I felt like my joy of reading deepened when I read poetry. It was also an age when new voices like Kim Hyesoon, Choi Seungja, Kim Jeong-hwan, and Lee Seong-Bok were bursting onto the scene. I liked how you weren’t supposed to understand everything immediately. That there was a prickly kind of vagueness, not just the foggy kind, and I liked that prickliness.      Then I began writing poetry, and you can say I started writing it because I liked reading it, but I did have a real moment one afternoon when I very deliberately decided to become a poet. I’ve said it in many interviews. It was back in 1987 during the June Uprising. I was in college, and I happened to be at a protest. The participants of the protest were divided into two groups in the process of selecting its leadership, and reconciliation looked impossible. It all looked like petty political squabbles to me. I still remember sitting in a corner and being jostled every which way and coming close to bursting. I just got up and went home. I walked a distance that would normally take an hour by bus, and I craved a life where I didn’t have to step on anyone, and that’s where I decided to escape into poetry. I often feel this desire to escape. I think I make a lot of effort to sublimate my desire for escape into an ability to do so. I call it “escape,” but it’s more of an attempt to move in a direction where I feel more alive, a vector toward the margins, with the addition of a literary attitude. So you became a poet, published your first collection, and took another ten years to publish your next. The Fatigue of the Stars Drags Behind It the Night felt very different from your first collection. Why did this collection take so long? I experienced the Asian Financial Crisis in my mid-thirties, which was when I truly realized the life of a poet is economically precarious. That precariousness felt like freedom to me, that if that was the case, then I could do whatever I wanted. I founded a small children’s library in Ilsan where I lived and spent many happy years circulating children’s books with the people who lived in my neighborhood. It was a great joy to run a small, experimental community project at the local level. Maybe I escaped to a more fun place than poetry writing. I don’t think I even kept track of time that much. It was my happiest time, in a way. Let’s talk about your latest collection, Catalyzing Night. In the title poem, I lingered for a long time over the lines, “Sometimes I unleash into now / memories from the future” and “time shall protect me / How wonderful / that some things only need time.” They made me think of Reach the Extreme. This connects to my first question, but the poems seem to look into the past, present, and future all at the same time, a gaze that seems to have already lived through an entire life. It’s like through this gaze, the lines come to you and then to me; they have this subsequent warmth to them that soothes the pains of life, and I could feel this empathetic desire for things to go well for others. I was wondering where you got this attitude, this ability to see time as several, simultaneously felt layers, and this sense of good cheer through firm resolve. When I wrote Catalyzing Night, I immersed myself with the sensibility of a lone beast. As if I were standing all alone on a very small stage with the audience right up in front of me, like some border zone. The border is where that tension between inside and outside meets a sense of being vividly alive. I tried to write poems like an outfielder stretching out their arm to catch a baseball. The Yongsan disaster, the high-altitude protest of the fired Ssangyong Motors workers, the Sewol disaster, the MeToo movement, the Itaewon disaster . . . What made our society cohere wasn’t so much a sense of solidarity but a sense of mutual crisis. The things that arc toward me, that arc away from me . . . The constant repetitions of arrivals and departures. These endless arcs create layers, and that’s what implicates us into mutual crisis. Our bodies are like this, but poetry also has this ability to capture all of those contradictions. I want poetry to help me maintain this ability, and I want to write that kind of poetry. I try not to do more than that, and I’m glad you seem to have recognized this. I can sense your particular brand of honesty in your answer. There’s also a sense of balance that you have, a warmth that’s not too hot, an intimacy that’s not too close, a sort of just-right distance. It probably has to do with the positionality of that lone beast I mentioned. Centrifugal and centripetal forces are two forces that are engrained in my very body, I think. I love all of your poetry, but I especially love “Morning of Visible Dust” in your collection A Mathematician’s Morning. Maybe it’s because I turned it into a song at a reading I did with you a few years ago, but every day, when light pierces a dark room, I sing this poem in my mind. There’s a moment in reading your poetry when the quotidian hours and spaces suddenly undulate with the force of epiphany. When I read those lines, I place my own gaze on those uncannily captured moments. I was wondering what your thoughts were on writing poetry using quotidian language using quotidian settings, the writing of poetry as a quotidian pursuit. There are moments when you look back on your daily life as a poet, and in that moment, something is spent. Like time drops away from that moment or I shed myself or the roof of the place I’m at flies away. You could call those moments the moments when poems find you. They are extremely idiosyncratic and limited moments, so much so you want to document them in words. The lightness of concentration in the writing of those moments make them sound like song, which is why I suppose you turned it into a song. I hum that song on occasion myself. If you give me the chords, I can practice it on my guitar. (Laughs.) What a fun idea, us two sitting side by side with our guitars and singing that song someday. Many of your readers love your prose work as much as your poetry. It’s been fifteen years since your first prose collection, Mind Dictionary, was published but it’s still being reprinted. Your essay collection Biting Molars is all about your family and the times you had to grit your teeth in endurance. Personally, I feel like I’ve slipped into another body when I’m writing prose. Do you feel a difference between writing poetry and prose, and do you capture things differently depending on genre of form? I like to practice for writing the kind of poems I want to write. I consider the poems in The Fatigue of the Stars Drags Behind It the Night and To i as resulting from such practice. Prose collections are a kind of practice. A documentation of the practice process and the scene of practice. Maybe I’m practicing too much. But I want to keep practicing, and I like thinking about practice, and . . . Well, that’s the way it is. Your mention of documenting the process of practice and the scene of practice makes me think of a poem I wrote titled “Practicing Speech: Etude of the South.” “I felt a handspan of freedom in the mention of an etude . . . / Etudes make you. Etudes pull you.” I think I have a lot in common with you in terms of how we deal with life and think about poetry. Nowadays, poets come from all walks of life and publish on the same page regardless of their literary legitimacy and whatnot. It’s a very vibrant time. And there’s something different in this era of poetry, like publishing on the web or poetry as performance or publishing completely different versions of poems for performances. There’s such a diversity of poetry reading and writing and performing now. You’ve long published your own magazine, Text, that went against the mainstream and didn’t care whether a poet debuted “properly” or not. You were instead more interested in introducing and publishing good poetry, continuously questioning the establishment. I was wondering if you could expand on these new literary attempts and the direction you might be going in. If I could have forty-eight hours a day instead of twenty-four, I could easily fill them with all kinds of activities other than poetry writing. I have so many ideas, and I’m always ready to try one of them out. I think Korean literature, like everything else in this country, is strictly regulated in its communication and distribution. I want our platforms to be as open as our voices are diverse. That an ecosystem is healthy only when many different species co-exist has always been my belief. Like the pine mushrooms in Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, something you can discover in an unexpected corner even in our capitalist system. The usual things everyone wants, but something I am trying to embody and manifest. I want there to be many ways of living as a poet, and I was able to realize many of these ways because whenever I talked about them, a compatriot would appear and lend me their strength to the cause.      I always want myself to be placed outside of something. There are times when I get wrapped up with or roped into something and I find myself on the inside, which is when I try to find a way to escape again. I think I always made my attempts at new things when I felt this desire for the outside rankle me. You mentioned escaping from the inside to the outside. I wonder if your literary lectures are also a method of escape? You’ve done many lectures and creative writing workshops over the years. Many of your former students have debuted as poets. There’s a line in Oh Gyuwon’s “Francis Kafka” that goes, “Sitting down with a crazy student of mine who wants to study poetry.” There’s satisfaction in teaching, but there must be frustrations and difficulties as well. In my workshops as an instructor, I tend to emphasize one thing. To be braver. To leave behind the poetic speaker that’s been educated into us by the literary establishment, to attempt new ways of doing language. At a workshop I finished last week, we used “persona” as a keyword. I wanted my students to discover a persona that would allow them to write braver. Sure, what I meant by “braver” could be “better” or “more confident” or “more sensitive,” but it could also easily be “worse” or “more monstrous” or “more incorrigible” or “more damaged” or “crazier.” The only place where such qualities can be encouraged is a poetry workshop. It’s basically a community of people who want to go crazy. How could I not like doing these workshops? There’s something in the voices of To i and Catalyzing Night. This speaker named lowercase i has a human body and is a letter at the same time. In the book before this one, you have beings that are referred to as ghosts, which reminds me of something Kim Hyesoon said in Women Who Do Poetry: “Would anything be left of women’s poetry if we got rid of all the ghosts? Should we not listen to the haunting ghosts, should we not reposition their places of haunting? To tell a woman poet to stop being a ghost, this admonishment that comes to us from outside the poem, is like being told to stop mourning.” She’s basically saying that a poet is someone who listens to untethered voices, who embraces the traces and makes them clear again. Through your speaker i, I can feel your embrace of others without pitying them, your determination to hold the past, present, and future in one place, to listen again to old voices and try to rediscover them. I hope you can tell us more about the gaze of the poet that looks through time, or this endless embrace of the disembodied, screaming presences. I want to talk often of the political aspects of poetry, and I learned a lot about how politics work in poetry through Kim Hyesoon. I learned how a sense of reality, when focused only on societal reality, can actually become warped into lies, and I feel that Kim Hyesoon has continuously shown how societal violence internalized in a poet’s physical body, especially a woman poet’s body, can manifest on a level different from reality when translated into language. There is a voice, in other words, that reality can’t capture. And this voice is rightfully part of reality. There’s one sensibility that hasn’t changed with me since my twenties when I wrote Reach the Extreme, and that’s the sense of having gone past the end as opposed to the end not having come yet. I wrote the following line in “Before Buying Food” in Catalyzing Night: “Whenever I get to the end, there is no end / I keep going past the end / The end can only but disappear / When I imagine something called ‘the end’ it is but an assumption, something that only seems to exist but doesn’t / innocent and pretty like playing house.” I think it’s a sense of the infinite. But instead of the infinite, I think of it as having gone past the end. This is the real fact beyond the world I perceive, something like a ball I’ve been playing with that bounces off into the tall grass and becomes hidden out of sight. I might even go as far as to say that imaging that escape arc from the ball’s point of view is training for a sense of endless care, but . . . Your words remind me of how there are voices our reality has overlooked, that to make into language the very specific interior of those voices, to question our learned assumptions about the world and traverse its boundaries is to live as a true poet. And that the fundamental reason behind writing poetry is to be irreverent of facts and things and the world we accept as truths without thinking, as well as our calcified grammar.      A moment engraved in my memory is how we had a reading at the Pak Kyongni Memorial Institute and there was a break so we sat in the forest behind the building, side by side without talking to each other. Maybe it was because I’d normally always considered you guileless and innocent like a child, but in that moment you looked as if you’d lived several lives. We are of the age when we’re becoming more aware of aging, in both the physical and mental sense. This may herald a shift in poetry writing as well, but I wonder how you get such will and determination to continue going about your work. I labored as a caretaker for my mother in her final years and did much research into sickness narratives. There are so many pressures surrounding health in our society, and my focus was on that. It didn’t seem like there being many sick people was the problem so much as this fantasy of “health” that was so pervasive. When you focus for the sake of writing poetry, it’s like poetry itself is some backyard teeming with all sorts of life. On rare occasions, I install a door into the wall surrounding this backyard and invite people to enter it, which is what publishing my books is like for me. My work, then, is a backyard full of things I planted and some I haven’t, otherwise just growing there on their own accord without any need for me to define what is meaningful about it. I think this inviting people in to that modest little plot, that unassuming attitude—it is, in itself, a talent of sorts. If I didn’t have that attitude, I don’t think I could have successfully undertaken the role of poet, which is why I keep trying. To have a guileless attitude and a willingness to accept failure. Not that I don’t constantly hesitate between the two. For over three decades since your debut, you’ve been producing political lines in both verse and prose as you soldier on with your forceful writing. Regarding your edition of the children’s book La Luna di Kiev, you’ve spoken of how different people in different circumstances are all connected, socially and psychologically, by virtue of being under the same moon. And that we write poetry to expand outside of ourselves. Where are you headed to with your lines, with your writing? What I’ve always stared at in the face since my first collection is fear. I don’t even want to call it fear—I want to look behind its head, inside its grasp, into each and every one of the crevasses of its fingerprints. I’m always imagining how the soul living inside fear can turn into beauty, how I would stand by it as it does. Translated by Anton Hur       KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:•   Reach the Extreme (Moonji Publishing, 1996) 1    『극에 달하다』 (문학과지성사, 1996)•   The Fatigue of the Stars Drags Behind It the Night (Minumsa, 2006) 2    『빛들의 피곤이 밤을 끌어당긴다』 (민음사, 2006)•   “Catalyzing Night,” “Before Buying Food,” Catalyzing Night (Moonji Publishing, 2023)    「촉진하는 밤」, 「식량을 거래하기에 앞서」, 『촉진하는 밤』 (문학과지성사, 2023)•   “Morning of Visible Dust,” A Mathematician’s Morning    (Moonji Publishing, 2013)    「먼지가 보이는 아침」, 『수학자의 아침』 (문학과지성사, 2013)•   Mind Dictionary (Maumsanchaek, 2008) 3    『마음사전』 (마음산책, 2008)•   Biting Molars (Maumsanchaek, 2022) 4    『어금니 깨물기』 (마음산책, 2022)•   “To i,” To i (Achimdal Books, 2018)    「i에게」, 『i에게』 (아침달, 2018)•   “Practicing Speech: Etude of the South,”      And Thus They Were Scrawled (Moonji Publishing, 2019) 5    「발화 연습 문장_남방의 연습곡」, 『그리하여 흘려 쓴 것들』 (문학과지성사, 2019)•   “Francis Kafka,” Oh Gyuwon's Perspective     (Knowledge Making Knowledge, 2012)    「프란츠 카프카」, 『오규원 시선』 (지식을만드는지식, 2012)•   Women Who Do Poetry (Moonji Publishing, 2017)    『여성, 시하다』 (문학과지성사, 2017) Lee Jenny debuted through the Kyunghyang Daily News New Writer’s Contest in 1993. She has published the poetry collections, Probably Africa, Because We Don’t Know Ourselves, And Thus They Were Scrawled and Non-Existent Lines Are Beautiful, and a prose collection, Dawn and Music. She was selected as the winner of the 2011 Pyunwoon Literary Award, the 2016 Kim Hyeon Literary Trophy, and the 2021 Hyundae Munhak Literary Award.

