Kevin O'Rourke: A Remembrance

It was in 1989 that I first met him. An acquaintance who worked at The Korea Daily, a short-lived English-language newspaper published in Seoul, brought us together at a place that sold Budweiser by the can. The first thing Kevin did was give me a copy of Our Twisted Hero, his translation of Yi Munyŏl's novella Uri tŭl ŭi ilgŭrŏjin yŏng'ung, which had been honored with the 1987 Yi Sang Literature Prize. The translation had been issued in 1988 by Minŭmsa, one of the premier publishers of Korean literary fiction.

"Review it," he said, and so I did.¹ In my review I noted that "readers of contemporary Korean literature in translation owe a debt to Kevin O'Rourke for having temporarily forsaken his first love—Korean poetry—to set his hand once again to a work of fiction." For it was through his translations of modern Korean short fiction that I came to know him as a translator. In the early 1980s I came across A Washed-Out Dream, his translations of eleven stories ranging from the 1920s to the 1970s. I was especially taken by the title story (Yushilmong, 1956), authored by Son Ch'angsŏp, whose caustic sketches of life in postwar Korea were invested with a sardonic humor that appealed to Kevin, who was not the first to observe that humor was in short supply in modern Korean fiction.

Not until several years later did I learn that A Washed-Out Dream had originally appeared in 1973 as Ten Korean Short Stories, published by Yonsei University Press.² I was most impressed: Kevin had arrived in Korea in 1964, in his mid-twenties, newly ordained as a Columban Father, and was in his early thirties when this anthology was first published. As someone who relished short fiction, I realized immediately that the stories in A Washed-Out Dream not only came alive as English-language literature, they had been well selected. Each of the stories is memorable in its own way, and among the authors I recognized Hwang Sunwŏn, whom I had met at Seoul National University in 1979 during the second year of my service as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer. He and a second author in the anthology, Ch'oe Inho, with whom Kevin shared a connection through Yonsei University (where Ch'oe majored in English and Kevin earned an MA in 1970 and a PhD in 1982, the latter degree the first in Korean literature earned by a foreigner in Korea), would become lifelong literary partners to Ju-Chan and myself.

In our meetings over the years Kevin never ceased to emphasize that selection of works to translate must be predicated first and foremost on literary quality. In terms of prose, he valued short fiction (he was especially fond of stories from his native Ireland): except for The Square and The Whiskey Jacks, his translations of Korean fiction consisted of short stories, the novella Our Twisted Hero, and three stories from Sŏ Kiwŏn's linked-story work Marok yŏlchŏn (1972). In 1977, Kevin expanded the introduction to A Washed-Out Dream into an essay, "The Korean Short Story of the 1920s and Naturalism," which he published in the March 1977 issue of Korea Journal. In this essay, he focused on the three writers often thought of as the founders of the modern Korean short story: Hyŏn Chingŏn, Kim Tongin, and Yŏm Sangsŏp. To this day I continue to assign this essay to the students in my introductory survey course in modern Korean literature at the University of British Columbia.

Ironically, his first translation in any genre to bring him international attention, The Square, was that of Ch'oe Inhun's novel Kwangjang (1960). Issued by a small publisher in the United Kingdom in 1985, The Square was honored with a modest international literature-translation award. Kevin was astute enough to recognize the crucial importance of this novel as an emblem of postwar Korea (the protagonist is a prisoner of war who...