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Tag: North Korea

  • North Korean love poetry

    In the West, we consider it proper to condemn government censorship of literature. In North Korea, the production and consumption of words is more strictly controlled and politically micro-managed by the ruling party than anywhere else on earth. Ironically however, there may be no government-censored art for which commentators in the West so often ‘suspend disbelief’ with regard to values we otherwise uphold and defend in our own world.

    Perhaps there is more sympathy for the notion that judging North Korean works according to our values is Orientalist, than there is for the notion that by denying these values as relevant to North Koreans we make them our ‘other’. Moreover, some might ask, aren’t there more pressing matters in North Korea that we should concern ourselves with than the right to free expression?

    I just received my first copy of a book I translated, Dear Leader, the memoir of Jang Jin-sung, a former poet laureate of the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il. The view of a devil’s advocate – that all writing is constrained, whether socially, politically or commercially – is where it began for me: when I met Jang, I asked myself, can there be a North Korean Virgil? Could North Korea produce the highest beauty in the highest service to those in power?

    My intuitive answer was no: not because I didn’t want it to be possible, but because I didn’t think it could be, at least within the current system. Not only because it’s impossible to publish any work outside of the meticulous legal-literary rulebook of Juche Art Theory, but because of an enforced vacuum: the abrupt breaking from the past and from outside context; the beginning of history and literature ‘anew’; the denial that goes beyond cultural amnesia. Roman writers were intimately familiar with the heritage that they were to assume and appropriate, and this heritage was instilled as superior even to their own; but as Jang says, his people were brought up to deny that any heritage superior to theirs could possibly exist, even when they were able to encounter the outside world through the rare privilege of family or work connections.

    The young Jang devoured what was forbidden, which for him was the poetry of Byron and the music of Dvorak. It led him to question state teaching, but he still believed there could and should exist aesthetic interrogation within the bounds set by the Party. In North Korea, it is forbidden for love poetry to be about a man and a woman; it may only speak of the individual’s love for the Leader. But Jang managed to write love poetry, within these bounds, but still about the love between a man and woman. In one poem, a soldier walks too fast ahead of his girl, saying that he wishes to slow down to her pace but cannot, as he must go and defend their country with the Leader; but one day, he might be able to walk in time with her. Not only did this poem cause a sensation, Kim Jong-il gave it the highest possible praise in North Korea: the Leader’s personal endorsement.

    But, as each North Korean exile among the privileged has testified (the North Korean elite, perhaps more so than any other, must continually deny and compartmentalise – whether in diplomacy, policy-making or proclaiming the truth of an ideology that each knows is false and hypocritical), there comes a point at which the sublimation and double life can no longer be denied to oneself, even if one manages to uphold it for others and the outside world. Jang had the impulse to acknowledge what he saw, not just what he was told to see on pain of death, both for him and his loved ones according to the dogma of guilt by association. He began to write secretly and, finally, began to share with close friends the forbidden literature he had been allowed to see as part of his work as a propagandist.

    As Jang says in his memoir, “The world might damn North Korea as a ruthless regime, claiming that the system is run by physical force. But this is only a partial view of how the country is run. Kim Jong-il always stressed: I rule through art and literature.”

    In a country where nobody is allowed to communicate freely with another, let alone with an outsider, for a North Korean to propose that there is another reality behind the façade poses an obvious problem: how can any outsider verify that this proposition is true or at least sincerely intended? But for Jang and all the others who know that a North Korean literature can exist beyond the absolute control of the Workers’ Party, it is a story that must continue to be told.

     

  • The suffering healers

    Ahead of his appearances with English PEN at the Free Word Centre and London Book Fair 2014, Hwang Sok-Yong takes us into the shamanistic past of Korean culture, and how those creation stories can be used to write about globalisation and modern suffering

    Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith

    For many hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years, the structure and content of a shaman ritual, which helps the passage of the souls of the dead from this world to the next, has been passed down from generation to generation, retaining a remarkably similar form given the time span involved. This exorcism tradition, generically known as
    Hwangch’ŏn Muga (‘Shaman Songs of the Underworld’), includes 47 oral sub-stories 
    relating specifically to ‘Princess Bari’, a shaman narrative that has been recited across the Korean peninsula with very little local variation. Much like the Greek Myth of Odysseus and the Scandinavian tales of Odin, the plot is structured around a journey to the world of the dead, undertaken in order to rescue one of the souls there. Shamans, who are female in Korean culture, consider ‘Bari’ as their foundation myth, referring to ‘Grandma Bari’ as the original ancestor of all Korean shamans. They themselves are uncertain as to why the ‘Bari’ narrative came to be included in all exorcism rituals, but it seems that through recounting the sufferings and ordeals experienced by Bari, their progenitor, shamans have been able to claim for themselves her position as a ‘suffering healer of sufferings’, one who solves various ordeals while undergoing them herself.

