KOREA Kyung Sook Shin A Universal Voice An Intimate Conversation

Note: Kyung Sook Shin has published 10 books in 25 years and has won many prizes.  If interested you can go to Amazon.com and hear a reading of the first chapter of her new book on Audible books, on the site.

The Korean Institute at UC Berkeley did something extraordinary; they focussed on a a contemporary Korean writer, who was the first Korean  to win the Man Booker Prize.  The first Asian Prize recipient was judged by Colm Toibin, and was a Chinese writer. Laura Nelson Introduced the program, but what was disconcerting that as Chair of Korean Studies, she said to the audience she does not like to speak Korean!!!  Yongmin Kwon currently visiting professor of Korean Literature, an Emeritus professor of Seoul National University who is well published...and is co editor with Bruce Fulton who teaches at the University of British Columbia and has just won an award from the NEA -- (with whom I visited, and who I saw with during the presentations) and has received many awards within Canada. 

 Christopher P. Hanscom who delivered the presentation "On Modern and Contemporary Korean Fiction: made a point about culture ,Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea( Harvard )  a study of theories of language and Modernist fiction in 1930s Korea.   He is currently looking at the relationship of social and aesthetic forms, comparative colonialism and concepts of race and culture under Japanese empire.He was the most impressive of the speakers, the most professional and the most clear in how he presented his material, using the book covers of different cultural presentations of the work, to illustrate context. He praises the author for "photo realism" and relates the young women on the covers to the stories told.  Out of social inequality, a narrative emerges, "lost, in time.."  He describes the central character, as being shoe-less, and then losing her bag, bag-less, and then becomes lost...when she looks around she sees the lover she had not seen for 8 years..as a student protest begins.   Communication fails, and oftentimes it is a "phone call", where it does not connect, or remains unanswered, or is a "hang up" or there is a refusal to take the call...he says the whole novel for an audience could be seen, using this paradym.  She writes with a kind of hallucinogenic clarity, creating an atmosphere of collective sadness.  Multivalent, there is no single authoratative narrator.  Both fiction and gender are in transformation in her novels.  Hanscom catalogues the significant Korean writers of the novel in the past century...and concludes that Kyung wants to represent the human being, not a feminist viewpoint.  A principle in her work is that if place can be narrated, it can be remembered....  

Christopher P. Hanscom 

Bruce Fulton made a plea for more publication of Koreans.  He has 100 students who have translated, and have been  published.  He mentions Massachusetts Review.   He has published Modern Korean Fiction Columbia University Press, 2005.  He is editor for the Korea section of the Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature 2003 and general editor of the Modern Korean Fiction series published by the University of Hawaii Press.   He and his wife(with whom I sat) or Ju Chan Fulton is his co author of the translations of  River of Fire and Other Stories by O Chonghui (Columbia University Press, 2012).  and other publications of Korean writers.

Jiwon Ahin, Professor of Korean Literature, Arizona State University, was a little disconcerting.  She is however under contract with Harvard Asian Center to do a book manuscript CULTURAL MEMORY AND Kyung ung, IN LATE CHOSON KOREA   She had a topic on food and culture but got distracted.  Essentially she made the point that the cultural or customary body connects to the social body in the domestic body. 

Impressive and clear and professional and competent, Ha yun Jung, Ewa University, Korea,  quotes Robert Pinsky.  A translator is a very close reader of a private fragile voice but also a distinct and obstinate voice.  One must have an attentive ear!   I talked with her after the presentation and she teaches translation as well as being the translator for Kyung Sook Shin, which she loves!

Jiwon Ahin, Arizona State   interpreter for the author 

Marcella Marini, Acquisitions Editor. "The Familiar in the Unfamiliar"  Sellario Editions. Palermo

Marcella is charming and stresses that Italy has a long history of translations.  She says that the appeal of Kyung Sook Shin's work to a Catholic society has the "mother" and "family" as central to her work, which coincides with values in Italy.

The author Kyung Sook Shin

Like many authors, she likes to rise at 3:00 AM, starts her day with yoga, and writes through the sunrise until 9:00 AM, but not every day.  She tries to keep this habit however and confesses to trying to write about something instead of actually writing.  She says her books of course do derive from her background in a place in Southern Korea which knew a massacre and she writes out of a Korea still in transition, since the 80s  in her view...She does not want to be writing about the past, but wants a moment to be ever present, in which one finds a moment of awareness.   When she first started to write, she loved to write a phrase that pleased her, but now she feels that when she writes, all writers she has liked are in the sentences that she writes.  She thinks it is like this in musical composition as well.  She writes about people who lose friends and life due to an uncontrollable reality.

 Kyung Sook Shin is also a UNICEF ambassador, and says that she has the ability to know what people want and need, and that she hopes that all carrying a sorrow find some relief in reading her stories.  Perhaps one day I will read her stories.  I listened to the first chapter on Amazon, of "I will be there".   She hopes "Lone Room" will be the next book of hers to appear in translation. She thinks a translator deconstructs a house brick by brick and then has to rebuild it.  She thinks of her books in translations like a son who has gone abroad and comes home, and she doesn't know him anymore.  She continues, that literature does not just record the happy moments.  If one follows the defeated, it does become gloomy.   She says Korea has lost alot and suffered alot.  Yes, her hometown in the South affects her outlook on Korean history.  Especially its economic development She says it is because I left the town(she now lives in Tokyo)that she has developed a longing for her birthplace ; it is a place left behind, and in that way, positively preserves a primal element, a dialect  landscape and village community and a country home which do figure in her stories.  A sense of death is carried by us all from this place.  The Mother has the richest character in her books; is that a comment on gender?  She says that a mother is a nurturer, takes care of  a frail being.   In modern times many people do not want to be mothers.  Therefore, we lose intimacy.  We lose closeness.  Human beings need for someone to play the role of Mom.  I hope my novel raises a question that others should concsider about their lives.  She hopes her books can be a companion to those who have some sorrow.