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  [JAPANESE] Narrators in the Age of the Pandemic

  This anthology features six short stories by Korean writers, each written in response to the pandemic. The original Korean edition was published in September 2020. As the title implies, these are science fiction writers and here they depict fictional worlds, distanced in both space and time from the pandemic that first confronted us in 2020 and which persists to this day. However, I don’t think this approach needs to be explained by the status of these stories as science fiction. I myself am a Japanese writer of realist fiction (or at least I think I am), but since the pandemic began, I have found it very difficult to write realistic scenes. I am sure writers in all genres share my predicament. These days, we are shocked by videos of concerts from a few years ago – the throngs of people, the complete absence of masks from faces. If we try to write about our pre-pandemic reality, about the world ‘before’, this erasure of the pandemic only ends up drawing attention to it. On the other hand, if we simply write about the reality of living with coronavirus, our setting becomes one in which science fiction is rapidly merging with reality (ghost cities, remote work, virtual spaces, etc.), again foregrounding the pandemic and interfering with our intended style and themes. Novels and short stories are, of course, works of fiction, but because they are formed from language, they will always have one foot in reality. However outlandish a story’s setting, what the reader responds to is a feeling that its language, the narrator’s voice, is real. Under these conditions, the notion of ‘realism’ itself begins to unravel: the question becomes not what we write, but how we write it. By holding the reality of the pandemic at a certain remove, whether in space or in time, each of the stories in this collection affords its narrator a poignant sincerity. They each find themselves in a situation they feel compelled to narrate (telling a story, no matter how short, is always a strenuous undertaking), and it is in this urge that their inexorable realness lies. Their very distance from reality is what makes them feel so real. The importance of this seemingly perverse approach in the age of a pandemic is something that even I, as a non-science-fiction writer, can appreciate – even more so when the theme being addressed is that of the pandemic itself. In Kim Choyeop’s “The Last Lyoni”, the narrator is dispatched to a robot settlement on a doomed planet, where she finds herself obliged to lie to a dying robot. This is no simple lie, however; it is also a narrative she directs at her own newly discovered self. In Djuna’s “The People Who Came from a Dead Whale”, the narrator is stranded on a planet far from Earth, trapped in a desperate situation, and yet frankly explains why they feel compelled to tell their story. The setting of Jeong Soyeon’s “Mi-jeong’s Uncertain Box” appears to be closest to our present-day reality, but its temporal structure is the most distant, and it is precisely this bold structure that communicates the narrator’s reason for telling the story. In each of these works, sadness and despair are what compel the narrator to tell their tale. But for this very reason, narration also becomes an act of hope, and narration itself a way of ushering hope into the story. I was most struck by Popo, the protagonist of Lee Jongsan’s “A Whirlwind of Insects”. Having just turned forty, she has decided to get married for the first time, but worries about the prospect of sharing a home and life with someone else. In a world constantly plagued by swarms of insects carrying deadly bacteria, this seems a personal, trivial worry – and yet it feels deeply sincere. No matter how great the terror facing the world, when an individual tells a story, it becomes the story of their life. This points not only to the limits and freedoms of storytelling, but also to its role in ensuring our lives remain firmly our own, never to be snatched away. A story consists of words in which someone tells us something: this holds true both before and after the pandemic, and whether or not the genre is science fiction. Whatever world the narrator inhabits, and whatever state that world is in, when they begin to tell their story, it is their sincerity that points us towards the light. No matter how dark or disturbing the point of departure, we are never left in the pit of despair. That, to me, is what stories are all about. Translated by Jesse Kirkwood

  by Yūshō Takiguchi

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  [GERMAN] It’s All about Dignity

  The most astonishing fact about Kim Hye-jin’s novel Die Tochter is this – the writer manages to tackle so many subjects and achieve so many layers of complexity in just one hundred and seventy pages that it becomes almost necessary to read it twice to give a proper review. On the surface, this is the story of two generations of women with different value systems who struggle to understand each other. The nameless narrator, the mother, is miffed about her daughter’s life choices, about the fact the daughter – thirty-something-year-old Green – openly loves another woman, her partner Rain. Furthermore, the mother is unable to understand why her daughter engages in activism, taking part in protests when another gay university worker gets fired. To all of this, the mother reacts in a hostile way, again and again repeating to herself (as well as to her daughter and her partner), that she wishes a good, respectable life for her daughter, one with a husband and children, as she is still just about young enough to hopefully have that. And it gets worse. When Green loses her job and can no longer afford her own apartment, she and her partner move in with the mother. The discomfort this causes the older woman is brilliantly portrayed and makes the reader cringe. But there is another layer to this seemingly hostile mother and to this novel. The mother, who used to be a teacher but is now working in a nursing home, is deeply attached to one of her patients, an old woman named Tsen, who has no family or relations and is now in danger of being shipped off to another facility as her dementia and her declining health make her a burden on the staff of her current more luxurious facility. The mother is shaken by this great injustice and the blatant economisation of a human life. Since Tsen is no longer valuable to the home, let alone to society, and because she takes up much more resources because of her health, the system gets rid of her to die in some remote home, three bus hours away from the city, on the margins of society, on the margins of humanity. The mother fights with her supervisors for Tsen’s dignity in vain. So in the end she has no other choice but to kidnap the old lady to take care of her in her own house. This is the moment in the book where absurdity could have taken over, or even worse, sentiment. But the author, wisely and in a very disciplined way, sticks to her very formal, sober and detached tone of voice to tell us about this brief moment in time where four women of different ages and values and life styles live under one roof. The mother is the obvious antagonist in this story and it might be easy for a reader to dislike or judge her. But I can only see a woman who is deeply scared and has no way of processing her profound fears in a changing world she no longer understands. She fears for her daughter and her daughter’s wellbeing, she wants her child to be happy and more importantly, safe, and not an outcast to society. Only, it is beyond her imagination that happiness could mean a relationship with another woman, or that a chosen family of close friends could provide as much safety as blood relations. She is deeply afraid of ageing too, as she sees in her workplace every day that there is no dignity, no respect and no security in ageing and ailing. She fights for the dignity of her patient Tsen as much as for her own. And in the process, she understands that she needs to respect her daughter’s life choices too, to try and see the dignity in a same sex partnership. Because otherwise, as she muses towards the end of the book, she might lose her daughter. By no means is this book a tale of redemption. At no point does the mother apologize for her rudeness. She is not a warm person who is able to share her emotions the way the younger generation can. Still, there is hope in the end, as she says herself, that maybe one day she will understand the children. After all, she is no villain, only a very insecure mother who is stuck in the rules she was brought up with. Personally, I feel the storyline along the mother in her work environment and her care for Tsen was more successful than the storyline surrounding the daughter and her love life, only because the dialogue between mother and daughter as well as the mother’s musings often seemed cliché and overly simplistic. The scenes also sometimes lack depth and originality whereas the parts in the nursing home and the work environment show the mother’s struggle with her daughter, with her own upbringing, painfully well and with great depth despite the very reserved tone. It is those scenes that make the reader want to give this woman, the narrator, a long hug and tell her she’s a good mother regardless, and her child will be alright. For a German reader, the language seems all together a little too sober and too pragmatic, and I am not entirely sure if this relates to the translation. Especially in the beginning, the dry tone makes it hard to dive into the book. That said, I believe the pragmatic language is a good fit for this particular narrator, especially given the themes of this novel. Rasha Khayat German novelist and literary translator Host of the feminist literature podcast Fempire 

