A funny thing happened to David McCann and Kwon Youngmin the day of the first class meeting of the Korean literature course they had been delegated to teach at Harvard University in the fall of 1984: they arrived at the designated classroom to find it empty. Scouring the hallways, they recruited enough students to teach the course, but quickly were confronted with another challenge. The students were breaking into laughter as they read the assigned readings. Professors McCann and Kwon immediately realized they had a problem with the texts, and suspected that something had been lost in translation.

Such was the state of modern Korean fiction in translation in the West as recently as the mid-1980s. Instructors had at their disposal only a handful of collections of short fiction, most of which have long since gone out of print. To the best of my knowledge the first modern Korean novel to be published in English translation in the West did not appear until 1985 (see Appendix). But as of fall 2010, survey courses in modern Korean literature no longer go wanting for either students or serviceable texts. And enough novels and novellas have been translated into English to allow courses dedicated to the modern Korean novel to be offered. And yet anecdotal evidence from colleagues suggests that very few such courses exist in the English-speaking world. Why is this? A comprehensive answer to this question would involve issues, several of them extra-literary, that are outside the scope of this review article. Instead I wish to discuss those translations that are readily available in the West,Footnote ¹ focusing on four texts published between 2005 and 2007. In the discussion I draw not only on the short history of English translations of modern Korean novels and on my readings of the texts and the translations but on their reception by the students in my Modern Korean Novel seminar course at the University of British Columbia.

The visibility of the Korean literary tradition pales in the West in comparison with the reception of the literatures of China and Japan. This is partly a function of the relative visibility of Korea and Korean Studies in general and partly, I would argue, a function of the status of the novel in modern Korea. Although fiction enjoys a long pedigree in all three literatures, the novel (as it is understood in the West) of classical times has been more successful in China and Japan than in Korea. Fiction in traditional Korea, whether written in classical Chinese or, after the promulgation of the Korean script in the mid-1400s, in hangŭl, rarely enjoyed the prestige accruing to hanshi (poetry in classical Chinese by Koreans) or the vernacular verse forms of shijo and kasa. Perhaps the greatest impact on the shape of the modern Korean novel was effected by the multi-volume, multi-generational family sagas that proved so popular among the literati during the Chosŏn era, and especially palace women. These lengthy narratives survive in the modern period as roman fleuves that collectively constitute one of the great achievements of modern Korean literature. Not surprisingly, the length of these works (averaging ten volumes), the massive amount of historical and cultural background they contain, and in several cases the use of dialect, pose significant challenges to the translator; only one such work, T'oji, by Pak Kyŏng-ni, has been translated into English, and only the first of five parts.

Single-volume novels for their part have had to contend with short fiction for status. The earliest of the modern Korean novels were serialized in daily newspapers, a convention established in the early 1900s with the emergence of a group of writers who were paid to serialize the New Fiction (shin sosŏl), a short-lived but influential genre. Ever since, serial publication of novels has born the stigma of commercialization and lowbrow entertainment, for in traditional Korea writers were regarded by their peers less as creative writers than as masters of the various forms of composition in classical Chinese; one did not write for a living, and one's literary works circulated only among the minuscule percentage of the population who were literate. Ironically, it is the short story, in Korea widely considered a Western import, that even today enjoys greater critical estimation. Almost every established fiction writer in South Korea has made his or (increasingly) her formal debut with the short story or novella, the current practice being to publish one or two volumes of short fiction before trying one's hand at a novel. Every literary prize of note save one is awarded for short fiction or (rarely) novellas.Footnote ²

Another reason for the imbalance between short fiction and novels in English translation is what we might call the push factor in the translation of Korean fiction. Translators of Korean literature enjoy generous support from several foundations in Seoul. Increasingly these foundations, and especially the quasi-governmental Korea Literature Translation Institute (KLTI), are specifying the works for which prospective translators may apply for translation grants. Among the 49 volumes of fiction designated by the KLTI for translation in 2010, only 22 are novels. If we subtract from this figure the three novels already translated into English (and reviewed in this article), then the number of novels whose translation the KLTI is willing to commission constitute 40 percent of the total. Who selected these 49 volumes for translation? Not the translators, not the instructors overseas who might adopt them for courses, not the overseas publishers who might publish them, and not the readers who might read them in translation; rather the selection is made by a panel of Korean literary critics (literary critic, or munhak p'yŏngnon'ga, is the conventional designation for Korean scholars of Korean literature). The implications of this process for the reception of the published English translations should be obvious.

Another element of this push factor is the outbound nature of much of Korean-to-English translation of literary fiction. One trend shared by the modern literatures of China, Japan, and Korea in English translation is that the early translations were executed for the most part by outbound translators (those translating from their first language into English). Today, most translators of modern Chinese fiction and modern Japanese fiction published in the English-speaking world are inbound translators (translating into their first language, English). This is not the situation with respect to the translation of Korean fiction into English (only one of the four translations reviewed here is an inbound translation).