    Together with my previous novels
    The Guest and
    Shim Chong,
    Princess Bari presents a reality which is recognisably that of our present world using a distinctively Korean form and narrative. If the period from the fall of the Berlin wall to the beginning of the Bush administration saw the beginnings of globalisation, 9/11 was the turning point after which a more openly enforced American unilateralism led to an increase in globalisation’s reach and intensity. Now, its effects can be clearly felt not only in Korea, but in every country, resulting in polarisation between nations.

    After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, North Korea suffered a famine which lasted for more than ten years, peaking as the period in the late 1990s known as the ‘Arduous March’. According to a UN survey, as many as three and a half million people may have died from starvation and the side effects of malnutrition between 1994 and 1998. Meanwhile in South Korea, only a very short distance away, we had everything in abundance. While recognising the responsibility of the North Korean government and seeking to call them to account, I also repeatedly criticised the hypocritical human rights logic of the Big Powers who instituted and subsequently managed the division of Korea into North and South, with other Communist countries previously supplying the former, and US troops still stationed in the latter. The reality of life in  North Korea has been obscured by ideological arguments and strategic preparations for the (highly unlikely) possibility of a ‘North Korean collapse’. Many aspects of the situation have been widely forgotten, or else used solely in propaganda intended to vilify the North Korean regime’s anti-humanitarianism. Every victim, every refugee in today’s world, must pass through the new ‘hell’ that has been brought about by the dark side of globalisation.

    For me, constructing a story overlaying the ‘movement through hell’ of present-day refugees with that of the Korean shaman myth ‘Princess Bari’ is a very symbolic act. Bari goes to the ends of the earth searching for the ‘water of life’, posing questions like: how, in this 21
    st
    century global village of dissolution, hatred and death, can we discover the road which leads to life? what is the real meaning of this ‘water of life’? How could a modern-day Bari go about finding such a thing? These questions were the seeds for
    Princess Bari. 

  • Capturing the mood

    In translating literature into English, tone and flow are everything. The right tone will capture the author’s intent and voice, magically transporting the reader into a different world created by the novelist. A not-quite-right tone makes the reading experience much like listening to a CD that keeps skipping— the reader will be pulled out of the story, unable to inhabit the fictional world the way she might if she were reading the original.

    As a translator from the Korean, I am constantly on guard against that reaction and therefore take very seriously the task of landing on the right tone. It can be challenging to capture, particularly when the author or narrator’s voice is so different from my own. To put myself in the right frame of mind, I read widely in English when I take on a new project. To translate a satirical, postmodern novel, I read several such English novels; when working on a novel about a poet and his poetry, I read various volumes of poetry. This ritual isn’t so much to gain direct inspiration, but rather to energize me, the way one might listen to upbeat music while jogging.

    I’ve translated many novels with alienated, lonely male characters, who often express their disillusion with life through destructive behavior I don’t relate to or talk in ways that feel foreign to me. In these cases, I pay particular attention to the way men of a certain age and epoch speak in movies, novels, and in life. Dialogue is revised and edited again, as I poll acquaintances, friends, and colleagues to craft an authentic voice. For example, in one project, a character is a middle-aged former baseball player, and to properly render the way he thinks about his past career and talks shop with a buddy, I read articles and blog posts about baseball to get a feel for the way people discuss the game, and asked baseball fanatics around me for their opinions on how they would talk about certain aspects of the sport. Little touches like these go unnoticed when done well, but are glaring when done poorly; they contribute greatly to the overall tone of the book.