  by Rasha Khayat

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  [FRENCH] Slow Death

  At the height of summer in 1762, the ruler of Korea, King Yeongjo, ordered his son, Crown Prince Sado, into a rice chest that was then sealed. The royal command meant slow, certain death for the twenty-seven–year-old prince. What would drive a father to essentially bury his son alive? How could every other member of the Joseon court avoid the stain of this scandal? These questions simmer beneath the surface of Hanjungnok, a series of memoirs written by Lady Hyegyeong, the woman who married Prince Sado and who lived on after her husband’s death to see their son’s elevation to the throne. Secrecy and suspense may be the drivers behind this sequence; the title of the new French translation by Han Yumi and Hervé Péjaudier is Écrits du silence—literally “Writings out of Silence.” Lady Hyegyeong’s words, however, are the antithesis of silence. In a time when most Korean texts were composed in literary Chinese, this was written in vernacular Korean; in a time when writings about the royal court were written by men, here a woman was revealing all. And even so, she was able to turn restraint into art; a footnote in the early pages of the French translation begins: “The reader of the 1802–1805 Memoir will admire the art of the ellipsis here.” These memoirs were brought into English by JaHyun Kim Haboush in 1996, and her work in ordering, editing, and translating these memoirs was seminal; in Haboush’s translation, the memoirs are organized by date of composition, such that readers are informed of Lady Hyegyeong’s early life and transition to the court, then of her male relatives and the court before moving on to her son who became king in the wake of her husband’s death, and only finally about her husband and how and why he was put to death. As such, the details of Sado’s death are withheld until practically the very end of the volume—thereby maintaining suspense across hundreds of pages. As I turned from Haboush’s stunning English translation to this first-ever French version, I was surprised to see that the climactic memoir describing Sado’s death had been moved and now immediately followed the first memoir about Lady Hyegyeong’s entrance into the court. This decision, while made “for reasons as much chronological as dramaturgical,” has drained the other two parts of their dramatic energy; they now read flatly. Rather than weaving a web of possible scenarios, they attempt to interrogate a scene that has already been set down on the page. Other translation decisions illustrate this editorial sensibility. Here are the first two sentences of the memoir that describe Sado’s death: English Translation by JaHyun Kim Haboush   The tragedy of the imo year (1762) is unparalleled. Early in pyongsin (1776) the late King [Chongjo], who was then still Crown Prince, sent a memorial to his grandfather, His Late Majesty King Yongjo, requesting the destruction of those portions of the Records of the Royal Secretariat [pertaining to that incident]. French Translation by Han Yumi and Hervé Péjaudier La mort du prince Sado en l’année Imo (1762) fut un malheur sans précédent. Juste avant qu’il ne se retrouvât intronisé en l’année Eulmi (1776), Jeongjo avait demandé à son grand-père le roi Yeongjo : « Je vous prie de bien vouloir faire disparaître toute trace de ce jour funeste du Journal du Secrétariat royal. » Literal English Translation of the French The death of Prince Sado in the year Imo (1762) was an unprecedented tragedy. Just before he was enthroned in the year Eulmi (1776), Jeongjo had asked his grandfather the king Yeongjo: “I beg of you to please erase every trace of this dreadful day from the Records of the Royal Secretariat.” The effect, then, is a treatment of this narrative more as a historical document to be made accessible than as a literary work of art that teaches its readers how to read it. Such editions certainly have their value; scholars who want to tease out particular threads or who would benefit from the subheadings that editors subsequently appended to these texts will find this faithful French translation a valuable document to have and to refer to. The common reader, however, who wishes to experience Hanjungnok as a literary work of art, will find that JaHyun Kim Haboush’s English translation has made a masterpiece of a masterpiece that other translators can and should look to for inspiration. Jeffrey Zuckerman Translator, Written in Invisible Ink by Hervé Guibert (2020)

  by Jeffrey Zuckerman

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  [ENGLISH] "To Make a Light, It was Dark"

