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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

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  [Russian] Girl, Interrupted: Through a Glass, Darkly, but Then Face to Face: Лимон (Lemon) by Kwon Yeo-sun

  I must admit at first to having a niggling suspicion that the immense popularity in Russia of the crime writing genre was the impetus behind this engrossing translation of Kwon Yeo-sun’s Lemon, that this was an attempt to reproduce the success of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo formula. Nothing could be further from the truth. One may as well call Scheherazade’s 1001 Nights a snuff film or slap a “murder mystery” label on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Kafka’s The Trial, Camus’ The Stranger, Kharms’s Old Woman, Hitchcock’s Psycho, or Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. The plot of this gnomic tale (we are given the premise and scope in advance) is so dangerously thin it is easy to wince should the author whiff, but the entire gamut of the grand themes, the intricate network of the enduring values of Existentialism, is present in spades here, so that the sincerest compliment I can pay this slim novella (that can be read in one sitting, something I would not recommend) is: Lemon truly bears re-reading. It is “literary,” and a specimen of realistic fiction (of New Sincerity) in its concerns for intimate psychological states only.  From the get-go, our first narrator, for our text is polyphonic, frames her story within genre conventions: “I draw a scene in my mind that took place a long time ago in the interrogation room of a certain police precinct. This does not mean that I imagined the whole thing . . .” This places us immediately within the realm of memory and re-creation, of the oral tradition whose roots hark back, in the western tradition, to Greek tragedy. Our book in fact begins in the manner of a play, with a preface page of dramatis personae. But this voice, like all the female voices here—three main and an additional one within the eight brief sections, each representing a different social stratum—is disembodied. That these voices are not sufficiently differentiated—the work’s greatest weakness—is also, by design I think, part of its strength (all the women’s voices are part of one woman.) That we as readers find it initially disorienting to determine who is speaking forces us to locate ourselves and, in an act of empathy, collaborate with the various narrators in reconstructing, along with the events, the meaning of meaning. Not merely unreliable but at times uncertain narrators, all sorts of doubling and re-doubling and fragmentation, as in a hall of mirrors, the essential loneliness and emptiness of life, the absence of meaning and connection, the utter impossibility of communication, but also the significance of coincidence and synchronicity, the bonds of family and class, and, finally, the solace of religion and faith (in something, in anything,) always and eternal—the meaning of suffering, redemption, and guilt. Due to space limitations, I can cite only a single example of the intensity of feeling this writing capably evokes—simultaneously, the utter absurdity and the intense pathos of a mother’s doomed attempts to posthumously change her daughter’s legal name to what she had intended it to be as a way perhaps of establishing the necessary illusion of regaining control over the narrative by providing her daughter with an alternate existence. (The word being sacred, just as it is one’s character, so destiny is in one’s name.)  Though the identity of the authors of the crime is squarely hinted at, given the impossibility of establishing the truth with any degree of certainty, it does not ultimately matter. In their attempts to reconstruct and make sense of the crime each narrator kills the beautiful girl over and over again, so that there is enough guilt to go around. Given her objectification, the girl’s beauty had been a curse that made her, along with everyone else’s existence or non-existence, immaterial. While the author’s impulses appear to be genuinely Christian, the book’s title offers us the best clue of her true intentions. Lemon refers to a poem the central narrator, the author’s stand in so to speak, had written in high school about a peripheral personage in James’s Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a hapless Eleanor Rigby of sorts. Like a lingering aftertaste, this self-referential nod reminds us we have just read a constructed narrative, art and not a literal account (these readings are not incompatible by the way). The subject of the poem, that character’s lack of agency, echoes the narrator’s own progressive loss of self (she had long stopped writing). One of a score of themes I found most engaging may serve as a warning of sorts: the greatest danger that confronts each of us in our media-saturated but virtually isolated age is depersonalization. In this sense, I found this novel to be ideal reading for a plague year for the habits of self-awareness, attention, and presence it cultivates. But each reader will find in it a different kernel of truth for themselves. Lemon is a work that I hope readers will return to again and again. I know this reader will. Alex Cigale Poet, Essayist, and Translator Author, Russian Absurd; the Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (2017)

  by Alex Cigale

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  [French] Hyun Ki Young, an Expert in Human Souls: Oncle Suni (Uncle Suni) by Hyun Ki Young