  by Lee Jenny

• 

  Face to Face with Choi Eunmi

  I’d like to start by asking you a question about your recently published novel Face to Face. This work captures the period when COVID-19 dominated our lives. It also serves as a record of individual narratives and emotions, invisible and undetectable. About halfway through the book, I was reminded of a conversation we had together at a writers’ forum last summer titled “Life (Post-)COVID-19: Connection and Severance.” As I think you remember, you described the pandemic as “a time we experienced together but had to go through alone.” You seemed frustrated that a national crisis was left to individual responsibility, that it was “every person for themselves.” I deeply sympathized with that feeling of isolation, of having to go through the pandemic by oneself. I remember that conversation now that you mention it. In addition to that, I also said that while I was comforted by the fact that I wasn’t the only one going through the “Corona blues,” I also hated that my thoughts and emotions were not the result of my own experiences and stories. I was in the throes of writing Face to Face when I attended that forum, and I remember feeling both motivated and burdened by the task of finishing my novel after the conversations I had with writers and readers that day.  A sigh escaped me when I finished reading the last page of Face to Face. Nari, Sumi, and Manjo. The workshop, the hospital, and the apple orchard in Ttan mountain. I was deeply immersed in the characters and the story, my heart was seeped in the emotions of the novel; so, when it ended, my heart was heavy and even trembling. You’ve said that during the pandemic, our trust in blood relations increased while trust in strangers decreased, and that societal incidents and issues are more difficult to write about when they are immediate. What experience during the pandemic motivated you to write this novel? While experiencing the pandemic, I realized firsthand that the greater the disaster, the more issues converge in the family unit instead of in the individual or the community. I think I was quoting a survey conducted in Korea during the pandemic when I made that comment about trusting blood relations and family members. The article I read expressed it as “trust in kin,” and I interpreted this as meaning that the destinies of family members become interwoven during great crises, and this in turn isolates the family unit. And when a family becomes a community of shared destiny, problems arise around the issues of responsibility, caretaking, control, and oppression, according to each family’s unique circumstances. Within this environment, the individual becomes lonely. I wanted the isolated characters of my book to live outside of the family, to experience new forms of relationships. I felt that the most important thing to do during a crisis was to open a door, escape from the isolation of the family unity, and become connected with others, people who aren’t your blood relations. That’s what I wanted to write about.  Face to Face focuses on isolated individuals, but it also shows us the potential of “community in the individual.” In other words, it depicts a sense of solidarity that never gives up, always trying to connect with neighbors and strangers. How can we imagine community in a world as cold-hearted, harsh, and individualized as our own? Face to Face begins with the line, “I once tried putting my feet into someone else’s shoes.” After the book was published, I came to think about the three years between when I wrote that first sentence in the winter of 2020 and when I submitted the manuscript in the early summer of 2023. I thought about the motivation or reasons behind the elements of the novel, things I only came to understand after I finished writing.     When you try to walk in someone else’s shoes, you immediately realize how different they are from you. I wanted to write about that strangeness and unfamiliarity, as well as the sense of connection, that encompasses it. While writing about characters who experience the pandemic for two, three years, I was able to think more about the idiom “to walk in someone else’s shoes” and what it reveals about our attitude toward the Other, about how Rebecca Solnit said that “some empathy must be learned,” that empathy doesn’t come naturally, that it requires constant effort and practice.     When I finished the book, I realized that this first sentence, which I wrote with the desire to express our unfamiliarity with the Other, actually encompasses the idea that the characters of the book need most to break through their isolation and to connect with others. Walking in someone else’s shoes, and making the effort to do this—is this not the mindset we need most when imagining the possibilities of community?  I also want to ask you about The Ninth Wave. Lime mines, nuclear power plants, pseudo-religions—real social problems appear in your books and sometimes serve as the backdrop for the story’s events. But what’s unusual is that the characters are treated on a personal and introspective level. I wonder if you’re trying to say that individuals are connected with and deeply influenced by the conditions of the world at large. What is the reason for including current issues in your novels? An incident happened around the time I got the idea for The Ninth Wave. Seeing the aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, especially the hysteria over food contamination after the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, I became acutely aware that disasters like this can deeply affect our daily lives. After that earthquake, I saw a small city on the eastern coast, where several people close to me live, shaken to its core over plans to build a nuclear powerplant there. I tried depicting the daily routine, relationships, and the emotions of an individual whose way of life is completely altered by a global crisis. Once I did this, I felt a strong energy begin to propel the story. I wrote the rest of The Ninth Wave with that energy and became more sensitive to individuals who must respond to the demands of society and the real world. Most importantly, the social situations that followed, such as the feminism reboot in Korea and the COVID-19 pandemic, influenced me greatly, and these were naturally reflected in my books.     Compared to The Ninth Wave, the dynamics of Face to Face are much different because of the lack of distance between myself as someone experiencing those events and as someone writing about them. I don’t know if readers felt this difference, but I could feel it after I finished Face to Face. Even though I could approach the subject while achieving a certain amount of emotional and temporal distance from the pandemic, because I was living through it in real time while writing the novel, I wasn’t able to completely erase those traces of immediacy. Even in those moments when the novel needed to move organically, I sensed that issues important to me at the time were sneaking into the text against my will.  In many of your novels, such as A Person Made from Snow, Magnolia Sutra, and An Exceedingly Beautiful Dream, there are characters who go through horrible things, whose worlds are filled with fear and violence. As a writer myself, I sometimes am asked questions like: What’s the point of bringing such horrible things into a book? Why must you write this kind of literature? And each time, I say that it’s meaningful and worthwhile in itself to accurately depict the violence in the world and faithfully depict a single character. This might be a question that is asked too often, but what purpose and power do novels have in  this world? In some ways, when it comes to writing novels, the most important thing is the internal motivation of the writer. After all, without that, the novel might not have even come into existence. There must be some reason why a specific writer chooses to write about a violent world and horrible events, reasons that she herself cannot completely understand. I think that when you write about the things that compel you to write, when you write differently, when you write again and again, eventually, a purpose is produced from within the work, much to the surprise of the writer and the reader alike. In all genres, there is nothing more enjoyable than reading a book that moves according to its own lifeforce, that exudes its own meaning. Understanding the Other, the world, and different points of view in a way you couldn’t have if you had not read that book—all of these are the perks of reading good books.  I’m enjoying following along as a reader as you serialize Mind Reading in the newspaper. Particularly memorable was your discussion of loneliness in the column, “A Day to Talk about Loneliness.” I think loneliness is at the center of all the various problems our society is dealing with right now. While I agree with you when you write that “Loneliness is an emotion that must be thought about on a social level,” I wonder if you could expand on what it means. As a part of a short piece for the “This Year in Pictures” column of Sisain’s year-end issue, I asked the following question: “Can the loneliness of teachers, students, and parents ever meet?”  When I saw the colliding perspectives surrounding the news that a new elementary school teacher had committed suicide in the summer of 2023, the first word that came to mind was “loneliness.” It occurred to me that these three groups of people had been isolated from each other. Sometimes loneliness shifts the target of our anger, and sometimes loneliness fails to gain a voice and be heard. And while we’re busy hurting each other, guided by lost emotions, the structures and systems that lie at the heart of the problem take a step back, avoiding responsibility. During the pandemic, I saw loneliness everywhere taking shape, and so I thought I wanted to talk to someone, anyone, about how our “lonelinesses” can be connected.  As someone who has thought a lot about this issue of connecting “lonelinesses,” I can’t agree more. What comes to mind as a possible solution on a social level are things like clubs and hobby groups, where people can find like-minded individuals and a community for their interests. Book clubs and writing circles might be good methods, too. Could you share your opinion on methods to connect loneliness? I think that book clubs and writing circles are a great choice. Perhaps we are biased as writers, but I truly think that there’s nothing better than reading and writing for connecting us not just with the people around us but with a whole range of other worlds. And, depending on your social concerns, if you read and write in various genres of non-fiction, not just literature, you can even practice a small form of political engagement. Just like how dog- and cat-lovers meet up with each other, I think that clubs and hobby groups provide a good opportunity for you to think and talk more about your passions.  I understand that after starting as a history major, you decided to double major in creative writing as well. What made you want to become a novelist? Also, you’ve been writing for almost sixteen years since your debut in 2008. Over that time, how have you most changed, and how have you not changed at all? I’ve always liked writing since I was a child, and most of what I wrote turned out to be fiction. And while I liked telling stories, my dream was to become a historian or an anthropologist, not a writer. But now that I look back on it, one of the reasons I liked history was because to tell history, you need a story. I began to realize I could make a career out of writing novels when I took a creative writing class in college. I remember being nervous before getting peer reviews of my writing in college, and ever since graduating, no matter what I’ve done, I’ve never let go of my identity as a writer.     I still think, just as I did when I debuted, that writing novels is difficult and lonely work. Although I feel slightly comforted by the fact that I can now at least sense the existence of my readers more than I did when I first started writing, the things that have had the greatest influence on my emotional state while writing are the events that happen inside the story. But when I feel that my book is becoming a novel, as opposed to feeling like I am making a novel, my heart rate and immersion changes, and even when I close my laptop, I continue to feel the emotions of the characters in my novel. Sometimes, everything I write completely engrosses me and raises my heart rate, but at other times, nothing I write feels like it is becoming a novel. Feeling my mind becoming flat, feeling like I have a plot only driven by simple cause and effect instead of a novel bursting with life, feeling like I’m simply making a novel—I wish that whenever I feel this way, I will recognize the situation before it is too late and have the energy to deal with it.  The title for this issue of KLN is Breath, Respite, and Emptiness. I interpret this as a call to think about the value of literature that allows us to catch our breath from the rapidly changing world, that gives us respite from our busy lives, that allows us to feel emptiness. Would you please share with us the ways in which these keywords apply to your work, or any related experiences. One day when my child was in preschool, they stayed home with a fever and spent the day sleeping next to me, occasionally waking up to take their medicine. At the time, I was always busy running around, but that day was like a gift to me from my child, the gift of emptiness. Sitting next to them as they slept, their body hot with a fever, I picked out a book to read, a collection of works by this one author. The book contained several years of their writing. It wasn’t my first time reading them, and I thought I knew what kind of themes they liked to write about. But after reading until sunset, I finally felt like I understood what they were writing about, about their world. I also remember that I was able to let go of myself because I was immersed in that book. I think having a different world you can lose yourself in, especially when you’re exhausted from being preoccupied with yourself, can itself be breath and respite.  When I feel busy, I crave breath, respite, and emptiness. And here, by “busy” I don’t mean being busy with a world of my choosing, but with calls and requests from a world I haven’t chosen, that I don’t want. When life gets in the way of reading and writing, it’s not long before I need a rest. Do you have any advice for people who live busy lives and are feeling overwhelmed? We’re all desperate for respite for similar reasons, but we also have our own unique circumstances. When I need respite, I simplify my thoughts as much as possible and try not to write at all, usually through sleeping or driving. I must make environments where, for just a moment, I can stop thinking about the things I (usually) want to think about. I read books that are as far away from the present as possible, recorded in the driest language. For example, I might open History of the Three Kingdoms to a random page and start reading. “In the second month of the fifth year of Beopheung of Silla’s reign, Jusanseong Fortress was built.” “On the fifth month, a dragon appeared from the well on the palace grounds. Clouds and mist gathered above, and the dragon flew away.” These are the kind of sentences I want to read.  What work and author has influenced you the most? I want to know about your literary experience as a reader. There is a book that shakes me to the core every time I open it, that feels new with every read: Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The structure of that book makes the reader take a deep breath and prepares them so that they can’t enter this world easily. Every time I read that book, I am captivated by its nonlinear structure that is designed to get us to that task, that day, that existence. Names and voices overlap in the structure, creating so many different layers of meaning.  And with regard to my recent projects, I am particularly focused on unpacking the concept of “rememory.” To quote a favorite line from Beloved: “I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened. […] Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It’s never going away.”    Is there any work of Korean literature that you would like to share with readers from other countries? An Boyun’s recent collection of short stories I’ll Take the Night comes to mind. In fact, I think that An is one of those novelists who does what you mentioned earlier: accurately depict the violence of the world and faithfully depict a single character. I think this collection shows you how an author can create meaning by simply and carefully grappling with an issue for a long time.  I once asked you the following question at the same COVID forum we attended: “Is there any advice you can give to people who want to write about issues of representation or pain but are having a hard time doing so?” You answered: “Like many, I too went through a long period when I was a bit too strict with myself and practiced self-censorship. I also doubted my own credentials to write. But if you can acknowledge those limitations and capture them in the text, I think you enable yourself to write about things and people outside yourself.” I was hoping you could elaborate on this. I think I’ve often projected my emotions and experiences onto my characters while writing my novels. I would think I understand a particular character well because their situation was similar to mine, and because of that I would feel very little resistance while writing. But conversely, I think I’ve been very afraid to write about characters who aren’t like me. Early on, I was worried about my qualifications as a writer, but with time, I’ve become less concerned about that and more concerned about the presence of my ego. I personally want to be careful about designing stories in which I project the writer’s ego onto characters in order to create empathy for the characters in the novel. I also think that objectification becomes a bigger risk the larger we allow the writer’s ego to become. I feel like I might be repeating my point earlier about walking in someone else’s shoes, but if you can clearly recognize your own position as the writer and be honest about distance when trying to understand the Other, I think you can work up the courage to take chances by interacting with more types of characters in your novels.  Ending with Face to Face, I’d like to quote you when you wrote in a column after finishing the book: “Now, I want to write something I can enjoy a bit more while writing. Goodbye, my ladies.” So, what kind of stories and characters do you want to write about in the future? For the last several years, I think I’ve been writing mainly about female characters and with very little emotional distance. After finishing Face to Face, I felt like I needed my own form of social distancing, and so naturally, I got the itch to write about a character very far from my own personal situation. I also want to write about someone that I can’t project myself onto. Remembering that I thoroughly enjoyed writing the first time I let loose while writing a female narrator’s voice, I realize that the type of story that I enjoy writing changes depending on my own state of mind at the time.      I spent my entire childhood and teens near the border of Korea, so I’ve always known since I debuted that I wanted to write about that area. And while it has appeared periodically in my work, I have plans to focus more on it in the future. I continue to think about emotions and memory, memory and history, and I think that’s because recently, I’ve been reading again about the rememory of Beloved.  Translated by Sean Lin Halbert     KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:•    Face to Face (Changbi, 2023)    『마주』 (창비, 2023)•    A Person Made from Snow (Munhakdongne, 2021)    『눈으로 만든 사람』 (문학동네, 2021)•    The Ninth Wave (Munhakdongne, 2017)    『아홉번째 파도』 (문학동네, 2017)•    Magnolia Sutra (Moonji, 2015)    『목련정전』 (문학과 지성사, 2015)•    An Exceedingly Beautiful Dream (Munhakdongne, 2013)    『너무 아름다운 꿈』 (문학동네, 2013)  Choi Eunmi debuted in 2008 by publishing the short story “I Cry and Go” in Hyundae Munhak. Her short story collections include A Dream Too Beautiful, Magnolia Sutra, and A Person Made of Snow. She has also written the novella Last Night Was Spring and the novels The Ninth Wave and Face to Face. She has received the Daesan Literary Award, the Hyundae Munhak Literary Award, and the Hankook Ilbo Literary Award.  Jung Yong-jun is a novelist. His works include the collections We Are Not Flesh and Blood and A Walk Along Seolleung, the novels From Tonnio and I’m Speaking, and the book of essays Long Live the Novel. He is currently employed at the Department of Creative Writing at Seoul Institute of the Arts.

