A Moment’s Grace: Stories from Korea in Transition (review)

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 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...