  What better tool than literature to challenge stereotypes? For a Western reader, the South Korean island of Jeju might conjure up images of beaches and mandarin trees, charming seaside resorts – perhaps an idyllic honeymoon. But for the writer Hyun Ki Young, born in Jeju in 1941, the picture is rather different. In Uncle Suni and Other Stories, a collection of ten short stories published in 1979, the author’s homeland is above all synonymous with ‘acute depression and grinding poverty’. Or at least, that is the narrator’s impression when he arrives on the island after years of absence. Having taken two days off work to attend his grandfather’s remembrance rituals, he has no inkling that these few hours will change his life irrevocably. In the course of a conversation, he happens to learn of the death of ‘Uncle’ Suni, in fact a woman he knew well. She had recently spent several months living with him in Seoul, helping with the cooking. Hypersensitive, depressed, she had certainly seemed an odd character, but there had been nothing to suggest she would take her own life when she returned to Jeju. What could have been going through her mind? Hyun’s great skill, in this long and magnificent novella, lies in his orchestration of a slow and dramatic crescendo. By exposing the truth behind this single death, the author gradually shines a light on the history of the island as a whole. In the late 1940s, Jeju became the setting for a struggle between pro- and anti-communist forces which ended in bloodshed. Hyun was one of the first to write about the insurrection, its repression, and the ensuing massacres. We travel back and forth in time with him, reliving the fear of the persecuted inhabitants as they hide in the black caves of this volcanic island, at the foot of Hallasan. We bear helpless witness to the razing of their village. We experience the freezing winter, the constant fear, the appalling, gnawing hunger. And we piece together Suni’s forgotten fate, from her youth to her violent death in a field, a patch of land that is deeply symbolic because of the human blood and bones it has absorbed – including, we learn, those of her own children.  Throughout his career, which began in 1975, Hyun has been striving to describe the psychological trauma wrought on the people of Jeju through history, and in so doing, to puncture the silence maintained by successive governments. In these stories, this burning topic returns as a leitmotif. Notably in ‘Father’, an extraordinarily powerful and evocative early text by the author, which describes a burnt village reduced to a pile of ashes together with a tiny white spot that has survived intact in the narrator’s memory: his school playground. And, a few metres away, ‘engraved like an iron seal on [his] retina’, the indelible image of a burned corpse, charred beyond recognition: that of his father.  Not all the stories are set on Jeju, but the island is present even when it is absent. Thus in ‘Shamanistic Ceremonies for the Summoning of Souls’, Jinho – an army corporal who gives his new recruits the ironic advice: ‘Grit your teeth, unless you want them to break’ – cannot bear the thought of returning to the island upon demobilisation. ‘His heart was as heavy as if he had swallowed a stone from one of the black walls on his native island [. . .] He had the feeling of being snatched away, of disappearing into exile in some distant corner of the world, in the middle of winter, under the snow.’ Hyun is a gifted analyst of the human soul. The final story is narrated from inside the head of a condemned man who may be walking towards his death – ‘may be’ because, it seems, his lord has pardoned him. Did he really steal rice? And what does a petty offence like that mean compared to the rampant corruption of the officials? In his panic-stricken brain, everything collides: spasms of distress, ripples of hope, confidence and distrust in the master’s word. For a moment, a long and steady gaze seems to save him . . . until a sudden, unexpected fall. When they close this book, European readers will not only have learned a great deal about South Korea; they will have done so through the emotions of Koreans themselves. Hyun’s characters are often described in simple, factual terms, but they impress with their liveliness, sensitivity and subtlety. They are fascinating in all their contradictions and complexities. Hyun is not only a master of the short story, but also a specialist in the torments of the soul – a moralist, in the truest sense. Translated by Jesse Kirkwood Florence Noiville Writer and Literary Critic Foreign Fiction Editor, Le Monde

  by Florence Noiville

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  [Vietnamese] Remembrance of Things Mundane: Oh The Humanity by Song Sokze