  The poetry book Invisible Land of Love by Chonggi Mah, was originally published in Korean in 1980, and the 2022 edition is now translated into English by Youngshil Cho. These graceful, often minimalistic poems are occupied with desire, memory, loss, and impermanence. The collection is suffused by the interpenetrating duality of life and death, where the boundaries between those on either side of the veil reach across in intimate gestures. Water is a frequent motif, signifying the fluidity of life shading into death and death returning to the living. Light—which gives visibility to porous forms in the daytime world—is not static but ever cycling, decaying.  Mah’s narratives use repetition to layer images, transparency building toward but never reaching opacity, bending back on each other to repeat things that melt from object to the subject, as in the poem “Love Song 9” which shares a fleeting moment:  A dead friend quietly comes to whisper in my ear under water on a spring day Dying and living is like water sound. Is that so, the spring day already darkening.  In the first instance, the spring day is an object and in the second instance, the spring day is a subject, darkening, fading, dying.  It’s no surprise that Mah, as a physician, would write poems that explore the juxtaposition of death and life. He sometimes renders scenes with a touch of the Gothic, which, as a literary movement, often contrasted innocence with decay: during my medical school course, toward dark daybreak after a vigil in the anatomy classroom lined with corpses, I confess my innocent love. Amid whispers of dim lightbulbs and corpses.  Words such as “vigil” and the solitude of the narrator lend a monastic feel to the scene and action. Mah’s lone narrators, surrounded by shadows and reminiscences, often seem to haunt the settings into which they are placed.  Space is important here. It is given shape by architectural features, which make emptiness bounded and visible. Mah’s poetics of space often honors this duality, of the tension between outside and inside. Here is a world in which natural forces have agency, have spirits, as in the poem “Illustration 5”: When I pass by the public cemetery / it always smells of mint. / A square window redolent of mint, / the dawn outside the window / needs to practice to see the inside. Images are additive; there is the window and then the dawn outside the window, and in this way even transparency is layered. Each poem is like a palimpsest in this way. In Mah’s poems, speakers exclaim how human makers enclose space in order to create emptiness, as in the poem “Drawing” which begins:  I’ve taken up drawing. Decided to be simple like winter. The tree outside the window’s fallen asleep and images of snow pile up inside a wanderer’s bones. I’ve started drawing an urn. Decided to live like an empty field.  There is a contrast between the continuous action of the speaker (who has taken up drawing) and the stillness of the sleeping tree, the images of snow, the motionless field. Mah’s poems make the human equal or less important than their environment, emphasizing the transience of human life while the elements persist, whether we are alive or just “bones.” Narrators here exist in surreal possibilities. They are alone, invisible in the dark, but still, perhaps instinctively, unavoidably, make movements toward communication: At night / I take out my rumpled shadow / and try waving it / like a forgotten banner. In this collection, shadows are constant companions, reminders that that which is visible may still be evanescent, mercurial, expressive, and can even impinge on the solid body. Scale becomes elastic: Lately I experience to the point of discomfort / a pocket rather great in size / the music of my own shadow.  With this English translation of Invisible Land of Love, Chonggi Mah and Youngshil Cho have produced a delicate, sometimes wounded, text. English-language readers, regardless of their relationship to twentieth-century Korean history and its undeniable traumas and separations, will find their own existential conditions reflected in the universality of these poems, which elegantly consider both the terrible and the tender. Sun Yung Shin

  by Shin, Sun Yung

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  [ENGLISH] Teaching is Easy (Apart from the Crippling Insecurity...)

  When I’m not reading and reviewing literature in translation, I can be found teaching English to foreign students at an Australian university, so reading Korean Teachers was an interesting experience. The novel takes us through a year at the Korean language school of H University in Seoul, with each of the four “semesters” seen through the eyes of a different teacher. It’s unnerving how well Seo describes the lives of people who can never quite be sure that they’ll have a job come the end of the course.     As the year progresses, the various teachers struggle to cope with issues that arise. Seon-yi, a new recruit, does her best in an unfamiliar job, hoping to be offered more work next semester, while the jaded Mi-ju is frustrated that teaching skills count for nothing when evaluation time comes around. Ga-eun, a popular, successful teacher, sees the world come crashing down around her because of certain extracurricular activities, and Han-hee, a coordinator hoping to be made a permanent employee, finds out that life doesn’t get any easier as you climb up the ladder.     Korean Teachers takes the unwitting reader on a journey through an incredibly precarious industry, one where immense peaks and troughs are caused by matters beyond its control. Enrolments can be affected by government policies and associated visa delays, fluctuations in currency rates and news reports of racist abuse flooding the internet. It doesn’t take a global pandemic to create an environment where any teacher without an ongoing position is constantly wondering where the next short-term contract is coming from.     If these problems affect all teachers equally, many of the situations encountered in Korean Teachers are specific to women. Early on, the focus is on Seon-yi discovering that students have posted photos of her online, and then wondering how complaining about it might affect her job prospects. Han-hee goes to even greater lengths to find job security, risking her health, and more. The female teachers are also affected by an unspoken belief that they’re lucky to have work, and that this is all just a hobby until they find a husband anyway.     While her novel focuses on the teachers, Seo also shows the reader the issues their students face. Whether it’s sleeping through class after a gruelling night shift at their part-time job, or feeling depressed about being so far from home, away from loved ones, there are a host of downsides to being an international student. Not all of the teachers understand, and this is where the experienced Mi-ju falls down, too caught up in her own issues to see how unfairly she’s treating a student who fails to live up to her expectations.     Much of this reminded me of my own experiences. I could almost feel the butterflies that afflict the teachers taking a new class for the first time (after decades of teaching, it still happens to me) as well as the self-doubt caused by perceptions of other teachers being more popular, and a sense that image is valued over actual teaching ability. A less welcome aspect of teaching life I recognised was the meeting where the teachers are urged to speak their minds even though everyone knows it’s best not to make waves. What really hit home, though, were the teachers’ constant worries about future work, and the relief when rumours of higher student numbers came true. I’ve been there more times than I’d care to admit . . .     Whether you’re an educator or not, Korean Teachers is an engaging read, thanks in part to the structure. More than a novel, it’s a collection of novellas linked by both the setting and the comings and goings of minor characters in the background, some of whom will later have their own moment in the spotlight. A more conventional approach might have produced a stronger central plot, but in sharing the narrative load across four protagonists, the writer is able to explore the experiences of teachers at various stages of their careers, all facing very different issues.     There’s nothing flashy about Korean Teachers, and Elizabeth Buehler does an excellent job of allowing the novel to speak for itself, bringing Seo’s story across in clear prose. As we follow the four women on their journey through a world that’s almost more corporatethan educational, with students seen as customers and education as a service, we share the teachers’ frustration, and their despair at ever finding a secure and fulfilling role. There are moments of joy, but overall, Korean Teachers paints a sad picture of a world where educators are disposable commodities – at least, that is, until the next influx of overseas students sees them being begged to return. Tony Malone Reviewer and English Teacher Tony’s Reading List(https://tonysreadinglist.wordpress.com/)