  by Jung Yong-jun

• 

  Interview with Poet Yi Won: A Time for Diving In

  To begin, I know you’re fond of inanimate objects. Things like mannequins and robots, but also a camel plushie, a figurine of a little girl on a motorcycle, a Pinocchio doll with a broken nose. You’ve said that taking care of objects—wiping down the camel’s eyes, finding a wall for Pinocchio to lean on—gives you time to think differently about what life is as well. I’m curious what inanimate objects you’ve recently been spending time with and taking care of, and what thoughts you’re thinking through them.   I want to start by saying I’m excited about this conversation. I know I’ll enjoy it. I’ve always felt we shared a certain inner closeness. I’m curious to find out what we’ll talk about, in this place where the personal and literary intersect. I imagine your questions will feel like gifts, each one a mirror that shows me some angle of myself I can’t see. Perhaps among those faces I don’t know I’ll find one I’ve been wanting to visit. The past few years I’ve had a lot of questions, both personal and poetic, which often make me stop and pause, so this conversation feels all the more valuable.         I do like inanimate objects. The moments I spend with them are bright and refreshing. My body and spirit grow quiet and clear. I still spend my time with those few objects you mentioned, each looking after one another. And I’m still captivated by objects, but I don’t keep as many by my side. Maybe you could say I’ve become more careful. Something else I’m keeping nearby these days is a bird. It’s made of linen in grayscale. It has no eyes or beak or wings—or no, maybe it’s hiding its eyes and beak, legs and wings. It has no concrete shape, which makes it seem even more like a bird to me. Even in the dark, it’s a bird. In the light, it’s a bird. With the bare minimum, there’s no need for more. This linen bird helps calm me.  I think your fascination with inanimate objects can be seen in your poetry as well. It’s not just how your poetic imagination manifests in your first collection, When They Ruled the Earth, through mannequins, plastic bags, rice cookers, plugs, and PCs—and later through motorcycles, TVs, sneakers, toilets, and so on—but also in the way you toss up new forms of sensation and thought. I was always surprised by how things that weren’t typically treated as ‘poetic’ objects could become such natural poetry. In your second collection, A Thousand Moons Rising Over the River of Yahoo!, the speaker no longer only writes about inanimate objects, but also speaks as them, finding a cyborg voice. In the voice of the cyborg, there are glimpses of an existential inevitability—it couldn’t not speak. In your opinion, what makes something ‘poetic,’ and what are some poetic objects you’ve been thinking about recently?  I once wrote, “If we love what we can never know, will it become beauty?” I think poetry is active in and of itself. It’s not so much through my own efforts as through the efforts of this unknowable domain called poetry. When I find myself participating together in this unknowable sensation, that feels poetic. I’m partial to that unknowingness. When I write a sentence I wasn’t expecting, within that sentence I can feel a connection to this world, something like the reason I was put in this world. That moment of mystery is probably why I keep writing poetry.        In other words, it’s not so much that I find any particular object poetic as that I let my captivation lead me. In the past I placed more focus on the object I was concentrated on, but I’ve found myself moving gradually toward scenes rather than objects. Scenes from everyday life that you might commonly pass by without noticing. I found a desire to reveal, in a minimal way, the coincidence and inevitability within such scenes. If I’ve had any persistent direction, it’s been an interest in people and the things surrounding them. Especially at points when change is noticeable. I like the collision of disparate things existing together, something you might call contradiction. I think I want to reveal how contradiction is not a boundary, but a form of coexistence. Of course, when it comes to coexistence, I want to maintain a geometrical attitude, like the camera eye, rather than the psychological perspective. Tell me about roots. There are many moments in your poetry where you mention roots. The roots that appear as a motif in your first and second collections seem to continue later in images of the ankle and foot. I’m curious how you started writing about roots, and whether the thoughts and sensations you had about roots have changed as you write them in your poetry.  When I was in my teens, I experienced the deaths of several family members in a row. It was so strange how they were just gone in a single moment, without a trace. At that time I had the realization that a person is not a tree. It was afraid of experience rather than abstract concepts, so after that I grew up rummaging through roots, real and symbolic. This had a big effect on my way of life. The fact that I had no roots made me feel anxious and afraid, and I had to invent a way to survive as a rootless being. I was anxiety-inducing to be rootless, but wasn’t I also that much freer? If I could have, not the gravity of rootedness, but the zero-gravity of rootlessness, couldn’t I soar upward weightlessly? If I could just love that momentary enchantment, then I wouldn’t lose my courage. These are the kinds of ideas I made for myself. The foot is an ambivalent body part. Our feet hold us up on the ground, but they can also move freely as they desire, and jump up into the air. When I write poetry, my feet leave the ground and take on the freedom of weightlessness. In reality, I struggled with the thought that my feet were often too far off the ground. In that sense, the foot and ankle are a place of both love and hate for me.        I feel no matter how beautiful the scene out a window is, people have a hard time looking at the same scenery constantly. Maybe it’s because people have feet and not roots. Isn’t that the reason we have feet? To go set foot in some unfamiliar place? I ask myself these questions often. Courage is very important to me. Like just going and sitting down at a new, blank page with nothing on it. From my perspective, that’s when I like poetry, and life as well.  You’ve often referred to yourself as a ‘momentist.’ As an attitude toward life, the saying ‘seize the moment’ has given me a lot of courage too. A ‘moment’ is a point at which there is a break in time, a point at which there is a cliff, a breaking-free. Your attitude towards life as a momentist appears in your poems in a variety of ways. In “Voices”, from The History of an Impossible Page, your fourth collection, the images of stone, light, wall, and so on feel to me like desperate voices created by a moment of time. I can feel a force that isn’t trapped or stuck but breaking free and expanding. Tell me more about writing poetry as a momentist.  Since it was the one who defined myself that way, it feels like I do always have to be a momentist. I actually do think in very short units of time. Maybe a month at the longest. It’s hard to think in longer time spans because it feels so heavy. Being a momentist is a kind of incantation for me. A moment is exactly the point at which a unit of time comes into existence, so it must be useless, devoid of any purpose. What I like is that zero point, which might be a kind of liberation. A moment is something so intense and yet empty, so it is enchanting.        That’s why I try to live my life as a momentist. Poetry is also structured by moments of sensation. A moment can be expressed as a single second. Within that second, like a line to its core, is the first, the least. The point at which the single second is spoken. That which doesn’t go away even when everything else does. In other words, the original form. I think that, within the moment of a second, there is a minimum—a least—that brings the moment forth. I like to discover that place. I think that’s why people sometimes say I write in a very unfeeling way. I’m starting to realize these moments I meet are eternity. I think about the realization that the very largest thing can be held within the very smallest, so a moment feels like a vortex, and a first feels like the eye of a typhoon.  When I read the poem “Shadows,” I thought about the things that produce a deep sense of solitude. Solitary moments when we are left by ourselves. Whenever I read your poems, it feels like I often stop on the words shadow, air, and solitude. They are present yet absent, opened but closed. The words “sinews of shadows” make us think of the shadow like a body. And we discover a contradictory aspect—empty yet full—to the motif of empty air in lines like “stairs made from the solitude of the air” (“Apple Store”). You’ve also written several linked poems about solitude, but with aspects other than loneliness or silence. What sort of thoughts or stories have you had while writing about shadows, air, and solitude?  I’ve been consistently interested in air, in the sense of a kind of visual emptiness. Air as the space that brings stairs and roofs into existence. I want to keep discovering that empty air. It’s because I want to have more experiences with it as something concrete, rather than abstract. Shadows and solitude share this same context. They’ve both gradually come to have a sort of corporeality, rather than remaining at the emotional level.        Because the concrete is not conceptual, but something with an actual form, I kept finding myself moving toward, not thinking those things, but becoming them. Becoming is a kind of experience, so although I was moving toward a different space, it was also my own. It was a shared space that was created. And then I just ended up staying there for much longer. Even after everyone else had gone back, I remained, and I returned again afterwards as well. I found myself hesitating in that space where I remained. It was actually a bit scary to learn the solitude of the final remaining place. Still, I think the place of poetry is that last remaining person, the one who returns to that empty place even after everyone else has gone back a long time ago. If you focus on the sinews of solitude, I think you won’t lose the dancing body.  In the afterword to your fifth collection, Let Love Be Born, critic Park Sangsoo mentions that we “must give some time to considering child-like naivete as one force that has led [your poetry] to this point.” I agree that naivete is important to your poetry. I think it arises from an attitude of refusing to let life make you solemn, of struggling to maintain a condition of not knowing, of being unfamiliar. And that’s actually why it’s so hard to maintain naivete. Why are your poems oriented toward naivete, and how do you break through at times when you can’t hold on to being naive?  I’ve spent lots of time with the phrase “no birth, no death” (불생불멸). In this space of neither emergence nor dissipation, it’s written that this is the same as naivete or innocence. Maybe that’s the foundation. Maybe that’s why I love naivete, why I’m always trying to find it within and without. Naivete is a space without distinctions, and the deepest of places. It’s not looking on, but diving in. It’s a space everyone experiences, so its time is the present. With weight, we can’t dive in or experience, and distinctions form. The space of altruism narrows, and the space of selfishness expands. To lose naivete is to lose the foundation, but the foundation never goes away, so it can’t be lost. I’m inclined to believe naivete is the foundation beneath every place.        If I’m not naive when I write, then I can’t awaken poetry or life, so when I’m not naive, I just walk a lot. After a while everything disappears, and all that’s left within me is a small, teary-eyed child. Things get simpler once I’ve met that inner child again. When things get simpler, I end up going to places I’ve never been before. If I change my outlook, then the world and my thoughts about it change too. I like that unfamiliar curiosity. I never have to go as far as I’d expect to get to all sorts of places I’ve never been.  Of all your books of poetry, Let Love Be Born is the collection that reveals the most emotion. I’ve always thought your poetry focuses more on the discovery of sensory detail than on psychological aspects, but it occurs to me that you’ve gone through a period when your emotions couldn’t help but come out. Your poetry inevitably deals with the subject of death. You’ve said that experiencing deaths close to you, both personally and socially, has left many graves within your body. What were the images of death you perceived close by as you wrote Let Love Be Born? And how did you use poetry to get through that time? You know how you sometimes search yourself on the internet? Once by coincidence, I came across a blog where a reader had written, “Yi Won feels a sense of vitality in death.” It felt like a revelation. I mean, it meant that I was centered on death. If I think back on it, my life did always have death at its center at that time. I mentioned that I became a material momentist after losing several family members in my teens. And even as an adult, the deaths of people close to me, as well as those in society, shook me terribly. In a sense, I was experiencing death and changing it, and I felt a close relationship to death. Sometimes I wonder if it’s my responsibility not to let death be death, and to live death instead. As more graves are lain within my body, and looking after them becomes part of my life, I realize that when I write poetry, the pencil of death and the dead themselves have written many sentences. And when that feeling comes over me, I have the ethical thought that perhaps I haven’t failed to fulfill my responsibilities.        The communal tragedy of the Sewol ferry disaster1)  had a big effect on my poetry. Let Love Be Born is composed of the poems I wrote during that time. I never liked to write poems that prioritize the human perspective, so I rarely allow the intrusion of the first person, but this time was like a whirlwind that swept over without a moment to think about method. I felt myself entering and speaking in the first person before I knew what was happening. It was also a time of hopelessness about what poetry could actually do. I leaned a lot on the poetry of my fellow poets, who had taught me, guided me, and written alongside me, and I came to believe in the possibility of raising our voices in chorus. In that collection there’s the line, “When I press my two hands together, how is it that you come to cry?” I had a realization that this is what prayer is. If I press my two hands together, a space forms for you to cry. If there are many innocent hands, a desperate light rises from the community. I came to believe in the possibilities of innocent hands even amid pain and suffering. You write in your prose collection The Smallest Discovery that you’d like to write the poetry of a machine–mudang (shaman): “If it’s conflicting, then it’s conflicting. If it’s too different, then it’s too different. If it clashes, then it clashes. This is the type of poetry I wanted to write. I felt this desire to create a place for the machine–mudang through poetry.” When I read those lines, I thought it suited you very well. The machine–mudang seems to touch on your attitude of carrying through all the points of possible contradiction. Are you still interested in writing machine–mudang poems? It’s a point I’d like to reach as a poet and a phrase that I still hold in my heart. Maybe it’s because I’ve always been timid, but as the time I’ve lived accumulates, I find I’m struggling with more and more fears. I have to confess that I’ve grown a contemplative perspective, so I tend to wander and shy away from things and to be afraid and lose vitality. But to look without exaggeration, to be reinvigorated, is still the place I want to reach.  I’d also like to ask you about poetry translation. Your poems have been translated into many languages, including English, German, Japanese, Arabic, and Dutch. The language of poetry doesn’t really line up logically—it’s closer to illogic. I imagine that in the translation process you’ve felt the difficulty of making adjustments, as well as points of freedom in donning an unfamiliar language. What has it been like to have your poems translated?  I think that the process of translation is both extremely difficult and beautiful. After all, the language changes, but it’s the same living thing within. That experience is special to me too. I’ve worked on just a few poems up to an entire collection. I’ve usually communicated with the translators over email. Sometimes we’d send a few dozen emails, sometimes a few hundred. In order to find just the right word they examine everything down to the veins, looking into Korean culture and even into me personally. Almost like a surgeon operating on what’s inside my head. And the process becomes a mirror for me to look into my mind as well. An English translation of The World’s Lightest Motorcycle that came out in the United States actually won the LTI Korea Translation Award last year. It was translated by E. J. Koh and Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello. Marci came to Seoul to receive the award and we got to spend some personal time together too. It was interesting because it felt like the kind of connection you have with an old friend.        A while ago at an international poetry festival, I took part in a translation workshop for my poems over several days. Several poets from different countries asked me all these questions in person and translated my poetry into their native languages. On the last day there was a reading in which we alternated, with me reading the Korean poetry first, followed by the translation. I remember finding it interesting that the translations could touch me with this vibrant, wriggling feeling even though I couldn’t speak the languages. I was so surprised when someone in the audience from another country came up to me at the end of the workshop and said, “Now I share a part of your spirit.” Searching for something in common in other languages feels like an impressive endeavor for the people of this Earth to engage in. A very impressive dance that crosses national borders.  When I read your recent poems “Small People Community” and “Friendly Gathering,” I thought about the moments when people meet each other. These poems left me with a feeling that they were at once carrying the possibility of community—even with just two people, even in silence, even if they don’t actually meet at all—as well as its impossibility. In the same vein, I was struck by the “world of Everyone” in the poem “Shared Kitchen.” The line “Until the feet leave those slippers, this is the shared kitchen,” gave me a physical experience of a new way of thinking about sharedness. Tell me more about your thoughts on meetings between people, and on community.  I don’t think there’s any more continuous, living way of learning than meeting. Meeting spreads outward in concentric circles from you and I, to us, to the country, to Earth. We ask the biggest questions and stroll across boundaries and try to make our bodies as small as possible. I think we’re in a time of many rapid, tumultuous changes, both in society and in the world. In times of tumult we’re very quick to judge and categorize for the sake of a new order. If society’s role is to create a superficial order, what can poetry do? I ask myself those kinds of questions often. Rather than looking for quick definitions, I think you have to try to very delicately approach the places where you can hear the big crashing sounds. I feel there’s something sinking away, something we must save, in acts of judgment and definition. Might poetry be in the direction of this saving? To do so, you must become even smaller and more delicate. This is my kind of self-inquiry and self-answer. When you become smaller, you approach things in more detail, and you can see what’s blatant too, so it might seem a bit coarse. But if you approach with a naive mind, in the direction of saving, then might that place be the possibility of community? Like a spark that we kindle together.  I’ve always felt your poetry was somewhat similar to painting. But while the more recent poems we’re discussing maintain that detailed accuracy of scene, they also feel cinematic in their progression, like the movement of a camera. Was there something that brought about this change?  I’m still a visualist who likes writing poems in descriptive form. If something feels cinematic about my recent poems, it’s probably because I’m trying out a somewhat different poetic language. Before, I structured poems in a painterly way, like a single canvas, but now I’m leaning toward structuring them as a scene. The painterly method offers a high level of tension, while a scene can rest within the flow of time.        Can poetry be made from tepidity? Can poetry be written with an unoppressive method? Can I become a tepid hand? Can I endure this anxiety? Nature is tepid, so is it anxious too? Do trees grow through the force of anxiety? There’s no drama to minimal construction. Every element is removed and only tepidity remains. That’s what makes it avant-garde. Tepidly/minimally—are these two in opposition? Are they a match? If language lets go of language, does the minimal emerge? Will language remove the unnecessary elements from abstraction all on its own? Then will the minimal naturally remain as the minimal? If you don’t let poetic sensations, poetic leaps, and poetic intention lead, then the prosaic inserts itself, but can this prosaicness maintain nature’s tension? Can it become the inevitability of coincidence? These are the questions I’m asking. Some days I call it impossible and some days I call it possible. My recent poems are a result of this rummaging. These days I want to lose. I don’t want to be steadfast.  In the poems “Biosphere” and “Rare Earth Equation,” we get a glimpse of your recent interests. Of course, we can also find extensions of your earlier poetic thought, in the sense of dismantling or overthrowing the idea of human superiority on Earth, in certain phrases: “of the mind [that] things would look a lot better if people shrank a bit, somehow or other,” “What’s superior is what’s vaporized,” “The grass grows all around when no one’s looking,” and so on. Still your view of the ecosphere itself seems to appear more prominently here. Does this touch on your recent interests?  I used to lean much more heavily into the human world, but now I’ve come to see the world that was there before as well, in a way that’s less stiff and has a more natural rhythm. I think it took a long time before I could see difference in one place. It’s one thing to take difference and coexistence apart and see them separately, but it’s another to see them together as one scene. It becomes easier to see disparate aspects, and easier to see difference. It’s easier to see how things are separate and together at once. Come to think of it, I guess there’s a natural shift from the poem “Unexpected Earth,” in which I was trying to discover an unexpected earth, to my curiosity about the equation in “Rare Earth Equation.” I’ll have to walk a bit further before I know, but I want to turn on my ecosphere like a little light. I want to record it. It’s still in process, but I feel like there’s no doubt that, whether physical or figurative, poetry and the Earth are on the side of small things.  While I listened to each of your answers, I strangely felt a fluttering urge to write some poems myself. I suppose your thoughts and energy for poetry must have rubbed off on me. I’d like to hear more, but unfortunately I think this will have to be my final question. What is the most daring thing you’d like to try today as part of your everyday life?  Poet Miok, after talking with you I also have an urge to write poetry, coming to me in the bright image of a rabbit. At first it was only a long pair of ears. When I take a walk, there’s a place where I turn around every day. I’d like to not turn around, and to go on walking aimlessly in that direction. What if it gets too dark? What if solitude closes in? What if I don’t have the energy to make it back? No, I’m not going to worry about any of that. I want to walk with the confident steps of a little soldier boy.  Translated by Seth Chandler        KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED: • When They Ruled the Earth (Moonji, 1996) 『그들이 지구를 지배했을 때』 (문학과지성사, 1996) • A Thousand Moons Rising Over the River of Yahoo! (Moonji, 2001) 『야후!의 강물에 천 개의 달이 뜬다』 (문학과지성사, 2001) • The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (tr. E. J. Koh, Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, Zephyr Press, 2021) 『세상에서 가장 가벼운 오토바이』 (문학과지성사, 2007) • “Voices,” “Shadows,” The History of an Impossible Page (Moonji, 2012) 「그림자들」, 「목소리들」, 『불가능한 종이의 역사』 (문학과지성사, 2012) • “Apple Store,” Let Love Be Born (Moonji, 2017) 「애플 스토어」, 『사랑은 탄생하라』 (문학과지성사, 2017) • “Machine–Mudang (1),” The Smallest Discovery (Minumsa, 2017) 「기계-무당 (1)」, 『최소의 발견』, (민음사, 2017) • “Friendly Gathering,” (Siindongne, Aug. 2019) 「친목 모임」 (시인동네 2019년 8월호, 2019) • “Shared Kitchen” (Webzine Gongsisa, June. 2020) 「공용 키친」 (웹진 공정한시인의사회 2020년 6월호) • “Small People Community,” (Literature and Society vol. 134, 2021) 「작은 사람 공동체」, (문학과사회 2021년 여름호, 2021) • “Biosphere,” “Rare Earth Equation,” (Webzine View vol. 57, 2022) 「생물권」, 「희귀한 지구 방정식」, (웹진 비유 2022년 9월호, 2022)  1) The sinking of the MV Sewol, in which 304 peopledied or went missing, most of them Korean high school students on their way toJeju Island for a class field trip.—Ed.

