Issue #17: Spring 2007

Modern Korean Fiction at UBC

by Bruce Fulton

Korean fiction reflects the cultural change going on in South Korea, and is catching the attention of readers around the world.

The Korean Wave, Hallyu, is sweeping East Asia, leaving in its wake legions of fans who follow Korean soap operas and historical dramas, Korean musicals, and Korean pop music with the fervour formerly associated primarily with those of us fortunate enough to have sampled Korea’s wonderful and spicy cuisine. But behind this recent phenomenon of popular culture is a venerable cultural tradition that predates the Christian era and that, in the case of the fine arts and the literary arts, continues to flourish. Modern Korean fiction, considered by most scholars to date from 1917, the year in which Yi Kwang-su’s novel Mujŏng (Heartlessness) was serialized in a Seoul daily, is a blend of Western genre and Korean sensibility. It offers to readers beyond the Korean peninsula a window through which Korea’s turbulent modern history is never far from the foreground. Indeed, for university students studying Korea, it is that nation’s modern fiction that offers the most vivid accounts of the changes sweeping over a proud people in the modern era.

The fiction writers considered most important in Korea today – Yi Munyŏl and Hwang Sŏgyŏng – are best known for their novels, which tackle some of the weightiest issues of contemporary Korea: the territorial division of the Korean peninsula (the two Koreas are still technically at war, as a permanent peace treaty ending the 1950-53 Korean war has yet to be signed); the ideological conflict underlying that division; and the confrontation between Eastern and Western tradition. Novels, though, are even today held in lower critical esteem than short fiction and the novella, in part because the novels carry the stigma of newspaper serialization and commercialism. And indeed to Western eyes familiar with the short story tradition of Europe and North America, the Korean short story has achieved a high level of development despite getting a late start, with noteworthy Korean short fiction not appearing in quantity until the 1920s.

Since the 1980s, modern Korean fiction has attracted increasing international visibility in translation, in story collections, novels and fiction anthologies. A good introduction to the varied voices of twentieth-century Korean fiction writers is Modern Korean Fiction (2005), an anthology edited by me and my mentor and colleague at Seoul National University, Youngmin Kwon. The stories in this volume range from the 1920s to the 1990s and include not only canonical stories of life in the colonial period (1910-1945), when Korea was ruled by Imperial Japan, but also portraits from the 1970s of an industrializing South Korea and a socialist North Korea and a selection of stories by women writers, whose voices were until the 1970s by and large muted.

Two of the stories in Modern Korean Fiction were translated by UBC students. This is fitting considering that UBC and the department of Asian Studies has become the primary training centre in the English-speaking world for Korean-to-English literary translation. Before I arrived at UBC in 1999, Ross King had developed korn 410, a course in Korean short fiction that introduced students to authentic Korean-language literary materials accompanied by extensive grammar notes and vocabulary lists. Among the requirements for this course, which King and I teach in alternating years, is a complete translation of a modern Korean short story. Student translators graduating from korn 410 may move on to my korn 412 course in Korean-to-English literary translation and from there to a seminar on the same topic that is open to both qualified undergrads as well as grad students.

What Ross King and I have witnessed among our students is remarkable. Literary translation is an art in which competence is commonly thought to take long years of experience to acquire, especially when the languages being spanned are as different as Korean and English. But here at UBC we are seeing that undergraduate as well as graduate students, after a year of intensive work with Korean-language texts, are capable of producing translations that with standard copy-editing are publishable as English-language works of literature.

Why is this surge in translation and publication more vigorous at UBC than at such venerable Korean Studies centres as Harvard, ucla, and the University of Hawaii? One reason is the collective vision of former UBC president Martha Piper, the UBC department of Asian Studies, and the Seoul-based International Communication Foundation. Representatives of the icf, visiting UBC during the annual Korean author visits that I host here, saw the potential of training literary translators at the undergraduate level. With the blessing of Asian Studies, President Piper endowed UBC with a professorial position in Korean literature and literary translation, the chair I occupy. To my knowledge it is the only academic position of this kind in Korean Studies in the English-speaking world. As a result, in the new millennium UBC alumni are already playing a leading role in bringing the rich variety of modern Korean fiction to an English-language readership. ¤

Bruce Fulton is Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation, department of Asian Studies