  by Tony Malone

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  [SPANISH] A Review from Bed

  I write these words from behind a closed door. From the bed in my room, upon which I turn from time to time so my legs don’t fall asleep. I write with a sore throat, heaviness in my chest, a cough. I’m quarantined. By coincidence, I’m writing about Los estándares coreano by Park Min-gyu (Hwarang Editorial, 2021), a book that discusses men who are profoundly alone—in it, the word loneliness appears as many as eighteen times. I’m going to tell you something you already know: the reading experience is strongly influenced by the time in her life in which the reader finds herself. That’s why I fixated on how alone the characters in this book are. That’s also why I was interested in the relationship between the planes of reality and fantasy in the stories; because more than anything, this situation I’m living in would’ve seemed like something out of a storybook to me three years ago. In fact, it is. Without wanting to label the text, and although I’ve already seen that several people have referred to it as “fantasy,” I consider Los estándares coreanos to bring together the best aspects of fantastical realism. In the same line as the realistic terror that many contemporary Latin American women authors are stitching—in which scenes of everyday violence cease to be normal in order to acquire their true disconcerting dimension—, Park Min-gyu uses situations of injustice or inequality with a basis in reality and brings them into the realm of the fantastical, demonstrating their senselessness. This is the case in the story “Diga ‘Ah’, pelicano” [“Say ‘Ah,’ Pelican”], in which some Argentine migrants, due to immigration laws, have to cross the ocean on the duck boats of a theme park. At the same time, the author manages to highlight those aspects of a South Korean—and capitalist—society that seem to be part of fantasy, but which belong to the universe of the real. After reading so many pages with fantastical people and situations, at certain points in the book, one might think that some things are not the case: that to inhabit a bedroom so tiny it forces you to live permanently hunched over or to have a job that consists in pushing people within the cars of the metro are real-world things, although they don’t appear to be. Something that particularly caught my attention—and that, on the other hand, makes up a characteristic of this fantastical realism—is Park Min-gyu’s interest in the metamorphic. In the collection, things are transformed into living beings, animals into things, and people into animals. On the plane of the real, my favorite aspect speaks to the strong interest that some contemporary South Korean authors have for narrating the universe of work. In this book, there is not a single story where work doesn’t occupy an important place, whether it be the setting or the actual motive of the action. All of the protagonists are college males scholarship recipients, overqualified young people newly arrived in the abyss of the labor market and employed part-time; or, they are established gentlemen enclosed in the robotic spiral that goes from home to office and back again. And by the fact that all of them are boys and men, I should say that perhaps what I liked least about the book was the scarce presence of female characters. With the exception of the Yakult [a popular probiotic drink] saleswoman, the women are absent, passing from mere objects of desire to the figure of the unwanted spouse, as is the case with the partner of the protagonist of the story that gives the collection its title. At the close of the book, the reflections that have stayed imprinted on me with the most force belong to these two stories: “No me diga. Soy una jirafa” [“Is That So? I’m a Giraffe”] and “Say ‘Ah,’ Pelican.” Both have in common recent graduate protagonists who work jobs they didn’t choose. Both hold the privilege of the external gaze: they are able to observe the society in which they live from the vantage point of employee-client relations. The first image is composed of the faces of passengers squashed against the windows of the metro. The second, of theme park visitors who pedal—very comically—the duck boats. The two protagonists of these stories experience a similar process. When focusing on these everyday postcards, they, at first, feel disgust and an external shame. Later on, sadness and compassion. This ultimately made me think that ambiguity is genuinely human and that the principal characteristic of great characters is precisely their level of ambiguity. And now, excuse me, it’s time for me to change sides of the bed. Also, I could go for some acetaminophen. Translated by Lucina Schell Andrea Abreu Author, Panza de burro (Barrett, 2020) Dogs of Summer (tr. Julias Sanches, forthcoming in 2022)

  by Andrea Abreu

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  [RUSSIAN] The Journey through the Fog: The Crucible by Gong Ji-Young