  by Ahn Miok

• 

  Interview with Ha Seong-nan: Looking Behind the Closed Door

  The K-pop girl group Le Sserafim recently released a song titled “Eve, Psyche & the Bluebeard’s Wife.” It takes women who have broken taboos as its main concept, women who have opened forbidden doors. A new edition of your collection Bluebeard’s First Wife was published in Korea in 2021 and has been receiving renewed attention. What did you find most challenging when you first wrote the story “Bluebeard’s First Wife”? The story of Bluebeard is one of the first fairy tales I encountered as a child. The book had pen illustrations, and a drawing showed the climax of the story—the moment when Bluebeard’s wife is at the top of the tower, waiting for her brothers to come rescue her, and Bluebeard is reaching out to grab her. I loved that tension. At the same time, I found it odd that the ones who save her are her brothers. You see, I didn’t have brothers. Angela Carter seemed to feel the same, because in her story “The Bloody Chamber,” which is also based on the Bluebeard fairy tale, it’s her mother who assumes this role. Bluebeard allows his wives to go anywhere in the castle, except for one forbidden room. This room contains the corpses of his previous wives, who had broken their promise by entering it. So, naturally, one can’t help but wonder why the first wife had to die if the room was empty to begin with and there was no reason to prohibit entry. This led me to ask: What is a story and how does it start? Was there anything you were particularly mindful of as you prepared Bluebeard’s First Wife for the revised edition? When I first wrote the title story, I didn’t find it particularly difficult to depict Jason, the narrator’s husband. However, I was so focused on the fact that this character had a secret that I failed to examine him with the depth he deserved. I neglected to understand his pain and identity as part of the LGBTQ+ community, choosing instead to use his situation as a mere source of conflict. The result left prejudices unexamined, a realization that fills me with remorse. Thirty years have passed since I wrote that story. Although the world has changed in many ways, some things stubbornly persist. For instance, the mayor of Daegu recently opposed a long-promised queer festival, labeling it an illegal occupation of public roads. This illustrates how far we still must go.Fortunately, I had the opportunity to release a revised edition, and though I couldn’t rewrite the entire story, I was able to incorporate some updates, even if imperfectly. The first edition of “Bluebeard’s First Wife” ends with the statement: “I think long and hard, and wonder what on earth I ever did wrong.” The narrator thinks her personal misfortune is a kind of judgment, while her language (“what on earth I ever did wrong”) places herself outside the blame, since it suggests she cannot think of anything she did to deserve her fate. In the revised edition, the last sentence has been changed to: “I think long and hard, and wonder where my life went wrong.” I wanted to remove the sense of causality present in the first version, the idea that misfortune is connected to wrongdoing, as well as her sense of bewilderment over her misfortune. Instead I wanted to convey that sometimes marriages end. Sometimes, misfortunes happen and our lives don’t turn out the way we had hoped. I feel that this is a more compassionate and understanding view of life.Bluebeard’s First Wife includes the short story “The Star-Shaped Stain,” which is based on the fire that killed nineteen children at the Sealand Youth Training Center in June 1999. This work sharply alternates between the perspectives of the victims’ families and third parties in social disasters, posing significant questions to readers. In South Korea, we keep seeing such tragedies. Are there points you specifically pondered when writing about social disasters? What can stories do in the face of such enormous tragedies? I remembered an interview with a father who had lost his twins in the Sealand fire. I recalled his expression as he said, “Thinking that your child has died and knowing that your child has died are entirely different things.” I had to be careful. The children who died in the Sealand disaster would have been the same age as my eldest child, who turned thirty this year. As a result of that disaster, all kindergarten field trips that year were cancelled, but the fact that my child was spared brought no relief. Thinking about something is different from reality, but the only thing I could do was think. Since then, tragedies have continued. As I watched the frozen image of the sinking Sewol ferry on the screen in 2014, I felt utterly helpless. I despaired, realizing no amount of work that I’ve ever done or could do would lift the ferry out of the water. Many people who went to the Itaewon Halloween celebration last year did not return. I’ve known that alley where the crowd crush occurred since I was twenty years old. My child or I could have easily been there that night. We have no choice but to leave our lives to chance, and society can no longer be trusted. I channel my fears into my writing, striving to overcome the powerlessness I felt that day, unable to save anyone. Writing becomes a way of not forgetting. This year, the movie Flowers of Mold, which is based on your story of the same title won awards in two categories at the 2023 Jeonju International Film Festival. The film is about a man who rummages through people’s garbage. How did you first conceive this story? Why do you think that even after twenty years, the story is still loved, reimagined in different genres, and reinterpreted in meaningful ways? First, I would like to congratulate director Hye-jung Shim and express my admiration for the impressive acting of Kim Jae-kyung. Seeing how the symbol of garbage was transformed and represented differently in the film was a revelation to me.When I wrote “Flowers of Mold” twenty-five years ago, I never thought that parts of the story could be read as stalking. Though these characters are fictional, their intense interest in others, and their yearning for connection and communication, can appear excessive in today’s context. This realization was surprising when I had the chance to re-examine the story. At the time when I wrote it, I was oblivious to that undertone, or how my characters could be perceived. I couldn’t sense this at all, and so wrote without any reservations. Of course, doubting the goodwill of my characters never crossed my mind.The question might arise: “Do we need to go so far in order to understand others?” If I may defend myself, the cultural climate back then was quite different. I believed, and still do, that communication is essential, even though it can be difficult to truly connect with those around us. That belief led me to express a profound desire in my story, and I started digging through my own garbage. Amidst the mashed-up, rotten, and torn remnants, I discovered aspects of myself I hadn’t known before. That kind of exploration may have been possible only at that time. If I were to revisit the story now with my current “sensitivity” or understanding, the story would take on a very different shape.Director Hye-jung Shim has approached this subject matter with a contemporary sensitivity, reflecting the shifts in societal understanding. Flowers of Mold was translated into English and received great reviews in the US market after being introduced in 2019. In the following year, the translation of your third collection, Bluebeard’s First Wife, was selected as one of Publishers Weekly’s 10 Best Books of 2020. What are your thoughts on the recent success of K-literature, and on your work being translated into other languages and reaching new readers? It all feels surreal, so I don’t really know how to respond. I was recently watching an American movie and saw the main character casually prepare Korean instant noodles by pouring hot water into the disposable container. It made me think of a future where reading the work of Korean writers might be just as commonplace and unremarkable.I can’t help but think of Janet Hong, who first translated my work into English. After stumbling upon one of my short stories many years ago, she translated the collection and tried for a long time to find a publisher. Had it not been for her dedication, my work might never have reached an English-speaking audience. The American publishing environment back then was strikingly different from what it is now, with presses offering far-from-ideal publishing conditions. Our pride was wounded, and we were forced to wait a long time for the right opportunity to present itself. Janet, however, never compromised. She labored for more than a decade to see the fruits of her work. And I must also acknowledge the work of other translators who endured even greater challenging conditions to bring Korean literature to the world. I’m grateful to them all. There was a time when the peculiarities of the Korean language were cited as reasons why no Korean author had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Korean was deemed too subtle, too nuanced, to translate into English, for instance. Yet seeing your work, known for its delicate precision, achieve success in the US market, I feel we have moved into a new era. I’m also curious about your collaboration with other translators, and if there are specific aspects you consider when your work is translated into other languages. As you know, a book is not the result of the author’s efforts alone. It takes a village to publish a book. In Korea, editors wield significant influence, an influence that seems to be growing. The role of a translator becomes even more crucial when a book is published in another language. Even with my limited grasp of English, I can appreciate Janet Hong’s immense skill in the English translation of my work. Janet is both a translator and a writer. She understood the tone and essence of my work, selecting just the right words to recreate it. I had very little to do with that process. Janet’s Korean is fluent, and we only occasionally discussed small details, like the size or shape of specific tools mentioned in a story.I recall an instance when a piece of my writing was translated by someone else. And even though it was a good translation, I immediately knew it wasn’t Janet’s work. Somehow, I just knew.  Your early works are often lauded for their delicate, precise descriptions. This meticulous attention to detail, as if observing characters and scenes through a freeze-frame lens, has a mesmerizing effect on readers. In your opinion, what is the role of such description within the context of fiction? I used to be severely nearsighted. I needed glasses, but didn’t tell my parents, because I didn’t want them to worry, and I also didn’t want to be teased for wearing glasses. For a long time, I lived without seeing clearly. Living in this blurry world required me to squint and study objects closely to discern their shape. This may have given my work a certain “myopic” quality. But it also taught me that true sight demands determination, that it takes a much stronger will to “see.” Not averting your gaze is a more active act than closing your eyes. When I was studying poetry with the poet Oh Kyu Won, I learned that seeing wasn’t just about perception, but about finding deeper meaning. I began to infuse my prose with poetic descriptions, cutting back on the characters’ internal thoughts and instead speaking through surrounding objects. While there are no new stories under the sun, I believe that detailed, immersive descriptions of scenes can bring freshness and focus. Your fourth collection, Wafers, opens with “Daydreams of a River,” which ambiguously intertwines the past and present of a woman who works at a trading company. What does this piece mean to you? The title of this story eluded me until the very end when Federico García Lorca’s poem “Daydreams of a River” suddenly came to mind, and I didn’t hesitate to use it as the title. This story grew from an image of a woman who had weathered much of life without regret or fear. Now, upon reflection, I feel a greater connection with the final scene that I’d only guessed at earlier. Lorca’s poem whispers lines like: “(What a beautiful time!)” and “(What a sad little time!)”. The parentheses add a sense of secrecy. Whether I have become more like the character I’ve created or have come to comprehend my character a bit more, a beautiful, sad, and fleeting time has passed. Now I think I can understand that time a little better, as if I’ve lived through it myself. In “Daydreams of a River,” the female protagonist is bitten on the wrist by a dying dog. This leads to a scene much later in her life where instead of fleeing from a street mugger, she charges at him and bites his wrist. Though severely injured and criticized by family and friends for not handing over her purse to protect her life, she remains unrepentant. In this way, your female characters have a certain unique charm. How have they evolved, and when, as the last sentence of the story states, is a woman “most beautiful”? Your question made me realize something I’ve never truly considered before: when is a woman most beautiful? Growing up, the women I knew were always toiling. They worked relentlessly and didn’t care about looking nice. They just seemed to endure life’s hardships. So why did I write that she was the “most beautiful then” as the last sentence? Maybe I thought that period of innocence, a time when she didn’t know any better, was beautiful. We all have a time like that, don’t we?I grew up with a lot of rules and expectations. I’m not just talking about curfews. There were things I heard so much from my mother that they felt like they were being drilled into me. I won’t mention them here. But as the eldest with no brothers, I had to be strong for my mother, especially since my father was often absent. I had to be two people: one who was shaped by my mother’s nagging, and another who stepped forward when necessary. With no brothers to come to my rescue, and with my mother who had to grit her teeth and work while raising children singlehandedly, I had to become my own savior, like the main character in “Bluebeard’s First Wife.” If my female characters are slightly unconventional, perhaps it stems from that period of my life. Some writers channel their unfulfilled desires into the characters they create. Because if your characters do things that you wouldn’t dare, that’s when a story really begins. A literary critic once described your work as having “a special magic of unearthing a universe from a grain of sand.” He observed that you could depict the flow of twenty years from a single photograph like a daydream or reveal profound truths from a single, everyday moment. Can you talk about how you discover and shape the subjects and themes of your work? I’m very fond of that phrase from critic Jeong Hongsu. When I encounter difficulties in writing, I often remind myself of his words as a form of encouragement. Even though we’re no longer as isolated as we were during the pandemic, I’ve come to realize that I’m quite accustomed to being alone. I often go days without calling or meeting anyone outside of my family. Before the pandemic, when I commuted to work, I had many chances to observe people. Sometimes, while having lunch at a restaurant, I would overhear conversations at nearby tables. I heard many interesting stories—not that I used them directly in my work! I wouldn’t converse with anyone on my way home, even when I’d overhear a teenager spewing obscenities near me. I cherished that time. Now that I work from home, these opportunities have dwindled. I read novels by fellow writers. Some works inspire me to write. When a person comes to mind, I dwell on that person for a long time. In your fifth collection, The Taste of Summer, you still delve into characters and events, offering a glimpse behind the scenes, but it seems that your perspective has shifted a little. You almost seem to have developed a greater compassion and understanding toward your characters. For instance, in “The Taste of Summer,” the protagonist mispronounces Kinkaku-ji (Golden Pavilion) as Ginkaku-ji (Silver Pavilion) and ends up at the latter. There, a stranger offers her a peach, a fruit she doesn’t particularly like, and this incident lingers in her mind for a long time, resurfacing at various points in her life. Can you discuss your thoughts when crafting this work, and how this work is perhaps different from your previous works? I wanted to create a narrative that looped back on itself, beginning where it ended. This idea brought to mind a stranger I once glimpsed at a train station in a foreign country. This person was just getting off the train. Our eyes met for a second and I felt a connection. Soon the train departed and he disappeared from view. I knew we would never meet again. It was the start of a story that couldn’t progress. Yet this fleeting encounter stayed with me, inspiring a tale of growing yearning. Sure, I may write a story where a character is bitten by a dog and then bites a person, but I sometimes entertain romantic thoughts, too. Ultimately, though, I find myself dissatisfied and end up writing another story with the same “character gets bitten by a dog” motif. In your author’s note for The Taste of Summer, you wrote: “I felt I could finally write what I’ve always wanted to write, that I’d been waiting for this moment for a long time.” This statement resonated with me and gave me a greater appreciation for the stories in this collection. What kind of stories are you hoping to create in the future? I spent several summers in a dormitory at a university in Wonju. When the students returned home, the dormitory became eerily quiet, only to buzz with noise again when the summer term began. From my dorm window, I could see a reservoir in the distance. I longed to go, but I was a little nervous. One morning, while on a walk, I worked up the courage to go. From there, the window of my room looked so small. It had started raining, and the rising water level roared as it fell below the dam. The waves formed by the falling water were breathtakingly beautiful. Had I not ventured there, I would have missed that sight. The idea that there could be exciting things ahead sparked a thrill in me. It gave me confidence that I could write any story I wished. I was trying to explain this sense of excitement and anticipation in my author’s note. But as you know, our thoughts and feelings shift constantly. It’s not easy to write a story. Now, I find myself cowering before the blank page once again, as if what I’d felt at the reservoir was just a dream. I’m not sure what story I’ll end up writing. Just as how the story “Why Did She Go to Suncheon?” emerged when I happened to discover a Nike intersection on a map of Suncheon. My mind continues to change at every moment, and this transformation is part of what keeps the writing process so intriguing. You made your debut over twenty-seven years ago, and your passion and dedication to your craft have not waned. What subjects are you interested in exploring in your future works? Your readers, both domestic and international, are eagerly awaiting your next creation.  Lately, I’ve been reading Philip Roth’s Why Write? and I exclaimed aloud at the phrase on the back cover: “Philip Roth, whose life was literature itself.” It led me to reflect on a time when writing was the same for me. Ironically, it was a time when I was exhausted from raising small children, sleep-deprived, yet always thinking about writing. This realization prompted me to reflect on my current state.From the second grade, when I copied nursery rhymes from a book, writing has been a constant in my life. Even when I was supposed to be writing journal entries, I would create stories instead. Now, I plan to complete all the stories I’ve harbored in my heart for so long. Though I hesitate in the face of my limitations, I know I must write. I observe the world around me, keeping my eyes open even when I want to avert my gaze. I write about what I have seen, what I must see, without exaggeration or diminishment. I believe I can do this. I’d like nothing more than to keep writing until the very end. Translated by Janet Hong   KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED: • “Daydreams of a River,” Wafers (Munhakdongne, 2006)「강의 백일몽」, 『웨하스』 (문학동네, 2006)• “Flowers of Mold,” Flowers of Mold (tr. Janet Hong, Open Letter Books, 2019) 「곰팡이꽃」, 『옆집 여자』 (창비, 1999)• “Bluebeard’s First Wife,” “The Star-Shaped Stain,” Bluebeard’s First Wife (tr. Janet Hong, Open Letter Books, 2020)「푸른 수염의 첫 번째 아내」, 「별 모양의 얼룩」, 『푸른 수염의 첫 번째 아내』 (창비, 2002)• “The Taste of Summer,” “Why Did She Go to Suncheon?” The Taste of Summer (Moonji, 2013)「여름의 맛」, 「순천에 왜 간 걸까, 그녀는」, 『여름의 맛』 (문학과지성사, 2013)