    Using these methods, I have embodied the voice of a middle-aged North Korean spy, a guilt-ridden writer despairing at the loss of her mother, a 1940s Japanese prison guard, a coddled but neglected ten-year-old girl who feels like an outsider, a murderous sociopath, and an autistic math whiz.

    The most challenging, however, wasn’t any of these characters, but a hen named Sprout. In The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly by Sun-mi Hwang, recently published in both the US and the UK, the feisty, spunky, independent-minded hen, yearning to leave the battery cage to lay and hatch an egg, charts her own course, refusing to settle for anything less than the life she has in mind for herself. The author’s writing is spare and charged with emotion, and I wanted to convey that while keeping the prose elegant.

    As I read classic and modern-day fables, I went through several versions of the manuscript, editing, discarding, and reworking to get to the right tone. In one of my early drafts, I had rendered a passage this way:

    Sprout slowed down to match the baby’s gait. The female ducks fell back unwillingly. ‘The weasel, that terrifying hunter! I’m scared. And I hate him. He took everything precious to me. I wish I were stronger than the weasel so I could get revenge!’ It was a foolish thought. Revenge? Just thinking about living in the wide-open fields was enough to make her cry. But she didn’t, closing her beak firmly.

    Although more literally translated, the hen’s thoughts in single quotes were jarring in English. Eventually, I decided to do away with the single quotes throughout the text while retaining Sprout’s feelings and thoughts. In the end, I ended up with the passage below:

    Sprout slowed down to match Baby’s gait. The female ducks fell back unwillingly. Sprout felt surging hatred toward the weasel. He’d taken every precious being. She wanted to be stronger than the weasel to get revenge. But she knew it was foolish. Revenge? Just thinking about living in the wide-open fields again was enough to make her cry. But she held her tears at bay and set her beak.

    In the second version, Sprout’s fear and gumption are still on display, but the text reads more fluidly, encapsulating the mood of the novel more effectively. As this novel is a fable, I wanted to convey the deeper meaning while keeping to the lean style of writing. It was surprising how difficult this proved to be, but it is because works with more complex sentence and narrative structures that seem more difficult at first glance allow for a wider choice of words. My goal for every translation I do is to recreate the mood of the original novel—in this one, to transport the English language reader into Sun-mi Hwang’s universe of brave, singular animals.

    • Sun-mi Hwang  is speaking at the Cambridge Literature Festival at 10am on Sunday April 6th, in the Lightfoot Room at the Divinity School,  St John’s College, St John’s Street, Cambridge, as well as at the English PEN Literary Salon, at the London Book Fair, Earls Court, at 11.30 on Weds April 9th, all as part of the British Council Cultural Programme.
    • Please see here to buy the book The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly.
    • Please see here for an interview with Sun-Mi Hwang, author of The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly.

  • Women Writers, Part I

    PEN Atlas contributor Krys Lee considers the impact of Kyung-sook Shin’s Man Asian Literary Prize win and where Korean women writers stand today