  Gong Ji-young is a well-known Korean writer. In 2021, her famous novel The Crucible (2009) was translated into Russian. It is not her first book available in Russian. In 2020, the novel Our Happy Time (2005) was also published in Moscow. The main character of The Crucible is a young man from Seoul—Kang In-ho. After his business fails, his family falls into financial difficulty. His wife asks her classmate to find a job for her unemployed husband, and her friend informs her of a private school in Mujin headed by her uncle. Actually, you can’t find the name of this city on a map of South Korea because it is fictional, but the plot of the novel is based on a real story that took place in the Gwangju Inhwa School for hearing-impaired students. Over the course of several years, school teachers, administrators, and a principal raped children there. Kang is thirty-three years old. This age seems to be symbolic, because it reminds one of Christ. Readers can feel that something important is going to happen with the protagonist, something that may rock his world or even destroy him. Another allusion is to Divine Comedy in which Dante finds himself “half way through the journey of our life [. . .] in a gloomy wood, because the path which led aright was lost.” This place, where boys and girls are tortured, could be called Inferno, but the difference is that children are sinless. Kang plunges into a world of fear, mystery, ghosts, and hidden violence. This journey makes him face his own past, which he had tried to forget. In this way he starts to struggle for the children and discovers his purpose.  The city is described as a locus of the uncanny. For example, one of the repeated images is the fog. It is compared to an enormous monster, seaweed, a mouth, a can of milk, the tousled hair of a ghost. This fog has the power to hide all the sordid and dreadful secrets. In this respect, it is similar to the invincible machine of bureaucratic procedures, corrupt police, and state institutions that wish to conceal the truth.  It is necessary to say that some of the metaphors the author invents are quite innovative and fresh. For example, when a little boy perishes on a railroad track, run over by a train, his body is “tossed high into the air, weightless as popcorn.” This heartbreaking scene made me think about the fragment from The Red Laugh (1904) by Russian writer Leonid Andreyev. In that text a person is on the battlefield, but suddenly his head disappears, and “blood flows as if it was an uncorked wine bottle.” The mechanism of creating these metaphors is the same and is reminiscent of Theodor Adorno's point that death turns individuals into things. Sometimes Gong Ji-young writes about the strong emotions of her characters by describing the food they eat and its disgusting metamorphosis. The pale light coming through the fog in this novel has “the color of mayonnaise,” the sun is turned into “a lingering bruise,” and the boarding school is represented as “a place more eerie than a slaughter-house.” I read this book in Russian and it seems to me that the translation has some flaws. This novel is a contemporary text written in the twenty-first century, and many relevant and timely subjects are mentioned or referred to here (the Me Too movement, feminism, cyber-bullying), but the chosen vocabulary is a bit archaic. Sometimes the translator uses vernacular expressions, idiomatic phrases or words taken from the nineteenth or the middle of the twentieth century, which are not common today. The protagonist comes from Seoul, the capital, but in the Russian version he utilizes words that are spoken only in small towns today. The Crucible is a powerful book that really influenced Korean society. The novel was adapted into a film, which prompted authorities to relaunch an investigation, resulting in the closure of the school. The work even led to legislation being enacted.  I suppose that this book is not only about the specific case that took place in South Korea. There are many custodial institutions all over the world where people are vulnerable, fragile, and often practically invisible. All these voices should be heard. Aleksandra Tsibulia Poet, Journey to the Edge of Blood (Russian Gulliver, 2014) The Ferris Wheel (Jaromír Hladík Press, 2021) Art and Literary Critic

  by Aleksandra Tsibulia

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  [GREEK] Is the Life We’re Living a Dream?: The Nine Cloud Dream by Kim Man-jung

  When eight fairies distract a promising young Buddhist monk, the Temple Master, frustrated by his behavior, punishes him. Not only does he send him to the underworld, but he also sends him to his next life as a mere peasant. However, the life of this young man, who is reborn both handsome and naturally cultured, doesn’t feel like a punishment at all! Never having read a Korean classic before, I was skeptical about how a Westerner could get into the spirit of such a text as The Nine Cloud Dream. However when I started reading it, page by page, I discovered a fantasy world and realized that Kim Man-jung had written a story far ahead of his time—unless his time was already ahead, though to us it seems backwards—and I was just lost in his enchanting narrative. The adventures of the young villager, whose life was destined to be glorious, could have been a Shakespearean tale; when someone peeks behind the veil of this amazing story, they notice that it’s a romantic comedy hiding the great message about life that Kim Man-jung meant to share with his work. The ordinary peasant becomes a scholar and manages to obtain higher positions, but also becomes an imperial groom. This is nothing more than a Romeo with eight Juliets and a happy ending; a Benedict with eight Beatrices, to be walked around, worshiped and challenged by them and a colorful bunch, enjoying poetic battles, dancing and equestrian archery. If one did not know that the text was written in the seventeenth century, dealing with the story of a charismatic young man living in the ninth century during the Chinese Tang Dynasty, they would be confused by the author’s fresh and lively writing. I’ll be honest with you; there were many times that I caught myself thinking that some of the scenes could easily be from a Marvel movie! Because it has it all: mythical creatures, battles, scheming, the necessary comic relief, but also a hero who, in the end, is confronted with a truth that honestly surprised me. That was a plot twist I didn’t expect. One might think that this is another book teaching us about life and how one should live virtuously in order to, at some point, stop reincarnating and reach nirvana, as Buddhism teaches. In the first pages, you might get such a vibe, but that’s not the point. To begin with the author gives hints not only of Buddhism, but also of Daoism and Confucianism. Although, it is neither a religious or historical text, several people and events from the history and mythology of the Chinese dynasties are mentioned. If we were to remove the heroes and the event, one question would rise: is the life we ​​live real or a dream? What if, after all, reality were our dreams and not the thing we call ‘life’? Centuries after Kim Man-jug’s masterpiece was written, even Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) in the film The Matrix had to deal with such “reality.” The Nine Cloud Dream is taught, as I have been informed, in South Korean high schools. Now that I have read it too, I would really like it to be taught in schools worldwide. Finally, I read the book in its Greek translation, published by Lemvos Publications, but I hope that one day I will be able to read it in Korean as well, in order to experience the greatness of Kim Man-jung’s writing. Elissavet Kyritsi Journalist/Writer

  by Elissavet Kyritsi

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  [ENGLISH] The Digestive Transformation of The World’s Lightest Motorcycle

