Journal of Korean Studies

This collection of short fiction translations spans six decades of Korean literature, beginning with Kim Tongni’s “The Shaman Painting” (1936) and ending with O Chŏnghŭi’s “The Face” (1999). The translator and commentator of the anthology, John Holstein, is professor of English at Sungkyunkwan University and his previous translations include O-Young Lee’s Things Korean (Tuttle Publishing, 1999). All of the stories are well known in South Korea, and most, including Kim Tongni’s “Loess Valley” (1939) and “The Visit” (1951), are introduced in English for the first time. Others, such as Ch’oe Inhun’s “House of Idols” (1960) and “End of the Road” (1966), have appeared previously in other volumes translated by Professor Holstein. Bruce Fulton has contributed a helpful introduction, situating the authors and their stories within the history of modern Korean literature and providing some brief but insightful interpretations. Professor Holstein’s essay “The Stories’ Background,” which takes up the final 102 pages of the book, is a mostly sociological and historical account of modern Korea that provides some introductory facts and some personal observations, connecting them to the content of the short stories. He also includes a thirty-five-page discussion of the practice of translation, “Stumbling across a [End Page 230] Language Barrier,” which details the problems he encountered in translating one of the short stories, Sŏ Chŏngin’s “River” (1968), as well as the reasoning behind his decisions. The volume won a Korean Literature Translation Award from the Korea Literature Translation Institute (KLTI) in 2010, so the criticisms offered here should be read with the understanding that the volume is highly evaluated by at least one prominent institution.

The stories deserve their canonical status and there is much in this anthology to discover and appreciate for those readers who are not turned away by Professor Holstein’s approach to translation. He definitely has his own writing style and uses more colloquial paraphrasing than many writers, translators, and readers would find justifiable. Hwang Sunwŏn’s “The Game Beaters” (1948) is a taut, allegorical snapshot of an impoverished child who tries to enter and burgle a foreigner’s house through a drainpipe, but instead shocks the gathered onlookers when he struggles and then dies in the current of water. The story is a quality addition to the now substantial amount of Hwang’s short fiction available in English. Other stories have a similar supplemental or comparative value for teaching purposes. As Fulton points out, Yi Pŏmsŏn’s “The Gulls” (1958), which describes the life of North Korean refugees on an island, provides a nice contrast to Yi’s dark urban refugee tale, “A Stray Bullet” (1959). O’s “The Face” describes the alienation of an elderly and mostly paralyzed husband, and despite the differences in the protagonists’ ages, the story contains striking thematic similarities with The Bird (Telegram Books, 2007), a well-known O novel about an orphaned child.

There are a number of connections to be made with history as well. Professor Holstein’s use of a contraction in the title of Kong Chiyŏng’s “What’s to Be Done” (1992) creates an odd hybrid of folksy American talk and Marxist-Leninism, eliminating the textual reference and the irony in the title of the source text. Nonetheless, this story of a woman remembering her first love, whom she met during the student protests a decade earlier and who is now engaged to be married, describes engagingly how love and politics can intermingle and how uncertain memories linger at the end of an era of activism and social upheaval. It could be a useful addition to a classroom discussion of the social movements of the 1980s. The stories by Kim Tongni, O Sangwŏn, Ch’oe Inhun, and Sŏ Chŏngin all have their own literary and pedagogical virtues.

I mention pedagogy because the extended commentaries on the practice of translation and on the social and historical background of the stories suggest the book is meant to serve as a textbook anthology. Unfortunately, Professor Holstein’s general approach in “The Stories’ Background” is to apply modernization theory to literature, giving an outdated and overly sociological quality to the interpretations. He makes the short fiction tell the story of (South) Korea’s national emergence out of tradition and into modernity. The subtitle of the book, Stories from Korea in Transition, does not refer coherently to the specific period demarcated in the introduction (1945–88), since only seven of the twelve stories [End Page 231] actually fall between these dates. Rather, the transition refers to something more abstract: the unilinear historical process of modernization. National history combined with sociological observations and personal anecdotes imbue this section with a sense of authority, but it is not entirely clear how Korea’s grand historical progress is reflected in the stories themselves, many of which are rather ambivalent about modernity. Nor do the stories confront the weight of history with the same rigid oppositions between individual and group, family and society, inside and outside, tradition and modernity, and such, which Holstein uses to explain Korean society. For example, the familial religious struggle in “The Shaman Painting” is explained away as only an exception to the sociological rule that Christianity and shamanism are syncretic in Korea, when a literary discussion of the text’s “atypical” elements would better bring out its cultural meaning within the context of late-colonial period Korea.

The other section of commentary, “Stumbling across a Language Barrier,” takes the reader through Professor Holstein’s translation of Sŏ Chŏngin’s “River,” reflecting on everything from the choice of tense, to the translation of currencies, to ambiguous passages about which he is compelled to consult “Korean informants.” With section titles like “Shall We Rearrange, Just a Bit?” or “Shall We ‘Improve’ on the Original?” one wonders how much modification Professor Holstein might have allowed himself, particularly when the texts remained opaque despite the input of his “consultants.” He reassures us: “The translator, no matter how much literary prowess he might presume himself to have, ought not tamper with the original any more than is necessary for understanding” (p. 250). He makes a number of such imperative statements about the ethics of translation. However, his own translations modify much more extensively than is necessary for understanding, which creates concern about how carefully he has applied his stated ethics to the wording of the translations.