  by Yoon Chi Kyu

• 

  Interview with Ra Heeduk: Poetry at the End of the World

  Dear Ra Heeduk,   I’m writing to you from the small studio apartment I recently moved into, leaving my parents’ care. When I was given the opportunity to interview you, I was delighted. I pulled out your books of poems and essays from my bookshelf and laid them out on the floor. I went through them from the latest to the earliest as if I were on a time machine. I was overjoyed at my discoveries—it was like locking eyes with you at various stages of your life.Here are a few questions I prepared to the best of my ability. I hope to visit you soon.   Sincerely, Lee Da Hee It’s been a long while since you moved from Gwangju to Seoul. When I think back to your office at your previous university, I remember the towers of paper with paintings and teacups in every corner. Whenever I had a chance to visit your office, I used to peruse your bookshelves, commit some titles to memory,and later buy the same books for myself. You were always very busy and sometimes exhausted, but you still looked around at your “paper towers” with interest. Have there been any changes to your daily routine since you moved? Or are there any routines you try to keep despite the change in your environment?   I lived in Gwangju for eighteen long years while I taught creative writing at Chosun University. I’m thankful for the joyful times I shared with my excellent colleagues and passionate students of literature like yourself. I found a job and moved to Seoul for personal reasons and, yes, it was difficult adapting to an unfamiliar environment, but now I’ve found a good rhythm in my daily life. I can’t help the ever-growing piles of books at my home and office, but I did get rid of my “paper towers,” as you call them. I’m trying to simplify my life. I don’t drive in Seoul, so I’ve been walking more. I take a lot of strolls, and I enjoy riding the bus and the subway where I can get glimpses of people’s lives up close.   I imagine you have many identities—as a professor, a mother, a daughter, a friend. However, as long as I’ve known you, I’ve seen you most of all as a student, studying the world constantly. Your curiosity has never waned all this time. Where does that curiosity come from? What are you currently most passionate about?    Ever since I came to Seoul, I’ve been going to a lot of exhibitions and shows. I’ve also been attending lectures and seminars on topics other than literature. Half the week,I’m a professor, and the other half, I’m a student of other fields. I especially enjoy being intellectually inspired by researchers and artists who are younger than me. I admit I am childlike in that I do have a curiosity and an adventurous spirit about unfamiliar things. It must be why I keep finding myself in unusual or dangerous situations in my everyday life as well as my travels. I’m a bit lacking in literary talent, but I make up for it by being welcoming and inquisitive about new things. That’s probably how I lasted thirty-five years as a poet. In the past few years, I’ve been interested in books and movies with a documentary structure. I like books by authors like Svetlana Alexievich, Rebecca Solnit, and George Orwell, and movies by directors like Agnès Varda, Patricio Guzmán, and Kazuhiro Soda.     The older I get, the more I think that I shouldn’t rely only on my internal feelings and thoughts. I should connect them with reality by looking outward and learn to communicate those connections effectively. Naturally, in my most recent book, Possibilist, I adopt techniques from documentaries, including point of view. Breaking free from the limitations of time and space, I acquired a critical awareness about the reality of the whole Earth.   There’s a striking scene at the start of the movie The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), directed by Yorgos Lanthimos: a close-up of a beating heart in a split-open body that slowly zooms in. As long as it’s alive, a heartbeats unconditionally and solely for its owner. It does not beat for anyone else, not even for a blood relative. Possibilist is like a scarlet heart, except, strangely, it not only beats for the owner but also looks outward. It’s a kind of heart that beats even though it has been separated from its owner. Do you think poetry is leading you toward something like that? If you had chosen a different medium, such as painting, music, or film, do you think your art would still be in a similar vein?   When I was picking out the color for the cover of Possibilist, I told the publisher, “Make it the color of dead blood.” It was because I thought of my recent poems as a documentation of the world full of death and suffering. They hold the liquids of sadness—blood, sweat, and tears. Now that I think about it, your description of that color as “a scarlet heart” is interesting. Poetry does throb on its own like a “heart that beats even [when] it has been separated from its owner.” A poet is one who learns that music by heart and sings it. I’ve suffered from arrhythmia since I was young. When I have an attack, my heart thrashes regardless of my will. Even if a poet doesn’t have arrhythmia, their heart is always overworked compared to other organs because a poet’s responsibility is to feel the pain of the world deeply, to take it into their own heart. Recently, my attacks have been less frequent, which is a relief because it means I’m healthier, but at the same time I wonder if my heart’s grown less sensitive. I don’t think my art would have been very different had I chosen a different medium.   About a year ago, I saw a couple on the subway giving each other a quick peck over their masks. It was a very COVID-19 kind of sight. “Easter Sunday” is set during the pandemic. You wrote that humans were like grains swept up in the wings of an angel. I thought the word “independence” in the fourth stanza applied not only to bacteria but also to humans, who believed that they were“independent” up until then. The line “To get something, you have to throw something away” gave me pause. We had to give up many things due to COVID-19, but are there things we gained thanks to the curious balance of the world?   If it wasn’t for COVID-19, would we have had the chance to ponder bacteria and viruses so often and so seriously? I think COVID-19 gave us the opportunity to step out of our human-centric focus and reflect on the myriad lives surrounding us and how they are connected, to pause the torrent of civilization and look back on our way of life. The factories stopped, the flow of money slowed, and movement and consumption declined. With that, fine dust diminished substantially too. They say the Himalayas, which had been shrouded in smog, became clearly visible. But I’m worried because, as soon as the pandemic subsided, fine dust levels surged again. Long before I wrote “Easter Sunday,” I wrote a poem called “From One Amoeba to Another.” As a poet, I don’t think the simple lives of protozoans and parasites like bacteria, viruses, amoeba, and other creatures invisible to the human eye are inferior. I think they’re remarkable beings who possess the wisdom of coexistence and immortality. Viruses gave up their independence and became omnipresent. On the other hand, humans called obstinacy and selfishness “independence” or “individuality” and became engrossed in propagating only ourselves. The pandemic was the event that sent this myth of hubris tumbling down in one fell swoop.   This is a personal question, but I believe many artists are curious about this. When I try to type the word “mask” into a poem, I sense a certain resistance. I worry that it would be like when you’re immersed in an old movie or a show, but as soon as a character whips out a flip phone, it distracts you, takes you out of that world. I guess I could call it anxiety about my representation of contemporary life eventually coming across as irrelevant. Your poems present their topics and objects in their correct contexts, but they don’t fall into the trap of such an anxiety. Will you share your thoughts on this?   Poetry is generally regarded as an emotional and subjective medium, but to heighten its emotional delivery, you actually need to distance yourself from your own emotions. Instead of writing barefaced, if you put on the mask of a speaker, take on a persona, it allows for objectivity and dramatic effect. “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion,” as T. S. Eliot wrote. Using an objective correlative to convey thoughts and emotions allows for a richer and more accurate delivery. It’s difficult to know precisely what you mean when you say that my poems “present their topics and objects in their correct contexts, but they don’t fall into the trap of such an anxiety,” but I imagine it’s a characteristic borne of distancing myself from my self. On the other hand, when I discuss other people or things, I try to minimize the distance between us. I can’t become them, but I need the “tenderness” as described by Olga Tokarczuk in The Tender Narrator. She explained that “tenderness is the most modest form of love,” that it “personalizes everything to which it relates, making it possible to give it a voice, to give it the space and the time to come into existence, and to be expressed.” It’s the act of putting aside my own voice as the observer or speaker and attentively waiting for the voice of other beings to ring out from within the text. Many poems in Possibilist are about other people’s experiences rather than my own, and they often take on the voice of the poetic object instead of my voice as the first-person observer. I didn’t want to talk about them. I listened carefully for them to speak directly for themselves. A poet is a good listener before they are a speaker.   When I read “Glaciers’ Funeral,” I realized how deeply humans inhabit the delusion that nature is irrelevant to them. The 225 small, black squares in the poem can be read as ice floes or as the dead bodies of war. The part that is most intriguing to me is: “We came from that vanishing, vanishing chunk of ice./ Drifting far away from the ice skirt and living in the city of fire, we / maybe awakened by the scream of a glacier cracking.” I interpret this part to mean that even if we are born in a city and will die in a city, ancient humans have lived by coping with nature, or by going along with nature, and because we area part of nature, we come from chunks of ice. I would like to hear about the specific context of these lines as well as your intentions.   I’ve read books and watched films about polar regions, but I’ve never seen an ice floe firsthand.But one time, I woke from a dream, startled by the sound of a giant glacier splitting. It was more of an aural experience than a visual one and, even afterward, I would hear that sound like a scream in my ears. Each time, it rang out as if it ruptured my heart. Then, I read an article about “glacier funerals” in the news. Like environmental activists holding funerals for glaciers, I’m holding a funeral through this poem. I likened the death of glaciers brought on by humans’ fossil fuel civilization to “the battle of fire and ice.” The squares spread out on the page are a visualization of ice floating like “the bodies of the dead in the war.” As I spoke the names of the glaciers one by one, I realized that they’re not some grand Mother Nature that exists far away, but that “We came from that vanishing, vanishing chunk of ice.” The Italian pianist Ludovico Einaudi played “Elegy for the Arctic” on a grand piano set up between the ice floes. Even as he played the elegy, you could hear glaciers thunder as they broke down. That’s the music of today, including the thunder.   “Water’s Borderline” makes it clear that wars deliberately started by humans aren’t the only wars being fought. The changing of maritime boundaries is another war that is a drain on humans. The phrase “day after day” is in the last line of both “Glaciers’ Funeral” and “Water’s Borderline”: “but also the funeral for glaciers day after day” and “Day after day, a new water line is drawn on the map.” The moment I arrive at the phrase “day after day” I feel like my time becomes synced in real time to the glaciers’ and the time when borders of water change. A disquieting tremor runs through me as if I’d been handed the same stopwatch as nature. What’s the time left on your stopwatch? Where are you running toward?   We don’t witness it, but the harsh reality is, every day, glaciers break off and climate refugees wander in search of water for survival. The main culprits of the climate crisis are in wealthy countries in the northern hemisphere, but the victims of climate crisis who have lost their homes are in poorer countries in the southern hemisphere.As freshwater flows north, tropical and subtropical regions dry up. Borders used to be drawn according to the political system of nations, but today, new,invisible borders are being drawn according to climate and environmental changes.     