    Last month, the phrase the “Asian Booker Prize” constantly popped up in the Korean media. Kyung-sook Shin’s Please Look After Momwas awarded the Man Asian Prize for 2012, and was greeted by a local media blitz that is rarely seen in literature. While an award is always exciting, especially for smaller countries as it helps to gain recognition and a larger prospective audience of readers for local literature, Shin is only one of many Korean women writers today whose debts lie in the past.One word in the Korean language that fascinates me is the word shinyoga (new woman). This was the title of Korea’s first short-lived feminist magazine launched in March 1920 and a term used for women associated with an education, Western-style clothing and modern ideas. At a time, when men of middle-class standing and beyond commonly had concubines, while women married in their teens and lived under the unforgiving eye of their mother-in-laws, many of these earlier female intellectuals, artists and writers suffered greatly as they struggled to make a life in a society that wasn’t ready for them. Writers like Na Hye-sok, now seen as an early role model for women writers and feminists, died a divorced woman, abandoned by society, friends, and even her own family, after an alleged love affair she conducted in Paris where her husband had been stationed. It didn’t matter that men often had other women; the more she belatedly defended her position in public, the more she was ostracized. Other writers like Kim Won-ju, a friend of Na Hye-sok’s and an editor at Shinyoga, left marriage for a monk’s life. The word shinyoga came to be associated with radicalism, rebellion and being modern.Two major women writers who benefited from these predecessors were Pak Wan-seo and Park Kyeong-ni.Pak Wan-seo, who passed away in 2011, was known for writing autobiographical fiction that vividly documents aspects of her personal life as well as the life of a rapidly changing nation. Pak’s life spanned a colonized Korea under Japanese rule, the Korean War that left the country divided, and South Korea’s dramatic industrialization and democratization. In books such as her debut novel,The Naked Tree, and the autobiographicalnovel,Who Ate Up All the Shinga?, her detailed impressions of a nation as well as ordinary families living in challenging times help bring Korean history to life in a way that few writers have accomplished. In Who Ate Up All the Shinga?, in particular, the mother’s attempts to remake the main character into a shinyoga are interrupted by the Korean War. Politics, in Pak’s work, is always personal. She was known as a chronicler, a storyteller, and a compassionate individual who understood suffering. In a literary world vastly dominated by men, Pak managed to gain both attention and respect for making history personal, yet still powerful.Pak Kyung-ni, another one of South Korea’s great writers died in May 2008.Toji, or Land, is widely considered her masterpiece. The 16-volume saga follows the struggles of several generations of villagers from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century under Japanese imperialism, and includes the lives of hundreds of characters, creating a comprehensive, complex portrait of the lives of Koreans. Pak’s life was tumultuous and filled with tragedy as a direct result of Korea’s history; her work is certainly influenced by a preoccupation of how the fate of a nation influences individual lives, but her approach to fiction is less autobiographical than Pak Wan-seo’s work. She strives to comprehend a nation and its people, in all their variety in a way that few writers have the courage to attempt. Even in a school curriculum dominated by men, Pak’s Land is considered essential reading.Shinyoga in Korea have come a long way. And yet not as much has changed as one would have hoped. According to Hankyoreh newspaper, discrimination against women in Korea in the workplace today ranks 104th
    worst in the world. Women score higher on most entrance exams than men but few women reach beyond mid-managerial positions. The more highly educated a woman is, the more undesirable she is considered by matchmaking agencies. Most working women are still too fearful to take their full maternity leave; the unforgiving beauty standard for women has heavily contributed to plastic surgery’s mainstream status; and unmarried women who are independent, successful, and in their thirties are treated with pity and asked almost daily, “Why aren’t you married?” Women have changed, but society is still catching up.Yet, there are writers arguing, challenging, and making space for women’s voices in a society whose patriarchal structures are largely intact. Some exciting women writers today gaining praise from critics and readers include Ch’oi Yun, Jeong Yi-hyun, Kim In-Sukand Kim Sun Woo. Younger writers such as Han Ganghave not been widely translated into English, but I expect the recognition of books such as the Man Asian Prize winner Please Look After Mom will lead to new forays into the translation of Korean women writers.

    About the author

    Krys Lee is the author of Drifting House recently published by Faber and Faber in the U.K. and Viking/Penguin in the U.S.. She was born in Seoul, South Korea, studied in the U.S. andEngland, and lives in Seoul. Her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Narrative magazine, Granta (New Voices), California Quarterly, Asia Weekly, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Huffington Post and Condé Nast Traveller,UK.www.krys.lee.com

    Additional Information

    Kyung-sook Shin (1963) is the author of 6 novels in addition to Please Look After Mother, which will be published in 19 countries, and has sold almost 1.5 million copies in South Korea alone. She is one of the country’s most widely read and acclaimed novelists, having won the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, the Dong-in Literature Prize, and the Isang Literary Prize, as well as France’s Prix de l’Inaperçu. She lives in Seoul and in New York.Park Wan-seo , also Park Wan suh (1931-2011)  is a household name in Korea and draws standing-room-only crowds in North American cities with substantial Korean populations. Who Ate Up All the Shinga? is a major work, being both a rare account of a woman coming of age in colonial Korea and the first book-length memoir in English by a Korean writer resident in and writing about Korea.  (Bruce Fulton, University of British Columbia).  Park Kyung-ni (or Pak Kyong Ni) (1926 – 2008) was a prominent South Korean novelist. She is well known for her 16-volume story  The Land, an epic saga set on the turbulent history of Korea during 19th and 20th century.Na Hye-sok ( 1896 – 1948) was a Korean poeter, feminist writer and painter, educators, journalists. She was the first female Korean artist of Western painting and the second Korean artist who held an oil painting exhibition. She became well-known as a liberal feminist with her criticism against the marital institution in the early 20th century.