Brother Anthony of Taizé’s extremely negative review of this volume makes Professor Holstein into a symbol for the general ineptitude of North American Korean studies.¹ That generalization is not convincing, but he does present a valid concern that Professor Holstein’s translations domesticate the source texts too much by rendering them into snappy and colloquial North American English. I agree that while readability and the art of the translation should not be sacrificed for the sake of a pedantic accuracy, his translations often give the impression that they are missing or hiding vital aspects of the source texts, a concern that is confirmed, at least to myself, through comparison with the Korean. In my view, the missing element is not the source texts’ “Koreanness,” exactly, but rather an overall sense of the style, tone, and sensibility of the individual writers. The greatest shortcoming of the volume is that the differences between the nine writers are obscured greatly because their voices are excessively subordinated to the translator’s own writing style. This controversial approach to translation, in which the translator usurps authorship, is encapsulated in “A Few Notes about the Book”: “The stories featured here were all translated by the author of this [End Page 232] book” (p. ix). Such a statement might slide by as overzealousness if he were translating one author’s novel, but for an anthology it borders on offensive.

One example of how Holstein’s own style can erase the voices of the writers he is translating would be the great number of sentence fragments and other clipped phrasings (e.g., contractions and subjectless sentences) that he inserts, even when the writer has used fuller grammar in the Korean or when the omitted subject would be assumed in Korean but is conspicuous when absent in English translation. Admittedly, sentence fragments, dashes, and subjectless expressions can give the writing a punchy and contemporary feel, because they rework “mere description” into something more poetic, such as the spliced thoughts of the focalizing character. Unfortunately, these techniques often turn direct speech into free indirect speech, which lends an air of pat modernist experimentation to texts that should be closer to realism.

At times free indirect speech might be appropriate to the source text, as with much of O Sangwŏn’s “A Moment’s Grace” (1955). Sentence fragments can also be appropriate. The first sentence of Sŏ Chŏngin’s “River” reads “,” and Holstein translates it as “On the bus.” Even in this case the sentence inexplicably becomes the second rather than the first sentence of the story, but at least the source text calls for the use of a fragment. The problem arises in places like the beginning of Sŏng Sŏkche’s “First Love” (1995), where Holstein renders “” as “Dust from the dirt road blossoming up and out in a big flower. Delivery trucks pouring out of the baking factory” (p. 171). The translator should translate the two sentences more simply, rather than convoluting them and turning them into present participle fragments. He should maintain the original past tense, have accuracy in diction, and mark the simile of the flower (e.g., “Dust blossomed up like a gigantic flower. The trucks poured out of the bread factory”). The writing suffers considerably on the whole when the translator makes too many modifications beyond those necessary for understanding. More importantly, however, an unsuspecting reader (or one who cannot consult the Korean) might wrongly impute Professor Holstein’s predilection for such openings to Sŏng’s own style, or, based solely on this anthology, to modern Korean literature in general. Because he begins a text written sixty years earlier, “The Shaman Painting,” with a similar translation of complete sentences into present participle fragments, and with the significant changes that Anthony has already pointed out, he obscures the commonalities and differences between Kim Tongni and Sŏng Sŏkche, not to mention the literary language of 1936 compared to 1995.

There are always multiple possibilities for a translation’s expression, and translation is also a creative act. What concerns me more is the aggregate disorienting effect mistranslation has on the English versions, rather than the sacredness of any specific author or wording. In places this anthology completely skews the events and ideas that are depicted in the stories, not solely the style of the writers. The beginning of O Sangwŏn’s “A Moment’s Grace,” a story set during [End Page 233] the Korean War, contains many fundamental transformations. In a fairly simple sentence in the opening paragraphs, O writes, “” and Professor Holstein translates, “After they lowered the ladder and dumped me here, on their way back up the ladder one of them said Just like the other guy” [sic] (p. 93). My translation would be “‘Just like the other guy’—right after I stepped down from the ladder, they pulled it up through the hole again, but I could still hear the conversation between them.” Granted, the omission of the subjects of action makes the sentence a little difficult, but the prisoner is clearly stepping off of the ladder at the bottom of the pit and the soldiers at the top of the pit are drawing it back up, rather than the soldiers lowering the ladder, “dumping him,” and then climbing back up the ladder. The other changes seem to be made in order to compensate for this basic misunderstanding of the grammar; after all, why would the prisoner remark about “still” hearing the other men if they were climbing up the ladder in close proximity to him? Therefore, “could still hear” becomes “one of them said.” Holstein’s translation conveys the gist of the situation, imprisonment in a pit, but the reader gets a mangled image of what is happening. Such passages (there are many, many more) are confusing even in English and after consulting the Korean they end up making me too suspicious about the translations’ distance from the source texts to enjoy reading the book as a collection of Korean literature.

As a reader I do not expect or want translations that strive to be mere reproductions, and there is certainly something appealing about the spirit of Professor Holstein’s approach to translation. However, I also appreciate the feeling of language brushing up against its cultural and linguistic boundaries. This feeling comes with reading a translation made foreign through the painstaking attempt to be accurate, rather than from rewriting that is uncanny in its familiarity.