  W.G. Sebald, the legendary novelist whose works mostly center on memory, contemplated that, “Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle.” In the same reflective vein on the importance of reminiscence, Song Sokze, a gifted and celebrated Korean writer, touches on the sudden emergence of seemingly buried memories in his portrayal of trivialities in Con người hỡi ôi. Comprised of eight short stories mostly about contemporary Koreans (except for one that is a historical tale set in the Joseon period), the collection swarms with mundane characters whose travails as well as comforts are placed at a focal point. Modern life is realistically limned in a series of absurd and comical situations that present people in their unpolished states: a car accident between a short-tempered middle-aged man and a senior wearing a hearing aid that leads to a quarrel about indemnity; a blind date that leaves one cold because of an unsolicited ecological lecture; a self-taught cultural tour guide who shamelessly upgrades himself to an expert in history. Song’s protagonists make no endeavors to camouflage themselves, but are rather being their truest selves: imperfect, whimsical, and disillusioned. Their characteristics strongly resonate with the author’s dreary vision of the world as a place full of chaos in a time of climate change and globalization. Song skillfully employs memory as a recurrent device to blur the line between past and present, transforming apparently mediocre stories into fascinating ones. As Song himself remarks in the author’s note, we can create the future by preserving the present, because “today originates from the memories of yesterday.” The depiction of the characters’ quotidian activities is thus colored by the act of recalling: a protagonist’s rumination on his encounter with a lonesome wanderer who escaped from Korea to tristes-tropiques Laos in order to avoid leading a pointless existence in “Phương nam” (“The South”); an unexpected mobile message producing an uncontrollable gush of sweet memories of first love in “Tuyệt mỹ” (“A Eulogy”); a tale about a childhood friend adroit at mixing fact with fiction to construct countless personas for himself in “Linh hồn mê muội” (“The Possessed Soul”); or the immortalization of a departed father thanks to an overcoat that the son inherits from him in “Chiếc áo khoác” (“The Overcoat”); or the unjust death of an upright man who lapsed into oblivion in “Yu Hee” (“Yu Hee”), to name a few. Memory is not merely a tool to make people nostalgic, but a means to transport deeply contemplative messages on how modern life renders us lonely and isolated. It is also used to help us keep balance and to seek a haven in the mind. Not every story, however, is equally enjoyable and well written, and several parts are lengthy and tedious. Perhaps, the most outstanding work is “Luân khúc” (“Rondo”) which demonstrates Song’s artistry at its peak. The reader knows he is in the hands of a master storyteller when every single reading expectation is challenged and ultimately rejected. “Luân khúc” consists of three parts in which the reader is lured into the narrative’s trap as he or she tries to make a connection between them, only to be greatly disoriented at the end because of their irrelevance. Song’s brilliant gift for storytelling also lies in his ability to create witty stories written in deadpan prose. In the titular story, a guy spews out endless words to his date, ranging from shrimp and chicken farming, to GMOs, to the pathogen E.coli O-157, to the revenge of the animals on meat-loving humans. A story within a story, or rather several environmental documentaries within a story, nonchalantly recounted by the male protagonist, makes the story farcical and toxically grave all at once. Deftly capturing various aspects of our complex and multifaceted world, Song shows us how remembrance is a way to preserve the history of mundane things and people. His writing transcends them into something spectacular. Con người hỡi ôi is a small gem in a market that is saturated with more familiar names from Korea such as Han Kang, Kim Young-ha, and Kyung-sook Shin.     Dr. Quyen Nguyen Literary Critic

  by Dr. Quyen Nguyen

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  [Spanish] The Rules of the Game of Life: Mr. Monorail by Kim Jung Hyuk

