Concrete We Are Universal

Recently I’ve been noticing more stray cats on thestreets. I wondered why: Has there been an increasein stray cats? But the number of stray cats has alwaystrended upward. There will never be a night on earthwhen you can’t hear the meow of a street cat.The reason I’ve been noticing stray cats moreoften is something else entirely. It’s simple, really:It’s because I’ve had more exposure to stories aboutcats. Dogs too—I’ve heard as many stories aboutdogs as about cats. As the imagination regarding catsand dogs has grown in literature, my perspective onthese animals has changed. I try to observe themmore closely, try to approach them. The way that Iobserve and approach them has changed too, and I’vebecome more careful than before. I want to respectthem as they are.The theme of this winter issue of KLN is“Dogs and Cats: The New Companions of KoreanLiterature.” Animals have appeared in literatureas variations on a classic theme: the relationshipbetween humans and nature. They appeared aswild animals that haven’t been domesticated, oras animals that are devoted and loyal to humansafter domestication. But now animals in literature,like these cats and dogs, appear as an independentOther, or as a partner to humans. Rather than beingdomesticated through human language, it’s almost asthough these animals in literature are domesticatingliterary language in a new way.If literature is a language that creates a bridgebetween humans and other beings—betweenhumans and other humans, humans and otherorganisms, humans and objects—we can say thatliterature in itself is a kind of translation. The poetsHa Jaeyoun and Kim Jeong-hwan are the featuredpoets in this issue. Kim Jeong-hwan is also atranslator, and in the past five years, he has translatedthe collections of twelve contemporary poets intoKorean. For him, translation is simultaneously anexchange between languages and solidarity betweenlife and death. His translation philosophy, whichaims to diversify and deepen public death viaprivate life, has much in common with Ha Jaeyoun’spoetics. She calls her poems an exploration of “theironic relationship between death’s universality andindividuality.”Literature is always born of perilous times. Orrather, even in what are considered peaceful times,literature stakes out for itself its own sense of peril.But we are now in an obviously perilous era. It’s justthat the perils have become so normalized that oursensitivity has been dulled.Even in the face of devastating global warming,which endangers every life, we are still lost in ouranthropocentrism. Even as civil wars and terrorismturn so many into stateless refugees, we are still lostin our ethnocentric views.Literature continues to tell the stor y of“the Other” because it argues that symbiosis andcoexistence with the other, that being that is notoneself, is inevitable in these undeniably periloustimes. This winter issue testifies to the urgency ofthat statement through the voices of many writers.These voices insist: The concreteness andspecificity of literature is not that of a single ethnicityor race but belongs to all ethnicities, all races.The translation of literature connects a singularconcreteness to the concreteness of the whole,and through this connection, we reach towarduniversality.Translated by Hedgie Choi