  • What We Don't Know About North Korea

    This week’s PEN Atlas despatch comes from Krys Lee, who takes a look at the literature from (and about)  North Korea that is available in English translation.North Korea has featured prominently in the news for many years, particularly in recent months with the death of its leader Kim Jong-Il on Dec 17, 2011. But it has been largely absent in fiction, at least in English. What is available in English is Adam Johnson’s much-praised and recently published novel The Orphan Master’s Son, James Church’s Inspector O novel A Corpse in the Koryo, and a few stories from my book Drifting House. Translated works, usually from South Korea, open up a few more  opportunities, including Jia: A Novel of North Korea by Hyejin Kim that reads much like a news report, as well as a more nuanced rendition of the country in Young-ha Kim’s Your Republic Is Calling You.I was able to have brunch with Young-ha in New Yorka few weeks ago. I’ve been reading his work for over eight years, both in Korean and in translation, so when he came to the Center for Fiction where I was reading and suggested that we meet, I quickly agreed. I wrote in English but have lived in Seoul, South Korea for over ten years, and Young-ha wrote in Korean but has been living in New York for the past two years as a writer in residence at ColumbiaUniversity. We are both part of a wave of transnational writers, and seemed to recognize this in each other. We talked about many things, but one of them was the sense of loneliness that Young-ha, as a seasoned writer, warned me of, that would inevitably mark my life as a writer. The constant travel and time spent away from home will change your life, he said. This observation is much in keeping with his book Your Republic Is Calling You.Though Your Republic Is Calling You is set in South Korea, it is the best novel about North Korea available in translation. The novel follows one day in the life of a North Korean spy named Ki-yong who has been slumbering at his job incognito for many years in Seoul, when he is suddenly called back to the homeland. Though it was marketed as a thriller in the English-language market and given a new glamorous, chilling title, the original book in South Korea was seen as literary novel with the title which would translate roughly as The Empire of Light. As a thriller, it is quiet at best. Not much happens in terms of action, and more time is spent on the ruminations of the main narrator as he makes the greatest decision of his life: Does he return toNorth Korea, with no idea of what awaits him, or does he stay in the South, with all its potential unknown repercussions? Either way, the reader becomes intimate with his neither here nor there status, and with the sense of being an outsider that has shaped Ki-yong’s life. Young-ha’s intimacy with the details of North Korean life as well as his deep understanding of Korean culture, help readers vividly feel and understand the troubled modern history of the Koreas.Yi Mun-yol’s An Appointment with My Brother is another seminal work in Korean that is being retranslated into English by noted translator and writer Heinz Fenkl. Two separated brothers, one from North Korea and one from the South, meet in China after their father has died. This meeting between separated brothers is a popular theme in Korean modern literature as it is emblematic of the relationship of the divided Koreas, but this trope is still powerful and fresh in Yi Mun-yol’s telling. Yi, one of Korea’s most eminent living writers, knows this particular story intimately. His father defected to North Korea after the Korean War, which caused incredible economic and psychological hardship to the family, all subjects that Yi explores in his fiction.The story of division has figured largely in the imagination of South Korean literature, but more recently North Koreaitself has taken center stage with the novel Rina by South Korean writer Kang Yong-Suk. The novel’s premise is promising, and it begins with great urgency as we follow North Korean refugees in China through the jungles of Southeast Asia as they seek safety in a third country. Despite the one-dimensional characters and a rather limited understanding of North Korea, Rina was successful in the domestic market, showing that the issues are ever present.More fiction about North Korea will continue to be published in South Korea and abroad, but what is available from North Koreans themselves is usually of little artistic merit, as all art forms strictly serve the government’s purposes. North Korean defectors have not yet made significant contributions to the world of letters, in part due to the vastly different education and literary systems of North Koreaas well as skewed demographics, as most defectors originate from the northern provinces where farming, mining and logging are concentrated. The most prominent cause, however, is the difficult climate awaiting them in South Korea, Japan, theU.S., and other “safe” third countries. Adaptation to a foreign culture and to capitalism, discrimination issues and the daily war of survival have made literature a luxury for most. I look forward to a future when more defectors write fiction and poetry the way they are making inroads into memoir, visual art and film.Young-ha Kim and I parted after two hours of food and conversation. In that time we spoke in Korean with a smattering of English, but when the English rose up it felt awkward and artificial, so we reverted back to Korean. This state of being between languages and between cultures takes on an entirely different meaning and import for the North Korean defector community of today, the only community of North Koreans that the international community can truly know, if we care to.