  At first glance, the surreal world of Yi Won’s high-tech contemporary twenty-first century Korea seems as distant from Emily Dickinson’s nineteenth century Amherst, Massachusetts as it could be. However, reading The World’s Lightest Motorcycle, first published in 2007 and published in an English translation by Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello and E. J. Koh in 2021, one begins to see that the two poets might have more in common than one might assume. Yi Won nods directly toward Dickinson in “Road, Motorcycle, Nike” where she references a letter of hers in which Dickinson writes, “my heart slowly grew bigger than me,” a fantastical image of the kind that surfaces often in Yi Won’s collection. Indeed, some of Yi Won’s images, including that of a speaker touching “the cosmos of the daffodils / in your address,” could almost be plucked from a Dickinson poem. Both poets interweave meditations on time, mortality, solitude, and connection to the natural world into compressed, often surreal images. While Emily Dickinson’s poetic eye often hovers closely upon a single image (a bird coming down a walk or a certain slant of light), Yi’s gaze flashes through collages of the quotidian: hangers and TVs, walls and mirrors, computer screens and wrist watches. In one poem, Yi writes, “the dough of time / stands before the rotting of history” within a refrigerator. Another poem peers in at two people at a table with stars in their mouths who are suddenly sucked into a black hole. Even as darkness often signifies loss and uncertainty in Yi’s poems, it also seems to have its own desires and volition. In one poem, the darkness “rolls up the roads like a straw mat,” and in other, it is “tired, unaware of the light leaking out from itself.” Darkness is the space from which rebirth arises, despite itself: “Even if the darkness won’t brim to the top, the earth’s time begins anew.” Darkness is the place where life both begins and ends, and in so being, is that which connects the two, even if its very nature challenges those on either side from understanding this reality. Both poets also press the limits of poetic form. Compared to Dickinson’s compressed poems which challenge meter and rhyme by pressing out from inside the walls of the poem, Yi presses form through her surreal approach to images, many of which occur in flashes, as if seen through the scenic rhythms of a dream. In many places, she slices an image open and inserts another one at its center: “[. . .] the world sloshes, there’s an empty road inside the sloshing sound, the world spills over, the side of the cup [. . .]” In another poem, a man and woman tear off parts of each other’s bodies until they become almost indistinguishable from each other. Images of violence permeate these poems, but the violence resists gratuity as it reveals the reality of alienation from self and society even as the poems continue to press toward survival. Yi Won’s multivalent approach to poetic image might overwhelm if the reader is seeking to understand them in a linear, meaning-making sense. However, Yi’s poems are better experienced than explained. This is not surprising, since, as the translators point out, the poet is much more interested in viewing “the world through images rather than meaning,” and in doing so, press “the limits of meaning.” As dense and sometimes disorienting as these poems can be, it is the very nature of the images themselves that guides readers in how to read them. Images of movement such as flowing, circulating, breathing, growing, and decaying saturate the poems and carry the willing reader along with them. The collection almost seems to be an organic thing, a body of sorts, that digests the reader, spitting her out on the other end, transfigured, sticky with the residue of Yi ’s difficult, yet life-giving world. Such a “digestive” approach to reading does not diminish the reader’s humanity but rather defamiliarizes, transforms, and finally renews it. In one of the most striking poems of the collection, the speaker says, almost confessionally, “I am a horror,” “a horror is love,” and finally, “Love is a horror, so I walk out from the mirror.” Love (one might say the ultimate connector) is a horror when examined closely: a dance of recognition and difference, one that beckons us deeper into and away from ourselves. In the gaping mouth of Yi Won’s strange and magnificently horrifying poems, few readers will escape profound transformation.  Leah Silvieus Poet, Arabilis (Sundress Publications, 2019)

  by Leah Silvieus

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  [ENGLISH] Every Sentence is a Story: Cold Candies by Lee Young-ju