  Mr. Monorail is a novel about a game, and game playing in general, and about life as a game, and how games can resemble life and vice versa. A young man nicknamed Mono (because he can’t hear in stereo, having lost his hearing on one side) invents a tabletop game called Hello, Mr. Monorail that allows players to journey across Europe without leaving home. Mono’s parents are obsessive about game playing and compete against one another to resolve the most minor disagreements, spending hours battling head-to-head to determine who must do a five-minute chore like taking out the trash. They are also sticklers to following the rules, which Mono always wants to rebel against. He is constantly getting roped into playing with them for games that require more than two players, and he always gets solidly and mercilessly trounced by his progenitors. Therefore, when he invents his own game, one of the rules is that tricks and cheating are an integral part of the game. Mono brings in his slacker friend Woochang to test play the game and together they tweak the rules, fixing its flaws and otherwise pulling together the whole package on the fly, which they decide to release commercially. (Woochang sketches a conventional train to put on the cover despite the game’s name because he doesn’t know what a monorail looks like; their slapdash solution is to just erase one track.) Hello, Mr. Monorail unexpectedly proves to be wildly popular, selling millions of copies in Korea in just a few months (as well as licenses abroad) and producing bucketloads of cash for its creators. All of which is almost just a prologue to the rest of the book.   Rules for reviewing Mr. Monorail 1. Read the book. 2. No spoilers. 3. Have fun.   For a novel ostensibly about a game that requires you to break the rules, the novelist likewise breaks a few of his own in complicity with the reader. Or rather, what seems at first like one kind of book (Mono’s story or even the story of “Hello, Mr. Monorail”) turns out to be another: something more philosophical, and less focused on the stories of the individual characters (or do I mean players?) involved. Despite its considerable length (over four hundred pages in the Spanish translation), it’s an agile read, and whenever it seems like things might get bogged down, there is a twist of fate or even perhaps of genre that raises the stakes of this grand caper and sends the story off in a new direction and keeps the reader turning the pages to find out how the author is going to pull this off. The novel is Korean on the one hand, but the emphasis is on continental Europe, first within the game invented by Mono and Woochang (neither of whom at the time have been to Europe), and later as the various characters crisscross Europe in a convoluted international chase as if they were actually playing out a live round of Monorail. (Though published in Argentina, the Spanish translation reads like that of Europe, where the action takes place; my one complaint might be that so much is left untranslated in English, especially names, whereas many Korean foods or terms are localized.) Often things are defined by contrast, as when Mono’s suitcase is stolen at the train station in Rome and he compares how onlookers would have reacted back home in Korea versus what happens in Italy. Rules for reading Mr. Monorail 1. Read the instructions before beginning. 2. Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride. 3. Have fun.   Agatha Christie once said (and I’m paraphrasing) that humor is national whereas tragedy is universal. (Spelling is also national as she would have written “humour.”) While in general I think this to be true, Mr. Monorail is also a very funny book whose many different kinds of humor resonate well with readers in translation. There is, on the one hand, a sort of slapstick humor, an almost visual humor that hearkens back to the Keystone Kops or Buster Keaton, with plenty of missed connections, and an air of the caper to the escapades of the book. There is also a gentle satire of family, game-playing, and even religion (sorry for the spoiler) although its bite is almost always softened by more profound observations or lessons. There are some puns, mostly Anglophone in the original, which are hard to re-create in Spanish and which are left in English in the translation as well. This is perhaps the humor that works least well, especially for a monolingual Spanish reader. But most of all, there is some very witty dialogue and banter between the characters and even by Mono by himself, who imagines dialogues between players of his game or possible situations he might get into (or out of). As readers of Mr. Monorail, you can break any rule except that final one.     Lawrence Schimel Bilingual (English/Spanish) Poet, Author, Translator

  by Lawrence Schimel

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  [Japanese] Believing in the Possibilities of “Another Story”: Twelve Women Already Dead by Bak Solmay