    About the author

    Krys Lee is the author of Drifting House recently published by Faber and Faber in the U.K. and Viking/Penguin in the U.S.. She was born in Seoul, South Korea, studied in the U.S. andEngland, and lives in Seoul. Her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Narrative magazine, Granta (New Voices), California Quarterly, Asia Weekly, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Huffington Post and Condé Nast Traveller,UK.www.krys.lee.comhttp://faber.co.uk/author/krys-lee/

    Additional Information

    Adam Johnson (1967): ‘The Orphan Master’s Son’, Doubleday, 2012.  American novelist and short story writerJames Church (pseudonym) ‘A Corpse in the Koryo’, St Martin’s Press, 2007. He is a former Western intelligence officer with decades of experience in Asia and an author of four detective novels featuring a North Korean policeman, Inspector O.Hyejin Kim:  ‘Jia – A Novel of North Korea’, Cleis Press, 2007 She has written for numerous publications including, Asia Times. ‘Jia’is her debut novel and was inspired by her encounters with North Korean refugees in northern China.Young-ha Kim (1968): ‘Your Republic is Calling You’, Mariner Books, 2010.  Novelist. His books are translated into many languages.Yu Mun Yol (1948):  ‘An Appointment with My Brother’, currently unavailable in English, is being retranslated by Heinz Fenkl for Azalea Journal. He is one of South Korea’s most admired novelists and his books are translated into many languages.Heinz Fenkl is a writer, editor and translator. His fiction includes ‘Memoirs of My Ghost Brother’, Anchor, US, 2007.Kang Yung-Suk; ‘Rina’, 2006, Munhakdongne Press. Kang is a respected short story writer and novelist. ‘Rina’ is her debut novel.

