Korean popular culture—television, film, and music—has been sweeping the globe. But Korean literature is darker and more serious than you might assume, given the fun and irreverent nature of 'K-pop.' Here, the respected translator and academic Bruce Fulton highlights five key Korean novels that offer insight into the culture and troubled history of the Korean peninsula.
I want to begin by thanking you for selecting five of the best Korean novels. Could you tell us about the criteria you used to compile your reading list?
Over the decades, Ju-Chan Fulton and I have developed a gut instinct for what we believe to be worthwhile and meaningful. I hope that doesn’t sound too pretentious. But for the last fifteen or twenty years, we’ve found ourselves addressing a rather common complaint among readers of Korean fiction, which is that much of what they read is dark and depressing and gloomy. So we decided in our translations to attempt to illustrate why that should be the case. This has led us to an increasing interest in literature that deals with trauma, with loss, with wartime, colonisation, and in which native Korean spirituality is called upon to effect healing and closure.
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I guess, if you were to choose a single criterion, you might describe it as ‘translations that matter.’ We want our translations to make a difference. And at a time when Korean popular culture is arguably driving popular culture worldwide, we tend to forget that much of the oral and performative elements of Korean popular culture derive from the Korean oral tradition, reflected in Korean literature from its earliest days. So, yes, another criterion would be simply to maintain visibility for Korean literature in the greater fabric of Korean culture and tradition.
Yes, as you say, interest in Korean culture has blossomed in the West in recent years. That must be quite satisfying for someone like you, who has worked so hard for more than forty years to bring Korean literature to a wider audience.
We are ever hopeful. But we also have to remember that the tradition of Korean recorded literature—that is, apart from oral literature—continues to be an elite, conservative, and patriarchal tradition. The reason for this is that, until about 500 years ago, Korea did not have a script of its own. So for those who were literate on the Korean Peninsula, the literary language was classical Chinese.
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How did Koreans go about learning the Chinese literary tradition? Well, first of all, you had to be male. The goal of becoming literate was to pass the government civil service examination in traditional Korea—an exam that was only open to men. So any self-respecting clan would sequester the oldest son, who would devote their childhood to mastering classical Chinese. If you think about the percentage of the population that could afford to do that in a traditional agrarian society, it’s infinitely small. Modern Korea, to a large extent, inherited this elevated status of recorded literature, whether prose or poetry, and this can prove intimidating to everyday readers. Only recently have women writers beaten down the doors.
There’s a strictly defined entrance to writerhood in Korea. But in the last ten years or so, we’ve begun to see more diversity—what we might think of as ‘genre fiction.’ But very few Korean fiction writers have achieved financial success. The ones who have usually write multi-volume novels that are serialised in newspapers or literary journals. The author of one of the books I’ve selected recently confided that she’s happy if she sells more than 3000 copies of a story collection or novel in the Korean edition. And surveys suggest that Korean readers spend less than an hour a week on print materials. Just about everything is accessed on smartphones. So I don’t think it’s realistic to expect Korean literature, especially fiction, to find as much recognition as music and food. But that won’t stop us trying.
Yes, you recently released The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories, the first work of Korean literature to be published by Penguin World Classics in the UK.
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Yes, Penguin US has published a few Korean volumes in the last twenty years or so, but this is a first for Penguin UK. When people abroad think of Korean literature these days, they tend to think of books like The Vegetarian, an English version of a work by Han Kang—which, as a recipient of a major English literary prize, got everyone very, very excited. But what’s wonderful about the Penguin anthology is that finally we have a sampling of some of the stories that have brought modern Korean fiction to a very high point of development, the short story form.
This needs a little bit of context; back in the old days, fiction was not divided by genre or by length. It was simply fiction. The works that were recorded could be a few pages long, or they might be hundreds of volumes long—usually family histories, which were very popular among court women during Chosŏn, the most recent kingdom. But with the start of the modern period in Korea, which we usually date to the late 1800s and early 1900s, we see the western-style short story coming into Korea by way of Japan. Russian short fiction was very popular in Japanese translation in colonial Korea.
Another anomaly in world colonial history: Korea was the first sovereign nation to be colonised by a non-western power: Japan annexed Korea in 1910 and their occupation of the Korean Peninsula lasted until 1945. During those 35 years, young Koreans interested in literature were reading Western literature in Japanese translation, because Japanese was the language of instruction in the colonial Korean educational system. But it was the short story that proved especially engaging to the young Korean literati, and quite quickly Korea developed a very solid tradition of short fiction.
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The Penguin anthology contains 25 stories, one or two of them verging on novella length, as well as an excerpt from a novel. What is historic about this excerpt is that this is not a South Korean novel, but a North Korean one.
As you may know, North Korea (‘The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’) and South Korea (‘The Republic of Korea’) are technically still at war because no formal peace treaty was signed at the time of the armistice that ended the Korean War in July 1953. There has since been very little contact between the people of the two nations and we are getting to know something about North Korean literature only recently, through memoirs by defectors. But the novel Ju-Chan and I are translating is by a writer who grew up in North Korea and attended university there, fulfilled his obligatory military service, and then wrote a novel about an iconic Korean entertaining woman called Hwang Chini.
Hwang Chini is an iconic figure in Korean tradition, and it is notable that the author—instead of writing a novel of socialist realism about present-day life in Korea—chose to go back 500 years or so. I think this is what made it possible for this novel to be published in North Korea. The writing is superb. And we should remember that the author’s grandfather was Hong Myŏnghǔi, also a writer of note. The grandson has obviously inherited the grandfather’s gift for storytelling.
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He was the first North Korean writer to win South Korea’s Manhae Literary Prize. Should we consider literature from North and South Korea as being one and the same?
Well, originally, of course, yes, before South Korea and North Korea became distinct geopolitical entities in 1948. But the emphasis of literature in North Korea necessarily had to connect with the
Of the North Korean leadership, which has always claimed patriotic background. Kim Il Sung, the original leader, was supposedly an anti-Japanese activist. After 1945, the division of the Korean Peninsula was effected as a temporary measure to take care of the surrender of demilitarised Japanese forces that ran the Korean Peninsula. Soviet military advisors entered the North and the US established a military government in the South. There in the South, writers seized on a tendency to reflect contemporary realities in their writing—that’s been omnipresent in South Korean literature from the beginning—but in the North it was necessary to help the Kim family solidify their rule. So from the 1960s, we see a standard, almost formulaic, North Korean plot structure and characterisation.
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Earlier I mentioned that our number-one criterion for translating a novel was that it should somehow make a difference. But we couple that with what we believe to be an appropriate literary style for the subject matter. On the surface, this book would be about a disturbing aspect of civil war—a massacre, or what you might call an ideological cleansing. This novel is based on a historical incident that took place about two months after the June 1950 outbreak of the war.
This incident took place in a small city in present-day North Korea. North Korean historians blamed it on United Nations forces pushing north—those UN forces were primarily US military. But subsequent research revealed that the UN forces had nothing
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