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Unparalleled Insight into War: The Shadow of Arms by Hwang Sok-yong scrap
by J.T. Lichtenstein
November 16, 2014
Author Bio 작가 소개
Hwang Sok-yong
There is a line in the first few pages of Hwang Sok-yong’s The Shadow of Arms that carries with it the brunt of the Vietnam War: “Just two weeks of carnage, of thirst and heat had transformed the fighting men into burnt-out tin cans.”
Hwang’s language is unadorned and direct, his metaphor effective. It conveys a hollowness, of both body and spirit, that foreshadows the horrific military brutalities, the moral corruption, the soullessness wreaked by a hellish war and captured with staggering precision in the novel, based on Hwang’s experience as a Korean soldier contracted to fight for the Allied Forces.
A “burnt-out tin can” can also be used to describe a translation; a text that has lost its soul, has lost its voice, in the process of being rendered into a new language, and all that remains of it is an empty shell. We were loath to let that happen to The Shadow of Arms, and took great pains to find the novel’s voice in English, scouring military dictionaries, reading dialogue aloud, comparing our translation as it developed against the French version, even delaying publication several times for the sake of getting it right. As translators and publishers of literature in translation, we have a greater responsibility than perhaps we often realize; we are pulling foreign writers, usually comfortable and celebrated in their own countries, into our local literary landscapes, and we are determining how their voices shall sound in our language, how they shall be perceived and therefore received by our readers. It’s an untold burden, and one we shoulder gladly because these voices deserve, and sometimes need, to be heard. That of Hwang Sok-yong, as this novel exemplifies, is one that should resound the world over.
It is this Korean novel that grants us unparalleled insight into a war that has haunted the United States for decades.
We have grappled with our troubled history in countless Vietnam War memoirs and novels. And to a lesser extent, we have sought to comprehend our hand in a nation’s suffering in works by Vietnamese writers on the same subject. Only through Hwang’s detached perspective are we able to step back and understand the conflict with a clearer eye and within a greater context. The narrative, which follows a young Korean corporal on his assignment from the US Army to keep an eye on the black market that, as it becomes increasingly obvious, lies at the heart of all military and guerilla strategies, reveals the capitalist motives underpinning American involvement. We see morality drowning in greed, humanity in barbarity, duty in self-interest. We see a Vietnamese family torn apart by two brothers’ opposing loyalties, a love abandoned for love of country, an individual struggling to remain indifferent to the atrocities of a war that doesn’t directly concern him. And we see ourselves, as a nation that has committed horrendous acts, and more importantly, as human beings who, in the face of what we know to be wrong, must choose to remain indifferent and at a safe distance or get involved and put ourselves in the line of fire.
Those who choose to read translated works are curious about other peoples, perspectives, cultures, and lives beyond the borders of their own language. The paradox is that translations often shape our understanding of our own identities, plurality being the closest we will ever come to finding universality in the human experience. We read translated works because we are looking to know the other. In translation we read ourselves. Never has this argument been better made than with Hwang Sok-yong’s The Shadow of Arms.
by J.T. Lichtenstein
Editor, Seven Stories Press
Writer 필자 소개
J.T. Lichtenstein
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