  • What We Don’t Know About North Korea

    This week’s PEN Atlas despatch comes from Krys Lee, who takes a look at the literature from (and about)  North Korea that is available in English translation.North Korea has featured prominently in the news for many years, particularly in recent months with the death of its leader Kim Jong-Il on Dec 17, 2011. But it has been largely absent in fiction, at least in English. What is available in English is Adam Johnson’s much-praised and recently published novel The Orphan Master’s Son, James Church’s Inspector O novel A Corpse in the Koryo, and a few stories from my book Drifting House. Translated works, usually from South Korea, open up a few more  opportunities, including Jia: A Novel of North Korea by Hyejin Kim that reads much like a news report, as well as a more nuanced rendition of the country in Young-ha Kim’s Your Republic Is Calling You.I was able to have brunch with Young-ha in New Yorka few weeks ago. I’ve been reading his work for over eight years, both in Korean and in translation, so when he came to the Center for Fiction where I was reading and suggested that we meet, I quickly agreed. I wrote in English but have lived in Seoul, South Korea for over ten years, and Young-ha wrote in Korean but has been living in New York for the past two years as a writer in residence at ColumbiaUniversity. We are both part of a wave of transnational writers, and seemed to recognize this in each other. We talked about many things, but one of them was the sense of loneliness that Young-ha, as a seasoned writer, warned me of, that would inevitably mark my life as a writer. The constant travel and time spent away from home will change your life, he said. This observation is much in keeping with his book Your Republic Is Calling You.Though Your Republic Is Calling You is set in South Korea, it is the best novel about North Korea available in translation. The novel follows one day in the life of a North Korean spy named Ki-yong who has been slumbering at his job incognito for many years in Seoul, when he is suddenly called back to the homeland. Though it was marketed as a thriller in the English-language market and given a new glamorous, chilling title, the original book in South Korea was seen as literary novel with the title which would translate roughly as The Empire of Light. As a thriller, it is quiet at best. Not much happens in terms of action, and more time is spent on the ruminations of the main narrator as he makes the greatest decision of his life: Does he return toNorth Korea, with no idea of what awaits him, or does he stay in the South, with all its potential unknown repercussions? Either way, the reader becomes intimate with his neither here nor there status, and with the sense of being an outsider that has shaped Ki-yong’s life. Young-ha’s intimacy with the details of North Korean life as well as his deep understanding of Korean culture, help readers vividly feel and understand the troubled modern history of the Koreas.Yi Mun-yol’s An Appointment with My Brother is another seminal work in Korean that is being retranslated into English by noted translator and writer Heinz Fenkl. Two separated brothers, one from North Korea and one from the South, meet in China after their father has died. This meeting between separated brothers is a popular theme in Korean modern literature as it is emblematic of the relationship of the divided Koreas, but this trope is still powerful and fresh in Yi Mun-yol’s telling. Yi, one of Korea’s most eminent living writers, knows this particular story intimately. His father defected to North Korea after the Korean War, which caused incredible economic and psychological hardship to the family, all subjects that Yi explores in his fiction.The story of division has figured largely in the imagination of South Korean literature, but more recently North Koreaitself has taken center stage with the novel Rina by South Korean writer Kang Yong-Suk. The novel’s premise is promising, and it begins with great urgency as we follow North Korean refugees in China through the jungles of Southeast Asia as they seek safety in a third country. Despite the one-dimensional characters and a rather limited understanding of North Korea, Rina was successful in the domestic market, showing that the issues are ever present.More fiction about North Korea will continue to be published in South Korea and abroad, but what is available from North Koreans themselves is usually of little artistic merit, as all art forms strictly serve the government’s purposes. North Korean defectors have not yet made significant contributions to the world of letters, in part due to the vastly different education and literary systems of North Koreaas well as skewed demographics, as most defectors originate from the northern provinces where farming, mining and logging are concentrated. The most prominent cause, however, is the difficult climate awaiting them in South Korea, Japan, theU.S., and other “safe” third countries. Adaptation to a foreign culture and to capitalism, discrimination issues and the daily war of survival have made literature a luxury for most. I look forward to a future when more defectors write fiction and poetry the way they are making inroads into memoir, visual art and film.Young-ha Kim and I parted after two hours of food and conversation. In that time we spoke in Korean with a smattering of English, but when the English rose up it felt awkward and artificial, so we reverted back to Korean. This state of being between languages and between cultures takes on an entirely different meaning and import for the North Korean defector community of today, the only community of North Koreans that the international community can truly know, if we care to.

    About the author

    Krys Lee is the author of Drifting House recently published by Faber and Faber in the U.K. and Viking/Penguin in the U.S.. She was born in Seoul, South Korea, studied in the U.S. andEngland, and lives in Seoul. Her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Narrative magazine, Granta (New Voices), California Quarterly, Asia Weekly, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Huffington Post and Condé Nast Traveller,UK.www.krys.lee.comhttp://faber.co.uk/author/krys-lee/

    Additional Information

    Adam Johnson (1967): ‘The Orphan Master’s Son’, Doubleday, 2012.  American novelist and short story writerJames Church (pseudonym) ‘A Corpse in the Koryo’, St Martin’s Press, 2007. He is a former Western intelligence officer with decades of experience in Asia and an author of four detective novels featuring a North Korean policeman, Inspector O.Hyejin Kim:  ‘Jia – A Novel of North Korea’, Cleis Press, 2007 She has written for numerous publications including, Asia Times. ‘Jia’is her debut novel and was inspired by her encounters with North Korean refugees in northern China.Young-ha Kim (1968): ‘Your Republic is Calling You’, Mariner Books, 2010.  Novelist. His books are translated into many languages.Yu Mun Yol (1948):  ‘An Appointment with My Brother’, currently unavailable in English, is being retranslated by Heinz Fenkl for Azalea Journal. He is one of South Korea’s most admired novelists and his books are translated into many languages.Heinz Fenkl is a writer, editor and translator. His fiction includes ‘Memoirs of My Ghost Brother’, Anchor, US, 2007.Kang Yung-Suk; ‘Rina’, 2006, Munhakdongne Press. Kang is a respected short story writer and novelist. ‘Rina’ is her debut novel.