In Memoriam: Professor Kevin O’Rourke (1939–2020)

Kevin O’Rourke’s passing has deprived us of our most accomplished translator of Korean literature past and present, prose and poetry. His published translations span a period of nearly fifty years. His first book-length translation was Ten Korean Short Stories, published by Yonsei University Press in 1971, a mere seven years after he arrived in Korea in 1964, in his mid-twenties, as one of the Columban Fathers. This volume of stories ranging from the 1920s to the 1970s was republished as A Washed-Out Dream, with the addition of an eleventh story, in 1980. His most recent translations were of modern short fiction, and when in November 2019 he was stricken with the brain hemorrhage that ultimately claimed him, our proposal to Penguin England for an anthology of modern Korean short stories had just been accepted.

In the five decades separating Ten Korean Short Stories and the Penguin anthology, Kevin completed what he considered to be his life’s work as a literary translator: to bring alive in English the totality of the Korean poetic tradition, from hyangga 鄕歌 to poetry of the new millennium. In between the dozen or more volumes of Korean poetry he translated, he also produced The Square, the first translation of a modern Korean novel to gain international attention. This translation of Kwangjang 廣場 by Ch’oe Inhun 崔仁勳, issued by a small publisher in the United Kingdom in 1985, was honored with an international literature translation award. In addition, Our Twisted Hero, his translation of the 1987 Yi Sang Prizewinning novella “Uridŭl ŭi ilgŭrŏjin yŏngung” 우리들의 일그러진 영웅 by Yi Munyŏl 李文烈 was perhaps the first translation of a work of modern Korean fiction to be accepted by a major American commercial publisher, Hyperion East.

Ultimately, it is Kevin’s translations of siga 詩歌 (poetry and song) that remain the foundation of his five-decade translation oeuvre. The year 1988 witnessed the publication of Tilting the Jar, Spilling the Moon, his translations of poets representing three eras of Korean history: Yi Kyubo 李奎報 from Koryŏ 高麗; Chŏng Ch’ŏl 鄭澈, Yun Sŏndo 尹善道, and Kim Sujang 金壽長 from Chosŏn 朝鮮; and Sŏ Chŏngju 徐廷柱 from the modern period. The reprinting in 1993 of Tilting the Jar, Spilling the Moon by Dedalus, an Irish publisher, ushered in a two-decade period in which most of Kevin’s book-length translations of poetry were published. In 1995, Dedalus published a volume of Kevin’s translations of Sŏ Chŏngju, whom he regarded as Korea’s most accomplished modern poet. In the same year, the Cornell University East Asia Program published Kevin’s anthology of Yi Kyubo’s poetry, Singing Like a Cricket, Hooting Like an Owl. Four years later, Dedalus followed with Kevin’s anthology of modern Korean poetry, Looking for the Cow. Significantly, the title of this volume is a sijo 時調 by Han Yongun 韓龍雲, Buddhist reformer and anti-colonial activist. Kevin had first published translations of sijo in the 1988 edition of Tilting the Jar, Spilling the Moon, and in 2002 would publish The Book of Korean Shijo with Harvard University Press.

Kevin popularized Korean poetry not only in his books but in “A Poem for Breakfast,” an occasional column in the Korea Herald. Among the poets he introduced in this series were Chŏng Ch’ŏl, Hyesim 慧心, Pak Mogwŏl 朴木月, and Sŏ Chŏngju.

One of the little-known delights of Kevin’s opus is a trilogy of pocket-book volumes published in Seoul in 2001 by Eastward. One is devoted to Yun Sŏndo’s sijo cycle The Fisherman’s Calendar, one encompasses a millennium of verse, and the third focuses on sijo by poets known and unknown.

In the new millennium, Kevin continued to focus on poetry. His longstanding goal was to anthologize Korean verse from the earliest times to the new millennium. Looking for the Cow, his anthology of modern poetry, was already in print. From there he returned to the beginning, translating hyangga and the Koryŏ songs variously termed sogak kasa 俗樂歌 詞, sogyo 俗謠, changga 長歌, and pyŏlgok 別曲, as well as hansi 漢詩 from Silla 新羅 and Koryŏ. Translations of these works were...