  Bak Solmay’s Twelve Women Already Dead is a collection of short stories compiled for publication especially in Japan. The copy on the book’s bellyband says that the author “confronts social issues such as the Gwangju Uprising, the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor, and femicide” with her “unique imaginativeness.” I cried so much I emptied a full box of tissues while reading Han Kang’s Human Acts. I saw A Taxi Driver, starring Song Kang-ho, in theaters, and left with my handkerchief soaked in tears, a newly made fan of Ryu Jun-yeol, who I first saw in that film. Whenever I see or hear the word “Gwangju,” I think, I know. I know. What happened there, at least, I know. “Social issues such as the Gwangju Uprising, the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor, and femicide.” I know the stories that are told along with these words, I think. So I prepared myself mentally before opening this book. No matter how painful the story, I must accept it, stand with the victims, and swear anew from the bottom of my heart to never let these atrocities be repeated. But on those pages, I found a space I had never imagined spreading out before me. If I were to put it into words, it was a quiet willfulness that refused to simply move the reader, refused to let them come close. The characters that appear in Bak’s stories are confused. So confused that it makes the reader pull back and ask, “Do you have to be so lost?” There were times when the characters themselves couldn’t accept their confusion. A certain credulity I had expected was missing, and the characters didn’t feel the things I expected them to feel. The world they looked upon was in constant flux, and they continued to change as well. They wouldn’t let me think, I know. In “Swaying into the Dark Night,” Busan Tower, which the main character is certain should exist in front of Busan Station, vanishes from their mind, transforms, and when they actually visit the spot, has actually disappeared. In “Beloved Dog,” the narrator has no faith in their recollection of 1994, which they must have lived through. When they think back to the year, “a variety of feelings and sensations” well up, yet they also recall without the slightest emotion “incidents, numbers, and people’s names carved into my mind by the words I saw in newspapers.” In “The Eyes of Winter,” two characters watch a documentary about the Kori Nuclear Power Plant and discuss how they wish they could have seen different kinds of movies. And in the title piece about femicide, the narrator evades telling us how they feel about either murdered or living women, including themselves. In “Well, What Shall We Sing?” the narrator, a Gwangju native joining in an event for students in San Francisco interested in learning Korean, listens to the stories told about the Gwangju Uprising while thinking about how they had expected “lighter” conversation. On the uprising’s thirtieth anniversary, the narrator visits the South Jeolla provincial office building that was the site of a massacre during the uprising. They think, “the people who actually know what happened here, maybe they’d tell us another story. Something that we haven’t talked about yet.” It seems Bak is always considering the potential of “another story,” that there is always “another story” behind everything that happens. In Japan, when someone creates a fictional work portraying actual incidents or events, I often see the “timing” of taking up those topics debated on social media. Isn’t it too early? It’s not yet over for the people who experienced it, they say. But these incidents never end. Suffering and sadness don’t heal with the passing of time, and events that have bred resentment in society are always passed on and stay in this world. Strictly speaking, there’s no such thing as perfect timing. If that’s the case, maybe one way an author can approach fiction with “integrity” is by quietly placing “another story” in some corner of this world. “Another story,” different from what we are all convinced we know. Bak writes about the lives of those of us who, in the face of these atrocities, cannot turn back time or save those who have lost their lives, who have no choice but to go on living out their lives in the places where those atrocities happened, where they still happen, and where they sometimes seem—though maybe not—to have come to terms with this past. The “other stories” she creates have a sedating effect, returning those of us who always wind up thinking “we know” back to a state of ignorance. Of course it is important to know history and the facts, but it is not a bad thing to be forced to remember, “That’s right, I don’t know anything.” And that is how these stories will make you feel.     Translated by Kalau Almony   Aoko Matsuda Author, Where the Wild Ladies Are (Soft Skull Press, 2020)

  by Aoko Matsuda