Artists are approaching the topic of glaciers from many angles. The installation art piece Ice Watch (2015) by Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosing is one of them. In an effort to raise awareness about the climate crisis, the artists brought twelve pieces of glacial ice from Iceland to Place du Panthéon in Paris. It was meant to be an opportunity to touch glaciers and watch them melt in the heart of the city and to reflect on climate change in the North Pole without going all the way there. But I wonder if it was truly necessary to spend so much money to ship and display those ice blocks just to raise awareness that the Earth is growing hotter. I wrote “Ice Watch” with such criticism in mind. To me, those glacier pieces looked like “twelve yetis dragged to the city.” The worst part was how the audience treated the ice. To them, they were nothing more than toys or a novel spectacle. These momentary performances can’t slow or reverse the climate crisis. What’s important is to change the lifestyle of each individual. As you wrote, Da Hee, the moment someone arrives at the phrase “day after day,” they should feel their time becoming “synced to the time of glaciers and to the borders of water change,” feel “a disquieting tremor” run through them as if they were “handed the same stopwatch as nature,” and become inspired to change their lifestyle.   Reading “How Far the Rose Came From,” I felt that, regarding the few days that roses are in our hands after they’ve left a long trail of carbon footprints, to call that the “nature of twenty roses” shows how limited humans are in our view of nature. If we are to change our ways, this is where we have to start. I sense a similar sorrow in “Milk Cows”—exploitation hides even in a cup of milk we drink in the morning and someone, somewhere, is counting the dollars. The use of simple sentences to concisely deliver accurate facts is striking. The sentences reveal the processes that we think we know but don’t know, that we want to continue ignoring. These unpoetic sentences have the great effect of making me recognize the cycle that wrings out life.   Whether it’s a bouquet of roses or a cup of milk, we need to look past the smooth surface of a product’s representation and retrace the process by which it is produced and distributed. Even the floricultural industry, with its short circulation period, leaves a large carbon footprint across continents. The livestock industry, too, traps animals in mechanized cages and endlessly exploits them, emitting large amounts of carbon in the process. It’s impossible to amass wealth in a capitalist society without such oppression and exploitation of nature and people. So, I wrote “How Far the Rose Came From” and “Milk Cows” as dryly as possible with matter-of-fact sentences for satirical effect.     We must break the “cycle [that] wrings out life.” That’s true, but I don’t really have the answer to the “how,” either. I just think about it all the time. I don’t think poetry is supposed to present solutions or carry enlightening statements. I think poetry’s role is to raise awareness of problems that are hard to notice. In these poems, I don’t propose a solution, I just remind the reader of the countless traces and connections embedded in a product. In today’s world where the boundary between the natural and the artificial is blurred, I would also like to raise these questions: “What is nature? And is nature natural?”   Toward the end of “A Black Leaf,” there are the striking images of mutated animals and overgrown plants in Chernobyl. The images in this poem feel like the chilling embodiment of a lesson we’ve refused to learn. I also think that it reflects a shift in the trajectory of your poetry from a botanical imagination to an animal one.   I think so, too. My poetry’s imagination, or sensibility, has gradually transformed from botanical to animal. My early poems almost never featured animals. Then, insects and herbivores started to appear, and in my most recent works, like Filename: Lyric Poetry and Possibilist, there are carnivores. I commented on this in the author’s note to Filename: Lyric Poetry “Fangs and claws passed by, scratching my life. In myself, too, there arose words with fangs and claws. What to do with these bleeding words?” As the world harms and scars me,I learn to fight back, but in the process, I think my poetry and language grow darker and more cynical.     “A Black Leaf” is about Chernobyl, where everyone—plants, animals, and humans alike—all suffered a catastrophe verging on extinction. It was eerie to learn that the name “Chernobyl” means “black leaf,” as if it were a prophecy for the disaster. As I read up on the event, the ecological changes and current state of the area stood out to me. I reflected on not only the destructive capacity of nuclear power but also the way we respond to a catastrophe. The tour package of Chernobyl, a part of so-called “dark tourism,” troubled me. Human consumption even targets catastrophes.   We talked a bit about a few poems in Possibilist, so now let’s talk about your newer poems. “Blood and Oil” reminded me of your debut poem, “To the Roots.” It gives a full view of the long distance between the Ra Heeduk in 1991 who wrote of drawing bright blood to let love pass by and the current one who asks herself if there is anyone who hasn’t drunk from “this juice of death” we draw ceaselessly from the ground. If you were to meet your 1991 self, what would you two talk about?   The climate crisis is a serious problem, but so is the danger of war. How many innocent lives are taken between national borders that are redrawn daily? We’re becoming desensitized to the war in Ukraine, but its effects are felt in our daily lives, from oil prices to gas prices. My focus in “Blood and Oil” is the fact that petroleum, the blood that fuels contemporary civilization, and human blood are both carbon compounds that contain porphyrin. Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, the former Minister of Mines and Hydrocarbons of Venezuela, called petroleum “the devil’s excrement.” I call it “this juice of death” because it’s a fossil fuel resulting from dead organisms. Petroleum and gas are symbols that encompass capitalism, civilization, religion, war, and more.     Your reading of the poem makes me think that what began as pure love and conscientiousness of life in my debut To the Roots has now become a fighter suffering on the Anthropocene’s mudslinging field of war. Dirt, the speaker of “To the Roots,” is an important touchstone to measuring the change in my poetics. As time has passed, the dirt in my poetry became less of an abundant Mother Earth. Rather, it has grown dry and barren. This internal sterilization perfectly overlaps with the process in which the Earth has been exploited and polluted. The world is deeply ill. It’s no longer possible for me to write beautiful and romantic lyric poetry. If “1990s me” and “2020s me” met, I’m sure they’d be very different, but they’d completely understand the change and they’d console and support each other.   My recent talking point is that humans cannot be alone and cannot not be alone. When I read “A Spider Starfish” (referring to brittle stars, the echinoderms closely related to starfish), I was intensely fascinated by this creature. I think this poem will come to mind whenever I face another loss. When I think myself deeper and deeper into a hole, I wonder if what I truly want is something like this: “Even if my arm is ripped off / My body is regenerated, exhaling light instead of moans.” Will you talk more about brittle stars? The poem also reminds me of Kim Su-Young and Descartes. I’d like to know your thoughts on that.   Last summer, I took a lecture series called History Entangled in Life by biologist Jeon Bang-Wook. I was more intrigued by the organisms in his examples than the theoretical parts. The brittle star, an echinoderm, was one of them. It has five long, thin arms that easily regenerate when cut off. It has neither eyes nor brain, but it feels and thinks with its entire body. The poem “A Spider Starfish” is a variation on its way of life, taking on Descartes’s principle of “Cogito, ergo sum.” The irregular crisscross structure of the poem is a visual representation of a brittle star’s movement and method of reproduction.     You were probably reminded of Kim Su-Young because of the words “with my whole body.” Kim Su-Young said, “Poetry is written not with the brain, nor with the heart, but with the whole body.” Now, I want to learn the dynamic quality of the entire body not from Kim Su-Young, but from brittle stars, a non-human entity, something that I’ve been interested in writing about. I wrote nine books of poetry about humans, so it won’t hurt to write at least one about non-humans that surround us. I would never be able to escape my human point of view, even if I write about non-humans, but it’s a good incentive to let go of my human-centric gaze for a bit.     In high school, I quit the literature club to join the biology club. I was very interested in biological phenomena, and enjoyed observation and experimentation since I was young. I probably would’ve become a biologist if I hadn’t become a poet. “We are made of star-stuff,” as Carl Sagan said, and the boundary between life and non-life is blurry, and all life is entangled with one another. Nor are our bodies singular—we are symbiotic with the countless bacteria that live in our bodies. My talking point these days is the symbiosis and entanglement within the community of “I.”   “A Mushroom at the End of the World” draws an image in my mind of damp, dirt-laden pine mushrooms before they’re collected. All I see in real life are neatly packaged pine mushrooms for sale, though. When I imagine glaciers,echinoderms, and pine mushrooms, this tension inside me starts to dwindle. That’s when I realize that I’m addicted to myself. I think I have to let go of this addiction to walk deeper into a forest farther away. Poetry can be subjective, and it can depend on taste, but sometimes it can be precise in raising issues. As a writer, is there anything you consider to be your responsibility, your duty?   As I wrote in a footnote, “A Mushroom at the End of the World” is the title of a book by anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Tsing analyzed the system and flow of capitalism through pine mushroom harvesting and distribution. I found a mushroom that sprouted in a flowerpot I left on the balcony during the rainy season. I looked at the white spores that had spread out on the dirt and imagined the mushroom popping off its spores like fireworks in the garden at night. Mushrooms reproduce asexually through spores, and their spawn reach into the ground and, entangled with rotten tree roots, moss, and insects, play a vital role in the underground ecosystem. That kind of symbiosis seems to be fading in human society because, as you said, we can’t escape the state of being addicted to ourselves. Before we head deeper into a more distant forest,we must first turn our gaze from ourselves to others. Then, the pain of others and the state of the world will come into view. In that way, a writer is one who suffers the world’s pain and sadness and translates it into language.   Last question. “End of the World” is within the world but implies a space outside of the world as well. If words were possible at the end of the world,they must be poetry. Do any phrases come to mind at the end of this interview?Personally, I feel like I’ve become an unknown organism that has traveled to the end of the world and become human again. But the end of the world? What an outlandish dream.   When Tsing says that the mushroom is at the end of the world, it’s a metaphor. The end is the most desolate, unstable, and exasperating place. Likewise, those who harvest mushrooms are the poor not protected by law. I think poetry belongs at the end of the world as well. It stands precariously close to the end and imagines the world beyond the end, the outside. My soon-to-be-published book of poetics is titled Outside Civilization. Our lives and consciousnesses won’t ever be free of civilization and capitalism but I chose this title to promise that I’ll step forward with my gaze turned toward the outside of civilization. “End of the World” reminds me of a poem I wrote a long time ago called “End of Land.” The end of the land isn’t a dead end but a new boundary where land and sea meet, and a poet is one who constantly lives out that boundary. Maybe I predicted this fate of the poet as a twenty-year-old, standing on the southernmost beach of Korea, the end of land. I would like to end this conversation with the closing lines of that poem. Thank you for your intimate questions and conversation.   I wasn’t searching for the end of land but I’m standing on it. But it’s strange that this precariousness is damp with beauty, that the end of land is always damp, that, just to see it, I’ll end up here again and again.   Translated by Soeun Seo     Korean Works Mentioned: •   “To the Roots,” To the Roots (Changbi, 1991)      「뿌리에게」, 『뿌리에게』 (창비, 1991) •   “End of Land,” The Words Stained the Leaves(Changbi, 1994)     「땅 끝」, 『그 말이 잎을 물들였다』 (창비, 1994) •   “From One Amoeba to Another,” The Time Horses Return (Moonji, 2014)     「한 아메바가 다른 아메바를」, 『말들이 돌아오는 시간』(문학과지성사, 2014) •   Filename: Lyric Poetry (Changbi, 2018)     『파일명 서정시』 (창비, 2018) •  “Easter Sunday,” “Glaciers’ Funeral,” “How Far the Rose Came From,” “Milk Cows,” “A Black Leaf,” Possibilist (Munhakdongne, 2021)     「어떤 부활절」, 「빙하 장례식」, 「장미는 얼마나 멀리서 왔는지」, 「젖소들」, 「검은 잎사귀」, 『가능주의자』 (문학동네,2021) •   “Water’s Borderline,” (Sangjinghag-yeonguso,Aug. 2022)     「물의 국경선」, (상징학연구소 2022년 가을호, 2022) •   “Ice Watch,” (Sangjinghag-yeonguso, Aug.2022)     「얼음 시계」, (상징학연구소 2022년 가을호, 2022) •   “A Spider Starfish,” (Position, vol. 38,2022)     「거미불가사리」, (포지션 38호, 2022) •   “A Mushroom at the End of the World,” (Position,vol. 38, 2022)     「세상 끝의 버섯」, (포지션 38호, 2022) •   “Blood and Oil,” (The Quarterly Changbi,2023)      「피와 석유」, (창작과비평 199호, 2023)

