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Lee Ho-cheol and a Divided Nation scrap
by Lee Ho-cheol
October 20, 2016
Author Bio 작가 소개
Lee Ho-cheol
Lee Ho-cheol is one of the authors who helps readers, non-Koreans in particular, understand what is currently taking place in the two Koreas, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Republic of Korea where he lived until he passed away.
Facts are said to be “an obstinate thing,” and the sad facts of the split of the Korean people that has lasted more than half a century may be best explained by those who know, not by hearsay, what has been happening in the country since the end of the Second World War and the liberation of Korea from Japanese rule.
Apart from his gift as a prose writer, Lee knew the history of his country from experience. His experience being as hard and agonizing as the experience of many of his compatriots of the same age and social status. When the war between the North and the South began, Lee was taken away from his high school and mobilized in the North Korean army. And a few months later he, a youth of no more than eighteen, was imprisoned by the Southerners.
His stories, like “Panmunjom” or “The Deputy Mayor Won't Take Up His Post,” or, in particular, “Separated Family, Divided Nation – A Lamentation,” as well as his most ambitious novel Southerners, Northerners, are written from personal experience, of which Lee writes in his preface to the Russian translation of Southerners, Northerners: “Both the story ‘Mollusc’ published in 1956 and the novel that it has a lot in common with, were written on the basis of my personal impressions, as I was the participant and the witness of the events described in those works.”
In his prose works, both novels and stories, by portraying the calamity of national division that extends well beyond the three-year Korean War, Lee makes an attempt to solve many issues that still seem unsolvable, to answer the “damned questions” of Korea in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Why is the peninsula still, after half a century, a “hot spot?” What should be done for people who not only lived through the Korean War but remain, as a result of Korea’s continuing division still separated from their family members, and continue to be “Far from Home” as one of his stories is called?
By describing in the novel such typical characters of Northern “people’s socialism”—Pak Ch’ŏnok, pedantic and dogmatist, enthusiastic about social activities of all sorts, who organizes collective recitals and political studies, or the teacher Ch’oe Sangho, a theoretician of socialism, a would-be director of the High Party School, who “observes the people defiantly”—Lee explores the trauma experienced by separated families, and probes into the problem of the “flight through the 38th parallel,” a phrase that may be unknown to foreigners but has become for Koreans an upsetting metaphor of the national divide. Division in Lee’s work, novels and stories alike, becomes for many of his characters, as well as for the author himself, the cause and effect of estrangement that is so hard to overcome, in cities in particular, and is as long-standing and as dramatic as the political division of the two Koreas.
The greatest of Lee’s achievements presumably is that he has made a very successful effort to help people around the world understand the essence of the tragedy of Koreans both in the North and in the South. A plaintive effort to make readers feel compassion for all those in Korea who are separated from their families still unable to meet. The translations of Lee’s novels and stories, made under the support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, first appeared as early as the end of the last century, while presently his creative output has been translated into dozen of languages, English, German, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese among them. 
Writer 필자 소개
Lee Ho-cheol
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