Under review here are translations of novels by three of Korea's most distinctive writers—Hwang Sŏg-yŏng, O Chŏng-hŭi, and Kim Yŏng-ha—as well as an autobiographical novel by a writer who enjoys the critical esteem accorded Hwang and O but not the popular success earned by Hwang and Kim. There is a strong coming-of-age element in all the novels except The Guest, and trauma figures in each of the four works. Narrative sophistication developed early on in modern Korean fiction, an inevitable response to the challenges faced by colonial period writers who desired free passage through the censorship gates controlled by the thought police of imperial Japan. Much of the success of The Guest derives from the author's structuring of the narrative along the lines of a chinogwi exorcism (a ritual conducted by a practitioner of native Korean spirituality to hasten the journey of wandering and potentially disruptive spirits to the next world): When the Reverend Ryu Yosŏp journeys from the U.S. to his native North Korea to attend the memorial ceremony for his brother Yohan, he meets in his dreams several of the victims of the massacres that took place between rightists and leftists in Shinch'ŏn, Hwanghae Province, in the fall of 1950, shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War. In dispassionate tones these wandering spirits tell Yosŏp their stories, and having thus achieved closure, they gather together in one final dream and take leave of Yosŏp in order to journey to their final resting place. In less experienced hands this would be the stuff of recrimination and han (see for example, Cho Chŏng-nae's Playing With Fire, in which the slippery concept of han is translated as rancor). Hwang Sŏg-yŏng, though, focuses on reconciliation, consistent with the possibility of at least partial healing from trauma.

Both Toy City and The Bird feature first-person narratives by precocious child narrators. In Toy City the narrator's family is forced by an uncle's political indiscretions to uproot themselves from their ancestral village shortly after the end of the Korean War and move to Taegu, which is already bursting at the seams with war refugees. Shocked by the necessity of using public toilets, peddling on the streets, going to church in order to obtain food supplements, and joining a street gang, the narrator, Yun, can cope with his new environment only by conceptualizing it as something unreal and ridiculous, a toy city. The Bird is narrated by U-mi, an eleven-year-old girl who with her younger brother, U-il, is shuttled from one relative to another after their mother escapes their abusive father. The tale is all the more ominous in that U-mi describes her life in a dispassionate tone that reflects no surprise at the bruises left by gloved fists on her battered mother's face or at her grandmother's diet of duck eggs soaked in urine. Eventually we see that this response is a defense mechanism: an instance of sexual abuse by her father is described as if it happened in a dream, and U-il's death at the end of the novel becomes his transformation into a bird. Both novels succeed in illuminating childhood trauma.

I Have the Right to Destroy Myself was one of the first works of fiction to foresee the post-IMF malaise in South Korean society, reflected in escalating divorce and suicide rates and a drop in the birth rate. The protagonist assists would-be suicides in ending their lives, and re-creates their lives as fiction. This linking of death with art is reinforced by the narrator's bookending the story with references to David's The Death of Marat and Delacroix's The Death of Sardanapalus (misspelled in the translation as Sardanapale; the paintings are reproduced in the Korean original, published by Munhak tongne in 1996, but not in the translation).

All four translations have numerous hitches, or “gotcha” moments. The translation that succeeds most in coming alive in English is The Bird, in large part because Jenny Wang Medina has captured the changing voice of the young narrator, from prosaic description to haunting reverie, as she struggles with the abuse, incest, and death visited upon her and her brother. No literary translation is perfect, and little is to be gained in a review by citing a list of mistranslations, inaccuracies, awkwardnesses, or typographical errors. Still, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, because it is the only one of the four translations to have been issued by a major commercial press, must be singled out for editorial dereliction of duty, of which the misspelling of the Delacroix painting is only one example.Footnote ³

The primary market for translations of modern Korean literature remains classroom adoptions, and for this reason I solicit text evaluations from the students in my Modern Korean Novel course at UBC, reminding them that it is possible to like a text and yet not evaluate it highly as a work of literature (and vice versa). Among the four translations reviewed here, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself has consistently drawn the strongest reactions, the students tending to find it either highly imaginative and stimulating, or else distasteful for religious or aesthetic reasons. None of the other three translations has proved a pleasant reading experience, a finding in keeping with the reaction of many students and other readers of modern Korean fiction in translation—that the works strike them as gloomy and depressing. The Bird proved disturbing for some students (a reaction that reminded me of my response to Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird). Students responded more positively to the child narration of Toy City and The Bird. The presence of “ghosts” in The Guest was problematic for some students.

One element of the modern Korean novel in English translation that will become more important as the readership for the translations increases is the presentation of the books. Production values of the books listed below—most of which were published by small presses or university publishing houses—suffer in comparison with those of books issued by successful commercial publishers. Drawing on my own experience in graphic design and editorial production at a major textbook publisher in the 1970s, I would rate Toy City the most attractive in terms of typeface, paper quality, and white space (a term reflecting the size and density of the type on the printed page), and I Have the Right to Destroy Myself for its cover design. The standard of excellence for text cover design among university presses has been set by Columbia University Press.

As can be seen in the Appendix, seven book-length English translations of modern Korean fiction appeared in 2009 and 2010, and this trend will most likely continue, judging from the number of translations currently funded by the Korea Literature Translation Institute and the Daesan Foundation. We can therefore expect an increase in the quantity of modern Korean novels in English translation. Whether there will be a commensurate increase in the quality of the translations is another question. With the exception of The Bird, the four translations reviewed here do not represent a watershed leap in quality over the translations published previously, and perhaps it is asking too much to suggest that they should. One ground for cautious optimism is that both the senior translator of the team responsible for The Guest as well as the translator of I Have the Right to Destroy Myself have to their credit a published translation of a second novel by the same author. History suggests that a long-term relationship between a translator and an author has better results than relationships built on one-time for-hire translations.