  Cold Candies might conjure the urge to shake one’s self free from Lee Young-ju’s unforgettable images, which through their profound and determined concreteness lock readers up like cement when they aren’t snagging their attention like holed sweaters or sticking in the mind like barbs. You see the conundrum. It isn’t easy to construct sentences, or stanzas, that evoke images clearly, much less over and over to produce a cohesive whole. But this is exactly what Lee does, almost effortlessly, over the course of this short volume, which was translated from the Korean by Jae Kim. Awe isn’t the right word—more like measured admiration for an auteur who has identified her art and stuck with it.  A major part of this art is association. “Mama’s Marmalade,” Cold Candies’ opening poem, amalgamates the image of a body, sick with decay but ripe with beauty cream, to fruit preserves’ sweet fruit and savory bitterness. Of course, “preserve” also means to maintain something in its original state. (“You want to make yourself layer by layer, / into a person who doesn’t rot.”) The way Lee orders her lines is disorienting, alternating between an “I” and “you” until an occasional observation fills in the atmosphere. However, it also feels real, despite its idiosyncrasy, which is due to Lee’s penchant for using the prose poem form to construct something larger thematically out of a series of micronarratives. “A Romantic Seat” begins this way: He’s sitting on a sofa. Crossing his long, beautiful legs. I’m silently looking. I’m standing. Is this the basement? He’s been sitting so long he’s become the basement. Darkness warms me. I’ve had the thought before, that darkness was round. I have to stand up to shatter the roundness. I’m standing in a corner. Can my hands determine the shape of the interior? When taken apart, these increments are complete sentences that contain precise narrative actions: the man on the sofa, silent save the motion of his legs crossing, which the poem’s speaker is looking at from across the room, and so on. Each piece has a unique function—long shot or close-up, internal or external exposition, setting or mood—that, when put together, coax the reader forward. The terseness and emphasis on sight recalls the imagist project promoted by Ezra Pound and H.D. In his translator’s note, Jae Kim describes an accident in which Lee was hit by a cyclist, partially blinding her. As a result, she took to turning her head to see out of her good eye, and this gesture of taking in image after image, and the subsequent compiling of information to reach understanding, is apparent throughout.  The vast majority of poems in Cold Candies work the same way as “Marmalade” and “Seat”—that is, dense sheets of text with a distinctive sense of motion. But several of the poems contain stanzas. These work in a similar way, but the difference is essentially scaffolding. Or rather, the compression of Lee’s images is equally distributed before each break, where the increments of the lines are held in place by the stanzas, which are their own autonomous structures. When they are put together, though, it’s to dazzling effect, such as the poem “Dinnertime,” which contains a five-four, five-five-two-one structure that deftly narrates the acceptance, the holding onto, and eventual slipping away of a dying relative, or “Motel Bellagio,” which unlike the vast majority of Lee’s poems, contains a line break between stanzas two and three that isn’t a complete sentence. Yet even this is governed by isolated images—that of someone eating canned mackerel in a hotel room amid “a doll’s pupil open[ing]” and “an old boy covered in scales” entering the space.  Going through these pages, one gets the sense that it is Lee who is imposing her logic onto the poem, and not the other way around. There is something satisfying about the consistency of syntax and tone, though it does present a double-edged sword. Deliberate choices, such as line breaks, stanzas, word placement, and poem length jump out at the reader when Lee decides to break the mold. Yet not fully taking advantage of the formal possibilities of different poetic shapes raises the question of whether or not the content is too monotonous. Something as simple as the enjambments at the end of the aptly titled “Bunker” carries an extreme weight due to its novelty, but perhaps reaches for more than it’s capable of justifying: [. . .] Wind rises from mud, and there are songs walking to the grave: the song that waits, the song that sleeps, the song whose tears have dried, the song that embraces, the song that rubs its knees,  and  the dead. J. Howard Rosier Lecturer, New Arts Journalism Department School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC)

  by J. Howard Rosier

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  [Japanese] Only You Know: きみは知らない (You Don’t Know) Jeong Yi Hyun

  Many works of Korean literature address issues of economic disparity and poverty head on. As depicted in the global hit film Parasite, the threat to life that is poverty sometimes causes families to forge deep bonds. Having to join forces to survive and the closeness of living in a tight space, whether it be small, old, or half underground, pressurizes the family, squeezing the members together. The five family members in Jeong Yi Hyun’s You Don’t Know, on the other hand, are wealthy. There’s plenty of space in their multi-floor villa in Gangnam. They can lead their lives without really seeing each other, so they can be complete individuals. And they can each can sink entirely into their own private worlds, their secrets kept secret. One Sunday afternoon, the youngest daughter, eleven-year-old Yuji, vanishes from their home. At that moment, the adults who we’d expect to be home, who should have been home, were not there. Yuji’s mother, her father, her stepsister and stepbrother from her father’s previous marriage, all have something suspicious about them, and we start to wonder if those suspicious backgrounds have something to do with Yuji’s disappearance. We could say that what makes them suspicious are the things they lack. Yuji’s mother has lived in Korea for a long time, but grew up in a family of Chinese merchants, speaking Chinese. She gained Korean citizenship through her marriage, but maintains a deep relationship with Min, a man she met in university who grew up in the same sort of household. To her and Min, Korea is both a home and a foreign country, and the Korean language is both their mother tongue and a foreign language. The uneasiness of being rootless haunts her wherever she goes, and while her family has noticed that she hesitates for a second before speaking in Korean, they never realize the meaning behind that hesitation. Even after getting married and giving birth to Yuji, she does not end her relationship with Min, and she never expresses her unease to her family. Her husband, Yuji’s father, never discusses the details of his business with family. Yuji’s stepsister is unstable and cannot control her emotions. She hurts herself, behaves aggressively to others, and seeks out sex with partners she barely knows. That may be because she grew up being told she was born from an unwanted pregnancy, or it may not. The human mind doesn’t give up simple answers under analysis. But the one thing that is clear is that she should have received psychological care at an earlier stage, but instead her problems were ignored until she became an adult. Her stepbrother got into medical school but doesn’t attend his classes. He maintains a strange distance from his kind and dependable lover, hurting her. He’s intelligent and sensitive enough to realize what he’s doing, and, as if to punish himself for that, begins committing crimes that benefit no one. All of them are bound by the things they lack but refuse to directly acknowledge. The longer this goes on, the greater these deficiencies grow, and yet they all continue to ignore them. The family, a group of people who live in the same house, joined together by blood and marriage, should bring their hearts together as one, and live with mutual trust. This ideal is most likely little more than a delusion. Even if there were once families that looked like this, weren’t they premised on patriarchy and a familial version of jus sanguinis that ignored inconveniences such as human rights (it’s questionable whether such a concept even existed), and were only able to maintain themselves by expelling without any chance for debate all who didn’t fit their definition of family or questioned their authority? In the modern era, it’s become common sense that individuals have the right to pursue their own happiness (putting aside whether that’s been realized or not), and the unconditional chains of blood and patriarchy have been loosened. This has led to situation where whether blood relations, married, or strangers, individuals must build their relationships with each other as individuals. And in such a situation, what is necessary for individuals to become family? Ethics, reason, imagination, to hope for another’s happiness while recognizing that they have inviolable boundaries. And to achieve any of these things requires dialogue. But that’s not such a simple process. The adults, once in denial, could bring together their deficiencies, share everything, and become a true family for the first time to bring back Yuji. But no, in this story they make no such effort. They all worry for Yuji and hope to save her but, out of fear of the absolutely irrelevant, continue to struggle alone. They variously hire a detective, cling to a shaman, hand out fliers, and seduce the detective. They refuse the help Min offers. They never make up for the lack within themselves. In the last scene, they are a smiling family. Or at least look like one. But when I noticed that they had not shared a single one of their faults, nor comforted each other in the least, when I realized that the only one aware of their regrets and the gaping vacantness within each of them was none other than myself, the reader, I felt an icy wind blow through my heart. Translated by Kalau Almony Hiroko Oyamada Author, The Factory (New Directions, 2019) The Hole (New Directions, 2020) Winner, 2014 Akutagawa Prize

