Translators’ Roundtable with Song Sokze

For this issue of Azalea, we introduce three short stories by Song Sokze, one of Korea’s most beloved writers and a gifted raconteur known for his witty depictions of life in Korea: “A Real Piece of Work,” co-translated by Sora Kim-Russell and Iou-chung Chang, “Roughing It,” translated by Jenny Wang Medina, and “Tale of Cho Tong-gwan,” translated by Jae Won Chung. The translators had an opportunity to engage the writer in a question-and-answer session about his work.

Sora: I’d like to start with a general question. You first debuted as a poet but later switched to writing fiction. What inspired you to make this change? How is writing poetry different from writing fiction for you?

When I first got into literature, poetry had this overwhelming importance for me. Far more than any other literary genre—more than fiction, more than drama, more than essays or letters or any other type of writing. I thought poetry would be the alpha and omega of my writing career. I published my first poem in 1986 and my first poetry collection in 1991. Three years later, while putting together my second collection, I was trying to figure out what to do with these scraps, left over from other poems, that I’d jotted down. Those scraps turned into short pieces of their own, and when I had enough of those short pieces, I assembled them into a book, and they were published as “fiction.” After that, I started getting requests for more fiction, rather than poetry, so I kept going. So, if you ask what really inspired me to make the change, I would have to say it was getting paid to write fiction! The moment an editor contacts me, expecting me to write fiction rather than poetry, the story gets its start and the blueprint takes form. This approach isn’t so different from how I write poetry, except what it really means is that “poetry inspires my fiction.” To add to that, for me, the fence between poetry and fiction is very low and weak. If I want to jump the fence, I can do so easily. Or I can poke holes in the fence. That’s because the boundaries of fiction, its territory, are much broader and more generous than poetry’s. Moreover, the realm of fiction is constantly expanding, like the universe after the Big Bang. I doubt I will ever reach the border in my lifetime—I won’t even so much as see a road sign pointing the way toward that border.

As for the difference between writing poetry and writing fiction: It’s different from the inception. When you write a poem, you aim for the most economical language, to refine your words the way one does a metal, and to toss out every possible scrap. There is no concept of wastefulness in poetry, and much of the byproducts find their use in other places (fiction, drama, television writing, essays, letters, conversations, etc.). But with fiction, the environment, the conditions, and the constant back-and-forth that take place within the writer continuously shape and reshape the story or novel.

In terms of process, poetry is both an attempt to transcend one’s human state through human language and a form of menial and mental labor that has nothing whatsoever to do with gods or men. If you don’t believe me, then consider that while we have a Muse, the goddess of poetry, we have no god of fiction.

Also, fiction pays way more.

Jenny: I have always enjoyed your work for its vivid depictions of sensory experience. Sounds, sights, smells, and tastes are so visceral in your writing that it makes it very easy to feel the story but also extremely challenging for the translator. What particularly struck me in “Roughing It,” however, was how Manjae’s physical sensations flow in and out of the narration, sometimes producing free indirect discourse, and sometimes pulling back to suggest a sympathetic narrator. I wonder...