  by Lee Da Hee

• 

  Interview with Kim Yeonsu: He Who Writes and Rewrites Every Day

  Your latest short story collection titled A Future as Ordinary as This was noted “Novel of the Year” in survey of fifty Korean authors run by the largest bookstore chain in South Korea. In your opinion, what is it about the book that resonated so much with readers?  I’ve been doing a lot of walking around lately. I just walk wherever my feet take me. Although I look at the scenes unfolding on the streets and the people I walk past, I rarely think about anything. I just walk. I got into this new habit after the coronavirus pandemic broke out. I realized that my own thoughts didn’t hold any special power. In fact, many thoughts are crossing my mind this very instant, but I choose not to pay attention to them. That’s because there are other thoughts I’d rather focus on. This is the biggest change I’ve experienced lately, which is something my readers might’ve picked up on through my writing. But that, too, is just a thought I had right now. The truth is I don’t really know. You made your literary debut as a poet and later became famous as a fiction writer. You’ve also published numerous essay collections. How does writing essays differ from writing fiction? I used to write essays whenever I hit a wall with my fiction writing. This is a creative writing technique known among writers as “creative procrastination.” The logic behind it is that performing two difficult tasks at once makes the least difficult one feel like a breeze. A short story is easier to write than a novel, and an essay is easier to write than a short story. That’s why I would turn to essay writing whenever I would struggle with fiction writing. As a result, I’ve never really struggled when it comes to writing essays. However, essays are sensitive to lies. As I grew into more of a fiction writer over the course of my career and writing fiction became easier, the conventions of the essay genre began to feel increasingly stifling to me. That’s why most of what I write today is fiction, including things that I might’ve written in the form of essays back in the day. One of your earliest works, the short story “If I Take Another Month to Cross the Snowy Mountains,” features a character who writes as a means to come to terms with his girlfriend’s death. Your stories seem to be inspired by a will to overcome feelings of denial in the face of loss or frustration with reality through writing. What is it about writing that allows us to reconcile with reality?  I write something every day. Sometimes I’ll sit down at my desk to write, and other times I will pull out a notebook to hastily jot something down as I wait for the train at the station. I hardly ever write proper sentences. It’s as though I stick my arm into a manhole without knowing what lurks inside and pull out whatever I can get my hand on. It could be just a few words, or a handful of sentences. My mind is constantly attempting to fill the void left behind by each letter I pull out. Since I don’t know what lurks inside the manhole, I must rely on my imagination to string complete sentences together. Anything goes since it’s all a product of my imagination. I could end up with a trivial piece of writing or an idea that will flourish into a novel after decades of writing. Imagination knows no bounds. I also do a lot of rewriting, too, of course. A single idea could lead to multiple versions of the same story. Which one gets to see the light of day will depend on the story’s skeleton. What differentiates writing from speaking is that written words leave a visible skeleton behind. If the bones are too brittle, I go back and rewrite everything from the start. I then look at the story’s skeleton once more. If the bones still seem too frail, it’s back to square one again; but if they appear sturdy, I consider my job done. I often recommend writing as a tool to reflect on past events for this exact reason. It’s because writing holds the power to make a story’s skeleton stick out in plain sight. Losing a loved one or failing to obtain the object of one’s desires are some of the painful things we all experience in life, but the sense of loss or frustration we feel comes as a result of attachment, or love. There would be no loss or frustration if we didn’t feel emotionally attached to begin with. Given this, couldn’t we say that people who write as a means to come to terms with loss or frustration are in fact doing so in an attempt to continue protecting the very object of their love? Could writing be considered an act of love in this sense? Looking back on my youth, there were many instances where I confused violence with love, both in regards to myself and others. This led me to wonder—is that just the way love is? Perhaps so. I think the opposite of love is fear. We sometimes choose love because we loath fear, or vice-versa. My point is that we have a difficult time distinguishing between the two. This gives rise to misunderstandings which don’t reflect reality, the kind of situation which easily lends itself to being made into a story. Love and stories share different realities. The reality of a story lies in revealing our own misunderstandings. This is what I meant by the story’s “skeleton” in my previous answer. If you can convince yourself of your love through writing, then you are admitting this reality.  “Everyone gets one shot at love.” This sentence appears in your novel No Matter Who and How Lonely You Are. Everybody has their own experience with love, which may manifest itself in the form of mutual misunderstandings, or in some cases, violence. Among the various factors which may give rise to discord and conflicts between individuals, is there a reason why you chose to focus specifically on loneliness?  Everything in the world falls into one of two categories: things we can understand through the right amount of effort, and things we can’t understand despite all effort. When two or more individuals get together to agree on something, they’re likely to reach a common understanding if they try hard enough. On the other hand, no amount of effort may help one understand what someone else is going through. I believe this is where history and fiction differ. Each of our individual lives is closer to fiction than history. The reason we have a hard time making ourselves understood to others is because we each have different lives. If we look at loneliness simply for what it is, it doesn’t seem hard to understand. I recently read Oh William! (Random House, 2021) by author Elizabeth Strout, a novel which begins with a question and ends with an exclamation point. It’s similar to when we ask ourselves “What’s that?” only to reach the conclusion “That’s what it is!” When a question turns into an exclamation, loneliness simply becomes loneliness. I don’t think it strange at all that love may sometimes turn into violence, or that we treat loneliness as an old friend who is neither good nor bad. You’ve written that loneliness doesn’t come from a state of neediness, and that a doughnut’s hole isn’t a void where something used to be, but that it was just a hole to begin with. I found such thoughts to be comforting. However, loneliness is bound to replace an empty hole left behind by something that goes missing. Are we being misled by a false perception that there must have been something when there really wasn’t? What can stories do about physical memories?  I feel like this question has more to do with mourning than loneliness. Someone going through a loss will naturally feel sad. There are many ways of grieving, among which my own preferred one is stories. I’ve used characters going through a separation with their lover as the protagonists for a long time because they have a greater craving for stories than anyone else. The story someone tells after breaking up with a loved one will go through a number of revisions. The first version on the day following the breakup won’t be the same as the version a week or a year after. Through the process of revising the same story multiple times, one reaches a point where they decide not to bring any more changes to it. This is when the period of mourning comes to a close and they are left with a story about their loss. In a sense, mourning allows us to get a story out of what we’ve lost. To me, all stories are like reminders of the voids left behind by loss. In many of your works, events in modern Korean history are depicted as the driving factor behind violent acts of love, or as the direct source of loss and frustration. Whether it be the Japanese colonial period, the Korean War, or the student protests of the 1980s, you seem to have a particular interest in modern historical events. Do you think this has something to do with the fact that you grew up as a teenager in the turbulent period between the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s in Korea? In other words, to what extent has history affected your own experiences with loss and frustration?  In my freshman year at university, I remember seeing the rallying cry “REVOLT” painted in big, red letters across the walls inside the bathrooms of the liberal arts building. The mood on the campus felt like we were on the eve of a revolution. Every day was extremely tense. I don’t remember any of the minor details—only how tense it was. The relentless tension came from our misled belief that we were perpetually in the midst of a decisive moment in history. Looking back on the events now, I realize that this couldn’t possibly have been the case. This means that we’d been wrong most of the time. Today, I feel like such misunderstandings were responsible for the loss of many lives. And this kind of tension wasn’t limited to my time in university—it resurfaced again when I worked an office job and when I had my first child. I think society is governed by big currents. It’s no easy task for a single individual to stand up to any of these currents. And there’s no way out for those who get caught in one. Those who are lucky might ride a current’s waves to success, but the majority of people will fail and fall into despair no matter what they do. Whether we’re looking back on history or what’s happening right now, people are and have always been pursuing some kind of current. When they actually get swept away, however, things hardly ever go as planned. One can always blame the current for the frustration and loss it leaves in its wake, but I think we ought not to let ourselves get swept away in the first place. Even if a story was to be written and read outside of a major social current, it would still have to be circulated and consumed within society. How do you think stories are able to influence social currents? In other words, what role do stories play within society? Although society presents us all with a formula for success, it’s really difficult for the majority of us to succeed using this exact formula. There must be a reason why we continue to believe in the formula even though it doesn’t work, but it’s really not something I’m interested in. I often find myself wondering whether or not I’m living in a dimension that falls outside of mainstream society. Since I’m not interested in the kind of life perceived as exemplary by societal standards, I just write stories dealing with other things. My stories may seem to challenge societal norms on the surface, but my intention isn’t to have them play any kind of role within society. In your novel Wonder Boy, you use “wonder” as a new solution to the issues you raise in your writing (as can be surmised from the work’s title). I’d like you to tell us more about wonder as a means of coming to terms with frustration and loss, and as a way of overcoming loneliness.  If someone finds themselves submerged in water, it most likely won’t occur to them that they are wet. They will only come to such a realization once they come out of the water. I think “wonder” works in a similar way. You need to be out of the water to experience what it’s like not to be wet. Only then can you know that being in water makes you wet. I don’t think one can arrive at this wondrous conclusion through the experience and insight gained from being in water. One needs to come out of the water to realize they aren’t lonely. All the stories and clichés ensnaring us are just like water. I advise readers not to believe all the stories they are told.  Keeping on topic, here is a line taken from Wonder Boy: “Understanding is to tell someone else's story for them, and to fall in love again with them through their story.” When I read this passage, I got the impression that your view of loneliness extended beyond your own condition to include the loneliness of others as well. As a fiction author, what is the significance of conveying other people’s stories for them?  I’ve lived a very narrow existence until now, both in terms of life experience and the kind of knowledge I’ve acquired. For me to pass judgement on the world around me with such limited life baggage would be akin to walking on the edge of a precipice with my eyes closed. I need more life experience in order to open my eyes. I’m always surprised when I have a conversation with someone. More than anything else, it has to do with the fact that the material environment in which others live is so different from my own. The same applies to the kind of lives they’ve lived—we might as well be living in completely different worlds. But whenever I accept these other worlds, they allow me to stretch the boundaries of my own existence a little further. That’s why I need to expose myself to more numerous and diverse stories.  Following the publication of Wonder Boy and If the Waves Belong to the Sea, eight years would go by before the release of your next title, The Last of Seven Years. Interestingly enough, the novel tells the story of a poet who becomes unable to write poems. In your case, what kind of situation would make you unable to write fiction? I asked myself the question: “If one day you were suddenly forced to write poems of worship [praising those in power], would you rather follow in Baek Seok’s1 footsteps and escape to the remote countryside instead?” I didn’t think so when I first began writing The Last of Seven Years. However, by the time I reached the last sentence of the novel, my answer had changed to a resounding “yes.” My perspective completely shifted through the process of writing the story. Many people think of Baek Seok as a poet who lost the freedom to write the kinds of poems he wanted, but I came to see him as a poet who made the deliberate choice not to write poems that he didn’t feel inclined to. I’m sure Baek Seok continued composing poems the way he liked but simply kept them for himself. I would do the same—I wouldn’t write any stories I didn’t want to write. I would only write the kinds of stories I felt inclined to, even though in the eyes of others it may appear like I’ve lost the freedom to write what I want. What kind of novel do you want to write at this point in your career?  I’ve always been interested in people who managed to survive in situations where the odds were stacked against them. For example, the Manchurian communists appearing in “The Night Sings,” or the Joseon-era Korean and Japanese Catholics appearing in “Three Steps Toward the Sea.” These people went through the worst imaginable kind of suffering and would’ve been better off dying, and yet they didn’t. I only recently found out why I felt drawn to these kinds of characters. It’s because what I thought of as the end of life is in fact only the start of something else, and there are things which only reveal themselves to us in such moments. I think I finally have an idea of what these things are, and I want to write about them. In your short story collection A Future as Ordinary as This published last year, the “ordinary” is presented in a positive light as something with the power to make loss and frustration bearable, an idea I found both refreshing and odd. Do you think the ordinary is really all it takes?  I think many of our problems in life stem from our level of satisfaction with things. There are times when frustration can feel satisfying, such as when we know we’ve done our best in a particular situation. We feel satisfied when we’re able to tell ourselves we did everything we could and have no regrets. Achievements can also be satisfying, of course, but it’s not always the case. The difference between feeling satisfied or not is semantic. It also depends on how we felt prior to reaching that state. In A Future as Ordinary as This, I opted for the word “ordinary” because the most amazing of futures will also be the most ordinary. We all wish to feel satisfied, and there’s nothing quite as amazing as being able to find satisfaction in the ordinary. While some people will despair in the face of the ordinary, others will manage to find satisfaction in it. What is responsible for such a difference in mindset? I’m someone who works with language. Although language reflects reality, language itself isn’t reality, which is why it’s bound to be misleading. This explains the constant need we have to correct our language. We can all think differently as long as language can be corrected. And if we’re able to change the way we think, we can all become different people. Despair can be turned into satisfaction through the act of rewriting. I think our mindset depends on the words we use. It’s a difference in language. This is why I recommend writing to everyone. Someone who can correct their own language will be able to tame their mind, and in turn, transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. Many people I know who have read A Future as Ordinary as This told me that the book brought them comfort. What is it about stories in general that give them the power to comfort us—both for the writer who writes them and the readers who reads them? Back when I was in university, one way I would console friends going through a breakup was by drinking with them. I hardly did anything. I just listened to whatever they had to say. It was the same for me—I would also feel the urge to talk to someone whenever I went through a difficult time. Somebody once said that sorrow becomes bearable when it’s converted into a story. Stories undoubtedly hold this kind of power. But writing a story takes this one step further because it requires one to go back and revise what they wrote. The story might be the same, but the writer has to rework it. This could either make the story more elaborate or more abstract. Since it deals with language, the act of rewriting doesn’t make a story worse. Rewriting a story several times also allows the writer to make new discoveries. The message I was trying to convey in A Future as Ordinary as This is that we have the power to rewrite the story of our life multiple times. We can’t change things that have already happened, but we can rewrite our memories of those things. I think this is where the power of stories lies. You wrote the following in the author’s note of A Future as Ordinary as This: “One day, these stories will become the reality of our lives.” This line made me realize that writing isn’t just a means of reconciling with the past, but also a way of propelling the present into the future. Thirty years have elapsed since your literary debut, and you are now in your fifties. How can a change or a shift in perspective allow us to look in on the present from the future without remaining stuck in the past? I really enjoy getting older. When I was younger, I thought of every moment as a decisive one. In my mind, not getting what I wanted amounted to failure. But with age I’ve learned how silly that is. All of these moments I thought to be so important at the time were just part of a larger process. I also see this moment right now as part of a process. If we see every moment as part of something bigger, then it doesn’t matter what happens in this very moment because we know it will be followed by a next one which has yet to reveal itself to us. There’s no way of knowing what the next moment holds. The world abounds with stories I’ve yet to encounter, but each passing moment allows me to experience more of them. That’s why I’m constantly reading stories I’ve yet to understand. I might have an experience one day that makes all the pieces fit together. It’s also why I write stories I still don’t even understand myself. I think it’s all I can do given my own narrow life experience.  Although you write in your native language of Korean, you’ve written stories taking place all around the world including countries such as China, Japan, and Germany. As an author with an interest in world history, and who has been influenced by the cultural traditions of both the East and the West, I’d like to ask you about your thoughts on translation. Given that your works are being translated into foreign languages as we speak, please tell us what you think about the role of translation.    I was born in a small town in the south of Korea. Growing up, I was encouraged to become either a lawyer or a doctor by the elders in our neighborhood. I had been convinced that wealth and power would be my only ticket out of a miserable life. That is, until I read a copy of Demian I found lying around at home when I was in high school. The novel left me shaken to the core. I felt like I was reading my own story—I was Emil Sinclair. Each word uttered by Demian came as a shock. How come no adult ever told me this kind of story? I thought to myself. I wanted to read more of these stories, not be told that becoming a lawyer or a doctor was the only way I could live a dignified existence. I started making frequent visits to the bookstore and the library where I had the chance to read more stories. I believe in a community of stories spanning the world and whose purpose is to offer alternatives to the stories of those in power who control the global narratives. A story offering an alternative in one country is just as relevant in any other country. That’s why I believe in the need to actively translate stories that can serve as alternatives to dominant narratives.   Translated by Léo-Thomas Brylowski KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:• A Future as Ordinary as This (Munhak Dongne, 2022)『이토록 평범한 미래』 (문학동네, 2022)• The Last of Seven Years (Munhak Dongne, 2020)『일곱해의 마지막』 (문학동네, 2020)• If the Waves Belong to the Sea (Munhak Dongne, 2015)『파도가 바다의 일이라면』 (문학동네, 2015)• No Matter Who and How Lonely You Are (Munhak Dongne, 2014)『네가 누구든 얼마나 외롭든』 (문학동네, 2014)• Wonder Boy (Munhak Dongne, 2012)『원더보이』 (문학동네, 2012)• “If I Take Another Month to Cross the Snowy Mountains,” I am a Phantom Writer (Munhak Dongne, 2016)「다시 한 달을 가서 설산을 넘으면」, 『나는 유령작가입니다』 (문학동네, 2016) [1] Translator’s Note: Baek Seok was a Korean poet born in 1912 during the Japanese colonial era. Although he spent part of his life in present-day South Korea, he returned to his hometown in the North following the division of the country in 1945. He opted to retire from his writing career as a poet in 1962 to become a shepherd after facing criticism from the literary establishment in North Korea.

  by Kim Hyunwoo

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  Interview with Kim Kyung-uk: Fiction, It's Not Over Until It's Over