  by Hiroko Oyamada

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  [Persian] An Endless Quest for Home: گلهای آزالیا (Azaleas) by Kim Sowol

  Although cultural exchanges between Iran and Korea date back over 1500 years, Azaleas is one of only a handful of titles of Korean poetry ever translated into Persian. The translation is the result of collaboration between a Korean translator and a Persian translator that  was edited by a Persian poet. The book includes a foreword which provides a brief introduction much-needed to the history of Korean poetry.  Due to major structural and stylistic differences between the two languages, the translators have decided to adopt a more liberal approach to translation. They employed some of the techniques commonly used in Persian modern verse to create a collection that reads smoothly and looks familiar to a Persian reader.  Despite differences in poetic forms, Persians and Koreans seem to have similar perceptions of the role of poetry. Both cultures are very proud of their rich poetic traditions and expect poets to be socially conscious and to reflect on social and national emotions in their work.  Kim’s language is deceptively simple and straight forward, but he uses this seemingly simple diction to express an array of complex emotions and to portray an interflow of sophisticated imagery. A refined and tender lyricism shines through every poem. Love, loss, and loneliness are recurrent themes wrapped in delicate images of nature and subtle references to social and national sentiments.  ‘Invocation’ is a very good example of poetry about loss. The narrator is in deep sorrow and despair and calls his lost beloved by name repeatedly as if hoping to resurrect the dead beloved or invoke her spirit. On a second reading, it can be read as a patriotic poem in which the poet-narrator reimagines the homeland as a beloved; fragmented and lost to occupation. He is prepared to die but will not abandon his homeland. A national suffering becomes his personal suffering, and his beloved becomes a metaphor for the nation.  This subtle and delicate treatment of themes of national significance gained Kim recognition as a voice for nationalistic resistance without undermining his poetic originality. He remained true to himself and his emotions throughout his poetic career. In a poem about homesickness, he expresses his desire to see his little son and the neighbour’s daughter; writing that he never forgets them and never forgets Joseon. The last line is particularly revealing of the political message of the poem: ‘But even the kitchen mice have now escaped’. In ‘O Mother, O Sister’, the poet employs the language of a child pleading with his mother and sister to live by the river. We don’t see the response of the mother and sister, but the desperate tone of the appeal indicates that a favourable response is impossible. Is it because the river and the homes by the river or even the entire country is under occupation? The fact that Kim doesn’t openly talk about the socio-political conditions of his time and the plights of Koreans under the Japanese occupation shows his deep commitment to his perception of poetry as a vehicle to convey inner feeling. This romantic approach requires the poet to ‘internalise’ the subjects he wants to write about and to present them as manifestations of his personal experience.  Kim makes a very creative use of narrative and dramatic devices. In some poems, he sets the scene like the setting in a play. Mountains, rivers, trees, birds, sky, and clouds are described in minute detail. By doing so, he creates a physical space within which his emotions can be shared. Narrative is a common element in oral and folk poetry in nearly every culture. Narrative renders poetry more accessible to a wider readership. It also helps them remember the poem more easily.  Dream and dream-like imagery is another characteristic of Kim’s poetry. Some images are melancholic and unsettling like those in ‘Half-moon’ and ‘Silken Mist’. ‘Silken Mist’ creates a foggy and mysterious environment evoking mixed feelings of the first day of love and the last day of departure. One line in the middle is particularly disturbing and even macabre: ‘It was then a lass sought death for herself / when the snow began to melt’.  Yet Kim’s poetry is not all doom and gloom. There are some very bright poems portraying happy emotions of fulfilling love and carefree gaiety. In one poem, the poet praises not only the physical beauty but also the spiritual elegance of his beloved and expresses his desire to kiss her soul as well as her soft and red lips. In another, he describes a morning sunshine on a peaceful mountainous road while the poet is walking through colourful meadows, reminiscing on teenage memories after a night of comfortable sleep. Alireza Abiz Poet, Literary Scholar, and Translator The Kindly Interrogator (2021) Censorship of Literature in Post-Revolutionary Iran (2020)

  by Alireza Abiz