  Congratulations on your latest short story collection, When Someone Talks About Me (Moonji, 2022). The title work features a protagonist who feels paralyzed and struggles to breathe whenever someone talks about him. Could you tell us the way you feel when you hear others talk about you? My mother called me to express her concern after she received a copy of my previous short story collection, My Girlfriends’ Fathers (Munhak Dongne, 2019). She was worried critics had stopped reading my books. I wasn’t sure what she meant at first, but it was due to the fact there was no critical commentary at the end of the book, as is customary in Korea. Just as the title of my latest collection suggests, I feel embarrassed when other people talk about me, so for that one time, I opted not to include a literary critic’s take on my stories. But I didn’t expect such a reaction from my mother. This is why I proactively told my editor that I wanted to include a review in my latest book. From some point on, my books didn’t seem to elicit any overt response from readers, so I thought it would be beneficial to receive at least one person’s feedback. It would also allow my mother to put her mind at ease. Your prolificacy as a writer has earned you the nickname “Story-Machine.” Could you tell us which authors or works have most influenced your writing throughout the years? When I was younger, I was particularly drawn to authors such as Albert Camus and Osamu Dazai whose lives came to an abrupt end right at the height of their prime. However, as I passed the peak of my youth, I became more interested in the works of authors such as Philip Roth, John le Carré, and Doris Lessing, who all continued writing well into their old age. When asked why he had quit writing, Philip Roth said, “I did what I did and it’s done.” Like him, I want to continue investing my heart and soul into writing and put my pen down once I’ve decided that I’ve written enough. Your debut story, “Outsider,” is about someone who tries to keep himself at a distance from the center. I think this provides us with an important insight into your work. Could you tell us how you define the center, and where do you find the strength or awareness to keep your distance from it? I wonder if my first story would’ve been more popular with the “in-crowd” had I gone with the title “Insider” instead. To tell you the truth, I chose “Insider” as the title for one of my other serial works that was published online last year, but it doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference.        I’d always been shy in the presence of others ever since I was a little boy, so I’d look in on the action from some distance away. I was a delicate child, and since I easily got carsick, I often stayed home by myself instead of taking part in family outings. Even today, I spend the majority of my time alone inside a small room. I think my own introversion has made me more curious about interactions between people.        I still think of the “center” as something that exists between people. The middle of a wheel is bound to be empty. Otherwise, how else would you mount an axle? What you can’t see when you spin with the wheel becomes visible only when you stand firm in the center of the rotation. In a sense, we could say that the most central thing is also the outermost, and the outermost thing is also the most central. In a 2013 interview for World Literature Review, you said that you tend to choose the title of a work before you even begin writing the story. I thought that was really interesting. I was wondering: what is the process you go through to come up with a new title, and how do you go about writing the story from there? To tell you the truth, I got the idea for the title “Outsider” from a movie I’d seen at the time. From what I remember, it was a film depicting young people who’d lost their direction in life. As you can see with my early works like “There is No Coffee at the Bagdad Café,” I would often get inspiration for titles from movies.        One thing that hasn’t changed over my career is the fact that I can’t begin writing a story until I’ve decided on a title. To me, a title is like the story’s seed in that it contains the work’s entire DNA, from the flowers to the fruit. If I can’t come up with a title for a new story, it’s a sign that it needs more time to mature inside my mind. The title is what gives birth to the first sentence of a story, and it’s that first sentence which gives rise to the second. A plant will only grow after its seed has sprouted. Your writing style has often been described as “hard-boiled,” something that is reflected in the characters and worlds you create. However, your most recent works seem to display a warmer, more compassionate view toward your characters. Why the change in attitude? It might be a sign that the “Story-Machine”is growing rusty and that the screws are starting to come loose. I’m now fonder of characters who struggle to find where they belong than I was back when my screws were still tight. If you feel my works exude more warmth and compassion toward my characters now, it’s probably because I’ve realized that there are a lot more layers to the truth than I thought. I’ve been having an increasingly difficult time getting closer to the truth that lies beyond the present condition before us. The larger truth often gets obscured by an excess of fragmentary truths. If an author wants to cut through the maze of fragmentary truths in order to reach the bigger truth, doesn’t he need to adopt a more hard-boiled gaze? I don’t think of hard-boiled as cold—rather, it’s just as an attitude that cuts straight through the extraneous. The clearer an author’s perspective, the more likely he is to show compassion for characters faced with a dilemma. I also remember you saying in another interview that you’ve started to reflect more on human dignity. I think what defines a breach of humanity depends a lot on the historical period. At this time in history, what types of dignity violations do you find yourself reflecting on the most? That’s right. Two words I try to always bear in mind are “survival” and “dignity.” How much longer can humans survive without changing their current way of living? That’s the question I ask myself whenever I hear that our days are numbered. If I were to meet my end in an unexpected way, how would I maintain my own dignity in the face of death? I imagine a situation in which ensuring my own survival would require me to forgo not only my dignity but also the survival of others. A situation in which the only way for me to maintain my dignity would be to give up on my own life. These are the kinds of things I’ve been constantly thinking about these days while writing. Your short story “Leslie Cheung is Dead?” does such a good job of vividly capturing the mood of the early 2000s. From some point on, however, you stopped making active use of popular culture references. Could you tell us why? I’m also curious if there are any aspects of pop culture today that stand out to you. I don’t watch movies or listen to music as much as I used to. Even back when I watched movies on a nearly daily basis and had music plugged into my ears wherever I went, I still thought of fiction as questions about the time in which we live. Pop culture references were just a means for me to explore some of those questions. That’s because pop culture is by far the best indicator of an era’s mood and aspirations.        One of the things I find especially intriguing nowadays is this new form of reality TV we call “observational entertainment.”[1] It could be a show featuring a group of panelists who watch and comment on people being filmed doing something for the benefit of viewers who tune in to chat with other viewers in real time. I’ve also seen a show where a panel of guests was invited to watch other people who were themselves watching others doing something. These shows have completely blurred the distinction between the observer and the observed, and I find it strange that this doesn’t make us feel more uncomfortable. I’ve been thinking about why that could be. There has been a huge increase in observational reality shows in recent years. What do you find intriguing about them? I find it interesting to see we’ve reached a point where it’s no longer relevant to ask whether what we see on such shows is real or scripted. There’s a popular show in Korea called “Omniscient Interfering View” in which, as the name suggests, the focus isn’t so much on what’s happening on the screen, but on what people who are watching the footage have to say about it. It’s a bit like quantum physics, isn’t it? Whether a piece of matter appears as a particle or a wave depends on how one looks at it. The story “Here He Comes” from your latest work stands out from your previous works in that it’s a story about a fiction writer. Could you tell us why it took nearly thirty years to write a story inspired by your own occupation? Back in the day I felt ashamed to write“writer” in the box designated for “occupation” on customs declaration forms, but I don’t think much of it anymore. I’ve come to accept that writing is both my occupation and my own way of getting through life. That might explain why I was finally able to write a few stories featuring characters who are fiction writers. It might also have to do with the fact that I’ve grown a thicker skin with age. I really wrote “Here He Comes” hoping that “he” would come. I told myself—so what if a house has a dark past as long as it allows a writer to come up with a good story? You then wrote a sequel titled “I Didn’t Write This Story,” which is about a fiction writer who denies having written “Here He Comes,” making it your second work about a writer. Was “Here He Comes” meant to open a door to this new type of story, and was “I Didn’t Write This Story” meant to go back and shut it closed? Or are these two stories just a taste of what you have in store for us moving forward? I don’t think I could just decide one day to write a story about a writer and simply go ahead and write one. The occupation “writer” just occurred naturally to me in the process of thinking about a way to turn a novelistic question that had sprouted in my head into a story. My concern wasn’t whether or not to include a writer in the story, but what this character would say and do. Who else other than a fiction writer running low on inspiration would be willing to go and sit inside a house with a dark past? Who else other than a fiction writer with writer’s block would rejoice at the thought of moving into a house known to have witnessed a tragic incident, hoping it will help him rekindle his imagination? If I happen to come up with a good story that requires the main character to be a writer, I no longer try to find a way around it like I might have done in the past. I don’t think I have the luxury of being so picky about what I write given that good ideas don’t come easily and I’m constantly racking my brain for new ones. Could you briefly introduce us to your short story “A Sheepish History” that is featured in this issue of KLN? I think anyone who’s ever encountered a chatty taxi driver will have a lot of fun reading this work. “A Sheepish History” tells the story of a man who finds himself listening to a stranger revealing a secret he has kept buried deep in his heart for a very long time. I got the inspiration while I was on a trip to Japan. I got into a taxi and the driver began speaking to me in Japanese. Although he knew I couldn’t understand a word of what he was saying, he kept speaking to me in Japanese until we arrived at my destination. After I got out of the taxi, I kept wondering what he could possibly have been talking about. That’s when another question popped into my mind. Why did he keep talking even though he knew I couldn’t understand him? Was it because he was telling me a story that he was only willing to share with someone he didn’t have to ever see again and so wouldn’t understand him? Did he tell me something he couldn’t tell anyone around him, including the people he was closest to? These are the types of questions that eventually led me to write this short story. The story was included in a Spanish-language anthology [titled Por fin ha comenzadoel fin: cuentos y poemas coreanos—Ed.]. What made you choose this particular work to be included in KLN after it had already been introduced to Spanish readers? This short story is about a taxi driver who picks up a Korean client at the Incheon International Airport and mistakes him for a Japanese person. The client decides to play along by pretending he is indeed Japanese, and this results in this strange situation where two Koreans find themselves talking to each other in a foreign language. As the story progresses, the taxi driver unwittingly reveals a lifelong secret in Korean, wrongly thinking that his client won’t understand him. As a result, the client who had pretended to be Japanese finds himself having to bear the weight of being told the closely guarded secret of a stranger he will likely never cross paths with again. One day it struck me that no matter where we come from, everyone has a mother tongue, and that the kinds of things one can’t tell even to those closest to us are also the kinds of things which can only be told in one’s first language. I thought such stories can’t see the light of day until someonewilling to listen and interpret them appears. Some people say writers are people who tell the stories of those who can’t tell it themselves, but I have a slightly different take. I’d like to think fiction writers are people who interpret the stories of those who mumble them in their mother tongue. That’s the reason why I wanted to share this story with as many foreign readers as possible. You also participated in the Bogotá International Book Fair this year. What was it like meeting with Colombian readers? The Bogotá International Book Fair is one of the most long-standing book fairs in Latin America along with the Guadalajara International Book Fair in Mexico. Since this year’s guest of honor was South Korea, I had the privilege of taking part in the festivities and meeting with Colombian readers. Although we needed interpreters to understand one another, I was able to feel their great enthusiasm for Korea and Korean literature. Perhaps due to the fact Colombia was Gabriel García Márquez’s home country, I was also able to get a real taste of magical realism. One of the stories I wrote features a character from Colombia, and I came across someone who shared the same name as the Korean protagonist in that story. I went to get tested for COVID-19 the day before my return flight to Korea and the test site worker suddenly said he was Korean and told me his name. We didn’t get to have a real conversation, though, because I was worried about my test result. I couldn’t stop thinking about what I would do if it came back positive and I had to miss my flight and spend the next ten days quarantining in this country whose language I couldn’t speak. Thinking back on it now, I feel sorry and regret not having asked that person about his story. That’s how I was driven to write “I’m an Writer from the South,” which tells the story of a character inspired by my own situation had my fears come true and I was made to quarantine in Colombia all by myself. The protagonist in the story convinces himself that the greatest works come from complete isolation and total solitude, setting his creative spirit ablaze. I don’t want to spoil it for potential readers, so if anyone is curious to find out what happens, I invite them to look for the story in the 2022 October issue of Hyundae Munhak magazine.   You’ve previously said that instead of basing your stories on real life experiences, you prefer using your own imagination to inspire you. You’ve also said that you get more inspiration from the blank spaces in books, from what isn’t written on the pages, than from what is. Could you tell us how imagination and real-life experiences differ when you write? I’m sure it’s different for every writer, but in my case, I feel like the more I rely on real experiences, the more I struggle to make full use of my imagination. Not to mention I don’t get any fun out of it. I don’t mind getting inspiration from real-life events, but I like to write stories that are grounded in my own imagination rather than actual memories. That’s because I don’t know where my own writing will take me. In the case of “A Sheepish History,” I wouldn’t have been able to write an entire story had I gotten stuck trying to recall what I had once been told by a Japanese taxi driver. The same applies to “I’m a Writer from the South,” which was inspired by a COVID-19 test site worker whom I took the liberty of changing into an imaginary immigration officer.        It’s the same with reading. The blank spaces between the lines feed my imagination more than the sentences themselves. Once, I was reading Hamel’s Journal and a Description of the Kingdom of Korea[2] and I came across a passage stating that a government official had been dispatched to Jeju Island to investigate Hendrick Hamel and his crew who were shipwrecked there. The official in question was a fellow Dutchman who’d gone adrift on his way to Japan and had washed up on the shores of the Korean peninsula and settled there much earlier. I was curious to learn more about the man, but he didn’t appear in any historical records. All I could find on him was a single line stating that he’d served as a military adviser for the King, married a local woman, and went on to live the rest of his life in Joseon Korea. I began imagining a character starting out on a completely new life in an unknown land, and that’s what allowed me to come up with the story for Kingdom of a Thousand Years (Moonji, 2007). Since I didn’t have historical sources to fall back on, I had to create the character from the inside out. Perhaps it’s precisely this lack of source material that allowed me to write an entire novel based on him. I was also inspired to write about Hamel, but given the abundance of information we have about him, I wasn’t able to produce more than a single short story. Your stories have now been translated into many languages. You’ve said that fiction is like a question about the community in which it was written at that particular point in time. How does it feel to see your works being translated for communities other than the ones they were originally intended for? I see translation as a second act of creation. I think it is nearly impossible to translate an original text as it is, due to all the linguistic and cultural differences inherent within it. Trying to complete such an impossible mission must be painful work for a translator, but it’s been an eye-opening experience for me. For example, while one of my works was being translated into Chinese, I found myself having to think up Chinese characters for the names of characters that appeared in the story. In one instance, I came up with the term “Heavenly Gate” to refer to an acupuncture point which allows people to die a painless death only to be told by my translator that such an acupuncture point already existed in Chinese. I was completely taken aback. I also wrote a work featuring a character who gets married to the same person three times and was convinced such a story wouldn’t exist outside the pages of my novel Like a Fairy Tale (Minumsa, 2010), but this all changed when the book was translated into Spanish. A journalist from South America who was interviewing me told me that he knew a couple in real life who had married three times just like the characters in the story. These incidents made me look at fiction in a new light. I stopped claiming that my job as a writer was to pull up stories that didn’t exist out in the real world from the depths of my mind, like someone who draws buckets of water from the depths of a well. I no longer try to come up with stories that don’t already exist. I tell myself that I write stories that might reflect something happening somewhere out in the vast world in which we live. I’m also curious to learn more about your life as a creative writing professor. The following is a quote from you in another interview: “I don’t really think of myself as a teacher. I just read with my students and share my love of reading with them. I think that helps with their writing.” Have your students taught you anything recently? My students are like colleagues with whom I’m able to share the pains and joys of reading and writing. Sometimes I think of them as teachers disguised as students. They’ll ask me questions that leave me speechless or give me perplexing answers that force me to introspect. As my brain gets slower and my heart begins to show signs of aging, they’re the ones who make it possible for me to keep up with the changing times.   I don’t remember seeing your name appear among the list of judges for any literary award or prize. I also don’t recall ever seeing a blurb written by you in another author’s book. Is there a reason why you stay away from judging committees and testimonials? It’s because I want to still be able to enjoy the works of fellow authors purely through the eyes of a reader rather than as a judge or a commentator. I once asked you the following question in an interview we did at the launch of your novel What is Baseball? in 2013, which was also the twentieth anniversary of your debut: “In the end, baseball is about coming back home. The aim is to go through all the bases in order to make it back to home plate. Given this, how far along the diamond have you come at this stage in your life?” You replied that you probably still hadn’t left the batter’s box. This was almost ten years ago, so where are you now? I’m still in the batter’s box. I feel like I’m just barely holding on, hitting one foul ball after another to avoid striking out. Given that I’ve been writing for over thirty years now, you’d think I’d have at least made it to second base. That being said, I don’t mind the batter’s box because it allows me to face the pitcher head-on instead of looking at him from behind, even if I don’t make it to first base before being sent back to the dugout. Baseball does require players to make it back home without being tagged out, but it’s also a game that isn’t over until it’s really over. Not to mention it’s one of the only ball sports in which games are played for a number of consecutive days at a time. [1] Refers to documentary-style reality shows where the action is not scripted or planned in advance. Cameras are set up inside celebrities’ homes or follow them as they go about their daily routines to offer viewers a glimpse into their personal lives, including their parenting and romantic pursuits. Other cast members or guests sit down together and discuss the scenes unfolding before them on screen.—Ed. [2] The first Western account of Korea, written by Hendrik Hamel, a Dutch sailor who was shipwrecked on Jeju Island in 1653.—Ed.   Translated by Léo-Thomas Brylowski  KOREAN WORKS MENTIONE • When Someone Talks About Me (Moonji, 2022)『누군가 나에 대해 말할 때』 (문학과지성사, 2022)• My Girlfriends’ Fathers (Munhak Dongne, 2019)『내 여자친구들의 아버지』 (문학동네, 2019)• Kingdom of a Thousand Years (Moonji, 2007)『천년의 왕국』 (문학과지성사, 2007)• Like a Fairy Tale (Minumsa, 2010)『동화처럼』 (민음사, 2010)• What is Baseball? (Munhak Dongne, 2013)『야구란 무엇인가』 (문학동네, 2013)

  by Hwang Yein